Perhaps you or someone else can give me a good explanation as to why God just seems like an evil prick to me.
God destroys the entire Earth with a flood, including children, the mentally retarded, etc. The only people he saves are one family, whose “righteous” patriarch gets drunk right after disemb-ark-ing.
Moses tells his men to kill all the Midianite women who are not virgins, but to keep the virgins for themselves. God does not object.
God orders Joshua and his men to kill everyone in the promised land, including women, children, animals, etc. He does so, exterminating them “without mercy, as the LORD had commanded.” (somewhere in Jos. 11)
God tempts David to take a census of Israel. When David does this, God punishes him by killing 70,000 people, even though David himself admits that he alone was to blame.
King Ahaziah, who is described as faithful and righteous, is stricken with leprosy for most of his life.
Despite Josiah’s reforms, God causes the fall of the Southern Kingdom, because of the evil committed in the reign of Josiah’s grandfather.
Now I imagine most intelligent people here don’t believe that these things happened exactly as described. But I’m not here to debate whether the “real God” is good, but whether the character of God in the OT is good. So, any explanations for these passages?
Opus, I’ll try to answer your question to the best of my ability. I make no claims to be a Bible scholar; I’ve just read it a lot and find that it works in my life.
Many of the things that you mentioned I have a tendancy to read as either: 1) the mythology of a desert people or 2) the justification of political actions. The saying “History is written by the victor” seems appropriate here. It’s a lot easier to attribute your actions to the command of a god in an age when the gods were feared, than to take on the onus of responsibility yourself. Do I think that the Bible is God’s spoken word in written form, inerrant and without flaw? No. Do I think that God presents Himself to be discovered in that word after sifting and searching? Yes.
I wish I could give a better answer than that. I’m still learning, still in that process of sifting and trying to recognize the dross from the truly valuable. It’s a lifelong process. I know it works for me though; I know the relationship I have with Him is true, it’s real in a way that I can’t measure.
I think what Baedlin said is really good:
Hope this helps. Again, I’m no Bible scholar - this is just my take on things.
The short answer for most of these is that while what you read in the OT tells you about the ultimate end of the societies being punished, it gives you little understanding about the scope of what they did to deserve that punishment. However, even without details, those societies come out looking pretty bad. In cases like these, G-d’s decision to wipe out these societies is a form of surgery, to remove the cancer of immorality from the still morally healthy portion of humanity. The decision is never made hastily, is never made without warning the sinful society to change their ways, never made without justification, and is never one that G-d makes flippantly.
For example, the society wiped out by the flood is described with (emphasis mine):
Genesis 6:5 - “The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.”
That’s not just “bad,” that sounds downright Hitler-esque. Even so, this society continued to exist for hundreds of years until G-d decided it had gone far enough. And even then, when he made the decision to destroy them, he still gave them another 120 years to clean up their act. They still didn’t. In such a society, someone with decency, even if he is a drunkard (and that’s being a bit harsh on ol’ Noah…heck, he just spent a year cooped indoors, tending to animals day and night. Once a job like that was over, wouldn’t you want to knock back a few cold ones?), is the best option for continuing humanity.
By the same token, the Canaanite socities that the Israelites were told to wipe out in Joshua’s time did some pretty awful things. Check out Leviticus 18. it describes all sorts of incest, homosexuality, bestiality and human sacrifice and caps it off by saying (verse 24): “because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled.”
Now, you seem to specifically be targeting the fact that this extermination included those who it seems did not deserve it. However, when a society is so corrupt, any remnant of that society brings back memories of what it used to be like, and tempts people to try to recapture and imitate it. This is what the Israelites are warned against in Deuteronomy 7: 2-4 - “Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods, and the LORD’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you.” In other words, showing mercy to folks like this will eventually lead to their corrupting you.
However, as in the flood-society situation, G-d did not punish them until their sins had grown out of hand. When he promised the land to Abraham, he said: (Genesis 15:16) - “In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.” He would not punish the nation if it does not deserve it.
As to David’s census, this was also clearly a punishment for the society’s sins, as indicated in the introductory verse, II Samuel 24:1 - “Again the anger of the LORD burned against Israel, and he incited David against them.” I’ll try to look up tonight what G-d was angry about, but G-d, as far as I’ve been able to tell, does not get angry for no reason.
That addresses the issues of items # 1, 3 and 4. Item # 6 on your list is similar…the Israelite kingdoms had been sinful over a span of centuries, despite repeated warnings from prophets. However, you ask why Josiah’s reforms could not remove the punishment the nation was condemned to suffer. The answer, quite simply, is that what Manasseh did to the society was, like situations # 1 and 3, a cancer that came to pervade Israelite society. You don’t seem to make much of the factthat Josiah’s reforms bought his generation a stay of punishment. Check out I Chronicles 34:27-28 - “Because your heart was responsive and you humbled yourself before God when you heard what he spoke against this place and its people, and because you humbled yourself before me and tore your robes and wept in my presence, I have heard you, declares the LORD. Now I will gather you to your fathers, and you will be buried in peace. Your eyes will not see all the disaster I am going to bring on this place and on those who live here.’” So they took her answer back to the king." G-d did not bring the actual punishment itself on those who personally deserved better.
Now, the other two instances you mention are of a different nature.
2, the Midianites. The Midianites specifically sent their women to tempt the Jews into sin. Thus, the women - those who did not remain virginal, who involved themselves in that campaign, were to be killed like the males were. The virginal women werethose who were clearly innocent of participation in that campaign, so were therefore to be spared.
5, King Ahazia. I’m a bit uncertain if you’ve got the right guy. In II Kings 8:26-27, it says, “Ahaziah was twenty-two years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem one year. His mother’s name was Athaliah, a granddaughter of Omri king of Israel. He walked in the ways of the house of Ahab and did evil in the eyes of the LORD, as the house of Ahab had done, for he was related by marriage to Ahab’s family.”
Could you give me a better reference on that issue?
Joshua 10, actually. It’s one of my all-time favorite passages:
“40. So Joshua subdued the whole region, including the hill country, the Negev, the western foothills and the mountain slopes, together with all their kings. He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the LORD, the God of Israel, had commanded.”
– Joshua 10:40, NIV translation
Yep, that’s your merciful, loving God for ya, all right.
Okay, I have a couple of problems with this. Firstly, I have trouble believing that children, infants, and animals can be evil. Secondly, I don’t believe that everyone on Earth was evil just because the Bible says so. Look around. Never in any society, at any time, has every single person been completely evil 100% of the time, as the Bible states. Clearly, the authors of the flood story had the story first, and made up a justification for it later. (As further evidence of this, note that another verse states that the reason for the flood was the “watchers” copulating with mortal women, producing a race of giants known as the Nephilim.)
Again, did the children and animals do some pretty bad things? Your argument that the children carry some “taint” of evil on them is pathetic. Should we have killed all Germans children in WWII? Was the U.S. right to give cholera-infested blankets to Native Americans, to ensure that their children wouldn’t live to attack the U.S. again? Or is this peculiar type of morality something that only God can do?
And, once again, I don’t believe that all these societies were “evil” just because their enemy said so. There was tons of American propaganda showing how evil the Japanese were in WWII. The Bible is just more war propaganda. Don’t you think that the Canaanites and the Jebusites had all kinds of horrible stories about the Israelites?
Finally, what about the tribes acknowledged to be good, such as the people of Laish, a “peaceful and unsuspecting people,” whom the Israelites “attacked with the sword and burned down their city.” (Jg. 18:27)
As best as I can tell, the Bible does not give a reason for God’s anger, but it might be in there somewhere. May I ask what you make of 2 Sam. 24:17:
When David saw the angel who was striking down the people, he said to the LORD, “I am the one who has sinned and done wrong. These are but sheep. What have they done? Let your hand fall upon me and my family.”
No, I don’t make much of God’s “stay of execution.” This is because the Bible says that repentance of a nation will prevent its downfall:
If at any time I [Yahweh] announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. (Jer. 18:7-8)
Now, it sure seems to me like Judah relented based upon the description given in 2 Kg. 23. If you wish to argue that corruption and evil still pervaded Judean society after king Josiah, I would appreciate textual evidence, of which I currently see none.
So seducing a man warrants the death penalty? What about all the old women and widows who just happened to be non-virgins but didn’t try to tempt the Israelites into sin?
I notice you also don’t mention what happened to the virgin women. They were not “spared.” They were turned into sex toys for the horny soldiers:
“Save for yourselves every girl who has not slept with a man.” (Num. 31:18)
On the last one, yeah, I had the wrong guy. I was going from memory without my Bible in front of me. I meant king Azariah, not Ahazia. He is in 2 Kg. 15:1-7:
He did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, just as his father Amaziah had done. (15:3)…The LORD afflicted the king with leprosy until the day he died, and he lived in a separete house. (15:5)
I have tons more examples of Yahweh’s incredible cruelty.
But here’s what I really think happened. No society is ever able to imagine a God greater than themselves. The ancient Israelites were a cruel, petty, superstitious, territorial, constantly warring society, who depicted a very similar God.
Whenever they won a battle, their god Yahweh got the credit (and probably even ordered them to attack). Whenever they lost, it was because Yahweh was trying to teach them a lesson. If someone got sick, it was because he did something wrong. If the Edomites rebelled, it was because king Joram married Ahab’s daughter, not because of any political or economic reasons.
I can pretty much imagine a whole bunch of Israelite scribes and prophets sitting around after a big plague that killed thousands of people asking themselves “I wonder what we did wrong to deserve all those deaths? Hmm. I know! A few months ago David held a census! That must be why! God’s punishing us for taking a census. We don’t know why, but that must be the case. What else could it be?” These are perfectly logical deductions if you believe that everything is ordained by God and you have no conception of disease.
I also think that many of the stories in the OT are political rhetoric. The entire Deuteronomistic history (Dt. through 2nd Kings) was written during the reign of king Josiah by a Shiloh priest, or possibly an entire school of them. Its explicit purpose was to glorify Josiah. The author(s) interpreted history to fit his/their theological purposes. The reason that the Northern Kingdom fell is because they were not loyal to God, had sacrificed in the high places, and had failed to observe the covenant. But with the “discovery” of the Book of Law, and Josiah’s smashing of the high places, the eternal Davidic covenant would ensure that the Southern Kingdom would never fall. But, when it did, the author had to revise his history to try to salvage it. He did this by emphasizing the older, conditional Mosaic covenant as the reason for the fall of the kingdom, and by ascribing blame to the fall of the kingdom to Manasseh, thus still keeping Josiah blameless.
Their are tons of other stories like this in the OT which probably never happened, and certainly didn’t happen as told.
So what we’re left with is two choices:
Ignore all modern scholarship, and maintain that everything in the Bible happened exactly as reported.
Accept scholarship and admit that much of the Bible is theology and political polemic, not history.
Choice 1 leaves us with the problem of an evil God, since we’d be forced to believe that God specifically ordered the Israelites to “slaughter mercilessly” millions of people and animals.
Choice 2 is slightly better in terms of a theodicy, but leaves us with the problem of inspiration. If God didn’t do all the evil things attributed to him in the OT, did he do the good things? If we admit that the Israelites saw the hand of God in a lot of places where it really wasn’t, then maybe God did anything in the OT. Perhaps the Bible is simply the history of a primitive people, like the Moabite stone (http://www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/1995/3/3claim95.html) and its stories are of equal veracity.
As everyone here can pretty much figure out, I choose 2. And I seriously worry about everyone who chooses 1. I mean, would we believe a diary by William Henry Harrison in which he tells us that God told him to destroy the Indians? Or would we think that Harrison simply believed that God had told him that, even though he really didn’t? Studies have shown that people are notoriously unreliable in determining whether they’re actually hearing God or just their own conscious. And every culture believes that God is on their side and has communicated with them, but not others. Why believe the Israelite version of history?
The second problem with choosing 1 is that we must then explain away hideous acts of violence which we would not attempt to justify if they appeared anywhere but the Bible. This sort of ad hoc theodicy (killing children is okay because they’re still tainted with evil; there must be a reason for God’s anger, even if the Bible doesn’t give it; etc.) doesn’t appeal to me, and hopefully doesn’t appeal to most rational people.
P.S. to tracer. We’re both right. Check out Jos. 11:20. Actually, God orders the Israelites to kill people “without mercy” at least a dozen times in the OT.
P.P.S. Here are some on-line articles about stories in the OT which I believe relate in some way to this issue:
If God does exist, and lets just say he’s the god from the OT, how can we judge Him. We live down here on Earth. We don’t have any supernatural powers, we can create a universe, we can’t do any of the cool stuff such as call down massive swarms of locusts on people that don’t agree with us. Now, keeping that in mind, how can we make a judgement on a being that can. If God is so great as to have created everything in the universe, and to have implimented the laws of physics, and to be able to remember is all, well, his brain must be mighty big. He can do anythingHe wants regardless of what we say. Our own conception of “right” and “wrong” is of no import when compared to what God says. If God says that babies are tainted by their parents sins, then dangit, they’re tainted! You can’t say the God of the OT is evil because we judge him with our standards, not His. And since we need to believe that He exists to make determinations about the OT then whatever action He chooses to take is the right one, no questons asked, no human morality, just divine law.
Yea, but would they have that Godly Goodness™ that come from the divine swarms? I mean really, I bet the Big Guy put little smiley faces on em and stuff like “Feel My Wrath” on the sides of the little buggers.
Don’t you think you’re being harsh? I mean, lots of those people he killed were, you know, homosexuals!
The big question here is, why does God settle problems by killing everyone? I remember a detective novel in which the detective said that the moment you draw your gun, you’ve admitted failure. It seems to me that the OT God fails all the time. Think of it this way: instead of instilling in the Israelites the idea that it’s good to hack babies apart with swords- knowing that the repercussions of that Nazi-esque evil will ring through the centuries with more and more genocides inspired by the OT- why not simply render all the Midianites and Amalekites sterile, and let all the sinful adults die off from old age without having to kill any innocent children?
I can solve the Schrodinger equation. Can you? If not, does that mean I have carte blanche to rape you?
I’ll never understand this “might makes right” mindset of the fundamentalists.
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But how do you know whether or not it’s really God making the statements?
Please prove to me that Jim Jones wasn’t God. I’m quite serious. And bear in mind that I will use your foregoing argument about the OT god to prove you wrong.
**
I imagine Opus can back me on this better than I can, but I believe that the OT “god” generally fails to follow its own rules. You know, like “thou shalt not kill.” Or “love thy neighbor.”
Do you believe that Alex from “A Clockwork Orange” was depicted as an evil character? Do you believe he really existed?
You could also interpret the OT as an original source document outlining the history of the Jewish people. It doesn’t reflect modern historical methods. But then again it was written in days both pre-scientific and pre-journalistic.
Or you could simply use it to get a sense of how some people living 2000+ years ago used to think.
Or you could interpret the Bible as a set of stories detailing different understandings of the Supreme Deity.
Or you could read the OT as reflecting both a very old oral tradition as well as one that fulfills some very familiar narrative requirements (i.e. sex, violence and gore).
As far as the “this is just how people from a violent time thought” argument: I wouldn’t be too keen on trying to live by the morality espoused in the Iliad either. The difference is that you never hear people talking about how what this country needs is to get back to the good, Homeric values that made it great.
You could also look at it with a few more grains of salt. I am not sure if this OP was looking for theological answers only, because I have a few points to make that are not strictly theological.
The God of the OT was terminally upset. Apparently he had so much reason to be angry that he frequently lost his cool and punished everyone, annihilating peoples and cultures and ordering his followers to rejoice after massive devastation.
The reason for this is very simple: God’s origins are those of a god of war. Violence was a good and healthy thing that led to victory, which was an even better thing. Being endowed with the characteristics of a god of war, he was also very cruel and short on patience, which is why he did things like eliminating the Earth’s entire population minus the passengers of one ark.
None of these things make sense because there is little sense to be made out of them. Over thousands of years we have softened God, merged him countless times with other divinities, and adapted him to suit our cultures. Jehovah has suffered countless schisms not just in one faith, but in several (from Judaism, to Christianity, to Islam, to Ba’hai, etc.). In a sense, each time a schism occurs it is because humans are adjusting their beliefs to better suit their particular needs.
You should not ask why God is so cruel; rather you should ask what the factors were that caused humans to represent him in such a manner in the OT.
One thing you have to understand about the Bible (and particularly the Old Testament) is that it is written for people of all ages, at all times, to meet God where they are in their lives in its pages, reading, telling, singing its words. People change. Cultures change. Attitudes change. To place upon the Old Testament our own attitudes without reservation is to be intolerant as they (the people of that time) are. We must read with an understanding that we cannot expect them to have.
One way to answer your question is to consider whether the people who were writing those words, living in Israel at the time, thought that God was good. Of course, the words that benefit God get included in the Bible, but nevertheless the sheer poetry of the psalms, the raptures of the way they sing His praises, the way the prophets call His people back to His justice with a constant call to His goodness and they way that the Jews respond to that call (they would not if they did not believe in that goodness, in spite of everything that had happened to them) all argue that indeed, they did believe that the God they lived with was a good God indeed. They clung to that God when all around them took on the gods of their conquerors (a common practice of the time) and worshiped any god who was expedient.
The Old Testament is knit together with story and myth, and the struggle of good versus evil. Often the story is not about history, but what the people saw going on around them and inside them every day. In that struggle, good must conquer evil, and in that battle evil should be destroyed, not given mercy; evil given mercy simply turns on you and takes out your throat later on. God in this dimension is not being a prick; he is destroying the things that would destroy us. Often, history is made into myth; we have built the kingdom by making it within our land and within ourselves. Campbell had it right here.
God’s dealings with real people — Samaritans (the outcast), an adulteress, tax collecters, oppressors, Roman centurians, Pharisees — had to wait for God to become man, and actually deal with them face to face. Here the stories have the ring of truth: Jesus cries, shouts his anger, writes in the ground pretending not to hear, deals with recalcitrant disciples.
Throughout all of this, the Old Testament and the New, one thing shines out — God works through ordinary people. Whether God is a prick or not, the kings, apostles, priests, elders, and heros of the Bible are uniformly pricks. David sends a man to the front lines to be killed because he wants his wife. Elijah curses a bunch of little boys because they tease him for being bald (they are ripped apart by she bears). Solomon is such a whiner that a book in the Bible is dedicated to his whines (Ecclesiastes). Peter, who is given the keys to the kingdom, betrays Jesus three times after being warned he was going to do so. Paul is a real pill — a woman hater, intolerant to his very core. All of these are ordinary people, with true flaws that the Bible shows in the harsh light that shines from Heaven.
The great lesson here is that if God can work great wonders through these, he can work them through us. If you want to take a lesson from the Old Testament, this is it. Not one of the characters in the OT is particularly admirable (unlike the Koran, for example). God may look like a prick because he deals with pricks, because pricks wrote the Bible, and because pricks are reading it. And that, of course, is really Good News — it means that there is hope for all the pricks out there. Perhaps even for me.
In the old days, shortly after the tohu and bohu got slightly less tohish and bohish, God wasn’t the One God, he was simply one of many around at the time. (“God” that created the earth and all in Genesis is “Elohim”, a plural word.) God the singular was pretty small-fry at the beginning; he just looked over a fairly small closed valley with a single entrance to the east, and he couldn’t quite be everywhere at once within it. It was a pleasant little place with happy animals, and two people in it that were also quite happy, ignorant, and properly worshipful. He was happy. Life was easy.
Then one day, a rival small-timer, the serpent, snuck in and stirred things up. He got the people to use their own initiative and disobey their kennel keeper, and the level of management he was in (Elohim again, you see) had a spasm of anxiety that mid-level management typically goes through–not very sensible but very very compelling to them. They had the equivalent of Powerpoint slides and everything. What they were concerned about was, now that Adam and Eve could think and make moral judgments, they might next chow down on the food that would add immortality to that mix, and “become as we are”–these guys were deathly worried for their jobs. Like I said, pure mid-level management stuff. So of course, they get laid off, and the security guards at the entrance aren’t going to let them back in.
Time passes. God is of course rebuffed for screwing up a project, gets ribbed for it at lunches, probably loses a bonus and gets snubbed at a company outing. He gets bitter, and really throws himself into the job, starts climbing up the ladder. He climbs it mean, but undeniably effectively. The various baals and molochs that were his direct reports are now reporting to him, being routinely humiliated, treated them cruelly, and so on. He goes through a meteoric rise to the head of the company. He’s rich, he’s powerful, he doesn’t have to kiss ass to any other power anymore, and he starts rewriting company history.
In short, he goes drunk on power. He fucks with everyone in his zone of influence, arbitrarily rewarding some and just beating the crap out of others. This is very entertaining to him for awhile.
Then after awhile, it’s getting boring. He’s been drunk on power a good long time, and now the drunken stupor is fading into a more maudlin mood. He starts getting weepy and sentimental remembering when times were simpler, the simple joys of shepherding his two favorite stupid animals, and bawls into his next beer before spilling it. Shortly after this, he’s embarassing himself in all sorts of ways, running around curing random lepers and blind men and cripples and doing gifts of charity to down-on-their luck fishermen and whores. Feelgood activities, basically–a really nice company picnic, for instance, without addressing that, for example, the sick day allocation is woefully inadequate for the realities of life. He’s mostly maudlin and weepy and embarassing himself throughout this phase, only the occasional flareup of mean drunk syndrome (gave some moneylenders some nasty welts with a horsehair whip). Weeped and cried and promised to be good, that he’s changed now, and fell into a muttering stupor, so out of it he hardly noticed when some roman pranksters nailed him up on a tree.
For the most part, he’s been hungover and frequently leaves the phone off the hook, doesn’t check his voice mail for centuries at a time, doesn’t respond to pages, that sort of thing.
Actually I always thought he doesn’t deserve all the flak he gets for that. IIRC he was still braver than the rest of the disciples, and his later works were also pretty good. I feel sorry for him because 2000 years later he still gets dissed for being afraid for a moment (not to mention the free will aspect)
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Are you asserting that God never changed? God, at many points throughout history, took on characteristics of Jewish conquerers, victims, and neighbors. When I get home, I can back this assertion with some facts.
Yeah, but for how many atoms? If you get it worked out for, say, water, would you mind sending it to me? After all, no one in molecular biology would appreciate it as much as my chemistry colleagues would.
As a general note, it seems that there are three different perspectives being taken in answering this question:
(1) God is, by definition, good, so anything He does is, therefore, good;
(2) You can’t judge the actions of 2000-5000 years ago by today’s standards [note that this option almost invariably leads into (1)];
(3) God committed genocide, encouraged rape, murdered at will, tore the tags off of matresses, etc. Is there any justification other than (1)?
I would furthermore like to say that giving (1) as the justification for God’s actions is both dissatisfying intellectually and dangerous in practice. Dissatisfying insofar as it doesn’t really answer anything and opens up a slew of other questions (Questions that Opus1 has been eloquently raising). Dangerous because it’s not much of a step to go from “God did it, so it’s good” to “God told me to do it, so it’s good.” Yikes.
I understand your slippery slope concern, Quixotic, but you understand that it gives us no valuable implication. I’m sure you’re a good person, too, and are no less good if I hurt someone and say, “Quix made me do it.”