Fairy Tale Spotlight: Genesis [Book Review]

Here we have the very first book of the Holy Bible. I read the King James Version because I was having a lot of trouble finding a more modern version that I could vet as 100% trustworthy. I basically just defaulted back to the English translation that has been around the longest in the hopes that it would stand the test of time.

So, the book of Genesis serves mostly has a history lesson of the very first part of the beginning of time. It was supposed to have been written by Moses. In this case, the author skips over a lot of specific details of things and glosses over the fine details as a means to let you know how humans originally spread out across the world. I like to think of it as a written time-lapse. It details the progress from Adam to Joseph.

The author occasionally breaks away from the general history to tell more detailed stories at very specific epochal moments. The story of Adam and Eve was the first of these. Noah was another big one. But the story almost breaks away from history telling altogether with the advent of Abram, later known as Abraham. His lineage is given special attention, and it is the point at which Genesis becomes less of a history book and takes on more of a proper narrative.

As interesting as the Abraham and Isaac stories were, I really enjoyed the Joseph tale the most, and it seems that Moses did as well. It got the most detailed attention than anything else. The whole story of Joseph shows how God can manipulate a situation in order to make something very specific happen.

He allowed Joseph's brothers to be jealous of him, so that they would sell him into slavery. This led into a new chain of events that caused Joseph to become the second most powerful man in Egypt. Because Joseph had a gift for being able to interpret dreams, he was able to figure out that there was a horrible famine about to hit the country. Basically, because his brothers were jealous, the world was saved from a famine.

Notice how God did not just fix the situation instantly. He manipulated people so that things would work out in a much more interesting and narrative manner. Were his brothers really evil? Yes, they did a bad thing. They repented it it later. Heck, even Joseph wasn't all that mad at them, because he knew God had intended it that way. Their evil got used by God for the betterment of the land many years in the future. This is really quite extraordinary.

Naturally, I am not going to go over all the stories found within this very real and true fairy tale. But I do recommend it if you are willing to take it all within the context of it being a very simple and sometimes blandly written history book. If you are not interested in the lineage of the original humans, then it may come across as a bit dry.

But the real big thing that I really enjoyed about Genesis was how often God communicated with, manipulated, and acted harshly against humans within this story. The Great Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah are two great examples of God pretty much just showing his might against evil humans.

But perhaps the most remarkable moment comes when Abraham got a visit by someone who seems to be a man but who is also God. Sorry, folks. God the Father is incapable of pushing himself into our world. He exists outside of our reality. But there is one aspect of himself that can exist with us. That would be his son, Jesus. Abraham met Jesus. Whether he met Jesus before or after the resurrection is unclear. There was no mentioning of nail holes in his hand, but if you understand how the Trinity works, Abraham met and broke bread with Jesus himself... and that is freaking amazing.

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