Written by Jackson Ferrell

Genesis 26 – Liars and Kings

In today’s chapter, Isaac travels in the land of a foreign king, in order to avoid the effects of a local famine, and to keep the inhabitants from killing him and taking his extremely attractive wife, he claims she’s his sister. Sound familiar? It’s the same thing Abraham did twice before. However, to paraphrase the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, you can’t step in the same river twice, much less the same river that your father stepped in. Isaac’s encounter doesn’t go exactly as his father’s two encounters did, but what are we to make of that?

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Written by Jackson Ferrell

Genesis 25 – What’s in a Name

Tip for Dungeon Masters: if you need an intriguingly foreign-sounding name for a non-player character in your tabletop RPG, put aside those random name generators and just turn to any of the genealogy chapters in Genesis. You only need open today’s text, chapter 25, and you can populate your Dungeons and Dragons game with the likes of Ishbak the Barbarian, the great wizard Zohar, or the noble king Adbeel, ruler of the plains of Eldaah. That said, if you would rather be playing Dungeons and Dragons than reading the genealogies, I wouldn’t entirely blame you.

Written by Jackson Ferrell

Genesis 24 – The Legend of Rebekah: A Link to the Isaac

Has God ever granted one of your requests in mid-prayer? One Saturday afternoon during my teenage years, after spending entirely too much time searching for a chapstick and getting increasingly frustrated, I began to ask God to help me find the chapstick, only to look down and see it lying on the sofa. I could tell you ten bojillion stories in which God answered my “help me find X” prayers, but all of them except the chapstick one involved some length of time between the request and the finding, ranging from a few minutes to half a year. But we are here to discuss not the Complete History of Jackson’s Answered Prayers, but rather today’s chapter of Genesis. And like my chapstick situation, today’s chapter of Genesis features a “help me find X” prayer that was answered before it was even completed.

Written by Jackson Ferrell

Genesis 23 – Dealing with Ephron the Hittite

More than once, a verse or passage in Genesis has done little more than remind me that we live in a vastly different culture than the people of the ancient Near East. And yes, we have just such a chapter today. Genesis 23 covers the death and burial of Sarah. Two verses are devoted to Abraham’s mourning over her, and fifteen verses–75% of the chapter, by verse–are devoted to the negotiation by which Abraham buys a burial plot. If you or I were recording this event, we would probably approach it somewhat differently.

Written by Jackson Ferrell

Genesis 22 – Faith, Doubt, and the Edge of the Knife

Today’s chapter tells the story of the Binding of Isaac, in which God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, Abraham goes to do it, and the angel of the Lord tells him that he doesn’t actually have to sacrifice his son. It’s one of the better-known passages from the Bible, and with good reason. An ostensibly all-loving God calling for human sacrifice, only to turn around and say, “No, wait, sacrifice this ram instead,” has a way of arresting our attention. But I feel like the story, in its magnitude, has me hemmed in on all sides. How can I adequately address its scope? How can I say something worthy of the monumental matters it raises?

Written by Jackson Ferrell

Genesis 20 – If at First You Don’t Succeed, Half-Lie Again

In junior high, when one of my friends encountered the name “Abimelech,” he adopted a silly deep voice with a quasi-Middle-Eastern accent and pronounced it “a-BIM-lick.” I started drawing a series of comics titled “The Bimlik,” in which a handful of shyguys, at least one of whom had just had or was about to have or was in the process of having face surgery, had inane conversations before encountering a nebulously-drawn monster called the Bimlik, with violent results. Apart from illustrating how strange ancient Semitic names can sound to contemporary American ears, this story has nothing to do with today’s chapter, but a personal anecdote can make for an effective introduction.