01-18-2010, 06:30 PM
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Contributor
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Los Angeles area
Posts: 40,549
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Genesis, the soap opera
Genesis, the soap opera
Another author trying to make a case for these ancient myths.
Quote:
For all of its familiarity, and its sacred aura, Genesis is a quirky work of literature, less a well-organized narrative than an outline for an epic that leaves out heaps of important details. Along to fill them in for the 21st century comes John Coats. In his book "Original Sinners (or via: amazon.co.uk)," he unpacks the first book of the Bible, story by story, mining it for very modern psychological insights. We see Noah’s family, post-Flood, slipping into a kind of madness straight out of "Apocalypse Now"; we see Joseph’s bedazzling coat hiding the fact that he was a snot-nosed brat we’d all love to hate. God pops up here and there, an omnipotent Jehovah-in-the-box who twists the plot in some impossible direction while the characters try to wrestle him back down.
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IDEAS: Sarah and Abraham are part of what you call the world’s first soap opera. There’s also a Bonnie-and-Clyde thing going on there.
COATS: The Sarah and Abraham chronicles are outrageous stories. He basically pimps his wife out in order to take down two kings....There’s this amphibian sense about him. They’re carrying her off and he’s counting his money. I don’t find much about Abraham that I like as a man. [Yet] he has this moment where Yahweh had presented himself in human form and was about to go nuke Sodom, and Abraham’s walking up and saying, “what about if there were 10 good men?” Abraham was a guy who was never really going to step out for anybody, and he’s all of sudden really putting himself out in going to appear in front of this deity that can make him disappear with a hard look, and he keeps pushing him, not too hard, but pushing him just enough.
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