Last weekend I ended up sitting at home on a Saturday night entranced by something called The Brick Testament. It is basically the Bible, with different passages illustrated with Legos. The project is insanely comprehensive, and the pictures are detailed and engaging. Meaning, yes, a heathen like me finds The Bible only readable when illustrated with precious plastic childhood toys. Better than nothing though right? I read it eager to see how it brought to life the story of my namesake, Rebecca (Or Rebekah). My mom had always told me she named me after her favorite saint, calling her “the water carrier saint.”

It’s a really happy story, what happens to Rebekah. Almost immediately after she gets married, Isaac, her husband, marries some other chick. Her biggest story is that she tricks her husband into giving his inheritance to her less hairy son by literally making him wear a goat skin so his blind father won’t realize it’s not the hairy son.

My favorite part was when Rebekah was sent away to get married and this is what people said to her: “May you become mother to millions, and may your offspring capture the city gates of their enemies!” Now that’s a high-pressure bon voyage.

As you read the Bible, it becomes increasingly apparent that if humanity did in fact need to spring from just 2 people, the process would require a whole lot of incest, and plenty of incestuous rape. Luckily, the ladies were super down, because they had to create humanity somehow.

Here are a couple frames from the Brick Testament that illustrate how this goes down:

Implication: When you can’t get pregnant, it’s because God’s mad at you. Implication of that implication: When you get pregnant, it means God is rewarding you. Plus, this era’s surrogate pregnancy is just letting your husband have sex with your slave-girl.

This was the story of 2 sisters that were sold to the same husband, and compete to have more babies than one another.

With more slave-girl rape!

Then there are the sisters who plot together to rape their father so they can carry on their family line.

Now I’m starting to understand where all this anti-abortion sentiment is coming from. People who hold the old testament as truth believe that women were made to bear as many children as God chose to plant in their stomachs, and that the amount of children they produced determined their worth and their reflection in God’s eyes.

In the old testament, motherhood was a sacred, integral part of building the human population from scratch. It’s a cosmic act of God that brings a child to earth to directly affect the fate of humanity. In this model of history, children were likely to start their own kingdoms, as the earth was only 1,000 years old or whatever and it was pretty dang empty. Clearly, abortion was not part of this sacred plan.

The thing is, evolution exists. Humanity is not the product of a bunch of incestuous families, but probably started with at least some healthy genetic diversity. It’s less likely that two humans started the whole population, and more likely that a bunch of pre-humans all over the place mated until they evolved into humans. Even if humanity’s duty was, at the time, to populate the planet, it certainly isn’t now. The human population has reached 7 billion people, and is expected to grow by 35% in the next 28 years to be 9 billion. We’re on the brink of an agriculture crisis that could cause world wars as more and more babies get a taste for carbon dioxide-producing hamburgers. Becoming mother to millions is a little bit problematic now.

–Becky Lang

Image source – The Brick Testament