Nimrod and His Incestuous Family, Genesis 7- 12

I've always wondered about the incest that occurs in the Bible. I only just started reading the thing and already the earth seems to have been populated twice by incestuous families.

Adam and Eve I wasn't really sure about. Was "Adam" a metaphor for man and "Eve" a metaphor for woman? This seemed likely since Cain feared the retribution of others after killing Able. Where did those other people come from?

Noah and his family are different. Noah, his wife, his three sons and their three wives were the only people on the Ark. They then went out and populated the earth. I know the definition of incest is different for different cultures. I suppose that Noah's family could have been careful to never "lie" with anyone closer than a cousin but that is still considered incest in most cultures.

I did go look this up, Google and I are buddies. Most people explain this incest away by simply saying that at the time of Adam and Eve and Noah's family, incest was allowed. My understanding is that I will learn more about this later when I get to Mosaic Law when incest will be official forbidden.

I don't know how I feel about all that. There seems to be a lot of mind changing when it comes to right and wrong early on in the Bible.

The other explanation is simply that the first four books of the Bible are a metaphor. Really? A metaphor means it is up to anyone's interpretation. The interpretation of the Bible to serve those in control is another issue I have with religion.

One of my favorite parts of chapters 7-12 was that Noah's great grandson's name was Nimrod. Is this where Nimrod as in "dumb-ass" comes from? My Bible has a little note at the bottom that says:

Nimrod's activities centered first in Shinar (Babylonia) and included building the tower of Babel, described in 11:1-9; then he went to Assyria (cf. Mic. 5:6)

From the sounds of it, building the Tower of Babel was a "dumb-ass" idea. God wasn't all that pleased with man's progress and pride. He decided to end the forward momentum of man, "let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech"(Gen. 11:7).

The whole thing seems odd to me but the strangest part is that God was so upset about man settling in one place and having pride that he decided he had to do something about it. "Behold they are one people and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them" (Gen. 11:6).

I always thought they were trying to build a tower to Heaven. Maybe they were, that isn't really what I read into the words. My Bible doesn't have any notes about that either just that the Tower was built as a "rallying point and a symbol of their fame" instead of for "the purpose of worshiping a deity". Donald Trump must be in some serious trouble for his "symbols of fame".

Is this the first case of materialism? I don't think "confusing our language" was very effective against materialism. Look around us, we are surrounded by Towers of Babels and Nimrods.

Definitions of Nimrod-

1. Nimrod - (Old Testament) a famous hunter
2. Informal A person regarded as silly, foolish, or stupid.

I was hoping to find something really fun on Urban Dictionary but I didn't. The only interesting thing was that the guy who wrote the definition obviously doesn't have the same bible notes I do because he is sure Nimrod did not build the Tower of Babel.

Nimrod was the Biblical founder of Babylon, also considered a mighty hunter. Contrary to the uneducated twits on here, Nimrod did NOT build the tower of Babel (at least the Bible does not claim this, only that the "men of Babylon" tried to build it), and the Bible does NOT claim he tried to kill God. 

Another interesting finding was the possible origin of nimrod as in dumb-ass from Dictionary.com

Nimrod  "great hunter," 1712, in ref. to the biblical son of Cush, referred to (Gen. x.8-9) as "a mighty hunter before the Lord." It came to mean "geek, klutz" by 1983 in teenager slang, for unknown reasons. (Amateur theories include its occasional use in "Bugs Bunny" cartoon episodes featuring rabbit-hunting Elmer Fudd as a foil; its possible ironic use, among hunters, for a clumsy member of their fraternity; or a stereotype of deer hunters by the non-hunting population in the U.S.