The Bible

Posted in martin's blog on ,

My younger daughter Molly is currently reading the Bible - reading it as a convinced atheist, for information and literary instruction - and I'm trying to keep up with her.

Molly reads much faster than me, so I'm still in Kings while she has finished the Old Testament and is about to start on the New. (Her plan after that is to read the Quran).

But it seems worth noting a few of our findings so far.

The Old Testament is "religious" in a very different way from that in which religion presents itself today.

There is no real talk of an afterlife. The various figures mentioned live for longer and shorter, and then they die, and that's an end of it.

If they are favoured by God, they have lots of land and cattle and slaves and wives and male children; if they're not, they don't.

And being favoured by God is only to a marginal degree anything to do with being "good". God, in the Old Testament, is a gang chief. He looks after those loyal to him, and smites the other gangs. You should worship him because he is the most powerful gang chief, and you'll do better with him than with the others.

For example, God helps the people of Israel to smite the Canaanites, and is very insistent that they should massacre the defeated people down to the last child, but there is no strong suggestion that the Canaanites are morally inferior to the people of Israel (less generous, considerate, truthful, that sort of thing). They are just the rival gang: that's all.

As a gang chief, God appears "supernatural" in only a very limited way. He is vicious, nasty, violent, vindictive, bad-tempered, petulant, but sometimes open to reason - a figure very different from the ethereal God of later religion.

Even the rudiments of moral codes appear only after a while, when the wandering tribes are beginning to settle down to a more organised collective life. Then, the codes are not really about people being "good" to each other. They are about the upkeep of the community - thus the very long passages stipulating the material upkeep of the priests - and maintaining its solidarity against other gangs. "Thou shalt not kill" means "thou shalt not kill people on your own side".

The patriarchal attitudes are very crude. The moral code, such as it is, is essentially only for men. Men should not covet their neighbour's wife (nor his ox, ass, etc.); a woman coveting her neighbour's husband may be in danger of retribution from her husband, but there is no moral rule covering the question.

Around the world
Culture and Reviews
Issues and Campaigns

Comments

Submitted by Llin Davies (not verified) on Mon, 25/08/2008 - 19:38

The codes in the Old testament are about property not morals. They are the rules set down by a society that is changing from communal to private property. That is what the story of Joseph and the Pharaoh is about. How people become slaves from being free. Its actually "Thou shall't Not Commit Murder", not "kill". Even here the rules are about property and class relations. If one free man kills another deliberately, he foreits his own life. If he kills the slave/servant of another he only forfeits the cost of a replacement.

Where morals are spoken of they are very dubious. Abraham goes to another kingdom with his wife Sarah - the Bible can't decide whether Sarah actually is his Sister or not it gives different accounts in different places - and fears for his life. He encourages the King to beleive that Sarah is his Sister, and available. The King has it away with Sarah. Whodoes God eventually punish, Abraham for acting as a pimp for Sarah, or the King? Of course, its the King.

You could probably write a book on all of the inconsistencies, lunacies, and bad morals in the Bible a Book that would be even bigger than the Bible itself. And why do Catholics retain the Old Testament? It clearly has nothing to do with Christianity. Other than the God spoken of there was the God of the Jews, the rest of us were screwed. Jesus himself had the same attitude. He considered all Gentiles as inferior species. There is a story of a Gentile woman going to see him to ask him to cure her dying child. He told her to go away, and called her a gentile pig. Granted he did evetually relent in sympathy with the woman's plight, but that hardly justifies the origina attitude. And that part was probably written in later by the Romans when they wrote the New Testament to fit their needs under Constantine so as to make Chritianity a faith for Romans as well as Jews. UNfortunately, they forgot about that when they included the last section. There when John (this is not St. John, no one knows who John actually was) talks about the Apocalypse, he talks only about Jews being found a place in the Golden City.

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.