Heart of Darkness
“But you shall be named the priests of
Yahweh; men will call you the ministers of our God: you will eat the wealth of
the nations.” Isaiah
61:6.
Marcion's church seems to have well understood the predatory nature of the OT god - so strangely worshipped by Christians as being the Creator of the World.
.
His view was well expressed, one may add, in the 8th chapter of the Fourth gospel, tho Marcion may not have been familar with this.
No wonder the remains of Marcion's Church had to be utterly destroyed.
The brooding horror of this OT god and its everlasting rage simmers in most of the OT books:
every one is godless and an evildoer, and every mouth speaks
folly. For all this [God’s] his anger is not turned away and his hand is
stretched out still. For wickedness burns like a fire, it consumes briers and
thorns; it kindles the thickets of the forest, and they roll upward in a column
of smoke. Through the wrath of the LORD of hosts the land is burned, and the
people are like fuel for the fire; no man spares his brother. They snatch on
the right, but are still hungry, and they devour on the left, but are not
satisfied; each devours his neighbor's flesh, (Isaiah 9)
- A god of vengeance and ceaseless ire is imagined, always
wishing to unleash horror upon the world. It is evil:
"And
when the LORD your God brings you into the land which he swore to your fathers,
to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you, with great and goodly cities,
which you did not build, and houses full of all good things, which you did not
fill, and cisterns hewn out, which you did not hew, and vineyards and olive
trees, which you did not plant, and when you eat and are full, then take heed lest you forget the
LORD…” Deut 6:10-14)
Fictional horror
The Anti-God of Terror speaks:
And you shall destroy all the peoples that
the LORD your God will give over to you, your eye shall not pity them; neither
shall you serve their gods, for that would be a snare to you. If you say in your heart, `These
nations are greater than I; how can I dispossess them?' you shall not be afraid
of them, but you shall remember what the LORD your God did to Pharaoh and to
all Egypt, the great trials which
your eyes saw, the signs, the wonders, the mighty hand, and the outstretched
arm, by which the LORD your God brought you out; so will the LORD your God do
to all the peoples of whom you are afraid. Moreover
the LORD your God will send hornets among them, until those who are left and
hide themselves from you are destroyed. You
shall not be in dread of them; for the LORD your God is in the midst of you, a
great and terrible God. (Deut 7:16-21)
“Ye
shall eat the riches of the gentiles” Isaiah 61:6:
But you shall be named the priests of
Yahweh; men will call you the ministers of our God: you will eat the wealth of
the nations
While thus eating the wealth of nations,
they are encouraged by their vampire-predator God to lend
money with interest: (Deut 23:20) “To a foreigner you may lend upon interest.”
In modern times, John Lash's has described the Jehovah-being, as an 'alien predator ... a demented alien with certain superhuman or deific powers' who 'infects humanity with the belief that he is their creator-god.' Lash sees him/it as a Power that did really exist. That may be more realistic than a position of simple atheism - and was certainlty Marcion's view (See Lash's interviews on Red Ice Radio, and his book
Not in His Name)
A helpful book here is Fountain
of Fairytales, a Scholarly Romp through
the Old Testament, by John Tiffany 2013 – Barnes Review, USA. Let's have a quote from it:
Could we permit ourselves to suppose that the almighty would distinguish any nation of people by the name of his chosen people, we must supose that people to have been an example to all the rest of thew world, of the purest piety and humanity, and not such a nation of ruffians and cutthroats as the ancient Jews were; a people who, corrupted by and copying after such monsters and impostors as Moses and Aaron, Joshua, Samuel and David, had distinguished themselves above all others on the face of the known Earth for barbarity and wickedness' (p29)
Historical Pipedreams
A perusal of Genesis
and Exodus suggests that their authors had little by way of authentic memories
of Egypt: the Egyptians are portrayed as a bunch of goons who allow the
Hebrews to relieve them of their gold and silver. The Saga of the Old Testament
Exodus story was summed up in Mr Tiffany’s new book as:
In their
foundational myths, the Jews steal the wealth of Egypt and depart to steal the
lands of the Canaanites, or Palestinians. (p75)
As to the Exodus, here is one
recent scholarly work commenting on another: The Religions of ancient Israel, A Synthesis
of Parallactic Approaches’ by Ziony Zevit 2005, alluded as follows to the
book Egypt, Canaan and Israel in Ancient
Times by Redford, 1992:
Barring
some significant new discoveries, his book closes the door on those seeking to
find evidence of Israel in Egypt during the late Bronze period.’ P.88.
Over much of the 20th
century, archaeologists had trouble in finding confirmation of any Exodus. The Hebrews appear as local residents of Canaan. They
started writing books to give themselves a ‘glorious past’ probably around 420
BCE, and that was once the Persian Empire had set up a temple to the One God
(in the Persian religion) at Jerusalem. http://askwhy.co.uk/judaism/index.php
And the Persian policy was, that they did not mind what the local residents
called the one god.
Excavation of Northern Israel has found records of the
Yahweh religion, over 11th-7th centuries BCE, together
with his consort the goddess Asherath (Astarte?), and other ‘Baal’ local
deities:
‘The link between YHWH and
Asherath was part of Israelite mythology…
during the ninth to seventh centuries BCE, Israelites adored certainly
one, but most likely a few – not many – goddesses’ (Z. Zevit, Religions of ancient Israel p.651)
Literacy first appears in the 8th century
BCE, on pots etc., but no schools have been found, as you might expect if there
were scribes and long texts, etc. Hebrew was a Canaan-dialect language.
All the genocide stories, in Book of
Joshua etc, laying waste city after city, smiting all the locals with the edge
of the sword, sometimes sparing young virgin girls - no such city-warfare is
confirmed by the archaeological record, or by anyone else’s record of what
happened. Not an arrowhead, not a helmet, nothing.
The glory of the court of King Solomon does not show up in any historical-archaeological record. Those writing the books may have has access to the
Persian court archives, of past history, so they could retro-construct ancient real kings and empires. The Hebrew texts allude to the building of the
temple in Jerusalem around 450 BCE as its ‘restoration’ or as the ‘2nd
temple,’ to avoid the implication that they were given their monotheism by the
Persian Zoroastrian religion. That's in the stories of Nehemiah and Ezra.
As the prophet Jeremiah complained -
How can you say, 'We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with
us? But behold. the false
pen of the Scribes has made it into a lie.' (8:8)
Gilad Atzman's View
Gilad Atzman is a wise man. In his book, The Wandering Who? he writes:
In my formative years I blindly accepted everything
they told us about our ‘collective’ Jewish past: the Kingdom of David, Masada
and the Holocaust: the soap, the lampshade, the death march, the six million.’
He ironically implies that none of
Jewish history is reliable, and maybe we need this wider perspective. Do people
like believing in the Holocaust, feel virtuous in believing in it, in the same
way as Christians have claimed to believe that Jonah could live inside a whale
for three days? ‘If anything, archaeology
refutes the historicity of the Bible (pp.175,141.)
Atzman puts the horror of the OT in a modern context:
'The
Catholic theologian Raymund Schwager found 600 passages of explicit violence in
the Old Testament, along with 1000 descriptive verses of God's own violent
punishments and 100 passages where God expressly commands others to kill.
Violence is one of the most frequently mentioned activities in the Hebrew
Bible.'
Moses, his contemporaries and
their current followers were and are excited about the possibilities that
awaited them in the Land of Milk and Honey. Israel, the Jewish State, has been following Moses' call. The ethnic
cleansing of the Palestinian people in 1948, and the constant and total abuse
of the Palestinian people since then, makes Deuteronomy 6:10-12 look like a
prophecy fulfilled. For
more than sixty years, the Biblical call for theft has been put into legal
praxis. The Israeli looting of Palestinian cities, homes, fields and wells has
found its way into Israel's legal system: by 1950-51, Israeli legislators had
already approved the 'Absentee Property Law', a racially-orientated law
preventing Palestinians from returning to their lands, cities and villages, and
allowing the new Israelites to live in houses and cities they 'did not build'.
The
never-ending theft of Palestine in the name of the Jewish people is part of a
spiritual, ideological, cultural and practical continuum between the Bible,
Zionist ideology and the State of Israel (along with its overseas supporters).
Israel and Zionism, both successful political systems, have instituted the
plunder promised by the Hebrew God in the Judaic holy scriptures.
But this continuum goes further
than just theft - in reviewing the following Biblical passages, recall the
devastating images of Gazans being bombed in a UN shelter at the time of the
IDF's Operation Cast Lead (Dec-Jan 2008-2009):
'You will
chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you. Five of you
shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight;
your enemies shall fall by the sword before you.' Leviticus, 26:7-8
'When the Lord
your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out
before you many nations ... you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with
them, and show them no mercy.' Deuteronomy 7:1-2
'Do not leave
alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them ... as the Lord your God has
commanded you ...'---Deuteronomy 20:16
A Moral Issue
Putting aside the dubious, we are left with the horror stories of this genocidal God, ever-enraged and cursing
everyone, like an ever-simmering volcano. One keeps turning the pages just to
find who will get bumped off next, and what dire end they will meet. Richard
Dawkins’ 2006 bestseller made the moral judgement:
The God of the Old
Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and
proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a viondictive,
bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal,
genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic,
capriciously malevolent bully. (the God
Delusion, Ibid, p.51)
One must surely agree, also with what Thomas Paine wrote:
Whenever
we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and
torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half
the bible is filled, it would seem more consistent that we called it the word
of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has
served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.— Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
The Predator Speaks
"And
when the LORD your God brings you into the land which he swore to your fathers,
to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you, with great and goodly cities,
which you did not build, and houses full of all good things, which you did not
fill, and cisterns hewn out, which you did not hew, and vineyards and olive
trees, which you did not plant, and when you eat and are full, then take heed lest you forget the
LORD…” Deut 6:10-14)
Why do Christians want this ghastly stuff in their
‘Holy Book’? One is grateful to John Tiffany’s book for expressing bewilderment
on this issue.
