Genesis- the fall of the first born

Okay so it's about time that I started blogging on this big book that I've been reading for the past couple of weeks. I thought I'd start where it all began, in Genesis. Of course we all know the story of Adam and Eve, many of us have heard the stories of Noah and Abraham. Some of us can even recall the details of Issac, Jacob, and Joseph. While I was reading though, I noticed something that was rather interesting. That is that God seems to be more fond of the second or third child in a family than he does the firstborn. First of all is weird because you would think in this kind of culture that the firstborn son would be the most important and that God would favor him, but I cannot find a place in Genesis where that is actually the case.

First there is Adam, who may or may not be the first man on Earth. (I haven't actually decided that yet.) We see a creation in Genesis one and then another in chapter two, but whether or not the two are two separate events or two varying accounts of the same event is unclear. I like to think of them as separate because that supports my God and the younger sibling theory.

Anyway, after Adam and Eve get to "know" each other, Cain and then Able are born. Who does God favor? Able of course, the younger son who is also the one that is willing to sacrifice animals to him rather than the vegetables that his brother offers. God, therefore, adores Able, and Cain, being the rational older brother that he is, decides to kill the upstart.

Time passes and we come to Abram, or Abraham, whether or not he is a younger brother I can't say, but I know for a fact that Isaac is younger than Ishmael, but it is to Isaac that God passes the covenant he made with Abraham. Ishmael is, instead, forced to wander the land, and although God promises to help him as well, the overall effect is that he kind of gets shafted even though he is the first born.

Of course, most of us know that Jacob steals his older brother Esau's birthright, and Joseph eventually has his brothers kneeling at his feet. Even when Jacob is dying in Egypt he blesses the younger son of Joseph, Ephraim, over his older brother Manasseh. In other words, God continually shows favoritism not to the eldest son, but to a younger brother. I like this actually because I'm the youngest so that means that I've got a good shot at having about a million kids some day.