God. A biography -- Friend of the family, Judge of All Earth

It's all very confusing to me: Jews, Hebrews, Judah, Israel, Semites, people, tribe... writers, editors, redactors... somehow, someone wrote all this stuff down--over how much time? Who can it be said of, that they created this god, and by extension a whole race? I think, it can be said of no one, that's my guess. It's like Reagan's America: a nostalgia for a past that never was, and the memory of that nostalgia is fueling new stories and new adepts and new faithful.

But regardless, at some point, there it was, a body of stories, a wrestling match between this god and these people. What would it feel like to believe it were true?! Here's how Miles describes it:

In the remainder of the Book of Genesis, the Lord God will be spoken of (an on occasion will identify himself) as 'of ' one patriarch or another. The Lord, the god of Abraham, will become the god of Isaac, the god of Jacob, or 'the god of your father.' As this happens, he will come to seem, often enough, more like a busy friend of the family than like the Judge of all the earth, as Abraham called him at Sodom. His help will be sought for conception and other human needs, but, significantly, the initiative will be on the human side. He will not attempt again to assert the same sort of control over reproduction that we have seen him attempting to assert over Abraham's reproduction. He will claim only what Abraham has already conceded. Yet the modest storms and calms of the house of Abraham will not be quite his concern. At times, the masterful, abrupt, inscrutable being we first me will return, for the radically unpredictable creator and destroyer personalities of yahweh and 'elohim remain in him alongside the loyal advocate now called 'god of your father.' All are in him, in a combination whose explosive potential will only gradually be revealed. (p66).

For my own purpose, I see in this part of Genesis (1:1 -25:11), the acknowledgement that the universe is not on humans' side, that it is unpredictable and unaccountable, ready to take back whatever it gives, or smear it around and leave it horribly disfigured; but it's base power thinks like us, and that by wrestling with it, you can make a deal of some kind, at heavy cost; and that that deal includes instrumental control over every fucking thing that is. There's a contradiction latent there. I think it's still here.