Exegesis. (noun). 1. Critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially of scripture. --- ## Axioms In this file, we the Authors make our first attempt, from a developers perspective, to reverse engineer the bible data format. We assume the following as given: - The authors of the bible were human. - Therefore, both as regards their individual personalities, and as regards the cultures from which they came, we assume the authors of the bible possessed (at least on average) the attributes that have been documented in all known human cultures. For a list of these attributes, see [[universals]]. - By "on average," we mean that while individual human beings may lack, for example, empathy (in psychopathy) or theory of mind (in autism), on average in any group, most members will possess most human universals, both individually (as cognitive capacities) and culturally (as general features of the cultures to which they belong). Given these assumptions, we now proceed to our reverse engineering analysis of the bible data format. ## Disassembly Give examples of the following: - Thinly veiled jokes about nearby tribes 1: Incestuous birth for Moab and Ammon in the story of Lot's daughters, analogous to a modern story of incest where the children are called Alabama and Mississippi. - Thinly veiled jokes about nearby tribes 2: "Give me this red stuff" for Edom in the Jacob Esau story. Edom sounds like red in Hebrew, and is right below Israel and Judah in the Authors' time. Genesis 25:29-33 is the equivalent of the "24 dollars worth of beads" story in American history. TODO: Merge this with the commentary on Genesis which (I think) is currently somewhere in zero, possibly in the man formats directory.