In today’s world, which is so enthralled with the knowledge and wisdom of man, true knowledge and wisdom is still found in the timeless, eternal word of God which is yet today able to make us “wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.”
—Youth Discussion Presentation, Laestadian Lutheran Church, 1999
Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately. But all the girls who have not known man intimately, spare for yourselves.
—Moses speaking to the Israelites, Numbers 31:17-18
The Deluge, or, If God is Love Then Water is Dry
Announcing, in my roundabout meandering way, the reading of my short story “Stones of Tribulation” by Seth Andrews on his excellent
Thinking Atheist podcast. You can listen to it
here (or on YouTube or iTunes) and read the text (with footnotes) for free online
here. You might even buy
my book of these stories when it comes out later in 2016.
The preachers in my old church like to begin their sermons–usually
based on some nice familiar text about salvation and forgiveness
plucked from the New Testament–by offering up prayers to “our loving
and merciful heavenly father.” They mumble the standard intonations
requesting God’s assistance with the weak faith of current believers
and the lost faith of former ones, occasionally with a mention that He
might also lead some of the rest of humanity to His Grace Kingdom.
(What’s stopping Him, anyhow?) As a gauzy familiarity descends on the
pew-sitters, the image conjured up in their minds is of a slightly
crotchety but ultimately benevolent Old Man of a God with this large
inheritance to dispose of. In His house are many mansions, and one of
them has your name personally engraved on the door.
Now, He does know exactly what you did last night and with whom. But
just as soon as you hear the magic words (as you undoubtedly will
during a Laestadian sermon) that all your sins are forgiven in Jesus’
name and blood, He will smile kindly and shake the memory out of His
divine head. You will breathe a small sigh of relief, wait for the In
Jesus Name, Amen to finally come around, and then go forth from the
sanctuary in peace, freedom, and joy. You will avoid being written out
of the Old Man’s will, for a few more days, anyhow.
Joshua Spares Rahab
He’s giving you a pretty good deal. The upside is huge after you die
(we won’t talk about that nasty potential downside–your sins are
forgiven, after all) and in the meantime nobody is getting hurt. At
least if you don’t count a little psychological damage, the lost
opportunities of a restricted life, and the occasional medical
complication from giving birth to that tenth baby.
There’s a problem, though. This vaguely pleasant hands-off deity that
I grew up hearing about bears no resemblance whatsoever to the
unstable raging psychopath who ranted and threatened and smote his way
through the first two-thirds of the Bible. Next time you sit there in
the pew, look carefully at the old book’s gilt-edged pages. Most of
them will be to the left of where the preacher is reading from,
ignored and silent, their horrors left unsaid.
It is impossible to convey here just how much savagery and inhumanity
is contained in those pages. During the summer of 2009, I spent
months reading the Bible from cover to cover. It was tough going,
because I kept getting shocked and disgusted by the awful stuff I was
encountering for the first time. It certainly wasn’t anything they
talked about at church.
One example is enough to make the point. Ezekiel 8 tells us that God
got upset about some “wicked abominations” that were being committed
against him: “seventy elders of the house of Israel” burning incense
and surrounded by carvings on the walls of his sanctuary of “creeping
things and beasts and detestable things, with all the idols of the
house of Israel” (8:10-11), some women weeping for a Babylonian
fertility god (8:14), and 25 men prostrating themselves toward the sun
and “putting the twig to their nose” (8:16-17). A little weird, but
whatever.
God’s response, however, makes the Spanish Inquisition look like small
claims court. He called for the executioners of the city to draw near,
each “with his destroying weapon in his hand” (Ezekiel 9:1). He
commanded that the men of Jerusalem who disapproved of the
aforementioned abominations be marked on their foreheads. Then, he
directed, “Go through the city after him and strike; do not let your
eye have pity and do not spare. Utterly slay old men, young men,
maidens, little children, and women, but do not touch any man on whom
is the mark; and you shall start from My sanctuary . . . . Defile the
temple and fill the courts with the slain. Go out!” (Ezekiel 9:5-7).
It didn’t matter that the women and innocent children had no way to
take sides and avoid God’s wrath. When the bodies piled up, theirs lay
right alongside those of the men.
———
The Bible-based short stories that Seth Andrews has featured from time
to time on his Thinking Atheist podcast are my effort to bring some
of this to light, to expose the dark underside of the “Good Book” that
fundamentalists would like to foist upon us all. In
today’s episode, he reads “Stones of Tribulation,” a bit of
Deuteronomy horror fiction I’ve set in a potential future afflicted by
climate change, petroleum scarcity, and economic collapse.
The Destruction of the Armies of the Ammomites and Moabites
You can also read the text for free online here, but I
suggest you let Seth’s golden pipes do the reading for you. Check out
the footnotes in the online version later, and please consider buying
my forthcoming book
of all my Bible stories when that comes out later in 2016.
Anyhow, amid all the death and looting, the few remaining authorities
were able to spare no attention for the Deuteronomic Church of Holy
Reconstruction, a fictional Christian cult using Deuteronomy as a
guidebook for conquering a strech of the Buffalo River in the Arkansas
Ozarks. (“So we captured all his cities at that time and utterly
destroyed the men, women and children of every city. We left no
survivor,” Deut. 2:34.)
With all the cabins and shacks taken over and the former occupants
dispatched in proper biblical fashion, the Holy Reconstructionists are
keeping things in line with Deuteronomy as a guide there, too. The
current project is to carry out God’s judgment against a young woman
who did not produce evidence of virginity on her wedding night. The
sentence is clear from Deut. 22:20-21:
But if this charge is true, that the girl was not found a virgin,
then they shall bring out the girl to the doorway of her father’s
house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death because she
has committed an act of folly in Israel by playing the harlot in her
father’s house; thus you shall purge the evil from among you.
Soon our hero, Jacob Davis, is watching a volley of rocks being thrown
at the woman, his sister, by the menfolk of the hollow. She screams
and curses at the men, and Jacob wishes he could join in with her
cursing, too, but Deuteronomy has a harsh ruling in store for such
rebellion: “The man who acts presumptuously by not listening to the
priest who stands there to serve the LORD your God, nor to the
judge, that man shall die; thus you shall purge the evil from Israel”
(Deut. 17:12).
As the narrator then recalls things, there
was sort of a pause as the men reloaded their arms with their
remaining rocks Leah’s voice slurred into a long raspy howl as her
mouth gaped open, her jaw probably broken now. Levi watched from the
porch with folded arms. Jacob stared at his sister, his crude and
brave and dying sister, and did not look away. Not from the blood
that was trickling out of her nose and gaping mouth. Not from the one
eye that was now hooded and bruised. He thought he saw blood coming
from there, too. A spinning piece of shale caught her on the cheek,
tearing open another gash. A couple of crows rustled and flew out of
the pines behind her, spooked by all the noise.
Then the dark and jagged hailstorm opened up again. He watched Leah’s
body jerk and flinch and sag with each impact. Every line and color
and detail was vivid, and impossibly wrong. He’d seen stonings
before, but this one he would remember. There was no call for
this. He decided with a sudden spurt of silent rebellion, unfamiliar
and shocking and strong in his throat, that he would make it right
somehow.
The howling finally stopped. Leah stared up at the sky through the
one open eye, her final act a breaking of the endless rules. Jacob
figured the last thing she saw was the sun, burning its forbidden
image onto her retina until her head slumped forward and hung against
her chest, bleeding.
It’s a gruesome scene. But it’s exactly what is commanded by that
“loving and merciful heavenly father” in his inerrant and unchanging
Holy Bible. You may believe in that God–no concern of mine if you
do–but I’m pretty sure you don’t believe in Deuteronomy.
Achan Stoned
There are true believers in Deuteronomy among us, though, and in
Joshua, and Leviticus, and all the rest of the Old Testament’s brutal
inhumanity. The most hardcore Bible thumpers of them all are
Christian Reconstructionists who advocate what one R.J. Rushdoony
(rhymes with “loony”) championed as a “biblical worldview.” According
to Professor Julie J. Ingersoll, who spent time in Reconstructionist
circles and then studied it exhaustively as a scholar of religion, the
movement is “rooted in historic Calvinism,” with a Bible that “speaks
to every aspect of life and provides a blueprint for living according
to the will of God.” Reconstructionists, she says,
contend that contemporary reinterpretations of Old Testament violence
are humanistic rejections of what God called justice. The New
Testament is not a replacement for the Old; there is no “God of Love”
replacing a “God of Wrath.” God is loving and forgiving, and just and
vengeful as revealed in the three persons of the Trinity and present
at creation. Old Testament biblical law, with its numerous capital
offenses, must be the model for Christian life, and civil law today.
Thus they “support the imposition of violent punishments (stoning
and death) for all manner of behaviors that they consider sin (or, in
their terms, that God considers sin).”
So, you may wonder, why don’t they have the courage of their
convictions to put all this biblical wisdom into action? Why aren’t
these true believers out there trying to govern some Ozark hollow
under Old Testament Shari’a law right now, throwing rocks at
back-talking teenagers and brides lacking virginity certification?
Because, they insist, “such punishments would only be exacted after
society has been transformed by the Holy Spirit such that the
overwhelming majority of citizens would be believers who would submit
willingly to biblical law.”
Well, if the failure of Ted Cruz in the Republican primaries is any
indication, we may still be safe for a while yet. Thank, er, God.
Rushdooney “argued for the use of the Bible as the only source of
authority.” He’s dead now, but if you find yourself yearning to have
an ancient book control your life without the hassle of, say,
converting to Islam and traveling to Syria, there are homegrown
Christian alternatives. You might consider my old Laestadianism (“the
Holy Bible is the highest authority in questions regarding faith and
life”) or, for example, the Covenanted Reformed Presbyterian
Church. Its list of beliefs begins as follows:
We believe that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament are
inspired by God and thus totally without error. The Bible (not human
tradition, not human experience, not alleged subjective “revelation”)
is the sole standard and authority for faith and life.
And guess what, according to the church’s pastor Brian Schwertley, is
the “only standard by which a civil magistrate can rule justly”? The
Holy Bible, of course, “the stand-alone infallible Word of God.”
Pastor Brian writes about “promoting true religion in the land,” which
he says is something “godly civil magistrates are very concerned
about.” What he seems to have in mind behind those benign-sounding
words promoting and concerned is more than just little old ladies
handing out flyers at the county fair. He cites First and Second Kings
and the story of King Jehu, biblical butcher extraordinaire, to help
us understand how these godly civil magistrates are supposed to
operate. Jehu, while “not a godly king,” did the right thing: He “was
blessed by God for what he did to the prophets, priests, and servants of Baal.”
Here’s some of what Jehu did, as described in another one of my short
stories, “Jehu’s Jihad,”
by a fictional victim of his true-religion promotional efforts:
The chanting stopped, replaced by the screams. There was a mighty
rushing roar of shouts and screams, and stamping feet, and the wet
smacking thud of iron blades violating flesh. My eyes could make out
very little in the dim light with frantic bodies lunging all around
me, but I heard and felt, and smelled. Shit and urine voided from
panicked and lifeless men. I gulped down nausea with the waves of
foul outhouse odors that mingled in my nostrils with the smell of
slaughter: dripping, naked guts and the coppery tang of fresh blood.
It was not my own blood, but I made it mine, smearing it on my neck
and falling on some bodies and letting more bodies fall on my own. I
closed my eyes and lay still as the swords chopped and sliced and
swung to chop and slice again. Another body landed, hard, and I
wondered if I would still be able to breathe. My chest barely moved
as I willed myself to draw long silent breaths from my belly to my
gaping mouth. Hot blood dripped onto my arm, first coming in little
bursts and then a slow and steady oozing as another life went out.
The screaming became the dying and the dying became the dead, and all
was quiet, except the panting and scuffling of the soldiers. I
focused my world into the agony of holding my lungs in a measured
starvation to stay quiet and alive. My world was the dark mute
pressure of dead arms and legs and torsos slick from their bleeding.
Then there were shouted orders and heaving arms, hateful arms,
carrying the dead and me outside the temple. I had to let all my
weight droop where it fell over the soldier’s shoulder. I stayed
silent as ribs cracked under their impossible load and seared my mind
with unanswerable pain, my legs swinging with the soldier’s hump-trot
to the dirt where he threw my living corpse. Again there were bodies
under me, cooler already, and then more on top. Again the silent
struggle for secret breath.
It’s another gruesome scene, but massacring an entire worship hall
full of helpless people because they don’t share your religion is a
messy business. And you will find it in your Bible, a brief, sanitized
version of it: 2 Kings 10:18-25.
Slaughter of the Syrians by the Children of Israel
Now, nobody–not even the most rabid Reconstructionist or preciously
believing Laestadian–really follows the entire Bible. You actually
cannot do it, no matter how crazy you are, because it is impossible
to conform to a text that contradicts itself.
Imagine you’re out there at your freshly built backyard altar dripping
blood, slaughtering all these cattle and trying to be a good follower
of Leviticus. Finally, that old-time religion, you smugly say to
yourself while plunging your Ka-Bar into the neck of the next poor
beast lined up behind the high compound walls. The BBQ is running out
of propane to get it all burnt. Then along comes your wise-ass cousin
quoting Micah 6:1-8:
With what shall I come to the LORD
And bow myself before the God on high?
Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings,
With yearling calves?
Does the LORD take delight in thousands of rams,
In ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has told you, O man, what is good;
And what does the LORD require of you
But to do justice, to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?
Whoops. Beef–it’s what’s for dinner, extra well done.
The less pragmatic reason people don’t actually follow the Bible is
that it has a way of interfering with real life. Consider the scene
from “Stones of Tribulation” where Jacob is musing about the presence
of pork chops at the dinner table of Levi Harding, prophet. Back in
Harrison, AR, some of the men had “said Jesus overrode Deuteronomy
when it came to what you could eat” (Mark 7:19). But the “others
reminded everybody what the Biblical Blueprint Series said about the
Old and New Testaments. One guy kept quoting the line Jacob knew all
too well: ‘God’s counsel and judgments are not divided!’ That old coot
probably couldn’t even taste bacon anymore.”
The Biblical Blueprint Series, edited by Gary North of Fayetteville,
Arkansas, is a real work, ten volumes published in 1986 and 1987. It’s
one “of the most direct and systematic efforts at popularization” of a
“biblical worldview.” It teaches some serious biblicism, which would
seem to lay to rest any questions about my Holy Reconstruction folks
eating cloven-hooved unclean animals, as much as their stoning of
Jacob’s sister:
We must never doubt that whatever God did in the Old Testament era,
the Second Person of the Trinity also did. God’s counsel and
judgments are not divided . . . . If we as Christians can accept what is
a very hard principle of the Bible, that Christ was a blood sacrifice
for our individual sins, then we shouldn’t flinch at accepting any of
the rest of God’s principles. As we joyfully accepted His salvation,
so we must joyfully embrace all of His principles that affect any and
every area of our lives.
But somebody else at the Hardings’ (fictional) table “wondered if
Deuteronomy really needed to be taken ‘whole hog’ [sorry] when it came
to the rules even Jesus said weren’t important. Then Levi’s dad
recalled that the guy who edited Biblical Blueprint figured the food
laws didn’t apply, and that was the view that finally won out.” Yes,
it seems that joyfully embracing all of God’s principles does not
quite apply to what’s for dinner. Take a look at North’s 1984 position
paper to see how he rationalizes that one. If you can stomach it.
Many Christians remain blissfully unaware of the Old Testament’s
brutality. It barely grazed my consciousness for most of the decades I
remained in Christian fundamentalism. For those who do know about it
and “ponder why God would allow, much less command, such horrors,”
Robert M. Price offers some strong words in Blaming Jesus for
Jehovah, a book whose publication I’m proud to have been a part of
via my little indie publishing company
Tellectual Press.
Just knowing and wondering isn’t good enough, Dr. Price says. That is
“stopping short of the real question,” which “is this: ‘Why should I
believe that a God who issues such orders is more than a tribal totem
embodying and justifying the bloodlust and hatreds of an ancient
people? How can I, with any shred of conscience, profess allegiance to
such a figure?’”
Fine, you have the information. You have the doubts, the
questions. Now, what are you going to do with them?
What if you are willing to discount those passages in which God
commands genocide and infanticide as merely the biases of primitive
worshipers of a God whose loving nature is clearer to us moderns?
Then plainly you must realize that, even if scripture explicitly
says, “God commanded so-and-so,” that doesn’t mean he did. Don’t you
realize you’re admitting the Bible was mistaken? And then, how do
you know when it’s not mistaken? I come back to my point: Your
judgment is your authority, not the Bible, which many seem to
“believe” only when they agree with it.
And that’s nothing to be ashamed of! The only thing to be ashamed of
is hiding behind the supposed authority of the Bible to buttress your
own opinions. If you have the courage of your convictions, surely you
should be able to present to another person the solid reasons that
led you to think as you do. Assuming there were any real reasons.
If you were raised believing in the murderous faith of the Islamic
Caliphate, you might have qualms about some of the things your
leaders said Allah had commanded, but you’d be looking at things from
the inside, and you’d chalk it up to “one of those divine mysteries.”
But you are, thankfully, viewing their atrocities from outside, so
you have no difficulty recognizing the horrors of a death cult for
what they are.
“If the Old Testament Jehovah is portrayed as the blood-spattered
totem of a slaughter cult,” and Dr. Price thinks the Bible does a fine
job of that, as do I, then “it is high time you stepped out of the
Bible bubble for an objective look at it. It is time you decided if
you really belong there.”
Dr. Price goes on to discuss the equivocation of “God’s defenders”
when confronted with all this. “They like to point out that God is so
astronomically far above us that it’s futile for us to imagine ‘good’
meaning the same thing for him as it does for us.” Uh huh. OK, fine; say
that a deity who commands genocide, religious persecution, and the
abduction of virgins is nonetheless “good” if you want to. But then
you will just be spewing pious gibberish. God’s ostensible goodness
is no longer any guide to what we may expect from him. Oh yes, he’s
“good,” thank goodness, but that doesn’t mean he won’t victimize or
exterminate the innocent. Whatever he did, the pious apologist has
ready excuses for his God. “He’s all-righteous, so he must have
some good reason for it!” If you woke up in hell one fine morning,
despite your Christian faith and God’s promise that it would save
you, I guess you’d have to conclude he must know what he’s doing.
Ours is not to reason why; ours is but to boil and fry. Maybe so, but
why empty the word “good” of what we all mean and understand by it by
applying it to such a being?
It’s not just Christians who are compelled to make excuses for these
ancient books. Todd Kadish, a former Orthodox Jew, tells me that “the
atrocities contained in them are “an albatross weighing down the moral
authority of ethical monotheism.” Worse, they can offer a “license for
ethnocentrism or even atrocities” perpetuated today, in some pious
fantasy world where the ability to do so would actually present
itself. The Orthodox can’t just wave away the sacred words on the
Torah scroll, because they “consider the Five Books of Moses the
vehicle through which a transcendent God touched humanity, and the
eternal guidebook he personally authored for his chosen people.”
Kadish acknowledges that the real-world consequences are very
different for a reluctantly tolerated albatross and an
enthusiastically embraced bad-behavior license. But he warns Jews and
others who revere the Hebrew Bible to focus on the common source of
the two positions:
The views of a liberal (“Modern”) Orthodox rabbi writing apologetics
and a radical Orthodox Jew who justifies the murder of innocent
Palestinian children by citing Biblical precedent are both seeking to
apply the morality of a being they consider the source of (or at
least guide to) morality to the modern world. But the world largely
moved beyond total warfare centuries ago, and most of us are now
trying to lay to rest a history of racial and religious genocide
which stretched into the modern era (with Jews as some of its primary
victims). And the Hebrew Bible is a truly terrible foundation
document for a moral code that demands ethics in warfare and respects
all human life, because it leaves one with apologetics at best or
license for atrocities at worst.
———
Happily, for those of us outside the fanatic fringes of Christianity
or Judaism, the Hebrew Bible is in no position to make any more
demands. We have read it and tossed it aside in disgust, dismissed it
as irrelevant to our lives, or rationalized it away under some
comfortable theory about Jesus fulfilling the Law. Reconstructionism,
never a big part of American religion to begin with, has retreated to
its bunkers.
Though Professor Ingersoll notes that “conservatives (Christian and
secular) have not disappeared” and expresses concern about lingering
influence from the Reconstructionist lunacy she’s studied for so
long, today’s conservativism seems to be a largely secular
phonenomen. The snarling theocratic fantasy of Ted Cruz’s candidacy
has evaporated, and the amoral authoritarian gasbag left standing at
the head of God’s Own Party exhibits no significant religious
convictions. Meanwhile, one contender for the Democratic Party
nomination says he is “not particularly religious,” and the other
one–the woman who will be the next U.S. President–is a pro-choice
Methodist not exactly beloved by the Religious Right.
Through no fault of the Bible, our nation and world remain infested
with ignorance, superstition, bigotry, and violence. We certainly are
not headed for any secular utopia as we leave that nasty old book
behind. But perhaps some of what another Ingersoll–the genius orator
Robert Green Ingersoll–promised a hundred years ago finally might be
happening:
Day by day, religious conceptions grow less and less intense. Day by
day, the old spirit dies out of book and creed. The burning
enthusiasm, the quenchless zeal of the early church have gone, never,
never to return. The ceremonies remain, but the ancient faith is
fading out of the human heart. The worn out arguments fail to
convince, and denunciations that once blanched the faces of a race,
excite in us only derision and disgust.
It is long overdue.
Paul wrote that he was pressing “toward the mark for the prize of the
high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” Forget those things that are
behind us, he said, and reach forth unto those things which lie before
us (Phillipians 3:13-14). Lofty words, and a worthwhile thing to adapt
for ourselves as we smile at Paul and Peter and whoever wrote all the
rest of it: Let us press toward the prize of our own high calling,
of our best and noblest selves and community and shared humanity.
Let’s forget the tribal atrocities and cruel punishments in this tired
old text that’s occupied too many of us for far too long, and look to
what lies before us–writings and thoughts that speak to us where we
are today as compassionate, decent human beings, that serve us, that
earn the space they ask for inside our minds.
———
All images are my photographic reproductions of Gustav Doré‘s incomparable (and, thankfully, public domain) engravings of Bible illustrations. Taken in full sun from The Bible in Pictures, Wm. H. Wise & Co. (1934) with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX7 camera and post-processed in Adobe Lightroom. Click on any image for an enlarged version.
“Stones of Tribulation” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance between characters and living persons is purely coincidental.
Scripture quotations taken from the
NASB unless otherwise indicated.
Notes
