Part of today’s reading for the One Year Bible Blog is Genesis 22, which talks about Abraham being asked to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. I suspect that my literalist friends will not like my take on this passage, but here it is anyway.

My translation (NRSV) of v 1-2 reads:

¹After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham” And he said, “Here I am.” ²He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moria, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”

Now, I know that this says “God tested Abraham.” But God had already made the coventant with Abraham in an earlier chapter. Was this God trying to look for a “loophole” in the deal? I think not. Rather, I think this was a case of Abraham testing God.

Note: I don’t regard these stories in the Old Testament, especially these early stories in Genesis, as history. Unless you break the word up, and call it His story. That is, I don’t know, and frankly don’t care, if any of these events actually took place. I believe they are intended to tell a truth about God, rather than a truth about events that happened at a specific point in time. And the truth that’s being told is that God is always faithful, regardless of our own doubts and failings.

I’ve discovered a couple of bug in BlogWatcher, and I wanted to post here about them before they cause any problems for any of my users. All 3 of you.

The first bug is that if you switch to the “View my BlogList” link before logging in, and then try to log in, you’ll lock up your access to all of BlogWatcher until you close your browser and try to log in again. To avoid this bug, use the “remember me” checkbox when you log in, or always log in from the main page.

The second bug is less easy to avoid. It seems that once you subscribe to somebody’s blog in the left hand side (where you subscribe to MySpace, Xanga, Blogger, etc blogs) you can’t delete or edit the subscription. I don’t have a workaround in place for this yet. I’ll fix it as soon as I can.

I’m also planning for a new feature, once I get these bug worked out. Once I have it working, you’ll be able to put a button on your we browser to automatically subscribe to a feed that you happen to find “in the wild” without using the standard subscription manager page. Stay tuned for more developments.

Edit: I found the bug that prevented edits to the subscription list. So that shouldn’t be an issue any more.