Quote:
Originally Posted by kingtgf
Reply to Levite
RE: god and incest. Re-read the history of Abraham and Isaac - it sort of spoils the thought that god doesn't like incest. (Abraham married his half sister and Isaac his first cousin) The patriarch of the 'chosen people'. And, god doesn't seem to have done anything to punish Lot and/or his daughters for their couple of nights together, except to make their offspring and their descendants scapegoats (as far as the Hebrews were concerned)
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Yeah, there's a fair amount of quasi-incest in Genesis, most of which gets glossed over pretty well. The traditional Jewish Bible commentators (who have, from what I understand, a much more authoritative place in Jewish Biblical scholarship and general conceptions than traditional Christian commentators have in the average Christian study-- at least here in America) have a number of different ways they try to spin it, but one that is most generally repeated-- and which I find the most convincing counter-argument-- is simply that all the Genesis stories take place long before the giving of the Torah.
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived many hundreds of years before the Exodus, and thus many hundreds of years before God commanded the Jewish people to refrain from incest. Since the only argument that Judaism makes in condemning incest is that God commanded us (Jews) in the Torah to refrain from it, this counter-argument seems to make perfect sense to me.