Dale's Bible Review! Genesis 1:1-4:26: The Opening Gambit

Welcome to a brand new series here on Sophisticating Sandwiches. For however long it takes, I will be taking a piece by piece, critical review of the Bible. Yes, I am aware this is probably going to upset people. God I hope so anyway. A negative article about us would really help page views. Anyway, let's do this! Let's review a book I've been avoiding since I was nineteen! We start with the first story, the granddaddy of them all! Creation.

So we start with a rather ham handed introduction to the man I assume our protagonist, God. Do we start with any sort of character establishment? No. First thing we get is this God guy creating pretty much everything. Kind of a mary-sue move if you ask me. You don't need your main character to create all of existence for us to like him. A little character development would be just fine. Instead we get a long winded, description free account of this guy creating everything.

We're already starting out with one big problem. You're creating the entire fucking universe! Describe it to me a little! Show me some mountains rising from a bubbling sea under and orange tinted sky. Show me animals frolicking through the first forests, seeing everything for the first time. Do we get any of that? No. It read more like a text book. First he did this, then he did that, then he did a third thing. The author doesn't seem interested in getting me invested in his story in the slightest.

After being told, at length, about all the amazing things God did, he finally does something interesting and creates people. According to the book he made them in his own image, which is the first piece of character development we get from God... he's a narcissist... what a wonderful protagonist we have. Here's a tip, if you're trying to make a character likeable, maybe making him so obsessed with his own face that he has to make a second sentient being that looks just like him isn't the best way to go. Of course, after doing all this he gives these humans domain over the Earth and takes a nap. How am I supposed to root for this guy?

Once God goes down for his nap, we get a flashback, giving us more detail about what happened when he created humans to apparently be his own personal gardeners. Again, not a good sign for the character we're supposed to like. He creates a man named Adam, and puts him in what's referred to as the Garden of Eden. He tells him basically everything there is his, but he can't eat from this one tree, which seems to me like an incredibly clumsy plot device. No shit he's gonna eat from it. If he wasn't, you wouldn't have said anything.

Anyway, God sees that Adam is lonely, and decides he needs a partner. He shows Adam all the animals, but Adams not interested in any of them, presumably because he's not from Alabama. God then takes one of Adam ribs and creates a woman who they name Eve. After this scene, with again very little description, we're introduced to what I guess is supposed to be our main villain for this particular story. They don't even give him a name, they just call him the serpent, and he is given no motivation. We get no back story, nothing, we just dive right into him convincing Eve to eat from the tree they're not supposed to. It doesn't take long by the way. This character of Eve has no resolve whatsoever apparently. She then convinces Adam to do the same, which is just as easy. Of course God finds out, and punishes them both in what I would consider an unjust manner.

Here we get my real problem with this first story. What little bits of character development God has make him look like an angry, vengeful parent who lays down arbitrary rules just so the humans will break them and he can punish them unfairly. Also, the author refers to the tree as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If they didn't have this knowledge before, how could they know disobeying this God guy was evil? So far I've been introduced to four characters. Only one of them has had any development, and it's made him look like a horrible person.

After the whole serpent fiasco, we jump forward several years to Adam and Eve's children, Cain and Abel. We don't get to know much about Cain, and we get nothing about Abel. All we're told is that Abel offers up animal meat and God likes that, whereas Cain offers up crops from his fields, and God isn't so into it. Seems kind of picky, but that's not even close to the biggest problem here. We go straight from God accepting Abel's offering, to Cain getting pissed and killing Abel. God sees this right away, because giant mary-sue, and punishes Cain with a curse that he will no longer be able to farm. Then we're told Cain went east with his wife, who just magically appeared out of nowhere, and had some kids. Before the end of the story we're told that Adam and Eve had another child, and Eve rejoiced because this one replaces Abel. That's awful and not how children work.

My impressions of this opening set of stories is not a good one. The writing is stilted and unimaginative, and the characters have nothing to them whatsoever. They're just cardboard stand ins for stuff to happen to. The main character, God, is nothing but an irrational, lazy control freak. I hope it gets better as we go, because this first section is not promising in the slightest. I give Genesis 1:1-4:26 a score of 3/10. It needs to improve greatly if I'm going to enjoy any of this.

Thank you for reading. Make sure to join me next week as I review the story of Noah.