Book Believers
May 21st, 2009 by Bill
Book Believers
Reading
Dr. Laura Schlessinger is a radio personality who dispenses advice to people who call in to her radio show. Recently, she said that, as an observant Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22 and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. The following is an open letter to Dr. Laura penned by a east coast resident, which was posted on the Internet. It’s funny, as well as informative:
Dear Dr. Laura:
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the other specific laws and how to follow them:
1 When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odour for the Lord – Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbours. They claim the odour is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
2 I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
3 I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanness – Lev.15:19- 24. The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offence.
4 Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighbouring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?
5 I have a neighbour who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
6 A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination – Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don’t agree. Can you settle this?
7 Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
8 Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?
9 I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
10 My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? – Lev.24:10-16. Couldn’t we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)
I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging.
Your devoted fan,
Jim
My new year’s resolution this year was to read the Bible through from cover to cover. I’ve done it before, about twelve times, but I had to stop in the early nineties because Morag said it was becoming something of a fetish. I felt obliged to read my three or four chapters every day no matter where we happened to be, and at times this could be very inconvenient and even embarrassing. I suppose I have a mild dose of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Anyway, I decided to stop and for many years I restricted my Bible reading to finding relevant passages for use in Sunday morning worship.
Reading it again after all these years has proved quite interesting. To begin with, I’ve been greeting some of the characters like old friends – Adam and Eve and the snake; Noah and his ark; Joseph and his coat of many colours; Moses and the burning bush – all the old familiar stories reconnect me with earlier times in my life in a rather satisfying and comforting way, and, as with all stories, they seem to speak differently to me as I reach different periods in my life, so what should be simply boring recapitulation actually turns out to be a relatively fresh encounter. In addition, I think that the Book of Genesis, and the early part of the Book of Exodus, the Book of Job, some of the Psalms, various chapters in the works of the Prophets, and the Gospels, are among the world’s great works of literature, so revisiting them is both intellectually stimulating and spiritually rewarding.
However, I seem to have been more disturbed than uplifted this time round, and there have been times when I have put my Bible down and wondered to myself why exactly people think that this book is the inspired word of God. For example, the Book of Leviticus consists almost entirely of outdated and barbaric laws such as those we heard about in our second reading today, or of instructions for the proper protocol involved in offering animal sacrifices – how to kill the animal, where to kill it, what to do with the blood, how to divide up the portions and the like. One wonders what possible value such a document can have as a spiritual text in the twenty-first century.
But by far the most disturbing feature has been its presentation of God as a tyrant, which I’d seen before of course, but which had not struck me quite as forcibly as it seems to be doing this time round. You can find it in the early books – the first five books, which the Jews call the Torah, and which, to them, are the holiest books in existence – but with the Book of Joshua, God the unmerciful tyrant really comes into his own.
You remember the story: the Children of Israel have been freed from their slavery in Egypt and spent forty years wandering in the Sinai wilderness under the care of Moses. But Moses dies before they can enter the Promised Land, so it is left to Joshua to take them in. But the land wasn’t empty. It was said to be a land ‘flowing with milk and honey’, so it would be only natural to find that people were already living there. So ‘entering the Promised Land’ was nothing short of an invasion into territory that the Israelites had no claim to. How can this be justified? The Bible writers justify it by claiming that God had given this land to ‘his people’, and furthermore, that the people who were already there were ‘an abomination’ to the Lord who had forfeited their right to live there. The original inhabitants had to be exterminated, and this is precisely what Joshua and his men proceed to do. Here are a few lines from chapter 10 of the Book of Joshua, just to give you a flavour:
Then Joshua and all Israel with him went up from Eglon to Hebron and attacked it. They took the city and put it to the sword, together with its king, its villages, and everyone in it, just as they had done to Lachish. (10: 36)
They slaughtered the whole city – men, women, and children, and then went on to the next city and repeated the procedure. Many years ago I put it to a Jehovah’s Witness friend of mine that such behaviour was simply inexcusable barbarism, but he replied that the people were so wicked – even the children, even the babes in arms – that they had to be destroyed. It is strange how normally civilised and humane people can justify the most flagrantly inhuman acts if they believe that God somehow approves of them.
One of the most barbaric and shocking episodes comes a little later, in the first Book of Samuel (chapter 15). By this time, Israel has a king, Saul, and Saul has been instructed by God to ‘go, attack the Amelekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys’ (verse 3). Saul does as he’s told – up to a point -, but he takes Agag, the king of the Amelekites, alive, plus the best of the sheep and cattle, the fat calves and lambs – ‘everything that was good’ the text says. But God does not countenance such disobedience, and so Saul has the kingdom taken away from him. As for Agag, he is slaughtered in cold blood by the prophet Samuel himself. The New International Version of the Bible simply says that he ‘put Agag to death before the Lord at Gilgal’ (verse 33), but this is a sanitised translation. The Authorised Version says that Samuel ‘hewed Agag in pieces’.
These so-called ‘historical’ books of the Bible not only present God as vengeful, they also depict him – and he most certainly is male – as jealous, as unwilling to countenance the worship of any other deity. This accounts for the appalling treatment that is meted out to the 450 prophets of the god Baal who are slaughtered at the command of the prophet Elijah.
Liberal scholars will generally explain and excuse this sort of thing – and there are plenty more examples of it – as the jingoistic tub thumping of an embryonic nation flexing its muscles, and they will often suggest that it is all exaggeration and probably didn’t happen this way. Or they will excuse it on the grounds that it describes the behaviour of primitive peoples who didn’t know any better, and that the revelation from God has been gradual, moving through this early barbarity to the exalted theology that we find in the Christian scriptures.
This may indeed be so, but the Christian scriptures themselves are not entirely free from the kind of narrow, exclusivist attitudes that characterise much of the Jewish scripture. Only last week as I was walking down Grafton Street I was given a leaflet from a member of the Knocklyon Church of Christ, which tells me that I will die in my sins if I don’t believe that Jesus is God’s Son, and that if I am not ‘born again’ I will not see God’s kingdom. Which means that, since the vast majority of human beings who have lived in the past or who are living now have never even heard of Jesus Christ, we are all pretty much damned.
But I’m also reluctant to accept the excuse that the people who wrote the Bible a couple of millennia ago belonged to an age that had not developed the kind of sensitivities we are accustomed to today. Hundreds of years before the Christian era, at the time that the Jewish scriptures were taking the form they have today, there was the greatest outpouring of sublime spiritual teaching that the world has ever seen. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the period from about 800 BC to 200 BC the Axial Age, a notion explored more recently by Karen Armstrong in her book The Age of Transformation. This was the time which saw the birth of the Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, whose humane and human centred, universalist teachings broke through the sectarian barriers of their times and gave us enduring messages of enlightenment which continue to inspire and which have probably never been surpassed. While the authors of the Book of Joshua and the Books of Kings were telling us of a jealous God who brooked no rival and who encouraged the extermination of his enemies, and who were boasting of the fact that when Solomon’s temple was opened, 22 thousand oxen and 120 thousand sheep were sacrificed ( II Chronicles 7:5), the Buddha was teaching that ‘hatred was never ended by hatred; only love can put an end to hatred’, and Lao Tzu was writing the Tao Te Ching, as sublime a piece of spiritual wisdom ever come from the pen of a human being. (It is only fair to point out that Karl Jaspers includes some of the great Hebrew prophets – such as Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah – among the spiritual luminaries of the Axial Age.)
Of course, there is another way of approaching these horrific biblical stories. It is an approach favoured by (among others) the 12th century Jewish scholar Maimonides, who said that the primitive and barbaric stories in the Jewish scripture were metaphors or allegories and should not be read literally. I’m all for that. I would say that most of what is in the Bible should be considered in this way, and that if we do look at it like this it can be illuminating.
The problem is though, that our Bibles do not come with instructions to that effect. Instead of a health warning pasted on the front, a bit like the health warnings on cigarette packets, telling us that unless we treat these stories figuratively we may be in danger of making colossal and dangerous errors of judgement, we get a beautifully bound book, printed on the best and thinnest paper, with the word ‘holy’ prominently displayed in gold on the front. Could it be given any more gravitas? Perhaps we ought to insist that all Bibles come with a sticker which says, ‘If you are reasonably intelligent, free from cultural prejudices, and have a modicum of historical and literary expertise, and an ability to appreciate ambiguity, metaphor and symbolism, then you can safely read this book. However, if you’re a bit of an eejit, or an inveterate literalist, you’d better leave it alone.’ Maybe that would do the trick.
But no such mental health warning is ever printed. Instead we have inherited almost unquestioningly the notion that a particular book, completed nearly two thousand years ago contains special, and definitive revelation from God, and this has given rise to a series of beliefs which have had and still are having a profoundly negative effect on the human race. Here are just a few of them:
That the universe is only six thousand years old. 50% of Americans believe this. How does this affect scientific research and scientific education?
That there is only one way to worship God and all other ways are abominations; that only one religion is ‘true’ and all the rest are false. Even the new ‘tolerant’ Ian Paisley said last week that he would never take part in a Roman Catholic service.
That God punishes the wrong doer, so if your life is going badly it’s probably because you’ve committed some terrible sin and now you’re getting your comeuppance. We’ve all felt this at some time or another, and with good reason. Parts of the Bible seem to teach it unequivocally.
That Israel was given to the Jews by God many centuries ago and so they have a divine right to the land;
That Jesus is coming back within the next fifty years, and so there’s no need for us to worry about ecology or global warming; according to a recent Gallup poll, 43% of Americans believe some version of this (Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris, page xv).
I sometimes wonder what those people who fought so hard to bring the Bible to the people knew what they were doing.
I am not against the Bible. I am just against the idea that this book – or any other book, including the Koran or the Book of Mormon or whatever – is a special revelation from God. It is probably the most irrational, dangerous and divisive idea that currently infects the human psyche. And, as Art Lester said to me last month, ‘The book-believers are the ones who will destroy the world.’ Sadly, Art might just be right. And it is our duty to challenge the book-believers, by fostering a new kind of religious consciousness with the contrary message that knowledge and wisdom are the result of human thought, human experience, reflection, reason, scientific endeavour. They do not drop down from heaven fully formed, nor are they the preserve of one nation or one religion or one period in history. And they are certainly not to be found in one book. To suggest that they are is to turn works of literature into loaded guns.
Bill Darlison
13th May, 2007