Out of curiosity I started reading it.
My mother is Jewish and my father Catholic...kind of. Both aren't religious at all and I was brought up slightly Jewish because my father's religiousness didn't go past having a Christmas tree.
Then again my mother's religiousness amounted to sitting down at the table, saying the minimum 1 minute prayer during Jewish holidays and eating a kosher meal (everything else was far, far from kosher).
So, I never read any kind of religious book before and always only heard about the stories and maybe saw something about them on TV.
For some reason I recently got interested in the old testament's stories and also just watched "The Bible Unearthed".
Maybe another reason for me to start reading is because 95% of all mythologic texts that interest me are poems and I hate poems.
The old testaments is one of the few prose texts (along with the Mabinogi which I just started reading).
Anyway, I got until page 35 so far, but I'm not quite sure if I want to continue.
They really are like 3-5 pages each, half of them being actually just repetition of things written a handful paragraphs above.
This is pretty lackluster considering that I always heard so much about them.
Now finally to the point of the topic title, so far it's just wack.
It essentially boils down to God telling Abraham, "go there, do that. No wait, go over there instead" and Abraham doing it without really asking why or giving it any thought.
Then god takes stuff from others and gives it to Abraham like he owns the place.
Sure, he made the planet and all, but he randomly takes things from the rightful owners and just gives them for Abraham cause he listens to god.
This reminds me of some 5 year old bully taking toys from the children he doesn't care about and giving them to the one that does as he says.
The Abraham/God combo also comes off as marriage swindlers when god tells Abraham to say Sarah is his sister and not his wife, then others marry her, THEN god appears them and threatens them so they give Abraham stuff out of fear of God.
God claims it's because they "will surely slay Abraham because Sarah is fair", but nothing even remotely similar has happened.
And I found the incident where God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and Abraham does as he's told without question to be pretty disturbing.
It boils down to Abraham being willing to kill his son for his own gain.
And even more disturbing was Lot being ..... by his own daughters.
If you ask me, that is some crazy **** right there.
