Biblical Eugenics - being wrong about how to colorize your goats

Eugenics has a connotation that you did not intend for this thread. It generally is not applied to non-humans.

From the point of view of the sheep, what Jacob did was benign; unlike eugenics programs which involve disallowing people to have children, sterilization, killing off of undesirables, etc. Some real involuntary eugenics programs ended in the US ended as recently as 1970.Sheep likely don't really care about about being speckled.What was not benign was that Jacob was rustling sheep. But genetics does not have much to do with that evil. Jacob was not trying to make them better. He was trying to make them his.I would have just used the term "Bible genetics". After all, isn't your point really that the story was written by someone with no knowledge of how traits were inherited?Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Yes. I think this point about the Bible being wrong on this topic has been brought up before.But the Bible does not advocate doing that to humans which would be eugenics. It really does not even advocate doing it to sheep.It would have been great if back in the day NC and other states had implemented their genetics programs using Bible "eugenics" back in the day. But instead they sterilized undesirables (minorities, people with mental deficiencies, pregnant teens or women with too many children) either by force of law or without their knowledge.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

The Bible describes the silly tactic as actually working. Do you not see a problem with that?

To which you replied. That's fine. But the claim I am asking you defend is the one I quote below in which you claim that the sheep breeding story can be taken literally. Really? Any defense for this?

After reading the story several times, it appears to me that Jacob can be excused for his con, because he was actually conning a cheater.After making the deal with Jacob, Laban then stacks the deck in his own favor by removing all of the parents with any coloring on them and put them in a separate flock from the one that Jacob would watch over. Laban expected his deal with Jacob would be wage free.Jacob then found a way to produce speckled animals anyway and used his trick on only the strongest animals in the Laban's flock.

I don't care what you said in post 17. The text itself explicit states that Laban did the initial separating out of the sheep.Genesis 30:34-36 (KJV)

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34 And Laban said, Behold, I would it might be according to thy word.

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35 And he removed that day the goats that were ringstraked and spotted, and all the she goats that were speckled and spotted, and every one that had some white in it, and all the brown among the sheep, and gave them into the hand of his sons.

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36 And he set three days' journey betwixt himself and Jacob: and Jacob fed the rest of Laban's flocks.

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"He" and "himself" in these three verses are pretty clearly Laban and "thy" or "you" is pretty clearly Jacob. In fact, it is impossible to interpret "he" and "himself" in Verse 36 as being Jacob. It is also quite clear that the sons in verse 35 are Laban's sons.At the end of verse 36, Jacob is assigned to tend pure white flocks and that is where his payment is going to have to come from. Laban and his sons are going to watch over the speckled animals from the original flocks.Jacob then responds by making the strong goats in the flock produce strong specked offspring. He lets the weak sheep produce white offspring which are presumably weak.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Really? Then who was that pissed off group of folks in Genesis 31:1 claiming their father had been cheated by Jacob?

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Jacob heard that Laban’s sons were saying, Jacob has taken everything our father owned and has gained all this wealth from what belonged to our father. 2 And Jacob noticed that Laban’s attitude toward him was not what it had been.

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Yes, and as the text makes clear, Laban removes the speckle animals before Jacob gets a chance to take his walk. Verses 35 and 36 make that abundantly clear. Laban did not keep to the spirit of his promise although arguably he did stick to the letter of it.By the way, did you notice that Laban actually did have sons? Meaning that you have no answer for those arguments.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I have no idea what you are talking about.

Let's make at least a cursory attempt to stay on topic.

He does not. Remember that it is your claim, and no one else's that Jacob is making speckled sheep strong.The Bible actually says Jacob manufactures marked sheep and goats, and that state of affairs is the entire point of this discussion. The Bible also says that Jacob chose the strong parents for his breeding experiment.

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38 And he set the rods which he had pilled before the flocks in the gutters in the watering troughs when the flocks came to drink, that they should conceive when they came to drink.

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39 And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled, and spotted.

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That's pretty danged clear. It is the offspring and not the original parents that are marked with color. And regardless of the fact that you interpret it differently, the above is also the way fundies read it. For example, here is Matthew Henry's commentary on the topic.

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According to this bargain, those few that were party-coloured were separated, and put into the hands of Laban's sons, and sent three days' journey off so great was Laban's jealously lest any of them should mix with the rest of the flock, to the advantage of Jacob.

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Now Jacob's contrivances were, 1. To set peeled sticks before the cattle where they were watered, that, looking much at those unusual party-coloured sticks, by the power of imagination they might bring forth young ones in like manner party-coloured, Genesis 30:37-39. Probably this custom was commonly used by the shepherds of Canaan, who coveted to have their cattle of this motley colour.

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We can see that Jacob does not believe that the rods make animals or their offspring strong because Jacob only placed the rods in front of the strong parents. He made no attempt to strengthen the offspring of weak cattle.

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41 And it came to pass, whensoever the stronger cattle did conceive, that Jacob laid the rods before the eyes of the cattle in the gutters, that they might conceive among the rods.

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And here he avoids putting rods in front of weak parents

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42 But when the cattle were feeble, he put them not in: so the feebler were Laban's, and the stronger Jacob's.

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The result as described in verses 41 and 42 was strong speckled flock for Jacob, and weak, white flock for Laban. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Yes. But only to show you the fundamentalist interpretation. Is there anything inappropriate about that? I supported my own interpretation using words from the text Well that's a start.Apparently you are making this up as you go. Why not just use the reason actually given in the text which says that conceiving in front of the rods produced colored animals. Your post 17 is silly and full of errors at least two of which you have acknowledged. If you have a point, make it.I'll make a point for which it actually does not matter all that much who removed the spotted animals. What we can see from verse 36 is that the colored animals were removed from Laban's flocks (according to you by Jacob) and that Jacob was charged with tending the rest of Laban's flocks. That means Jacob was tending flocks with no colored animals.Again, you try to skip over any verses that disprove your point by labeling them moot. Those verses are not moot. They disagree with your interpretation. Verse 40 provides no help for you.Verse 40 completely trashes your interpretation. I quote it below followed by my comments.

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40 Jacob set apart the young of the flock by themselves, but made the rest face the streaked and dark-colored animals that belonged to Laban.

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First of all, according to your interpretation, which streaked and dark-colored and streaked animals would have belonged to Laban at this point? Wasn't the agreement that all such animals would belong to Jacob? Yet Laban still has colored animals (after, according to you Jacob took all the colored animals). Can you explain that? Not without inventing more stuff, I'll wager.In fact, Laban must have a flock consisting only of colored animals in order for verse 40 to make any sense after verses 34-36. Hmm, I wonder where that flock came from if not from verses 35-36?Secondly, Jacob's animals simply faced in their direction. Yes it is true that those animals were described as being 3 days distant. But so what? That is not a problem with facing in their direction.Edited by NoNukes, : use generic words for flock animals

I am not an atheist and neither is Jar. I am a Christian.You don't believe Jesus walked on water. So why does my failure to believe that the incidents in Genesis 30-31 actually occurred a problem for you.There is value in the story, but the value is not produced by assuming that the rods actually had any biological effect on the sheep. The fundies assume that God's power was involved, but they don't find it necessary to misread the text the way you do. I would suggest that it is your non-textual reading that actually trashes the Bible.

What I actually said was that verses 35 and 36 make it was clear that someone removed the animals. Do you disagree with that?I also said that verse 36 made it clear that Jacob was tending Laban's flocks after the colored animals were removed. I note you did not respond to that. I note that you also have provided no explanation for the fact that verse 40 says that after someone, let's say Jacob to avoid the issue, removed all of the colored animals from Laban's flock, Laban still had colored animals. No I don't expect you to believe that. Despite the fact that I've demonstrated that the text requires that result, and that your own interpretation is completely fubar, I expected you to continue to defend the indefensible. What disappoints me is that you did not bother to do even that.I note that your post does not contain a single argument. Instead you try to "lol" your way through. I don't see much reason to respond to that stuff.