It is certainly true that one can find conflicting approaches, but there is at least as much diversity within the Hebrew Scriptures as there are differences between the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.
Most of the “genocidal” passages are found in a relatively small number of books–the books that happen to describe the founding of the nation in the midst of adversity. The Prophets did not tend to be genocidal. Rather, addressing a people who were seeming to fall away from their core religion, the prophets warned of the dire consequences of abandoning their God. (Kinder, gentler Jesus? Read Matthew 3:7, Matthew 12:34, Matthew 23:33, Luke 3:7, Matthew 12:39 - 45, Matthew 16:4, Mark 8:38, Luke 11:30-32, Matthew 11:20-24, and numerous other passages.) The Revelation of John has whole chapters of destruction. (It was written in a time of threat that corresponded in some ways to the threats that faced the fiery prophets.) Of course, even those fiery prophets were not limited to a single tone. Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55) is mostly hopeful, as is Ezekiel, while Trito-Isaiah (Isaiah 56 - 66), is pretty peaceful, holding out hope through most of its length. Forgiveness? Try reading the prophet Hosea to see real forgiveness. And there is nothing in the Christian scriptures that corresponds to the Song of Songs.
I blame the Greeks. And the Romans. You can’t go wrong blaming the Romans. What have they ever done for us?
No, really. The OT was colored by the myths and philosophies with the other peoples of the region, especially the Persians and Babylonians. The NT was colored by the myths and philosophies of the Greeks and Romans, and was even first written in Greek. They don’t seem particularly related because they aren’t.
The New Testament isn’t exactly the same thing as Christianity either. I don’t think I was saying that the reforming impulse in the New Testament was focused on the previous documents, rather, it concerned the Judaism practiced in Israel at the time of Christ.
I fully agree that the Hebrew scriptures and also the Talmud contain both compassion and wisdom. But the overall tone is distinctly different.
But the New Testament culminates in the Revelation of St. John. in which God opens up the ultimate can of WoopAss and fiendishly tortures and slaughters billions of humans and casts the Devil and his Angels into the eternal lake of fire and finally blots out every soul whose name is not written in the Book of Life from the beginning, so it’s really the same old Bible from start to finish because God does like to point out He never ever changes not even a jot or a tittle so the whole argument is moot…
I was taught in Sunday School that it was a basic training type of lesson for people: 1) We had all sinned and deserved God’s wrath, hence the destruction and pissed-offedness of the OT God. But, 2) After being torn down, we are shown that we can redeem ourselves through Jesus.
I’ve never been able to square the Book of Revelation with the rest of the Bible or anything else. I agree with Jefferson that it is probably simply the ravings of a lunatic.
I think there’s a modern Western, and especially American, tendency to believe that a religion’s entire belief system ought to be deducible from its holy texts. Some Protestant sects may come closer to that than other religions, and they certainly hold that as an ideal, but it’s a poor way to understand things other than Protestant Christianity, and incredibly poor once you start looking at Eastern religion.
Is the god of the OT really harsher? Sure, he did the flood, and various massacres, mostly stories the priests who edited it probably included to make the inhabitants of Judea toe the line. Fire and brimstone preachers do the same today. But these people just died, while in many varieties of Christianity those who don’t toe the line suffer eternally.
And along with the bad parts we have God being willing to bargain with Abraham.
And while the OT was heavily influenced by Babylonian culture, the NT was heavily influenced by Greek and Roman culture. Heroes descended from god is foreign to Judaism, but very common in Greek myth.
To flesh it out more, the point was to show that no human being could “toe the line.” God kills everyone. I will give you comfort if you obey my enormous amount of laws. You didn’t obey. Kill. Kill. Kill. Try again. You didn’t obey. Kill, kill, kill.
But the New Testament (according to my Sunday School) gave people the revelation that humans were sinful and descendant from sin. We are incapable of following the law and being good. But God loves us so much that he sent his own son as a sacrifice for all of our sins: past, present, and future, and that if we accept that sacrifice, then we can be with God despite not “toeing the line.”
So it’s sort of similar to military basic training. Learn through torment. In the OT we learn that it is simply impossible to please God and earn his favor by simply following the law and being good. We are incapable of being good. But Jesus completes the picture and shows us the way.
Not being Christian, I’m curious: did anyone ask about, say, Enoch, or Elijah? (Or, at that, Elisha?) They seem to have met, line-toeingly, with God’s approval.
Not all violations of the law are punishable by death, and certainly even fewer are in practice. Even those that were were punishable by a secular death penalty, something Christianity didn’t exactly do away with. But my point was that there is no eternal death penalty. I don’t know where you get torment from, but any conceivable torment is trivial compared to hell. There is also no sense of it being impossible to be good - that is a Christian invention that comes from a misreading of Genesis.
In Judaism no one but Jews have to follow the laws, since we have special responsibilities. In Christianity everyone is condemned by default unless they kiss the ass of a failed messiah, one who did not fulfill the Messianic prophecies - but did fulfill a supposed prophecy which comes from a misreading of the text.
The basic Christian God is like an abusive spouse - say you love me and I won’t beat you.
Now I know liberal Christians have backed away from this malarkey, and good for them. But it means that Christianity isn’t really necessary, and of course they know you can’t demonstrate that it is even true. So why you’d send missionaries out in this context is beyond me.
I would agree that Christianity isn’t the same thing as the NT, of course.
Naturally, Christianity has a somewhat different “flavour” from Judaism as they both evolved. However, in basic matters of ethics and morality, the “message” as found in the NT is in many ways pretty similar to that found in the writings of Rabbis roughly contemporaneous with the writing of the NT - for example, the Rabbi Hillel. Both focus on the Golden Rule.
My guess is that both modern Judaism and Christianity came out of the rabbinical reforms to Judaism happening at around that time.
“Humanistic” is of course my commentary. What it is, in religious theory, is simply the ‘oral Torah’ - that is, the writing-down of the oral tradition that was handed down at the same time as the written one.
From a purely secular perspective, it is quite remarkable how often the “oral Torah” as recorded in the Talmud in effect dampens down the iron age harshness of the code found in the (ancient) written Torah.
Take the death penalty as an example. In some cases, the written Torah prescribes the death penalty for offences. The Talmud doesn’t say this is wrong - no, not at all. It’s written in the Torah and so it must perforce be correct.
Rather, the Talmud simply prescribes so many conditions for the death penalty to be imposed, that the death penalty can, in effect, never be imposed because in real life the conditions can never be met.
Now, I know that religious Jews are of the view that this is simply the way the laws were always intended to operate from the beginning, and it is in no way a “humanistic” gloss. From a purely secular perspective, it appears more likely that rabbis, working with a (dare I say it?) more complex and ‘humanistic’ morality, were in effect changing the law through the process of ‘explaining’ it, using the ‘polite fiction’ of an ‘ancient oral tradition’ as their source of legitimacy.
I do not say that the Rabbis involved did not themselves believe in this oral tradition - hence ‘polite fiction’ in scare-quotes. Only that, over a long, long period of time, the views of the Rabbis themselves tended to creep in; and in every case, they impose what to a secular eye looks like a more ‘humanistic’ morality than that found in the OT without rabbinical commentary.
IANA Bible scholar, but off the top of my head, the time span between Daniel and 1 Thessalonians is maybe a little over 200 years.
And to answer the OP: because sometime in that time span, God stopped drinking.
And what is your proof that there was some prior, pre-Talmudic interpretation of the Torah that is more ready to execute? I don’t believe a single judicial execution was recorded in the historic books of the Bible. There were executions by monarchial fiat, but that’s different. You’re just guessing that the Talmudic rabbis are reflecting a “more complex, humanistic” (i.e., more in tune with the moral sensibilities of modern, irreligious folk) when in fact you have no real reason to believe that it wasn’t that way all along.