Carsen Codel > Recent Status Updates

Judges: 1.75/5. Repetitive as ever, Israel is back at it doing their very best at upsetting God in all the worst ways: worshipping other gods, breaking oaths, committing heinous acts against women and their fellow Israelites, the whole nine yards. This begins the cycle of God subjecting them, as punishment, to the oppression of others. A Judge (ruler) comes in to save them. But then they fall again. Sigh. Repeat.

Joshua: 0/5. Just absolutely terrible, hateful writing. And boring. A God that allows for and encourages genocide is not the God I would want to worship. God encourages genocide, pillaging, destruction, and rampant imperialism. Absolutely awful. And if you deviate one inch from His word, you and your entire society get blown to pieces. Nah, I’m good.

Deuteronomy: 2.5/5 - a solid way to recap the Books of Moses, so inherently repetitive if read right afterwards. Still rules rules rules, some of which are so unbalanced as to confuse me - if a woman disrespects her husband she gets stoned to death, but if a man disrespects his wife, all she gets to do is spit on him and hit him with a sandal. Makes me wonder…

Bruh

Numbers: 2/5 - God is weird in this book. The Israelites complain incessantly of their conditions; God calls them ingrates and makes their situation worse and worse to “teach them a lesson” which just makes them more upset, which makes God mad. God also basically gives the Israelites permission to become colonizers and tells all the colonized to let it happen because God loves the Israelites most. Oopsies!

Leviticus: 1/5, a book of laws, some extremely problematic, by which everything is a rule and never a standard. True justice needs room to honor the individual in the appropriate occasions, by which God leaves none. Every so often an interesting set of laws laid down that point towards good medical practice (at the time) as well as proper and just treatment of farming land to increase yield. Overall a dud.

Exodus: 4/5 for the first half, was pretty epic although God is kind of fickle, jealous, and petty. Also the Israelites are iPad babies, Moses left for like 48 hours and they already made a golden calf?? Maybe if they had a Subway Surfers stream they would be fine.

1.5/5 for the second half, it read like an IKEA manual with all the directions, and then a Twitch stream of Moses and the Israelites building stuff.

Dang God really just did Pharaoh like that huh 😔 go Moses go

As I mentioned, I’ll be benchmarking every book as I go through. I don’t really have a strong sense for the ups and downs I’m about to go through but let’s call Genesis a 3/5 for now. Lots of betrayal and intrigue (as interesting as the prose allows for). There is some beauty to be found in the blessings and forgiveness throughout. But lowkey these people suck!! They lie and hurt each other all the time :(

We rocking with Genesis right now. Thought it’d be interesting to read the thing straight through just so I can say I’ve done it. I’ve been doing Matthew in Bible study so I’ll drop a review of that later. Otherwise will go in order and release reviews of each book as I go along.