The
Ten Commandments, Deconstructed
Moses comes down from the mountain with
the tablets of stone, and smashes them. Hold
it right there.
The Levite killer-priests then go on a
rampage slaughtering three thousand men, women and children - with God’s
blessing, of course. The men offer no resistance as the Levite
killer-priests hacked about at their women and children. Normally the warrior-caste
and priestly caste are separate, but not here. (When the Hebrews get
to Canaan they start wiping out entire communities and cities ‘with the edge of
the sword’ – how did they make the swords in the desert?) With
the Ten Commandments smashed to bits, and thousands writhing around in a
death-agony after God’s own priests had been on their bloody rampage, then
what does Moses do? He makes potable gold, he alchemically dissolves the Golden Calf into
drinkable colloidal gold - and goes about administering it to everyone. Uh-huh.
Moses goes back up the mountain and gets a
replacement set. The commandments are not the same. The Sabbath every week had
been a blessing when no work should be done, in the Sixth Commandment. Now
it becomes a death-curse: anyone found working on the Sabbath ‘will surely
die’. Surely no culture could exist, where anyone found working on that one day
of the week gets killed? The replacement set ought to be the one where we know
the words – after all the first was smashed to bits wasn’t it? - but instead it
becomes rather diffuse.
On the same page as the Ten Commandments in Exodus, right after them, we get
God discussing how to sell off your daughter as a sex-slave: He advises putting
in a money-back guarantee clause in case satisfaction is not obtained (exodus, 21:7). To call
this an ethically-challenged deity would be a grave understatement. On the same
page the deity also starts listing the various types of persons who need to be
killed.
The Book of Exodus begins with the Israelites in bondage in Egypt, hard to find in any historical records of Egypt[1]):
1: 12-16 But the more they were oppressed, the more
they multiplied and the more they spread abroad. And the Egyptians were in
dread of the people of Israel. So they made the people of Israel serve
with rigor, and made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and
brick, and in all kinds of work in the field;
Then the king of Egypt said to the
Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiph'rah and the other Pu'ah,
"When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the
birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him; but if it is a daughter, she
shall live.
Hebrews in Egypt
are multiplying, and Egyptians are ‘in dread’ of them. The unlikely instruction
is given to ‘midwives’ by the King, to murder every male Hebrew child. The
midwives reply:
So the king of Egypt called
the midwives, and said to them, "Why have you done this, and let the male
children live?" The midwives
said to Pharaoh, "Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian
women; for they are vigorous and are delivered before the midwife comes to
them.
They pop out quickly, before the midwives can arrive to kill them. Despite
being ‘in dread’ of the Hebrews, the Pharaoh commands that "Every son that is born to the
Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile.”
Moses has a dialogue with his Adonai God about how to lead out his people from
Egypt. The latter explains the tactics of theft:
when
you go, you shall not go empty, but
each woman shall ask of her neighbor, and of her who sojourns in her house,
jewelry of silver and of gold, and clothing, and you shall put them on your
sons and on your daughters; thus you shall despoil the Egyptians."
We are left in suspense, of how the Hebrews are to ‘despoil’ the
Egyptians, by relieving their neighbours of household gold and jewellery – but,
all will be revealed. God explains to Moses the dire plan for plagues over
Egypt:
"When you go back to
Egypt, see that you do before Pharaoh all the miracles which I have put in your
power; but I will harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go.
(4:21)
The
aim is not primarily to get ‘Israelites’ out of Egypt, but rather to force the
Pharaoh not to agree to it. The deity
instructing Moses is here claiming to be ‘God Almighty’ (6:2)
The first plague begins, and all the Nile
turns to blood and the fish die etc – and the magicians of Egypt claim to be
able to duplicate this effect!
“But the magicians of Egypt
did the same by their secret arts; so Pharaoh's heart remained hardened, and he
would not listen to them; as the LORD had said”
A
second plague was unleashed, of frogs everywhere, and again the magicians of
Egypt claim they can duplicate this effect! (8:7)
But the magicians did the
same by their secret arts, and brought frogs upon the land of Egypt.
So
far, this is looking like a contest between rival groups of black magicians –
but, hang on. Gnats appear everywhere as the third plague, and this time the
magicians of Egypt cannot duplicate the effect:
The magicians
tried by their secret arts to bring forth gnats, but they could not. So there
were gnats on man and beast. And
the magicians said to Pharaoh, "This is the finger of God."
–
which apparently shows this to be ‘the finger of God.’
What god might that be,
wondered Seymour Light?
The
Hebrews are to be given a special plot of Egypt to live in called Goshen, so
they do not experience the awful plagues. (8:22) As God keeps hardening the
heart of the Pharaoh in order to prevent him from letting the Israelites go, frightful
hail and rains fall, and the Pharaoh repents. But even then, God makes him
un-repent, after all one wouldn’t want to miss the plague of locusts:
Then the LORD said to Moses, "Go
in to Pharaoh; for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants,
that I may show these signs of mine among them, and that you may tell in the
hearing of your son and of your son's son how I have made sport of the
Egyptians and what signs I have done among them; that you may know that I am the
LORD.
The
deity wants to ‘make sport of the Egyptians’
As the last, cataclysmic punishment approaches, this is a good time to
remind the Israelites about relieving their neighbours of family gold and
silver: (11:2)
Speak now in the hearing of
the people, that they ask, every man of his neighbor and every woman of her
neighbor, jewelry of silver and of gold."
The Passover
In
the first month of the year (12:2)
The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in the
land of Egypt,"This month shall be for you the beginning of months; it
shall be the first month of the year for you
each
Hebrew household needs a lamb to slaughter, and on the 14th day (i.e.
Full Moon) its blood has to be daubed over the house lintel – “It is the Lord’s
passover” - and the murderous over-flying
God will spare their children on that Passover night.
This,
Seymour Light reflected, was weirdly fulfilled much later, when the Prince of
Peace was crucified on the Passover full Moon on Friday, 3rd April
33 AD, the first full Moon after the Equinox: this Exodus text defines it in
this manner. (Seymour Light was puzzled that Jews today began their year on the
New Moon nearest the Autumn Equinox, when this Exodus text clearly defines it
as the springtime month) Dire Pauline theology passed dimly through his memory,
as to how the Lamb of God had somehow atoned or rescued believers by His death,
making the analogy with this ‘passover’ Full Moon when this nightmare god chose
to slaughter innocent children, to ‘make sport with the Egyptians.’
.
It
was indeed a bloody religion, Seymour Light reflected:
For I will pass through the land of
Egypt that night, and I will smite all the first-born in the land of Egypt,
both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am
the LORD. The blood shall be a sign for you, upon the houses where you
are; and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall fall
upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt. “This day shall
be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the LORD;
throughout your generations you shall observe it as an ordinance for ever.”
The horror of
the mass murder of innocent children had to remembered ‘forever’ - nay, celebrated and honoured. No-one needed to say how this over-flying god could ‘smite’ all the innocent
little children in their cots at night.
The Egyptians finally
let the people of Israel take all the gold and silver and clothing they ask for
(12:36). None
of this happened as such, it’s just a story from someone’s hellish imagination
– and for which God will forever after ask the Israelites to feel gratitude.
‘Thus they despoiled the Egyptians.’ (12:36) I wouldn’t invite these people to
my party, reflected Seymour Light.
Helpful rules appear
here about who may ‘celebrate’ Passover, eg
“…every
slave that is bought for money may eat of it after you have circumcised him.”
(12:43)
The Redempion Theme
Once
the Israelites have escaped from Egypt, the Lord instructs:
"Consecrate to me all
the first-born; whatever is the first to open the womb among the people of
Israel, both of man and of beast, is mine… you
shall set apart to the LORD all that first opens the womb. All the firstlings
of your cattle that are males shall be the LORD's. Every firstling of an ass you shall
redeem with a lamb, or if you will not redeem it you shall break its neck.
Every first-born of man among your sons you shall redeem.
Redemption
here is a payment, a first-born ass
can be ‘redeemed’ with a lamb – or if not ‘you shall break its neck’. ‘Redeem’
here seems to mean, avoid the slaughter of’ or else what does it mean? Later on
we will discover, that the first born sons may be ‘redeemed’ by paying a tithe
to the priesthood – who are presumably writing this text in the first place –
many centuries (Yes, Seymour Light nodded his head) many centuries after you have been told it was written.
We
consult Douglas Reed’s weighty The Controversy of Zion, for
a perspective, to explain the chains of enslavement here being
forged:
The picture of blood-bespattered
priests, thus given, is worth contemplation. Even at this distance of time the
question prompts itself: why was this insistent emphasis laid
on blood-sacrifice in the books of the Law which the Levites produced. The
answer seems to lie in the sect's uncanny genius for instilling fear by terror;
for the very mention of “blood,” in such contexts, made the faithful or
superstitious Judahite tremble for his own son!
It is all spelt out
in Exodus, this claim of the fanatical priests to the firstborn of
their followers: “And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Sanctify unto me all
the firstborn, whatsoever openeth the womb among the children of Israel,
both of man and of beast: it is mine.” According to the passage
earlier quoted from Micah, this practice of sacrificing the human
firstborn long continued, and the sight of the bloodied Levite must have had a
terrible significance for the humble tribesman, for in the words attributed to
God, quoted above, the firstborn “of man and of beast” are coupled. This
significance remained long after the priesthood (in a most ingenious way which
will later be described) contrived to discontinue human sacrifice while
retaining the prerogative. Even then the blood which was sprinkled on the priest,
though it was an animal's, was to the congregation still symbolically that of
their own offspring!
Again
and again blood is spattered over white-robed priests and the congregation, to
make everyone feel ‘holy.’ The act of redemption is later explained as
achievable by giving so many shekels to the priest. And we will address in due
time, the issue of sacrificing the human firstborn – yes, alas, we will be coming
to that – as might not be quite what you heard from the pulpit.
Crossing the Red Sea
Prior
to the crossing of the Red sea, Yahweh once more explains his motive:
And I will harden Pharaoh's
heart, and he will pursue them and I will get glory over Pharaoh and all his
host; and the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD."
He intends
to ‘get glory’ by the spectacular mass murder involved. Those writing this
story gave no motive for the Egyptian army to wish to chase the Hebrews – when
they would have been devoutly grateful for their departure.
Three
months later Moses gets to receive the Ten Commandments. Special effects appear
in the story, which will reiterate:
`Take
heed that you do not go up into the mountain or touch the border of it; whoever
touches the mountain shall be put to death … no hand shall touch him … whether
beast or man, he shall not live.' (19:13)
This
was no god of light, but rather:
And the people stood afar
off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was (20:21)
On
the very same page as the Ten Commandments, Yahweh was explaining about how to
buy and sell slaves – especially one’s own daughter:
When a man sells his daughter as a
slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. If she does not please her
master, who has designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. (12:7)
Selling
your daughter for sex, with a refund guarantee - if satisfaction is not
obtained! Yahweh also explained how its OK to beat up your own slave without
punishment (this immediately follows the Ten Commandments):
"When a man strikes his slave,
male or female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be
punished. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be punished; for
the slave is his money.
There
follows the categories of people to be killed “You shall not permit a sorceress
to live” – (22:18) and "Whoever sacrifices to any god, save to the LORD
only, shall be utterly destroyed.” The trashing of anyone else’s religion is a
recurrent theme. But, having said that,
a weird twinge of benevolence appears later in Chapter 22, as if memory of some
benevolent deity were endeavouring to make itself heard.
Seeing God
Moses
threw buckets of blood around (24:6-8), it was how to please his God:
And Moses took half of the
blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he threw against the altar. Then he took the book of the covenant,
and read it in the hearing of the people; and they said, "All that the
LORD has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient." And Moses took the
blood and threw it upon the people, and said, "Behold the blood of the
covenant which the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these
words."
After the contract was struck, with loads of blood, then Moses and
Aaron go up the mountain. God offered them a snack on their way:
Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab, and
Abi'hu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up, and they saw the God of
Israel; and there was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone,
like the very heaven for clearness. And he did not lay his hand on the
chief men of the people of Israel; they beheld God, and ate and drank.
Rather like meeting
Darth Vader, they are relived that no-one had tried to kill them.
The Torah stories were materialistic, with no after-life, and the blessings offered by Yahweh
in return for obedience are all material, as are all the curses (in far longer
lists than the blessings). The point of all of the obedience, burnt
offerings etc was not virtue or salvation, but that they would obtain the land – it was a 100% material
promise and contract.
The God constantly
defined Himself in material terms, as a being who can see and taste etc, who
gives advice in battle, often thru some sort of intercom system, and at one
point moans because the Hebrews want their own king, claiming won’t he do? He
constantly demanded sacrifice offerings like evening snacks, with detail
over their cuisine, admires the odour of the burnt offerings and wine … Indeed
Seymour Light occasionally wondered (but
could not decide) about the argument put forward in that classic work, The Genius of the Few by O’Brian, that
Yahweh was some sort of large Annunaki-type being, who could fly in his
‘cloud by day, pillar of fire by night’, and come down when required into the
Tent of Meeting where He often dwelt.
Yahweh was ‘bellicose
and vindictive’ O’Brien found. (p175, adding: “With Yahweh by your side,
violence is never more than a hand’s breadth away!” (p.190)
Levites: The Killer-Priests
On coming down with
the Ten Commandments, Moses finds that the people have alas melted down their
gold to make an engraved image – contravening the Third Commandment they had not yet been given! That was asking for trouble. Contravening the Seventh
Commandment he was bringing down from the mountain, Moses assembled the Levite
priesthood and had them slay three thousand men as punishment. This
Levite priesthood appear as the only ones who have swords, for no resistance
was offered:
then Moses stood in the gate
of the camp, and said, "Who is on the LORD's side? Come to me." And
all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together to him. And he said to them,
"Thus says the LORD God of Israel, `Put every man his sword on his side,
and go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his
brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor.'" And the
sons of Levi did according to the word of Moses; and there fell of the people
that day about three thousand men. And
Moses said, "Today you have ordained yourselves for the service of the
LORD, each one at the cost of his son and of his brother, that he may bestow a
blessing upon you this day.
The
killer-god blesses this mass-murder act, with no hint of
incompatibility with the Seventh Commandment He had just engraved on the stone.
The atheist Richard Dawkins wrote, one might have hoped that this
killing ‘would have been enough to assuage God’s jealous sulk. But no, God
wasn’t finished yet. In the last verse of this terrible chapter his parting
shot was to send a plague upon what was left of the people ‘because the made a
calf, which Aaron made.’’ (the God
Delusion, p.277) Seymour Light admired the moral judgement of Dawkins -
‘God’s monumental rage
whenever his chosen people flirted with a rival god resembles nothing so much
as sexual jealousy of the worst kind, and again it should strike a modern
moralist as far from a good role-model (Ibid, p276)
but could not go along with the view that no such Being had ever
existed. Too much horror had come from this deity, for it to be merely a
figment of anyone’s imagination. Who could ever dream up so hellish a god?
Seymour
Light here reflected upon Aaron’s ability to construct a furnace reaching a
thousand degrees centigrade, in the middle of a desert, to melt gold (32:4) –
and the even more remarkable alchemic ability of Moses to unmake Aaron’s golden
calf, dissolve it and turn it into potable, colloidal gold! (32:30)
The
Fifth Commandment gets revamped as a death-curse:
You shall keep the sabbath,
because it is holy for you; every one who profanes it shall be put to death;
whoever does any work on it, that soul shall be cut off from among his people.
(31:14)
Originally
it had been a blessing - but, hey, that was on the original tablets that Moses
had smashed in anger, remember? (20:8) Seymour Light here recalled the piteous
story of an old man caught gathering firewood, not knowing it was the sabbath
day – and by the way this is the invention of the seven-day week, this is how
it began. The Hebrews ask God what to do with him, and God replies, stone him
to death - and lo, they stoned him to death (Numbers, 15).
Once
again Seymour Light admired the moral judgement of the atheist Richard Dawkins:
What shocks me today about
such stories is not that they really happened. They probably didn’t. what makes
my jaw drop is that people today should base their lives on such an appalling
role model as Yahweh – and, even worse, that they should bossily try to force
the same evil monster (whether fact or fiction) onto rest of us. (Ibid, p282)
At last
someone was correctly evaluating the Judaeo-Christian god Yahweh, which surely
has to be a milestone and an augury of hope for Homo Sap.
It
began to dawn upon the Hebrews that being ‘rescued’ by this Deity from Egypt
may not have been such a great idea. Yahweh, whose rage was like an
ever-simmering volcano, turned out to be unappeased by the thousands just
slaughtered followed by a plague - and to his ‘chosen people’ vowed, of the
Promised Land: ‘To your descendants I will give it’ (33:1) – the promise is broken,
for which they had left Egypt and they will all have to die in the desert! Only
their children will get to enter this promised land, ‘flowing with milk and
honey.’
Later on, we get detail about how to make
and consecrate the Ark of the Covenant, (29:21)
Aaron and his sons shall lay their hands
upon the head of the ram, and you shall kill the ram, and take part of its
blood and put it upon the tip of the right ear of Aaron and upon the tips of
the right ears of his sons, and upon the thumbs of their right hands, and upon
the great toes of their right feet, and throw the rest of the blood against the
altar round about. Then you shall take part of the blood that is on the
altar, and of the anointing oil, and sprinkle it upon Aaron and his garments,
and upon his sons and his sons' garments with him; and he and his garments
shall be holy, and his sons and his sons' garments with him.
The
alter is splattered with blood, the priests are splattered with blood – ever so
holy, Seymour Light reflected.
Moses was given a preview of just a few of the local residents due
to have their land stolen from them: “I will drive out the
Canaanites, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Per'izzites, the Hivites, and the
Jeb'usites,” as well as destruction of their places of worship: “You shall tear
down their altars, and break their pillars, and cut down their Ashe'rim”
(34:13) These Middle-Eastern goddess-worshipping peoples were living - or so
Merlin Stone argued, in her The Paradise
Papers, When God was a Woman, 1976 - in ecological peace and harmony. ‘For
I will cast out nations before you, and enlarge your borders’ (34:24). This deity behaved as if totally exempt from the Commandments
just given, not to steal or kill.
This
was bad news for Planet Earth, reflected Seymour Light: the Predator had
arrived.
[1]
‘The Scholarly consensus is that the story of the Exodus is not historical’
Karen Armstrong, The Bible, The
Bibliography, 2007,15.
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