So Lucy, 'splain something to me: how could a just God kill David's baby for his father's crimes?

Great Debates
1

Some of y’all may know the story of David and Bathsheba. I’ll summarize for those who didn’t have to sit through Sunday School every week.

David was the second king of Israel and a man after God’s own heart. He had many wives, but one day he happened to see a local hot chick, Bathsheba, bathing in her courtyard, as seen here.


Sure is pretty, ain’t she?

Struck by Bathsheba’s righteous booty, David decided to have her bathed and brought to him. (Well, okay, they probably skipped that first part.) This being before the pill, Bathsheba promptly got knocked up, which was a problem as she was married to another man: Uriah the Hittite: a general in David’s army, off fighting the enemies of Israel. Hoping that Uriah cannot count, David summons him back to Jerusalem in the hopes that he’ll take advantage of the unexpected leave to shtup his wife; but Uriah declines, feeling that despite his wife’s grooviness he should not be making the beast with two-backed-beast while his guys are fighting at the front. David wants to avoid a scandal for some reason, so he then has Uriah whacked, then takes Bathseba as his new bride.

Months pass. Bathsheba has the baby, a son. Then the current voice of Yahweh, Nathan, shows up and calls David out, tricking him into condemning himself with a clever parable. The Lord of Hosts then decides to punish David, but rather than use the time-honored lightning bolt method, he inflicts the child with a slow and presumably painful illness. David puts on mourning clothes and begs the Lord of Hosts to spare his baby boy, but Yahweh’s in one of those moods and isn’t having it. The kid dies. Bathsheba, for unclear reasons, does not react tothis by slitting David’s throat while he’s asleep. David goes on to live quite a few more years, and ultimately is succeeded by another of his children by Bathsheba.

Okay, that’s the story.(And here’s a less assholish version.)Now Christians, please tell me this: how do you – you, personally, not your church or pastor – reconcile Yahweh’s behavior in this story with the notion that he is just and merciful?

2

I didn’t know that **elicidator ** stepped up as the Board’s religion expert.

3

Why is this question for Christians only? Isn’t this an Old Testament occurence? Scholars of Judaism might have an opinion.

4

No, that would be 'luci.

Reason:
God is a right bastard. “Just and merciful” is more New Testament-ish.

5

Five reasons:

[ol]
[li]I felt like it.[/li][li]I was raised in a Christian denomination (a Pentecostal denomination, to be specific, the Church of God in Christ) whose “theology”* generally asserts that God is (a) unchanging throughout history, and (b) kind, loving, and just, so that is what I am most familiar with, and I am not certain that Judaism makes the claim of God being kind;[/li][li]The person I am currently refraining from strangling in the real world is COGIC and is fond of making the above referenced assertion;[/li][li]If any Jews wish to answer the question, they will whether I ask them or not; and[/li][li]I felt like it.[/li][/ol]

6

Oh, I see. But I thought Lucy was a psychiatrist by trade (5¢; the doctor is in). Wouldn’t it have been better to ask one of the guys who write for the Family Circus or B.C.?

…

The Old Testament has a lot of things in it that make no sense from a “what would God want with a starship” perspective. Judges 12 somethingorother is my favourite WTF moment. Jephtah or something like that does a 180 on the whole no-sacrificing-kids-do-god thing.

7

I’ll give Yahweh a pass on that one (and even the story about the war against the tribe of Benjamin, which is a lot worse) because he’s not the one stirring up shit in either case. But in the son-of-Bathsheba story, it’s all but incontrovertible that God kills the nameless kid to punish David. Bad aim, that.

8

IIRC the Old Testament had a lot of “punishing sons for the sins of their fathers” moments.

9

Sure. But I’m still interested in Christians’ take on it. I can think of a fairly rational response: The Bible in general, and the OT in particular, is full of myth and symbol, and anyway a lot of it was written by Bronze Age sheep herders. You have to pick the parts that work for you, because frankly a lot of it is horrifying to modern sensibilities.

I can think of one pastor I know who’d say just that. But she’s in the minority.

I’m wondering how persons of more mainstream beliefs take it, and also how Biblical literalists resolve it.

10

I really don’t have a good answer from the child’s perspective. I could assume it would be similar to many of the aborted, the soul removed before the body is destroyed. But will ask and get back to you.

11

I mean, I’m a Christian and that’s basically my view.

I think most of those things come down to attempting to explain events as part of a “just world” worldview, ie. something bad happened so it must have been because someone sinned.

12

First of all, the reason why murder is a sin is because it means we’re playing God. It’s God’s place to decide that someone should die, not ours. Among other reasons, this is connected to the fact that God knows with absolute certainty what happens in the afterlife, and also connected to the fact that E has a plan for each of us. From a human’s point of view, we can’t know what happens to someone we kill, and we are probably going against God’s plan (whatever that is) for that person, so doing so is wrong for us. From God’s point of view, though, he was just taking the baby to Heaven, which is no punishment at all for the baby.

Even if it’s not a punishment to the baby, though, it is still a punishment on David. There are other ways God could have punished David, of course, but E still had big plans for him, and wanted to give him a chance to change his ways and continue on that plan.

Now, one might reasonably point out that this whole ordeal was also presumably very painful for Bathsheba, who can’t really be assigned blame for anything that happened. I admit that I do not know what to say to that.

13

Most “mainstream” Christians accept that lots of the Old Testament in particular are unreliable, and are most unreliable when claiming the Voice of God directed something.

However, we also accept that we don’t own our lives. We only live as long as God wills: everyone and noone dies of “natural” causes, since every life and death has a supernatural cause.

14

Because he didn’t have a poll function. Seriously, Skald is the one asking this? Mr. Hypothetical disaster to a hapless fictitious second person for the amusement of the stat checking masses. Really? The irony is so broad that you could operate a dry cleaner’s mangle with it.

15

God kills EVERYONE. Every human being on Earth, except those alive right now, died because God decided they should die. And the only reason we aren’t dead is because God hasn’t decreed our doom yet. But pretty soon–maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon–we’re going to die at God’s command as well.

The baby that dies because God decides to teach David a lesson dies just as unfairly as a baby that dies for no particular reason that we can see, or young woman who dies of an ectopic pregnancy, or the old man who dies in bed surrounded by his great-grandchildren.

Either it’s all unfair, or it’s all fair. As an atheist, I think it’s all unfair because the universe is not conscious and is indifferent to human suffering. As the man said, deserves got nuthin to do with it.

16

Hang on.

The Bible says that God’s plans can never be thwarted. So how is it even possible that something that a human does can go against God’s plan?

This makes no sense at all. If killing someone is “going against God’s plan for that person” then that means that the plan has been thwarted. If God has a plan for a person, and that plan can never be thwarted, then killing that person must, ipso facto, have been part of God’s plan for that person all along.

This is a recurring theme in Christian attempts to explain the parts of the OT where God acts like an arsehole. The explanations themselves contradict other parts of the OT and the whole thing becomes and even bigger mess that makes God look like a lying arsehole as well as a bloodthirtsy arsehole.

17

The actual theological answer is that there are two plans: one that is what would happen in a perfect world, and one for what happens in a world with human intervention. It’s what leads to the concept of free will: God doesn’t force man to follow his plans. He merely works to ensure his ultimate goals are still met.
Christians refer to these disparate plans as his “perfect will” and his “permissive will.”

As for why God doesn’t force us, that’s another debate entirely. I’ll just briefly give the usual answer: What good is someone who loves you because you made them do so?

18

Stop assigning human traits to God and you’ll have less of a headache.

19

It’s my plan that my son does the dishes in the evening. I’m the boss. But I’m not going to stand over him with a frying pan screaming if he doesn’t do the dishes, though I suppose I could.

God says, “Do this.”

Human says, “No.”

God says, “Well now look what you did. I just grounded you from the Wii.”

20

Amazing. In one simple paragraph you have both shown that the Bible is both worthless as a source of information on the traits of God *and *demonstrated that the Bible is self-contradictory.

The Bible says that no plan of God’s can be thwarted in the highly and demonstrably imperfect world in which Job lived. That the world is an imperfect one in which even the innocent suffer is the whole point of the Book of Job.

Trying to explain how humans can thwart God’s plans by claiming that it only applies to a perfect world radically different to the one in which Job lived makes the Bible both dishonest and worthless when it comes to describing God, since the Bible says specifically that no plan of God’s can be thwarted in the imperfect world.

As I said above, these explanation invariably become an even bigger mess that makes God look like a lying arsehole as well as a bloodthirtsy arsehole and prove the Bible to be worthless in diving the nature of God.