I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 8-11.

    As I was reading today’s passage I was struck with what God told Noah after Noah offered a sacrifice for surviving the flood; “I will never again curse the ground because of the human race,…” I remember seeing this before and I remember thinking about its meaning. However, what struck me today was the thought, “How does this apply to pollution?” Or perhaps, “Does this apply to pollution?” I do not have an answer to that question, but I will note that it seems like every time when it has seemed like pollution has turned some place into a wasteland, it takes less time to undo it than anyone postulated. Even if that statement does apply to pollution that does NOT make it OK to pollute, because the end of that sentence is, “…even though everything they think or imagine is bent toward evil from childhood.” I would look at that and interpret it to mean that anything we do which results in something which can reasonably be interpreted as “cursing the ground” qualifies as evil.

    Generally, we think of the story of the People of Israel as starting with Abraham, but that is not correct. The story of the People of Israel starts with Terah, Abraham’s father. We are never told why Terah left the city of Ur. We know that he left Ur after the death of his son Haran and that he set out for the land of Canaan. But Terah never got to Canaan. He stopped in the city of Haran. I have long thought that if the Book of Genesis is to any degree factual, the stories about what happened before this point in the book needed to be passed down to Abraham from his father (and from Abraham to his sons). Is it possible that Terah left Ur because his son Haran was killed for telling the story of the Flood which conflicted with the official version as presented in the Epic of Gilgamesh? It has long been postulated that, because of the similarities between the story of The Flood and the Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of The Flood derives from the Epic of Gilgamesh. I have always wondered why we assume that the biblical account derives from the non-biblical rather than the other way around. I understand that the earliest records we have of the Epic of Gilgamesh are older than the earliest records we have of Genesis. However, those early records of Gilgamesh were on stone tablets, which survive the ravages of time better than any scroll. On the other hand, Abraham and his sons, grandsons, and great grandsons, were nomads. Which means that, if they had written their account down, they would likely have done so on something lighter, and more transportable, than stone. Even if they had written it on stone, they would have been unlikely to have left broken fragments of it where archeologists are likely to find it.