Hebrew people were enslaved, children were separated from their parents, scrolls were burned, and for the first time Hebrew stories fell under threat of being lost and forgotten.
So the Hebrew priests decided to collect their people’s stories, poems, and songs, and place them alongside laws and rituals. These enslaved priests become the editors of what we now know as the Hebrew Bible.
The original Hebrew text still bears the scars of their editing. Over the centuries different versions had emerged in different villages. And when there were two treasured versions of a story, the editors sometimes chose to catalog them side-by-side in the text. The starkest example of this is the two creation stories—the story of the all-powerful creator of the universe, placed beside the very emotional Yahweh walking next to Adam and Eve in a small garden. Sometimes they wove two versions together, as in the story of Noah and the ark. If you read closely you can see that everything happens twice. The animals are loaded on the ark twice, earth is flooded twice, Noah sends out a raven first, then a dove. And in the Hebrew these couplets make the text feel stilted. Broken and mended.
When I learned this, I felt, well, shocked. I felt lied to by the English translators and tricked by the pastors who told me over and over again that the Bible was a historical account. These stories were what really happened, they’d told me.
But it was around this same time that I met a village elder from the Pokot tribe of northern Kenya. Michael Kimpur grew up in a nomadic community. He herded cows and listened to his village elders retell stories around campfires. When I asked him if there was a written collection of the stories of his people, he told me something that changed my perspective on the Bible. “There are no official versions of our stories,” he said. “It is the responsibility of the elders in each generation to retell these stories in a way that meets the needs of the next generation.”
Shortly after this exchange, I was in the religion section of an old bookstore, my head tilted sideways reading book titles. I stumbled across a collection of Jewish folk retellings of Biblical stories called midrash. The collection contained wild and fantastic retellings that had been told and retold by rabbis over thousands of years. These rabbis played with the details. In one retelling of Adam and the garden, Adam is created as a giant, so big he can barely fit on the earth, his head reaches all the way to the stars. And when this oversized and overconfident Adam begins to question the judgment of the angels, he is shrunk down to normal human size. The story ends with Adam sleeping, dreaming of being a giant and walking among the stars.
In comic books they call these types of stories an Elseworld story. A story set in a world where things are just a little different. A great example of an Elseworld story is Superman Red Son by Mark Millar. In Red Son baby Superman’s alien shuttle flies from the exploding planet of Krypton through space, but it doesn’t land in the Kent family farm in Kansas. Instead, his shuttle lands in the Soviet Union on a collective farm with a Ukrainian family. Changing this one detail about Superman’s story, changes so much.
Superman still has the power of flight and super strength. But he doesn’t fight for “Truth, justice, and the American Way.” Instead Superman is heralded on Soviet radio broadcasts “as the Champion of the common worker who fights a never-ending battle for Stalin, socialism, and the international expansion of the Warsaw Pact.” And readers are suddenly faced with the harsh reality of how terrifying Superman’s power is when he is working for Stalin.
Sometimes all it takes is changing one detail to see a familiar story in a whole new light.
The book you are holding is a collection of reimagined stories from Genesis and Exodus set in a Biblical Elseworld. If you grew up with Bible stories, I suspect the setting and characters will feel familiar, but I did change one little detail–in these stories the Hebrew God, Yahweh, doesn’t exist. Why take Yahweh out of the Bible you ask? Because I wanted to see what would happen next.
I hope my stories inspire you to play with the Biblical details so that we can meet the needs of this and the next generation.
Nathan Roberts
Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field, but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner.
—Genesis 1:20
Cain and the Snake
“What should we name it?” Adam asked holding a small brown snake by the tail. His two young sons, Cain and Abel, watched as its scaly body wriggled back and forth, its red tongue flickering in and out like a sword.
“What about calling it a dirt snake?” Abel shouted, his four-year-old fingers petting the very end of the tail.
“Hm . . . dirt snake you say?” He smiled turning the snake as he rubbed his long graying beard.
“But remember that we found it on the branch of a tree?” Adam added.
“How about Branch Snake!” Abel shouted.
“Excellent idea!” Adam grinned, pulling out a long dusty scroll from his satchel.
“Is that the kind of snake that bit mommy?” Cain asked as he watched the snake slither with a sick feeling in his stomach. He stepped off the red dirt path onto a large rock, his eyes checking nearby branches and tree trunks.
They had walked all morning, up and down the shadowy forest trails, surrounded on all sides by chirping and squawking, the howls of hidden monkeys, and creatures rustling in the tall dark bushes. It had been a long time since he had gone exploring and the forest seemed to hold a lot more creatures than he had remembered. But the snake wriggling between his dad’s fingers was the first animal Cain had actually seen.
“What was that about mommy?” Adam asked. His knees were in the dirt, a long scroll unrolled in front of him. Adam held the snake with one hand and sketched it with the other. The scroll was already covered in dozens of snake drawings each with its own new name.
“I said,” Cain asked louder, “is that the kind of snake that bit mommy?” Cain could feel his heart beating faster. He rubbed the sweat off his forehead.
“No, no,” Adam reassured his son, not bothering to look up from his drawing. “That snake was much much bigger.”
“Bigger?” Cain whispered to himself as he checked the waist-high grass that lined the trail.
Abel’s small frame leaned against his father’s shoulder. “Hey, don’t bump me while I’m drawing,” Adam laughed and licked a finger to blot out a stray line jutting out of the branch snake like a leg. Adam finished drawing and rolled up the scroll. Then he gently placed the newly named branch snake back on a low-hanging naked branch.
“Don’t worry, Cain,” Adam smiled and lifted Abel onto his shoulders. “We’ve been walking these hills for months and we haven’t seen anything to worry about.” Adam reached out for Cain’s hand, and Cain felt his sweaty palm swallowed in his father’s rough skin. Secretly, Cain wished he was still small enough to ride on his father’s shoulders.
The three of them walked until the trail abruptly ended at the edge of a steep, grassy hill. The long wet green shoots reached all the way up to Cain’s belly button. The hill sizzled with the sounds of insects he didn’t recognize. At the bottom Cain could see a small river bordered by trees. Cain hoped they were just stopping to look at the river.
“You
