Recently I've been keeping the Bible in the bathroom and alternating between reading it and some of the trashier literature I like to read (Star Trek novels, profiles of famous murderers, all of that stuff I should be embarrassed to mention here), very slowly, a page or three whenever I step to answer one or the other necessity of nature. I've never actually read any of the Bible before, except for a weird arty translation of Ruth in college, so it's been instructive. I figure every once in a while, when I finish a book (which I've been doing about once every two months so far, though I've only finished two so far), I'll post a little "who knew?" post about it.
So, the weirdest thing I didn't know about Genesis, aside from the fact that it was the chronicle of a family of assholes becoming bigger and bigger assholes throughout the generations, culminating in one of them enslaving all of Egypt for the Pharaoh, was that at least four times, a husband and wife will settle down in a place they haven't lived before, and the husband will think "Oh, my wife is so beautiful that all the men here will kill me and steal her away," so he'll pretend that they're brother and sister, but then all the men in the new place are like, "Oh, she's unattached" so they start sleeping with her (she, of course, voices neither approval nor disapproval of all this), and then the husband finds out, and says "Oh woe, you're sleeping with my wife" and the other men are like "Oh, she's your wife? Why did you say she was your sister? If we'd known we would have left her alone!" and then God has to forgive people all over the place, as he sees fit.
What's weirdest to me is that the entire sequence is exactly the same every time, and that it's not the same person over and over, nor is it different people every time (I think Abraham does it twice). If the details changed a little, or everybody just did it once and then learned their lesson, or if the same numbskull did it over and over again, then I think I could understand it, but none of those is the case.
Exodus coming whenever I feel like it.