The Inconvenient Truth about Genesis

Demigods, an inplausible flood, and Moses' non-authorship

Biblical inerrancy, the view that the Bible only contains truths, is a pillar of religious Christian and Jewish faith. These religions hold strong beliefs about incredibly important questions like which deeds are good or bad, and whether we’re going to heaven or hell for all eternity. It would be an understatement to say that knowing the correct answers to these questions is a matter of life and death.

To answer these questions, religious Jews follow the Old Testament’s description of the laws of Moses, and Christians emulate the Gospels’ accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus. If the Bible could be shown to be historically inaccurate, even in places unrelated to the laws of Moses or the life of Jesus, doubt would be cast on everything these religions stand for.

Everybody knows about the conflict between the Biblical creation narrative and modern cosmology and evolution. But there are way more conflicts between the history the Bible narrates and what is known to modern archaeology.

Let’s start with the book of Genesis. Genesis is the Bible’s first book, and one of its most entertaining reads. As a young Orthodox Jewish boy, I read this book in the original Biblical Hebrew. From time to time, I will draw on the Midrash, which is the Rabbis’ fanfiction commentary on the Old Testament. If the Old Testament is Star Wars, the Midrash is the Star Wars Expanded Universe.

1. The Primeval History

1a. God(s) Create Humanity

Genesis says God created the world in 7 days 6000 years ago; modern cosmology says the Big Bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago. Let’s just ignore that contradiction since it’s been discussed to death, and there’s juicier stuff later anyway.

After creating the world, God says “let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1:26), which is a peculiar thing for a monotheistic deity to say. The Midrash explains this away by saying God was trying to be nice and involve the angels in the creation process. Some Christians like to explain this as a cheeky reference to the Trinity.

So God makes Adam and Eve, the first couple, who immediately sin in the Garden of Eden by eating from the Tree of Knowledge. God is unhappy about this because “the man has now become like one of us” (Genesis 3:22). No other gods to see here, folks!

1b. Anachronisms and Demigods

The Bible starts enumerating the next few generations after Adam and Eve:

Jabal was the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock. His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all who play stringed instruments and pipes.

• Genesis 4:20-21

This is some BS because there’s evidence of nomadic hunter-gatherers and musical instruments tens of thousands of years before 4000-3000 BCE when these guys would have lived!

If you ask your religious friend how they explain this anachronism, they’ll reply: “Who the heck are Jabal and Jubal? Is that like Luigi and Waluigi? Never heard of them.” I’m telling you, this stuff is just not taught or justified in religious schools.

Eventually, “the sons of the gods took the beautiful daughters of man as their wives” (Genesis 6:2). Religious translators try to avoid the polytheism in this verse by translating the Hebrew word “אֱלֹהִים֙”, which most definitely means god or gods, to “great” or “divine”.

Over this whole era, even before the introduction of godly genes, the typical human lifespan had been 600-900 years. (Adam lived 930 years.) No religious person today seems bothered by this or even tries to explain it.

God decides this long lifespan is too overpowered, and sets the max human lifespan to 120 years (Genesis 6:3). But God is not powerful enough to stop Jeanne Calment from living 122 years from 1875 to 1997!

Jeanne Calment laughs at God’s age limit on humanity.

1c. The Flood

Around 2400 BCE, God gets fed up with humanity sinning, so he instructs Noah to build an ark (a big boat). Noah, his family, and a few individuals of each land animal species get on the ark, and God destroys everything else in a worldwide flood. There are just a few problems with this story:

• The ark would have been far too small to house all of the required species. (The Rabbis sidestep this by saying the ark was bigger on the inside than the outside, like the TARDIS from Dr. Who.)

• The flood would have buried the Earth’s plants and mixed the Earth’s saltwater and freshwater, making it impossible for most plants and marine life to survive, but we don’t see anything like that in the geological record.

• There’s no way Noah and his family could have logistically fed all of these animals, safely removed their waste, etc.

• The Americas were migrated to >10,000 years ago, but the flood would have destroyed those migrants.

• There’s no evidence of the flood in the geological record, the ice cores of the Antarctic, genetic bottlenecks in human or animal genomes, or anywhere else.

• Ancient civilizations like the Egyptians and Mesopotamians were thriving right through this time with no sign of upheaval.

In my opinion, the Biblical flood has the dubious honor of being the single most implausible event in the Bible, except for the Biblical creation story. As usual, nobody seems to care.

1d. The Tower of Babel

After the flood, all of humanity spoke one language. They started building a tower towards the heavens. God didn’t like this, so he scattered humanity across the Earth and scrambled their languages. I have never heard anyone even try to reconcile this story with our understanding of the historical origins of humanity’s language families. Even Natan Slifkin, an Orthodox Jew whose apologetics on the Biblical creation and flood stories I love, hasn’t discussed this.

1e. Grading the Primeval History

Genesis’ primeval history gets an F for being clearly fantastical. Most modern religious people avoid the religion-destroying implications of this by #just-not-thinking-about it. The few who do think about it either lose their faith, try to interpret the primeval history as a sequence of allegories, or turn to implausible alternative pseudoscience and/or pseudohistory.

2. The Patriarchs

After the flood, the Patriarchs were Abraham, his son Isaac, and his son Jacob. The Old Testament claims the Patriarchs were the ancestors of the Jews, but were they historical?

2a. Did Moses Write Genesis?

Genesis says Abraham was from “Ur of the Chaldees”, which was (probably) the ancient Sumerian city of Ur. The Bible gets points for mentioning a city which actually existed in 2000 BCE (when Abraham is said to have lived). However, it loses points for calling it “of the Chaldees”, when the Chaldees wouldn’t settle in Ur until 850 BCE. That’s over a thousand years after Abraham was supposed to have lived.

Religious Jews and Christians claim Moses wrote Genesis, but Moses lived around 1300 BCE, when Ur wasn’t yet “of the Chaldees”, so Moses can’t have written that. Later, Genesis says “the Canaanites were in the land in those days” (Genesis 12:6). This implies the Canaanites are no longer in the land of Israel, which was not true at the time of Moses, so Moses couldn’t have written that either.

Later, Genesis 36:31 talks about a time “before any king reigned over the Israelites”, which sounds like it’s written when or after a king reigned over the Israelites. But that didn’t happen until hundreds of years after Moses, so Moses couldn’t have written that either.

2b. Grading the Historicity of the Patriarchs

There’s no direct evidence that the Patriarchs existed. But to be fair to Genesis, we shouldn’t expect that. These guys are depicted as nomadic lords, and when we’re talking about 2000 BCE, little is known of pretty much anyone who wasn’t a Sumerian king.

In fact, there’s significant evidence that the traditions Genesis depicts the Patriarchs participating in were authentic to the time period they’re supposed to have lived in!

Furthermore, the Nuzi tablets authenticate customs depicted in the biblical narratives. For instance, we find the practice of a barren wife providing her husband with a concubine, as seen in the story of Sarah (or Sarai) giving Hagar to Abraham (Genesis 16:1, 2). Additionally, the conduct of business transactions at the city gate, illustrated by Abraham’s purchase of the field and cave of Machpelah near Hebron (Genesis 23:1–20), resonates with practices recorded in the Nuzi tablets.

Finally, the Nuzi tablets detail the selling of birthrights, echoing the story of Jacob and Esau (Genesis 25:29–34). Notably, possession of family gods—typically represented by small clay figurines—conveyed rights to property or inheritance, akin to holding a title deed. Such a scenario is referred to in the Bible, where Jacob’s wife Rachel took her father Laban’s household gods, known asteraphim, as they departed (Genesis 31:14–16, 19, 25–35).

“The Nuzi Tablets”, Philippe Bohström (2024).

Standing on their own, I think the narratives of the Patriarchs are plausibly historical. But their juxtaposition to the implausible primeval history and (as we’ll see) implausible Exodus means I’m overall pretty doubtful they actually existed. Still, the authenticity of their traditions gives their historicity a B.

2c. Bizarre Stories of the Patriarchs

Young Rebecca

Read this passage in Genesis about Rebecca, the future wife of the patriarch Isaac, and then guess how old she is:

Rebecca came out with her jar on her shoulder…The woman was very beautiful, a virgin; no man had ever slept with her. She went down to the spring, filled her jar and came up again. The servant hurried to meet her and said, “Please give me a little water from your jar.” “Drink, my lord,” she said, and quickly lowered the jar to her hands and gave him a drink. After she had given him a drink, she said, “I’ll draw water for your camels too, until they have had enough to drink.” So she quickly emptied her jar into the trough, ran back to the well to draw more water, and drew enough for all his camels.

• Genesis 24:15-20

She’s a beautiful virgin who’s strong enough to draw enough water from a spring for a man and several camels, and is old enough to walk around and have conversations on her own. I would guess she’s at least a teenager, since it would be weird as hell to describe (say) a 3-year-old as a virgin.

Well, the Midrash says that Rebecca was indeed 3 years old at the time! There’s no reason to assert this, and the plain meaning of the text clearly indicates she must have been much older than that. But nope, the Midrash says it, so Orthodox Jewish kids learn to this day that our patriarch Isaac married a 3-year-old girl.

Jacob is Blinded by Beauty

Jacob meets a guy named Laban who has a beautiful daughter Rachel. Jacob works for Laban for 7 years so he can have Rachel’s hand in marriage. On the wedding day, Laban pulls a switcheroo and makes his daughter Leah the bride instead of Rachel. Not only does Jacob not notice this during the wedding, but he even sleeps with Leah without noticing she’s not Rachel! On the morning after, he finally realizes his wife is not Rachel, but it’s too late. So Laban asks Jacob to work for another 7 years so he can marry Rachel too. And instead of just telling Laban to piss off and taking Rachel, Jacob agrees to that and works for another 7 years for Rachel!

The Cheating Ethiopian Wife

For payment from Laban, Jacob requested all of the spotted sheep he was shepherding. Laban separated the spotted sheep from Jacob’s flock, so that the baby sheep from Jacob’s flock wouldn’t be born with spots, and he wouldn’t have to pay Jacob. (Laban was a real piece of work.) So Jacob put some spotted tree branches near where his sheep would mate, which somehow caused the sheep to have spotted offspring. Genetics be damned!

Unfortunately, the Rabbis who wrote the Midrash learned from this that a child’s skin color is controlled by what their parents see. Once, a worried Ethiopian guy asked the Rabbis for advice because his Ethiopean wife had a white son and he suspected cheating. When the Rabbis learned that the Ethiopian guy had portraits of white people in his house, they told him that’s what caused his son to be white! Poor Ethiopian guy, I’m sorry to break it to you…

3. Conclusion

It’s easy to sneer at Biblical literalists for being so uncurious about examining views which could overturn the foundations of their lives. But we all have beliefs we’re uncurious about, often because their implications make us feel uncomfortable.

We avoid thinking about what we could do about the horrors of factory farming, and how to save African children’s lives, because they require sacrifices of us that we’re uncomfortable making. We’re worried about upturning what we find important in life, and we’re worried about social disapproval. In that way, we’re very much like the Biblical literalist. But like the Biblical literalist, we can do better. If we’re brave, we can stare the truth in the face, and follow it wherever it may lead.