I just feel like I need to write - but I don't really have anything to write about right now - so I'm going to do some free association - let me mind go - and write where it goes...

Twelve tribes of Israel, Hagar and and Ishmael and all that - fascinating really. Why is hereditary blah blah blah so important? Legitimacy and all that. Boys and girls. Why always dudes? Why always first? Why legit? None of that really means that the kid is right for the job or responsible.

So Israel had all these kids - the twelve tribes. Joseph ended up a king? Was it a king? Or just a high ranking official. I feel like bible school sometimes took shortcuts and some stuff was lost in translation. Speaking of kings and Pharaohs and such... So the Old Testament stories predate history. What if they are so old that the names and places and concepts are really just the adopted names and places and concepts from when they were actually written down. Like when the stories were actual events, there was no Egypt and no Pharaohs. When the stories were finally written down, the writers only had contemporary places and names and concepts to compare it to, so they used what they knew. It's basically an updating or reboot. Like if we take an old story from the Middle Ages - say Beowulf or even King Arthur, but update it to the 21st Century and relocate them to New York City. Instead of kings, we might say President or Mayor or Senator or whatever. Instead of monsters, it could be a serial killer or a Republican. lol. You get the idea tho, right? So like the stories of the Old Testament could be based on actual events, but from an era much longer ago than we traditionally think.

I kinda believe in the old world theory... the idea that humans have been here far longer than traditional science currently states - that maybe there has been an ebb and flow for millennia - that civilization builds itself up (possibly to our technological level or higher) then crashes and has to build itself back up again... who knows. Maybe over and over. You know how archeologists occasionally find oddly technological items or inexplicable drawings or manuscripts that describe tech unknown to past peoples... It could be that those are really just remnants of some of our previous peaks.

All this brings to mind that maybe the Old Testament stories are actually from one of our peaks - when cultures mingled via air travel and communicated via internet or radio or telephones - and then, for whatever reason, we destroyed it all. Nuclear war? Economic collapse? Who knows?

I guess I need to go to sleep. Wonder what I'll dream about - perhaps I'll turn grapes to wine and the Pharaoh will drink from my cup - and I can escape this prison.