This is a short chapter and gives me a chance to offer some commentary about slavery in the ancient world and the difficulty of translating Hebrew.
Read the Bible: Genesis 33
Read the Bible: Genesis 32
After 20 years, Jacob finally breaks ties with Laban. But to return home he still has to deal with an older brother who possibly still wants to kill him, and was the reason he left in the first place. Then he wrestles with an angel and claims to have seen the face of God. There is never a dull moment with this guy.
Continue readingRead the Bible: Genesis 31
Jacob finally gathers all he has and flees from Laban in order to return to the land of Canaan. There is a verse in this chapter that is often quoted but maybe it does not exactly mean what a lot people think it means.
Happy Monday
Read the Bible: Genesis 30
When people say they don’t read the Bible because it’s boring, I can tell they have in fact not read the Bible. There are portions that are a little dry but the book of Genesis is not among them. If the stuff from chapter 30 happened on a modern daytime soap, the audience might find it hard to suspend their disbelief. But of course this is real. In the words of Jack Palance, the truth is stranger than fiction.
Genesis 30
When Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, she envied her sister and said to Jacob “Give me children, or I will die.”
Continue readingRead the Bible: Genesis 29
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are great men of the Old Testament, renowned for their faith but sometimes questionable in other aspects. They lived in a different time, in another culture, and remember this is before the Law was given to God’s people. Abraham lied, on two separate occasions, about his wife being his sister; Isaac later did the same thing with one of the same kings. Jacob stole his older brother’s birthright and later his father’s blessing. And now it’s Jacob’s turn to be on the receiving end of some deception. This is just the beginning of the drama for Jacob.
Continue readingSatur-deja Vu
We continue to make tweaks to the Read the Bible series of posts. By the time we finish Genesis, I hope we have the design elements of the posts, the quality of the audio – maybe find a good place to record – everything just right. We started Happy Monday in 2012 and that took a little while to find itself. Here is the latest post, Genesis 28, and I think we’ve just about got it. If anyone comes along later and starts at Genesis 1, that will be a fun trip.
Continue readingRead the Bible: Genesis 28
As we have gone through the book of Genesis one chapter at a time, this series has been a work in progress. I started Read the Bible as something of an experiment, not sure how well things would work out. There have been changes in an effort to get better; the goal is to settle down at some point once we have the bugs worked out. I know that some of you would like to read along as I read out loud. What I am reading begins with the KJV text and then I make adjustments to update some of the archaic language. It is not a published translation, I have no desire to create my own paraphrase; but I cannot read any modern translation in its entirety because of copyright laws nor do I want to read a public domain text such as the KJV or ASV. But what if, for the benefit of those who wish to see what I am saying, the text was included with each post?
Continue readingRead the Bible: Genesis 27
Wow, this one has been a struggle. I’m not going to burden you with all the details of my life but surely this post or this series of posts are going to do great things or mean something to someone because the work has been opposed at every turn all day today (Thursday).
Jacob has previously taken his brother’s birthright. Jacob and his mother Rebekah are crafty, and Esau gets mad enough to kill somebody.
Noises
We live in a noisy world. I have known that for a long time. Some of those noises are naturally occurring and some are voices trying to get or hold your attention. Some of those voices we should be listening to while others need to be tuned out. Only when I started recording the Read the Bible series of posts did I truly realize how hard it is to eliminate all sounds, whether they’re barking dogs and singing birds or traffic and locomotives.
I’m going to write this post for those that perhaps miss reading a long form blog post and also upload an audio clip that plays for about 15 minutes and hopefully illustrates what I’m talking about. You can hear songbirds and traffic but to my surprise no train went by during that 15 minutes and none of dogs barked even once. We need to be deliberate and intentionally about what sounds and which voices we pay attention to. Listening is a discipline and as such requires a little bit of effort; some work and practice to get it right.
We need to make a short list of things that deserve our attention and then prioritize the things on that list. Maybe everybody doesn’t have ADHD but like a lost of conditions and disorders it is becoming more prevalent. Identify the things that deserves your attention then give them priority over all other things. Maybe things further down on the list could be eliminated, or limited the time you give to each of them. There are only so many minutes in each day and like a CPU, in your laptop or cell phone, the human mind can only run so many processes at a time. If you run out of resources you could be looking at a crash – and your mind cannot be replaced like a cell phone. Let’s try to take care of what we have. (There’s another lesson in there about being a good steward but I didn’t think of that while I was talking.)
Click play to hear my stream of conscious rambling on this topic:
The Master's Table 