The strange world of the Bible
During my many years as a Jehovah's Witness my studies of the Bible was extremely shallow. The Watchtower Society was deluging us with magazines and books and the references to the Bible you found there were just filtered through the Watchtower propaganda machine.
When I escaped from the Watchtower Society I could read the Bible as I wanted and apply my common sense in a way that was impossible during my Witness days. In the years since I left I have found that many other people have found much of the same things strange and I have read several books on the subject. Bible texts and passages like the one below is puzzling to me and many others:
*** Rbi8 Deuteronomy 2:32-34 ***
32 When Si'hon came on out, he and all his people, to meet us in battle at Ja'haz, 33 then Jehovah our God abandoned him to us, so that we defeated him and his sons and all his people. 34 And we went capturing all his cities at that particular time and devoting every city to destruction, men and women and little children. We left no survivor.
For anyone who wants to believe in God, and the Bible as the word of God, this text presents two very difficult and uncomfortable alternatives. Either the people who wrote this text wasn’t telling the truth or God’s people were evil sadistic terrorists. Why anyone should find it necessary to brag about such mass slaughter seems totally incomprehensible to me.
Not many Russians brag about the millions that Stalin murdered, neither do we see much bragging from Germans about the holocaust.
Most of us were thoroughly disgusted when we watched the news from Bosnia and Kosovo, where ethnic cleansing and the horrible atrocities that accompany such activity unfolded before us. Yet strangely enough the reports of far worse behavior seem to be perfectly all right when encountered in the Bible. If CNN reported that Israel had wiped out all Palestinians, adults and children alike from Lebanon, Jordan, Gaza and the occupied territories, the whole world would be disgusted and shocked. Yet this is exactly what took place in Biblical times:
*** Rbi8 Deuteronomy 20:16-17 ***
16 It is only of the cities of these peoples that Jehovah your God is giving you as an inheritance that you must not preserve any breathing thing alive, 17 because you should without fail devote them to destruction, the Hit'tites and the Am'or•ites, the Ca'naan•ites and the Per'iz•zites, the Hi'vites and the Jeb'u•sites, just as Jehovah your God has commanded you;
As we can see, the author of the above texts tell us that these horrible atrocities was carried out on the explicit order of Jehovah. After reading such Bible passages one is hardly surprised to find more examples of sadistic barbarism, like this:
*** Rbi8 Deuteronomy 21:18-21 ***
18 “In case a man happens to have a son who is stubborn and rebellious, he not listening to the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and they have corrected him but he will not listen to them, 19 his father and his mother must also take hold of him and bring him out to the older men of his city and to the gate of his place, 20 and they must say to the older men of his city, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious; he is not listening to our voice, being a glutton and a drunkard.’ 21 Then all the men of his city must pelt him with stones, and he must die. So you must clear away what is bad from your midst, and all Israel will hear and indeed become afraid.
Of course no civilized nation on earth, not even fundamentalist Moslem countries practice such barbarism as this. The only ones that long back to a society like this seem to be mostly Jehovah's Witnesses and other Christian fundamentalists.
Another strange phenomenon is when Bible texts that one had often read and thought was very familiar turned out not to be if read a bit more carefully. Take this text for instance:
*** Rbi8 Exodus 20:2-3 ***
2 “I am Jehovah your God, who have brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slaves. 3 You must not have any other gods against my face.
Many other Bible translations say: “any other God before Me”. The interesting detail here is that Jehovah acknowledge the existence of other gods, if he knew there were no gods beside himself this would be a moot point as there would be none to worship besides him. Mark Twain had a very interesting comment about this text:
“[God] did not say He wanted all of the adulations. He said nothing about not being willing to share them with his fellow gods. What He said was, "Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me." It is a quite different thing and puts him in a much better light I confess it. There was an abundance of gods. The woods were full of them, as the saying is, and all He demanded was that He should be ranked as high as the others not above any of them, but not below any of them .... He wanted to be held their equal.”
For the true believer this is of course preposterous, they don’t seem to find all the killing and such much of a problem but of course the idea that there was a lot of gods besides Jehovah will have them screaming on top of their lungs.
Of course the authors of the Bible were very clear that worshipping other gods was the ultimate transgression, punishable by death. Jehovah wasn’t very concerned with killing, sadism, rape, prostitution, incest, ethnic cleansing and genocide, but worshipping another god, wow, that was bad!
Norm