Love this. It’s like right out of the Haggadah, when they keep multiplying the number of plagues for some reason. No one does fan fiction like those old rabbis!
The ghetto in heaven. Who knew?
You’d think god would be a bit clearer about this stuff. However, the real problem is the idea of infinite punishment for a finite crime. That’s a Christian invention.
Ha, I never thought about that, but that’s a good point. The story of Isaac and Abraham almost lampshades this. God tests Abraham and then at the last second says, “No, wait, don’t kill your kid! That’s be freaking insane! Could you imagine someone doing that?!?! Man oh man, that was crazy!”. Then in the sequel he does it Himself? Sus.
Apparently you were so horrified that you stopped listening before the part where Abraham most certainly does not kill Isaac.
But did you consider that a hand has fourteen knuckles, therefore each plague was fourteen plagues times fifty?
(They’re interpreting the repeated expression “with a strong hand and an outstretched arm” as being mathematically significant to how devastating each plague was, essentially).
I think it is entirely possible to judge morality based on what a being (human or devine) does with their own creation. Susan Smith “created” her children and we judge the hell out if her for drowning them. Why shouldn’t the same rules apply to a god?
One of the truest things I’ve ever heard about religion was, of all places, in the lyrics of “The Loophole” by Garfunkel and Oates.
So whatever people tell me
That The Bible tells me
I will do
The point is that most Christians aren’t getting their religious beliefs directly from the Bible. They’re getting their beliefs from some authority figure who is claiming they are passing on what the Bible meant to say.
The Bible itself follows this same principle. Even if you assume God exists, he didn’t personally sit down and write the Bible. It was written down by people who were claiming they were passing on what God meant to say.
While Abraham doesn’t sacrifice his son, Jephthah does sacrifice his daughter
https://thebrickbible.com/legacy/judges/jephthah_kills_his_virgin_daughter/jg11_34.html
Here’s my interpretation of that story. It was a test by God of Abraham - and Abraham failed the test.
God had laid down a set of moral laws and told Abraham to obey them. And then God commanded Abraham to do something that was clearly immoral. And Abraham was willing to do it.
What God had wanted was for Abraham to refuse. God wanted Abraham to say “No, you have told me to be moral. So I won’t commit what I know is an immoral act. Even if I am ordered to do so. Even if God himself is the one who orders me to do so. Acting morally is more important than obeying orders.”
But the later authors of Genesis couldn’t see this. They were, after all, the kind of religious authority figures that God had been worried about. They recast Abraham’s willingness to obey an authority figure as the right decision.
I keep hearing the claim that God wrote His morality on everyone’s conscience, therefore we judge God by God’s morality.
My interpretation is that is was a test of Isaac, not Abraham. Would Isaac continue to trust and have a relationship with his father after this episode? He obviously does, because he allows Abraham to find a wife for him.
Sometimes HaShem asks things of us that we do not understand, an that even seem to contradict other things. We trust that things will work out, and continue to be the people of HaShem.
I choose to believe that not every story in the bible is factually true, and there is no problem with Jewish tradition in thinking this-- Job, for example, has been regarded as fiction since it was written, even if some Orthodox groups chose to consider it true now, because they insist all of scripture is a factual record. Which is backlash to the emergence of liberal Judaism, and the idea that the Torah may not be factual history.
Anyway, this story is something I consider not factually true. It’s a weird story that honestly looks like it could have been interpolated by someone wanting to make Israel look bad-- “Haha! your leader is the son of a harlot who was dumb enough to sacrifice his daughter!”
And the sacrifice, BTW, is like a lot of cautionary fables that exist in most cultures and are about being careful what you wish for, and how you phrase things. You know, you have three wishes, and with the first one, you don’t think things through, or phrase it in slightly the wrong way, and then spend the next two wishes getting rid of the first wish, and putting everything you did with it right again.
The story is implausible in a lot of ways that don’t seem obvious to us, like the daughter knowing everything that has happened before her father has a chance to tell her about it. I’ve got more, but I have to get ready for work.
My 2 cents.
As noted by other people, as a kid I only learned about the shiny, happy parts of the Old Testament/Tanakh. The violent stuff like homicidal she-bears and slavery of virgin girls I only learned about later as a teenager (e.g. reading the Bible by myself or reading Larry Gonick’s “Cartoon History of the Universe”).
One of the more bizarre episodes (to me) is the slaughter of the Midianites in Numbers 31, where Jehovah punishes the Israelites with a plague because they weren’t genocidal enough!
Moses seemed to get to the promised land during the transfiguration. So it was only a temporary ban.
In Rev 2:23 Jesus promises to kill the children of Jezebel
Kill them with death!
Also Rev 2:23 does not actually quote Jesus.
Rev 2:18x These are the words of the Son of God,
and 2:27x. just as I have received authority from my Father.
They’re the words of John of Patmos, they claim to be the words of… someone else,
I John, who also am your brother, and companion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ.
I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.
That can be said of the gospels also, Matt, Mark, Luke and John quoting what Jesus said. So can you define a difference?
There is no difference. It’s all third person, at best.
And some of it is clearly not possible for the writer to recount given the specifics in the text.
And they were all written long after anyone who actually knew Jesus was dead, so…