Almost Interesting

The Book of Joshua isn’t particularly interesting, though much more heinously bloody than all previous. It recounts the string of genocidal conquests into Canaan which occurred between the death of Moses and the death of his second-in-command, Joshua. Of the people found there, God orders all of them put to death without exception. Of course, exceptions are made about which God is peculiarly silent.

In chapter 2 two Isrealite spies are aided by Rahab, a treasonous resident of Jericho. Rahab is either a prostitute or an innkeeper, about which the NIV is unsure. (Seems like a fairly big difference, yes?) She aids the spies in exchange for her and her family’s lives. After a successful campaign (the one where the city is marched around for seven days and all the walls fall), she lives among Israel. This story confuses me. So God commands destruction of all the people of Canaan without exception, yet exceptions are allowed?

Chapter 7 shows the inconsistency of these edicts. A man named Achan looted a few items during the conquest of Jericho, all of which was to be destroyed. After suffering a minor loss in Ai and some others dying of sickness (revealed in 22:20-22), Joshua is told that it was because some among them secretly sinned. (Sure, all bad things that happen are punishment for sin. It can’t be that you weren’t adequately prepared. Noooo. Joshua also preemptively blames intermarriage for military failures in 23:12-13. What about everybody who will marry a relative of Rahab?) Upon interrogation Achan confesses and is punished with death for himself and his entirely family, again directly acting in opposition to Deuteronomy 26:16.

I was impressed with the Gibeonites, a group of Hivites, whom deceived Joshua in chapter 9. After they heard of the fates of Jericho and Ai, some men were dressed shabbily and sent to meet Israel in order to forge a treaty. They claimed to have come far away and proffered their shabby wares as proof. (Smooth!) They are believed, God is not consulted nor does he intercede, and a peace treaty (sworn by the God of Israel) is made. Shortly thereafter the ruse is discovered and all Gibeon LOLs at them. Just kidding, they become the Israelites’ slaves. Um… good going?

In the next chapter occurs the other memorable scene from the Book of Joshua: the Sun stands still. Of course, nobody – apparently even God – knew that the Sun was stationary (Well, not really, but I’m sure God didn’t know this either.) and that the Earth turns and revolves around it. And when, as logic would dictate, the Earth stood still (perhaps the genesis of this term) gravity was not noted to have suddenly decreased. Also no word was of how hot the Earth – especially in a desert place like Canaan – became that day. Surely even an ignorant such as the author of the Book of Joshua knew the relation between the Sun being “up” and the temperature rising.

In chapter 20, the rules for people acquitted of murder are changed or contradicted. In Numbers 35:24-26 the person in question must remain in the Levite city until the high priest dies, but Joshua 20:6 states that they may leave upon being cleared of the charge. Though I do not complain about laws becoming more just, it does bother me that they are not constant. If their god is perfect, ought not these laws remain the same for more than some fifty years? (It’s not as though their society or technology improved much during the interim.)

Chapter 22 relates the anecdote about the tribes East of the River Jordan erecting a replica of an altar in order to remind those there of their god. The Western tribes get upset thinking that they had resorted to idolatry (which is likely given that these people have a history of worshipping new gods just two weeks after the old becomes occupied with other work [Exodus 32:1]). This was very funny to me because isn’t that exactly what a graven image/idol is? Surely people even back then were not stupid enough to think that the little statue got up and did the bidding of worshipers while nobody was looking, right?

The whole book is about genocidal military conquest, misplaced blame, stupidity, long lists of non-Israelites murdered, and more long lists of land allotments (upon which other people still live). The pervading themes of Joshua are the bigotry and smallness of the Israelites and of their god. “Thou shalt not murder” (Exodus 20:13) and other commandments clearly only apply to Israelites (who have not incurred magical wrath) and those whom curry their favor. My reading thus far has only strengthened my conviction that even if magic and all that nonsense could be real, a god like this is not worthy of worship. Any just-minded person would certainly rather spend eternity in Hell than with a monster like Israel’s God.

Deuteronomy failed to impress me; it’s little more than Moses rehashing the last four books and dying. Really, Moses? Didn’t I just read this? He just totally phoned it in here – maybe he signed onto a five-book deal and only had enough material for four. Deuteronomy is the Bronze Age equivalent of a clip show. Additionally, it has contradicts the previous books and at least one instance of contradicting itself. With a dearth of egalitarianism rivaling Leviticus, I’m sure you can cut me some slack for having dragged my feet, ultimately spending three days to read it.

When I first started taking notes, I started marking approvals of slavery and godly orders to commit genocide, but by the end both had become so commonplace so as to escape notice entirely. Slavery and genocide seem to be no more than background noise in the Bible, and I’m afraid the rampant misogyny may soon become similarly unexceptional. I did mark 7:1-6 for its orders to kill everybody currently inhabiting Canaan, but after that it just started becoming white noise.

There were a few direct contradictions of previously stated things. For starters, in 2:26-29 Moses recalled sending messengers to a king asking for passage through his land, paying for all things consumed as they passed. To elicit a bandwagon effect, I suppose, he claimed that the Edomites had agreed to these terms as well, but the story as told in Numbers 20:17-21 states in no uncertain terms that the Edomites refused Israel. Perhaps Moses lied? Moses contradicts God’s aforementioned edicts on Hebrew slavery by making provisions for the emancipation of Hebrew women, too (15:12-14). (Not that this is a bad thing by any means!) In clash with almost everything in the preceding books, 24:16 claims that no parent or child ought to die for the sin of the other. (So God draws the line at death? He already spits on the children of a sinner until the third or fourth generation but won’t kill them. What a good guy!) This little love fest gets shot to Hell though since, in the series of curses on those whom dare defy the myriad illogical and downright unjust rules saddled to them via birth, he condemns the defiant to the cannibalize of their own children for sustenance (28:53). Does God think you can eat your children as punishment for your sin without killing them? (Actually, my mom had a CD of folksy joke music in which this one family had a pet pig they couldn’t bear to part with so they ate him in piece-by-piece, but I think this may a little different. [Also I digress.])

32:1-43 is comprised of the “Song of Moses,” which is a misnomer for a song written by God for God, probably in a fever of self-fellating inspiration. Right off the bat, verse 4 makes the outrageous claim that

He is the Rock, his works are perfect,
and all his ways are just.
A faithful God who does no wrong,
upright and just is he.

Well, I’ve already covered a great deal of this god’s wrongdoing, but there’s more to be found here!

• 8:16 explains that God fed people nothing but bland manna for forty years in order to “test” them, meaning that when he killed people for whining about the manna he was clearly guilty of entrapment.
• Chapter 13 uses the hypothetical situation of a person predicting a future event accurately and using the event to proselytize their gods. That person is to be put to death. (Surprised?) You know, because God is just testing you. (I can has circular logic?)
• Expanding on the earlier idea that unruly children should be stoned to death, 21:18-21 includes parents complaining about a “drunkard” child. Does this mean that parents can still get their adult children murdered or are we to blame the parents for giving their kid booze?
• 23:2 punishes the children of “forbidden marriages”/unmarried people (e.g. me) for the non-crime their parents.
• Also perfectly in character for this fellow, any if woman attempting to break up a fight between men accidentally touches the (more-than-likely covered) penis of someone she’s not married to, she is to have her arm chopped off (25:11-12).
• In his ravings against those whom defy him, God punishes the sinner by making his fiancee endure rape. Um… yeah… that’s fair. (28:30).

Of course, there was other bullshit. Moses, after destroying the golden calf that Israel made during Exodus, spent forty days and nights in the desert consuming neither food nor water (9:18). Even Terri Schaivo who was completely bedridden in humid Florida only lasted thirteen days. I suppose, then, that Moses was actually a waterbed with legs. Also, my favorite flub in the book is 14:11-18 in which the bat is identified as a bird. Of course, this can probably be attributed to an imperfect editor as easily as to an ignorant author, but still: much LOLs.

There were some things I found agreeable here, too! (Sure I’m inclined to poo-poo the whole thing, but I do try to be as fair as my very biased mind can allow.) 22:5 condemns slavers to death, but can’t a parent (Oh, who am I kidding? the father) selling an unwilling child into slavery also be considered ripe for retribution under this rule? Also, how do they reconcile this with being the buyers of slaves? 25:1-3 forbids more than forty flogs in a punishment and can easily be seen as a prohibition on excessive punishment, though maybe I’m being too liberal in this reading. (I mean, surely I haven’t forgotten 25:11-12 yet, right?) And in 30:1-3 all are assured that any who have turned away from God can return to him and may be fully restored to their previous position and possessions. It’s too bad that most crimes call for capital punishment, huh?

Interestingly, I found what is probably the genesis of a couple of idioms: 8:3 makes use of “man does not live on bread alone” and 32:10 “apple of his eye” is used to describe Israel.

And in the end Moses is instructed to climb Mount Nebo and look out onto the land which he has labored tirelessly for eighty years to reunite his people with and die, never entering on account of a small indiscretion. Is Jesus’ story meant to echo that of Moses’? While Jesus died for others, Moses lived for them. (Though my life has not been long thus far, I can in good faith disclose my hard gained knowledge that it is a far more arduous task to live for others than it is to die.) In the unjustness of his fate I found the deepest story the Bible has yet given me: all who toil away their entire lives for their own benefit do so in vain. Even if Moses had made it into the Promised Land, he would still die one day; his great legacy is having given his all to his people. I have to admit that his story has moved me.

Thankfully, Numbers was a far better book than Leviticus. The first nine chapters are about the census taken of the Israelites, sans the Levites, for militaristic purposes. The aforementioned 603,550 men mentioned in Exodus are indeed only males and all over the age of 20, which (as the notes say) lends to the idea that there are about 2,000,000 people in total. This, of course, is an extraordinarily large number of people and various possibilities of mistranslation have been suggested to account for this. 2,000,000 in a population may not seem like much today, but, in order to put this in perspective, take into account that the whole of the Las Vegas valley is currently home to two million people. Farming and food distribution systems at the time were not adequate to provide for this many people in a place such as Egypt – even Babylon had only ~40,000 people at its peak. Regardless, the Bible is a book of impossibilities and this is doubtlessly one of them.

Numbers repeatedly lists the names of representatives of the 12 tribes (Ephraim and Manasseh each counting as a tribe as the Levites are excluded); when the Tabernacle was finally set up each tribe’s gifts are listed separately, even though all the tribes gave the same gifts. These parts were boring. There are also some holdover laws and regulations discussed at points in Numbers, but not to the tedious extent of Leviticus. The various atrocities wrought on sacrificial animals are now referenced by their specific titles (Burnt, Fellowship/Peace, Sin, Guilt Offerings, and Grain Offerings usually only accompanying a furry or feathered victim). 5:11-31 details a bit of more anti-woman hypocrisy with a borderline-voodoo test to decide if an accused wife has cheated on her husband: she is to be given a jug of water with dirt in it of which she drinks and if she contracts a wasting disease she is guilty, if not she is innocent. Sanitization at the time was abysmal so any poor woman found guilty is clearly the victim of bad water, and the acquitted merely lucky. No cheating-husband test was ever introduced.

From here an actual story develops in which the authority of Moses and Aaron is repeatedly tested and challenged by their needy charges. Nostalgia (and probably idleness, too) wear on the Israelites and they alternately complain, act as though bondage in Egypt or death would be better than freedom in Sinai, and attempt to usurp power from those their god has placed in charge.

It is in this book that I developed a strong regard for the character of Moses. He seems to be all that is virtuous: humble, hard-working, compassionate, forgiving. All the evils he brings onto others is at the command of an evil god whom he is forced to serve. Repeatedly he pleads with God to forgive those whom transgress against him (Moses, that is) and often succeeds to an extent. Examples include 12:1-13, 14:11-19, 16:22, 16:46-50, and 21:7. His great humility is exemplified in 11:26-29. For his pains, 20:11-12 sees God barring him and Aaron from ever entering the promised land for a very minor disobedience: when the Israelites cry for water, Moses strikes a rock twice with his staff (which he had been commanded to do once on a previous occasion) instead of speaking to it. For eighty years of constant, dedicated service he is given nothing at all! I feel as though no Jesus would ever be needed, as Jesus lived but 33 years in relative comfort to Moses whom toiled nearly all of his life for the good of others and all for no personal gain. Even after God informed him and his brother that they should receive no payment, they continued to work every day for the rest of their lives. When God tells Moses that the end of his days were nigh, his only concern is for the good of his people (27:12-16). The only point at which my respect for this character was diminished (and I must declare it an immense grievance) was after the defeat of the Midianites; the army of Israel had spared all the women and children. This show of mercy angers Moses and he instructs them to kill all the boys and every non-virgin woman (31:9-18). (You know, because women are like toothbrushes and nobody wants a used one.) Then the prisoners are divided as spoils along with the sheep, cattle, and donkeys (31:32-47).

There is an interesting story of Balaam, a sorcerer of sorts. According to the notes in the book, Balaam may have been a real person as he had at least one divination recorded in non-Biblical texts. Balak, king of Moab, had seen the multitudes of Israel camped near his lands and was convinced that they had come to defeat him. Because he does not think that he can defeat them, he sends for the famous Balaam to curse them. Israel’s god, however, forces Balaam to bless them instead. I especially liked the bit about his donkey, probably because it is the first regard I have ever seen paid to a non-human up to this point in the Bible. I include it forthwith:

²¹Balaam got up in the morning, saddled his donkey and went with the princes of Moab. ²²But God was very angry when he went, and the angel of the LORD stood in the road to oppose him. Balaam was riding on his donkey, and his two servants were with him. ²³When the donkey saw the angel of the LORD standing in the road with a drawn sword in his hand, she turned off the road into a field. Balaam beat her to get her back on the road.

²⁴Then the angel of the LORD stood in a narrow path between two vineyards, with walls on both sides. ²⁵When the donkey saw the angel of the LORD, she pressed close to the wall, crushing Balaam’s foot against it. So he beat her again.

²⁶Then the angel of the LORD moved on ahead and stood in a narrow place where there was no room to turn, either to the right or to the left. ²⁷When the donkey saw the angel of the LORD, she lay down under Balaam, and he was angry and beat her with his staff. ²⁸Then the LORD opened the donkey’s mouth, and she said to Balaam, “What have I done to you to make you beat me these three times?”

²⁹Balaam answered the donkey, “You have made a fool of me! If I had a sword in my hand, I would kill you right now.”

³⁰The donkey said to Balaam, “Am I not your own donkey, which you have always ridden, to this day? Have I been in the habit of doing this to you?”
“No,” he said.

³¹Then the LORD opened Balaam’s eyes, and he saw the angel of the LORD standing in the road with his sword drawn. So he bowed low and fell facedown.

³²The angel of the LORD asked him, “Why have you beaten your donkey these three times? I have come here to oppose you because your path is a reckless one before me. ³³The donkey saw me and turned away from me these three times. If she had not turned away, I would certainly have killed you by now, but I would have spared her.”

-22:21-33 (emphasis mine)

We see at a couple of points something resembling movement toward a truly just society, too. At the end of Numbers, six Levite cities are established to serve as sanctuaries for accused murderers seeking a fair trial (35:22-30). Of course, it’s not perfect – even an acquitted person must stay in the Levite city until the high priest dies or they may be subject to vengeance, but this is clearly better than the total lack of judicial oversight experienced before. I was very happy to read 27:1-11, which contains the story of a brother-less group of Manasseh sisters seeking to one day redeem their father’s inheritance. Moses applies to God and God agrees that they should not be denied, henceforth establishing an inheritance system which resembles male-preference primogeniture: if a family has no sons, the daughters shall inherit, if no children, a brother, if no neither children nor brothers, an uncle, and so on. Again, it’s not perfect but it’s a start.

Of course, women can’t even completely savor this crumb of consideration thrown to them by their owners. The very last chapter of the book, chapter 36, is entirely about the men of the tribe of Manasseh complaining to Moses that if said women marry outside their own tribe, their property will be turned over to the other group. God’s solution to this is to say that women in such circumstances must only marry within their own tribe so as to keep one tribe’s property from changing hands. Even the NIV note claims the book to end “on a happy note” because all of the sisters obey God and subjugate themselves by marrying within Manasseh. (Fuck you too, Zondervan!)

The eternal tyrant’s crusade against egalitarianism continues in full force in Numbers. Indeed, much of Moses’ appeal is due to his opposition to God’s cruelty. Chapter 30 is entirely about how if a woman decides to serve God, her owner (a husband or father) can completely negate her decision at will. The war on justice does not end with women, of course. In 15:32-36, God commands that a man caught gathering wood on the sabbath be stoned to death. The ground split apart and swallowed not only three men trying to usurp Moses and Aaron, but their innocent families, as well (16:31-33). When the Israelites tell God that his food stinks he sends snakes to kill them (21:4-9). This last one leads to as stupid and convoluted a remedy as ever there was: God instructs Moses to fashion a bronze snake’s head and put it on a stick so anybody bitten may look at it and will survive. Um… wow, you are the brilliant one who invented calculus? So much Byzantine silliness clearly indicative of the simple-minded superstitions of ignorant people grasping for a sense of control over a world they could not even begin to comprehend with their ingrained methodology of un-reason. The being with all these useless regulations and panaceas cannot be an intelligent being, let alone an omnipotent one.

In 25:6-15, Phinehas, a priest-designate, sees a fellow Israelite with a Midianite woman, follows them to their tent, and runs them both through with a spear. For this he is rewarded greatly – apparently his countrymen believed that their consorting with the Midianites displeased God and brought upon them a plague. In this cold-blooded double homicide the ignorant people believed he quelled God’s anger and released them from the infectious disease killing their population. Again, more Bronze Age silliness about godly displeasure bringing illness. Anybody with half a brain and an sixth grade education can see that it is patently false.

The biggest thing I’ve taken away from Numbers is the general feeling that Moses is more moral than the god he served. Loyal, hard-working, trustworthy, never jealous, and miles more compassionate than his contemporaries, he is clearly the least reprehensible in the Bible thus far.

And on a strange note, Serah, descendant of Asher, who was mentioned in Genesis 46:17 was mentioned again in Numbers 26:46. It is too bad we’ll probably never hear her story. For a woman to be so mentioned among her brothers and male cousins in a 400-year-old account of her family must mean that she had a fascinating story.

I finished Leviticus last night, but again waited to post anything about it. Mostly because I was sleepy and a bit feverish. I’m still feverish, but feeling more up to the challenge of talking about this book. This post is going to be mostly comprised of lists; there really is no story to speak of, what with its being mostly a series of lists itself. Maybe you’ve heard before that Leviticus is the worst book in all the Bible – it was awful, but since I’ve not read past it I cannot yet say. It would be easier to explain what I liked rather than what I didn’t like.

The good:

• Chapter 13,with the exception of verse 12 – It is full of smart ideas about how to contain infectious disease and mildew control, but for some reason v.12 says it’s OK when a skin disease has spread over the whole body. (Perhaps it refers to Vitiligo?)
• 19:9-11, 13-18, 32-26 – These are all about charity, honesty, egalitarianism, and kindness.
• 25:35-37, 39-41 – On not taking advantage of the downtrodden

The almost-good (i.e. heart’s in the wrong place):

• 19:29 & 31 – Don’t pimp your daughter or everyone will start doing it! (And property values will go down?) & Fortune-tellers are bad not because they’re full of shit, but because they’ll sully you.

LOLs:

• 18:6 – At this point, God starts saying, “I am the LORD,” at the end of random sentences, repetition becoming more frequent as the book wears on. It seemed to me a very silly thing to say, like when Invader Zim yells, “I AM ZIM!” or when a dumb character in a TV show, pretending to be someone s/he is not, will constantly and without prompting affirm their supposed identity.
• 18:21 note (in NIV)

– 18:21 is another piece of good advice with a bad reason: do not sacrifice your children to another magical fairy because the magical fairy you already worship will be disrespected. I found the note in my Bible ridiculous because it calls the sacrifice of young humans “detestable” but is a constant apologetic for the sacrifice of non-humans.

And everything else was pure horror. The first part is about how to go about ritual sacrifice of various animals, how to dismember them, and which are the proper ways to play with the blood and parts thereof. Then it discusses the ordination of Aaron and his sons (with more unnecessary gore). After this the laws of kashrut are laid down, misogynistic vagina-hating, disease control, ritual cleansing, holidays, more laws and regulations for priests, and punishments (either death or banishment; they weren’t very creative about abuse when it wasn’t about animal dismemberment or playing in blood).

I have specific examples of things which stuck with me, too.

Outlandish punishments for non-crimes:

• 10:1-2 – Two of Aaron’s sons are burned to death for using incense at a time God didn’t approve of.
• Chapter 20 – Death or banishment for petty offenses and non-crimes.
• 24:10-23 – A man is stoned for blasphemy, despite a little bit of lip service paid to justice in 24:17-22. They make a big deal of treating all people the same, even those they do not view as one of them, much in the same way a homophobe will repeatedly remind you of “all [their] gay friends.”

  Furthermore, the man in question is as one of them as Ephraim and Manasseh – half Egyptian, half Israelite – why, because his mother is a Danite and his father Egyptian instead of the other way around, should he have been so excluded? It is utter ridiculousness.

Crazy superstitious nonsense:

• Chapter 14 – Following the useful (perhaps even insightful) chapter 13 is a list of different animals to maim (and instructions, too) in order to atone for the sin that caused the illness.
• 26:4 – Appeasing God for rain.
• 26:14-46 – If bad things happen to you, it’s because you’ve displeased the Magical Sky Fairy. The reverse is obviously true, as well.
• 26:22, 29, 39, 40 – Foolish punishment of descendants for the sin of an ancestor.

Woman-hating:

• 15:19-24 – Anything a menstruating woman sits on will be “unclean” (They mean in the religious sense, not physically… What did they use in lieu of tampons back then, anyway?)
• 15:25-30 – Claims that there is something wrong with a woman whose period is longer than what others would consider normal. Clearly she is sick and this is tantamount to sin, so more birds are to have their heads twisted off.
• 18:19 – Ew! Period! I’m really starting to think that modern-day silliness about the menstrual cycle is a direct result of the enshrining of this Bronze-Age bullshit.
• 19:20-22 – You can rape an engaged slave so long as you have a ram for the priests to brutally murder and dismember.
• 21:13-15 – Priests are to only marry virgins because for some reason his children will be unclean if the vagina he buys isn’t shrink-wrapped.

Other bigotry:

• 18:22 & 20:13 – Inciting anti-gay violence
• 21:16-23 – Ableism; anybody who is a little person, has an impairment, missing limb, etc is considered defective and is not fit to be a bloodthirsty butcher priest, despite being a descendant of Aaron.

God ≠ smart:

• Chapter 14, 15, elsewhere – Mentioned again because God is the one pushing the idea that sickness is a transgression and requires ritual cleansing. If he created everything, surely he’d have an idea as to how disease and infection works.
• 20:20, 21 – Claims that if you have sex with and/or marry your sister-in-law or aunt that you will both be childless. Um… this one is only too easy to prove false.
• 25:1-7 – Every seventh year, no crops are to be planted. (God provides three years worth of food in the sixth year so nobody will starve.) The wisdom in this is clear, the practice of crop rotation has been done for ages to avoid soil nutrient depletion. However, God could’ve used his supposedly infinite knowledge of the planet he created and told them that planting legumes would’ve restored them. (Come to think of it, why doesn’t God reveal anything useful, like how to cure polio or germ theory?)

God reaffirming he loves slavery:

• 25:44-46 – In Exodus, God laid down rules for enslaving Hebrews and how they are to be treated. Here it is made abundantly clear that he sanctions the practice, so long as the slave-to-be is not an Israelite.

So yeah, that’s Leviticus in a nutshell. A dash of goodness in a stew of superstition-fueled psychotic bloodletting masquerading as holy writ. It’s horrible and I hope that people are right and it is the worst book in the Bible so I won’t have to endure such a disgusting reading experience ever again.

I finished Exodus last night, but decided to sleep on it before writing. When I began it, I was fresh from the nostalgia of reading the stories I’ve heard since childhood, but am beginning to feel anew that sickening disgust that anybody should worship, or even regard as vaguely moral, such a barbaric monster as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The first half of Exodus is the story of Moses, with the help of Aaron and the man upstairs, leading all 603,550 men (it is not clear whether “men” is used to mean all the people or just males [who were the only ones found worthy of counting]) out of Egypt and into the Sinai Peninsula. The Israelites complain frequently (but perhaps it only seems so because the book elapses the time and the grumbling is thus condensed). The next 13% of the book is about God ripping off the Code of Hammurabi while changing some details and adding a few things. The last 37% is God playing the part of the whiny McMansion dweller ordering new furniture and curtains for his house.

The first segment, the titular Exodus, is easily the best part of this book. We see an enslaved people freed – a heartening story by almost any account. However, that is where the heartwarming part ends. The biggest feature in this story, the plagues, are nothing short of a travesty: after a few initial (and relatively minor) plagues, each time Aaron and Moses apply to Pharaoh God personally “hardens his heart” (Exodus 9:12, 10:20, 27, 14:3, 8) so that more atrocities can be brought upon the Egyptian people, thereby providing a showcase for the horrors the God of Israel can muster.

¹⁴For I will at this time send all my plagues upon thine heart, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people; that thou mayest know that [there is] none like me in all the earth. ¹⁵For now I will stretch out my hand, that I may smite thee and thy people with pestilence; and thou shalt be cut off from the earth. ¹⁶And in very deed for this [cause] have I raised thee up, for to shew [in] thee my power; and that my name may be declared throughout all the earth.

-Exodus 9:14-16

Thus, for this god’s vanity and fame, all the citizens of Egypt suffer most grievously. Even if it were just the Pharaoh himself hardening his heart (and the story makes it clear that after a point God alone is the one to blame) against Israel, why should all his subjects pay for it? No enlightened notion of justice would see this as pertinent, let alone right, so why is such a monster to be held up as some beacon of righteousness? Not only are the people affected by them but the non-human slaves of Egypt are punished as well. Fish, frogs, livestock pay a heavier price than the humans of Egypt, and even gnats, flies, and locusts are used as pawns. And to what end? To display power and unadulterated cruelty. If it were God’s only wish to free Israel, would he not simply soften Pharaoh’s heart or smite Pharaoh after Pharaoh until one of a more egalitarian mind came to power (or until the government crumbled and the resulting disarray allowed them to leave)? The whole business is revolting.

I have previously posted an essay touching on the belief which slaves of the Americas held that the story of the Exodus meant that the Christian God rebuked slavery. The next section of this book instantly proves them wrong. (Perhaps, as literacy among slaves was low and later forbidden, they were not told the whole story and could not read it for themselves.) Exodus 21:2-3 does not even allow for the total suffrage of the Hebrew people, let alone those whom this god does not show favoritism for. This god has a very definite idea that slaves ought to exist, permits beating them, and the provisions for freedom are only made for Hebrew men and never Hebrew women or non-Hebrews. It further touches on personal injury cases and buying virgins whom one has either seduced (or raped, I suppose, since Tamar was to be executed [Genesis 38:24], but Dinah was not condemned [Genesis 34]). Lovely.

The third part is all about the frivolous things that God wants made for him for his “Tabernacle,” including (but not limited to) the Arc of the Covenant, altars, incense burners, and curtains. Lots of curtains. Everything is to be made of gold or gold-plated (except a few minor things made of silver or bronze), fine linen, goat hair, red-dyed ram skins, dugong skins, various gemstones, and red, blue, and purple dyes. The specificity with which it is all described harkens to fussy suburbanites giving orders to a decorator. In fact, much more space in the book is given to all the superfluous things that God wants made for him than to useful information like “do not steal” or “do not murder.” There are also plenty of detailed instructions for killing bulls and rams, dismembering the corpses, and doing various bizarre things with the fat and blood. Sure to make a psychopath of any Levite – guaranteed.

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For this book, I only have two questions:

• After the Plague on the Livestock (Exodus 9:1-7) in which all but the Israelites’ livestock animals died, why is there talk of sheltering Egyptian livestock from the Plague of Hail (Exodus 9:19, 20-21, 25) and the deaths of the already-dead livestock in the Plague on the Firstborn (Exodus 11:5, 12:12, 12:29)?
• How can God (or God’s avatar – it was not clear) discern the firstborn male child from his siblings but not which homes ought to be passed over without a lamb’s blood (Exodus 12)?