Let’s be real, there are a lot of places in the book of Genesis where you’re going to go “Ewww!”. Here’s a sample:
Cain murders Abel over simple jealousy. Ugh!
Something fairly undefined happens between Noah and one of his sons. It’s not clear what, but it has to do with one of them disrespecting him when they found him sleeping naked. Ewww?
When Lot is trying to prevent the men of Sodom from raping his house guests, he tries to distract them by offering to let them rape his daughters instead. They’re undeterred. Ugly on multiple levels!
After Sodom and Gomorrah have been destroyed, Lot’s daughters get him drunk and get themselves pregnant by him. Ewww!
Judah finds a wife for his son Er, her name is Tamar. Er is apparently evil, and God lets him die. Then Judah tells his other son Onan, “Okay, you go into her and have kids with her.” But Onan, uses the pull-out method to make sure he doesn’t get her pregnant. So God lets him die too. Tamar, a single, twice-widowed, childless, woman with no husband (basically a death sentence) is told to go back to her father’s house and wait until Judah’s youngest son, Shelah, is old enough to marry. When Shelah is old enough to marry, Tamar veils herself to get a look at him, and she’s wondering why she hasn’t been given to him in marriage yet. At that moment, Judah mistakes her for a prostitute and she goes along with it and becomes pregnant with twins! When it comes out that she’s been scandalous, she provides some proof of the prostitution incident and Judah realizes he was the one who messed up, and takes her for his own wife. Yeesh!
God makes a promise to be faithful to the children of Abraham and to bless the whole world through his descendants. All of his descendants though, they’re just normal people who do what normal people do. They mess up, make mistakes, do terrible things. But God, keeps his word and works it out the way he said he would anyway. That’s how Genesis goes for 40 chapters, until it ends with what I think is one of the most incredible stories in the Bible, the story of Joseph. This is where God works everything out for the good. Joseph’s brother’s get jealous of him (sort of like Cain did to Abel), they stop just short of killing him by selling him into slavery. They do evil to their brother, and they lie about it. God uses their evil to put Joseph second in command of Egypt. He gifts Joseph with insights and wisdom to prepare for a major famine, and in doing so he’s able to save the lives of thousands of people in and around Egypt, including the lives of his brothers. He reconciles with his brothers, and forgives them. Joseph fully yields to the goodness and provision of God. In the end of Genesis we find a picture of God’s grace and mercy. He brings all of the Israelites to Egypt to live and multiply for several hundred years until they’re ready to live out the next phase of his plan for them.
If you were to look at what the people say and do in Genesis as if it were the example to follow, you’d be right to question why it’s productive to believe in any of it. When I read this book as a non-believer, all it did was give me fuel to question even more why anyone would believe in this God. But when you instead focus on what God does and says throughout this story, you begin to see His character separately from the actions of people. If we’re to have a relationship with God as his children, we need to seek who He is rather than looking to the world for who they say He is. The world will show us hostility, immorality, hypocrisy, and violence and try to tell us that’s who God is. God shows us something else entirely.