Ezra: Racist D-Baggery

Ezra is kind of a weird book. It starts out in third person, then in the middle starts being told in first person as though it were the personal account of this Ezra person, and then it switches back to third person. There’s no reason given for the transitions at all. So… yeah.

Anyway, the book starts off in the first year of the reign of King Cyrus of Persia (which by this point was in command of Babylon, where the captive Israelites had been carted off to after Judah fell to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar). This is about 70 years after the fall of Judah, and as supposedly prophesied by Jeremiah the Israelites are about to be released from captivity.

So the Book of Ezra starts out with Cyrus’ declaration that the Jews are to be released and allowed to return to their homeland to rebuild the temple of God. This apparently was part of his overall policy of allowing all the Babylonian captives to return to their homes and return their religious icons that Babylon had been in the habit of looting, but that policy gets no mention of the Bible. It talks only of the Jewish people, as if they and their god were specially singled out. It also claims that in his proclamation Cyrus credits Yahweh for giving him his kingdom and calling on him to rebuild the temple. Thing is, there’s this thing called the Cyrus Cylinder which is an original declaration by Cyrus, and it explicitly credits the Persian god Marduk for his victories and for the order to restore all the other gods to their various homes. So the Bible may have a… creative interpretation of the proclamation.

There’s also a funny bit where the book gives an inventory of the vessels being returned to the Jewish people from the original temple.

“Ezr 1:8 Cyrus king of Persia brought these out in the charge of Mithredath the treasurer, wo counted them out to Sheshbazzar the prince of Judah. 9 And this was the number of them: 30 basins of gold, 1,000 basins of silver, 29 censers, 10 30 bowls of gold, 410 bowls of silver, and 1,000 other vessels; 11 all the vessels of gold and of silver were 5,400. All these did Sheshbazzar bring up, when the exiles were brought from Babylonia to Jerusalem.”

See the problem? Hint: the Bible is bad at math. 30+1000+29+30+410+1000 = 2,499. Not 5,400.

All of Chapter 2 is spent on listing everybody who returned (I think by town), and they’re all listed as “the sons of X…” followed by a number. So presumably this dull recitation doesn’t include any of the women, as usual.

Anyway, the exiles return to Judah and start rebuilding their temple. They get as far as building an altar for sacrifices and laying the foundations of the temple before they are approached by some of the people who’d been living in the area since the Jews were spirited away. As you may recall, after conquering Israel and Judah, the kings of Babylon sent some Israelites back to teach the people who were living there in the Israelites’ place how to follow God’s laws in the hopes that it would make life easier in that land. Anyway, these people approach the newly returned Jews and say “Hey, we’ve been worshipping your god here while you were away, and we’d like to help you build his temple.” And the Jewish people told them to fuck off.

After that, the locals start interfering with the building, intimidating laborers and bribing officials to slow down construction. Eventually Cyrus is succeeded by other kings, and the folks who are interfering with the construction write a letter to the new king Ataxerxes complaining that the Jews plan to rebel once they finish rebuilding Jerusalem’s walls. So Ataxerxes issues orders to stop the construction, and authorizes the governors in Judah to use force if necessary to prevent it.

This stops construction for a bit, until Ataxerxes is eventually succeeded by Darius. The under the urging of a pair of so-called prophets named Haggai and Zechariah, the Jews just start building again. When the new governor asks who authorized it, they say that king Cyrus had commanded them to rebuild. This is technically true, it just ignores the fact that king Ataxerxes had countermanded the order. But the governor writes to king Darius, whose scribes find Cyrus original proclamation, and so Darius orders the governor to allow the construction to continue. So the temple gets finished, and is dedicated with the usual bloodlettings and burnt sacrifices.

At this point, seven chapters into the ten-chapter Book of Ezra, we finally get introduced to Ezra. He’s this scribe who’s studied the law of Moses, who was also apparently somewhat in favor with king Ataxerxes (since this portion of the story explicitly takes place after the completion of the temple during the reign of Darius, this can’t be the same Ataxerxes who ordered the construction to stop before Darius was king. The Bible, in its usual clarity of writing, makes no effort to distinguish between the two). Ezra is also apparently a direct descendant of Moses’ brother Aaron, and therefore eligible for priesthood.

Anyway, for some reason Ataxerxes sends Ezra to Jerusalem to teach the people God’s laws, even going so far as to authorize him to appoint judges to enforce those laws (which, frankly, seems like a really weird thing to do. Most kings send governors to enforce their own laws, not the laws of some foreign god). The Chapter starts out speaking of Ezra in third person, then provides a supposed transcript of the letter in which Ataxerxes orders him to Jerusalem, and then immediately after the letter the chapter finishes out with talking in first person as though Ezra himself were writing.

Another fucking geneology of people who went with him.

So anyway, Ezra makes the journey safely, and presents all the wealth and offerings and shit the king had sent with him to the priests at the temple. And afterwards…

“9:1 After these things had been done, the officials approached me and said, ‘The people of Israel and the priests and the Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands with their abominations, from the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites the Jebusites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites. 2 For they have taken some of their daughters to be wives for themselves and for their sons, so that the holy race has mixed itself with the people of the lands. And in this faithlessness the hand of the officials and chief men has been foremost.’ 3 As soon as I heard this, I tore my garment and my cloak and pulled fair from my head and bears and sat appalled. 4 Then all who trembled at the words of the God of Israel, because of the faithlessness of the returned exiles, gathered around me while I sat appalled until the evening sacrifice.”

Racist much?

The book goes on to cover the lengthy and histrionic prayer Ezra sends up to god recounting his deep shame for how disgracefully his people have behaved and how thoroughly they deserve to be punished for their evil deeds in marrying whom they chose.

And then, suddenly, we’re back into third person for the final chapter. And in this chapter, Ezra and the priests basically round up all the Jewish men who had married outside their race, and force them to divorce their wives and disown any children they had by them. Because Ezra and the priests were fuckers. Religiously motivated racist douchebaggery is still racist douchebaggery.

And that brings us to the end of Ezra. There’s really no overt participation in the story by any god, just people acting like tools on the basis of their past pronouncements. Next up is the Book of Nehemiah, who I’m sure we’ll find is just a swell guy. Can’t wait!

Genesis: Making Stuff (Up)

Worked over 10 hours yesterday. Yes, it was a Sunday. No mobs showed up to stone me to death as a result. But if anyone would like to form a mob to stone my bosses for making it necessary, I’m pretty sure arrangements can be made.

Making an offer on a house today. Busy times, but I managed to start my little project anyway. So without further ado, let’s jump in, shall we?

“1:1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3 And God said ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

And with that, we’re off to the races. We have light without source, darkness without any objects to cast shadows, and day and night without any sun. But whatever, it’s pretty abstract shit. But basically, it’s the creation story we’re mostly familiar with if we grew up in the West. The days continue and we get the following timeline:

Day 2: God separates the “waters above” from the “waters below” with an expanse that he calls Heaven (so we have two layers of water separated by Heaven – a Heaven sandwich!).

Day 3: God gathers the waters below into one place, exposing dry land. Then he puts plants all over it.

Day 4: God puts up the sun and moon, and fills heaven with stars.

Day 5: Fish and birds

Day 6: Land animals and humans (when the hell did insects get made? Some fly like birds, some crawl like land animals).
Day 7: Rest.

At the end of it the Bible’s described a kind of layer cake of a world. At the bottom is the earth and some water. Above that is Heaven (kind of implied that Heaven = everything above the surface of the earth), and Heaven contains the Sun, moon, and stars… so basically the atmosphere and all of visible space (Odd that Heaven can be paradise while simultaneously being made of 99.99999999% environments that will kill you pretty much instantly – and possibly no water). Although to this point, there isn’t actually any claim of a Heavenly paradise, so I guess I’m getting ahead of myself. Beyond Heaven (beyond the edge of the observable universe?) is another layer of water.

I want to call particular attention to Day 3, when God’s making the plants. It reads like this:

“1:11 And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind on the earth.” And it was so. 12 The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.”

Why’s that important? Let’s proceed to Chapter 2 and find out.

“2:5 When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up – for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, 6 and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground – 7 then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”

That’s a contradiction! Biblical perfection takes a flying leap out the window before we’re even ten verses into the second chapter. I mean, aside from the fact that the creation myth doesn’t line up with observed facts about the real world. If all you knew about the world was what you read in this book, even then it should be glaringly obvious that the writers didn’t have the first clue what they were talking about. Chapter 1 says plants were made on day 3 and humans on day 6, chapter two says humans were made first.

And don’t give me any crap about them saying the same thing because God just put seeds in the ground on Day 3, but they didn’t sprout until after man was made. The Day 3 description explicitly says the plants were brought forth and producing seeds of their own before the end of the day. These verses explicitly contradict each other, and saying otherwise is to pretend that they say something other than what they say.

Plus there’s the kind of asinine implication that humans working the ground is necessary for plants to grow in the first place. But whatever – I never expected science to be a strong suit in this book.

Guess that’s enough for today! Biblical literalism turns out to be logically impossible (Law of Non-contradiction), and Biblical perfection a myth. Next up will be the Fall.

Introduction – Why I’m Reading the Bible

On more than one occasion I’ve heard Christians tell atheists that they should read the Bible and it will lead them to god. I’ve also heard atheists say that the surest way to become an atheist is to read the Bible. So we have two sides of the debate saying mutually contradictory things about the Bible. Color me shocked.

So, let’s put it to the test, shall we? The purpose of this blog, quite simply, is to document my attempt to read the Bible, and give my impressions of what I’m reading as I go along.

Now I’ll say right up front that this is not a fair test. I’m already an atheist, and therefore already predisposed to think it’s all a load of crap. But I suppose there’s some possibility that reading the Bible will change that. I guess we’ll find out.

This first post is just to introduce myself, and set up the premise of the blog. I was raised by a Southern Baptist family, though most of my young life I went to non-denominational churches on military bases. Most of my understanding of the Bible came from Sunday school, which as we’re going to see is a pretty damn sanitized. Sometime around my 12^th birthday, my grandmother gave me a copy of the Bible as a birthday present. Dutifully, I tried to read it, and didn’t make it past Genesis. The thing’s a snore, to be honest, and just couldn’t compete with The Lord of the Rings or pretty much anything written by Heinlein (or most fiction written by reasonably creative high school students). The Bible went back in its box, displayed on my bookshelf amidst stuff I actually did read so Grandma could see it there when she visited.

A couple years ago I tried again. By this point I had been pretty comfortably atheist for years, a grown man with a college degree and a wife and two kids. This time, I made it as far as the Psalms before petering out. The reasons I couldn’t sustain this second attempt were slightly different from the first – I had no real outlet to express my frustration and disgust with the text. Being older and more experienced, and not at all predisposed to see everything in the Bible as good just because it was in the Bible, I was actually kind of horror-stricken to realize the stuff I was reading was stuff that many people actually believe was true and good. And since I don’t like burdening my friends and family with my own little rants (and most of them wouldn’t have been sympathetic anyway – Southern Baptist family, majority Christian society, etc., etc.), I just lost momentum under the weight of just how depressing a read it was. Aside from the fact that the quality of the storytelling hadn’t improved any with age.

But maybe blogging will help. Maybe this will give me just the outlet I need to keep up flagging spirits. So… here we go with attempt number three. I’ll be reading from the English Standard Version for a couple simple reasons: 1) I’m in the middle of moving, so the Bible my grandmother gave me is in a box in a storage facility, and 2) I could download it for free from Amazon onto the Kindle app for my phone.

Next post will start In the Beginning: Genesis.