Motives

Something I noticed in both the Genesis and Qur'anic account of Joseph is that not only are some of the events inconsistent with one another, but the reasons behind some of the events differ as well. I thought this was interesting because if the motives are different, then the stories end up teaching different lessons.

For example:

In the Qur'an, Joseph simple goes to prison because they thought "after seeing the sings of his innocence, that they should imprison him for a while." (12:35)

Basically, he's just SO innocent that incarceration is needed. This, I feel, shows what we talked about in class today: no matter what people want to do, God's will shall always win out.

In Genesis, however, Joseph goes to prison because his master thinks he tried to get with his wife. That's legitimate: he is assumed guilty of a crime and thus must suffer jail time for it. This account also teaches the more legal lesson of no adultery and such.

I just thought that it's interesting that both accounts are similar but teach different things just by the way events are presented.

God Made an Oopsie

In Religion 121 E, we were given the assignment of Interpreting Gen. 11, The Tower of Babel.  My first reaction was God was just insane, but that, I was told, would not earn me a passing grade.   Needless to say, I changed my interpretation.

Did God give the humans too much power?

It seems to me that God made a mistake in giving the humans all "one language" because it gave them too much power.  In doing so, he gave them the ability to work together (Gen. 11:1).  They had decided to build a tower with "its top in the heavens," which is God's domain (Gen. 11:4).  It would have been possible for them to be where God lives because of how they cooperated so well.  This is evident also when God says, "nothing that they purpose to do will now be impossible for them (Gen. 11:6)."  This implies that humans could do anything they want, anything at all.  They could have the same amount of power as God., who can also do whatever he pleases.  Nothing would be impossible for either party.  Seeing this, god realizes his mistake, and is quick to remedy it.  He "confuse[d] their language[s]" so that they could no longer share his power.  God accidentally made humans too much like himself.

An alternative way of answering the question could be that God was just upset that people were getting along so well, not because of how much they were accomplishing,  but because he could have felt just a tad bit left out.  Or he could have just been having an off day.  Although these are things that could cause humans to be upset, I think the idea that God realized he had given humans too much power is a more plausible explanation.  It accounts for the idea that God doesn't get upset for no reason, and it logically explains why he was mad that his creations were doing so well, which the other explanations fail to do.

If taken in relation to earlier Genesis accounts, the idea that God made a mistake becomes even more plausible still.  He's made mistakes before, like when his creations were wicked before the flood in Gen. 6:5.    Previous passages have sow that maybe God doesn't exactly know what's going to happen, such as when he was surprised Cain murdered Abel in Gen. 4:10, and that he could have accidentally given humans too much power and been surprised by the outcome.  And, earlier text also gives examples about how he's not afraid to fix his mistakes, such as with the flood in Gen. 7:6, making the confusion of languages as a solution to that problem more likely as well.