Judges: This… is… Spar… err… Israel!

Welcome back to my Bible blog, and I hope today’s installment finds you well. We’re in the middle of the Book of Judges, where we’re about to start the story of Gideon. If you’re like me, you’ve heard the name and references to “Gideon’s trumpet,” but may not be familiar with the actual story. Well, today we find out what it’s all about.

True to form, after the days of Deborah and Barak, the Israelites went and backslid again to the worship of other gods. And once again, they get conquered by another people as a result. This time it’s the Midianites, which has to count as one of the greatest comebacks of all time since we were told in Numbers 31 that the Israelites had destroyed all of the Midianite men, women, and male children while keeping only the young virgin girls as slaves & concubines.

We’re told that Midian oppressed the Israelites for seven years, routinely raiding their crops and livestock so that the Israelites had to build caves to hide themselves and their stuff. And once again, after years of this crap, the Israelites cried out to Yahweh to save them. First thing God did was send a prophet to scold them for forgetting God.

Next, we see the angel of Yahweh paying a visit to Gideon. Here again we see an encounter with an angel that seems to switch back and forth between referring to the angel being the actor and God being the actor, which seems to imply that an angel is supposed to be interpreted as an avatar rather than an independent being.

At first they talk as if Gideon doesn’t realize the angel is [from] God. Then the angel starts talking as if he is God and giving Gideon orders to save Israel from the Midianites, but without actually introducing himself or anything. Gideon doesn’t seem to be much surprised by the abrupt change in tone, but asks for a sign that it really is God he’s talking to. So he goes into his house and makes some unleavened cakes (we know how God hates leaven) and prepares some goat meat, which he brings back out. The angel has Gideon put the food on a rock, then touches it with his staff. The food is abruptly consumed in a burst of fire and the angel vanishes. Gideon gets all excited that he was talking to God’s angel, then God (invisible now? Who the fuck knows? The narration is as crappy on details as ever) tells him not to fear because he isn’t going to die from talking to him. So Gideon builds him an altar.

That night God tells Gideon to take his father’s bull and a second bull (never specified who owns the second one) and use them to pull down the altar to Baal and cut down the Asherah (that’s a sacred tree dedicated to Asher, a Semitic mother goddess – data that’s not in the Bible and had to be looked up separately). Then he’s supposed to build God another altar, chop up the Ahserah for firewood, and use it to burn the second bull as an offering to God. So Gideon gathers up some of his servants, and does all that (at night so that nobody will see him).

In the morning the villagers discover the vandalism, and eventually figure out that Gideon had done it. So they march over to his place and demanded that Gideon’s father Joash hand Gideon over to be killed. Joash’s response is… well, pretty damn hypocritical, all things considered. See, he tells the people that they have no business killing Gideon on Baal’s behalf, since if Baal is really a god then he can kill Gideon himself. This from someone whose religious beliefs lay down a metric shitload of pronouncements demanding that Yahweh’s followers kill people on his behalf, rather than leaving him to do it himself.

Not that it’s in any way unusual for people to refuse to apply the same logic to their own religious beliefs that they do to others.

Of course Baal, hindered by a crippling case of nonexistence, totally fails to kill Gideon. So the people give him the nickname Jerubbaal, which means “Let Baal contend against him.”

So anyway, the next time the Midianites and Amelekites get together to pillage Israel, Gideon blows his trumpet to summon his clan to follow him. He also sends messengers to all of Manasseh, Asher, Zebulun, and Naphtali, and they send men to follow him as well. Why on earth they would have done so is never explained since, as he had mentioned to God when they first met, Gideon was the youngest son of a member of the weakest clan in the tribe of Manasseh. And his single greatest claim to fame was pissing off his neighbors to the point where they wanted to kill him.

But before he actually goes out to battle, Gideon wants to test God (and even though testing God is specifically forbidden earlier in the Bible, the spook seems happy enough to submit to tests now). What follows is perhaps one of the lamest miraculous signs of all time.

Gideon says to God that if he’s really going to help him defeat the Midianites as he has promised, then when he lays a bit of fleece out overnight God will make sure the dew gathers only on the fleece and not on the ground around it. And God does it. Then Gideon, not sufficiently impressed with God’s ability to wet a piece of sheepskin, asks that the next night when he lays the fleece out, God will make dew gather on the ground but keep the fleece dry. And God does this as well. For some reason, this assures Gideon that God has both the intent and the power to defeat the Midianite army (or perhaps merely reassures him that he’s not going crazy and hearing voices in his head).

So the next day he gathers up the army and heads out to meet the Midianites. But as they get close, God pipes up again. Seems he’s worried that Gideon has too many men, enough that if they win the battle they might get the idea that it was actually them who did the work instead of God. So Gideon tells his army that any of them who are scared can go home, and 22,000 men leave while 10,000 remain (seems odd to me that 2/3rds of an army of volunteers would be perfectly happy to turn around and go home because they’re scared, especially in these sorts of warrior societies where being thought a coward is quite shameful, but whatever). But God is still worried that the Israelites have enough men to think they won the battle through their own efforts, so he wants to whittle it down further.

You know… when someone is doing something for other people, and they go out of their way to make it completely clear that their real priority is making sure that they get the credit… we tend to think of that person as an egotistical douche.

Anyway, God instructs Gideon to take his people down to the water to be tested. The test is this: everyone who drinks by kneeling down by the water is to be sent home, and everyone who cups he water in their hand and laps it up like a dog gets to stay and participate in the battle.

Ummm… sure. Is the message here “The test can be as arbitrary and stupid as I want it to be, since it doesn’t really matter which particular group of assholes come to the fight; we’re gonna win anyway?”

In the end, this test narrows the men down to 300. Leonidas would be so proud.

So finally, Gideon’s contingent is whittled down enough to satisfy God. But now he tells Gideon that if he’s scared to go fight with so few, he should sneak down to the Midianite camp and listen to what they’re saying. So he does, and overhears two guards talking. One tells the other about his dream in which a barley cake rolls into camp and knocks a tent over. The second guard is like “Whoah! That totally means that God will make Gideon beat us like a cheap rug! We’re doomed!”

This is all Gideon needs to convince him. So he returns to his army of 300 and gives every man a trumpet, a jar, and a torch (which he appears to have spontaneously pulled out of his ass), divides them into three groups of a hundred men each, and sneaks back down to the Midianite camp in the middle of the night. Then on his signal, everyone blows their trumpets, smashes their jars, and waves their torches around like madmen. All of this cacophony in the middle of the night throws the Midianites into a panic (and here God steps in with his tremendous miracle of… encouraging the Midianites to panic). They start running away, and in the dark and confusion they’re even so freaked out as to start killing each other.

Now if this were Leonidas’ 300 Spartans, they’d have chased the Midianites down and beat the everloving snot out of them all by themselves. But this is not that 300. Gideon calls back all those dudes he’d sent home earlier and has them help pursue and kill those Midianites who hadn’t already killed each other in the panic.

Notice how the actual fighting is being done by thousands of dudes after all?

Notice also how this primitive society seems to be able to communicate and summon up large armies pretty much instantaneously? Or maybe those armies were never actually sent home. Or maybe this is all the fantasy of a poor storyteller.

Gideon pursues the remnant of the Midianite army across the Jordan, and for the first time we’re given numbers for that army. Supposedly at this point in the story there are 15,000 Midianites remaining, after 120,000 had died in the initial battle. That sounds really impressive: 300 men routed an army of 135,000? Surely God must have performed a miracle!

It’s impressive, that is, if you ignore the absolute absurdity of the idea that any civilization in that time and place could have fielded an army of that size. It’s exceedingly unlikely that the Midianites could have had a total population of that size. Seriously. Take a look at what archeology has to say about populations in that time and place – it’s not that hard to look up. The Midianite army described in the Bible never existed.

Which means this miraculous victory is horseshit.

But anyway, back to the story. On his way to chase down the fleeing Midianites, Gideon stops at the town of Succoth to ask for supplies for his men. The people of Succoth, fearing reprisals from the Midianites, refuse, and so Gideon tells them that when he gets back from killing the Midianites he will strip the flesh from the town leaders with thorns and briars. He gets the same response from the people of Pennuel, so he tells them that when he gets back he’ll tear down their tower.

Eventually Gideon catches up to the Midianite army and attacks, defeating them and capturing the two kings Zebah and Zalmunna. Then he heads back to Succoth and Pennuel to make good on his threats. He beats the town leaders of Succoth with briars and thorns, and tears down the tower at Pennuel. And also, for no stated reason, he goes ahead and kills every man in Pennuel for good measure. True heroes of God slaughter indiscriminately, after all.

After that, Gideon sets about questioning the captured kings.

“Judg 8:18 Then he said to Zebah and Zalmunnna, ‘Where are the men whom you killed at Tabor?’ They answered, ‘As you are, so were they. Every one of them resembled the son of a king.’ 19 And he said ‘They were my brothers, the sons of my mother. As Yahweh lives, if you had saved them alive, I would not kill you.’”

I bring this up because it’s an odd exchange in light of the fact that nowhere in the story up until now was there ever any mention of the Midianites having killed Gideon’s brothers. Or killing anyone at Tabor, really. But this exchange kind of raises the question of whether we’re actually reading a tale about God rescuing Israel from oppression, or just a shitty revenge saga with the real motivations hidden behind a bunch of god stuff.

But anyway, Gideon tells his firstborn son Jether to execute the kings for killing the brothers we’d never heard of until a few seconds ago, but Jether is scared and won’t do it. So the kings taunt Gideon into doing it himself.

Afterwards, the Israelites are so thrilled with Gideon that they want to give him and his sons hereditary rulership over them. But he turns them down, asking only that they give him all the gold earrings they’d looted. He takes those, along with the golden ornaments worn by the kings and their camels, and uses them to make an ephod (a sort of ceremonial apron thingy).

“Judg 8:29 And Gideon made an ephod of it and put it in his city, in Ophrah. And all Israel whored after it there, and it became a snare to Gideon and to his family.”

Given the way the phrases “whored after,” and “became a snare,” have been used up to this point, this suggests that all of Israel, and even Gideon himself, started to worship this article of clothing like it was a god. Which you have to admit is pretty stupid, especially if we’re supposed to believe that Gideon had been having in-person conversations with an actual god. Suddenly he can’t tell the difference between a real god and a fancy piece of gaudy clothing that he made himself?

The Bible then goes on to tell us how Gideon had seventy sons by many wives before he died, and that he also had a concubine who bore him a son named Abimelech. That last part will become important in the next post; I won’t get into it now since this one has run on to well past my usual length.

But I do want to close on one little thought. Notice that, within the context of the story, Gideon didn’t have anything like what we might call “faith” today. He spoke directly to, and was spoken to in turn by, God himself. And he never did anything God told him to do without asking for some sign or evidence that the being asking him to do it was actually a god and actually could follow through on his end of things. And God provided him every sign he asked for, as lame as some of them may have been. This story exhibits pretty much the exact opposite of the faith that priests try to foist on people as being a necessary component of belief in this religion.

Anyhow, that’s it for this post. Until next time, be happy and well!

Judges: The First Few Cycles

Welcome back to the Book of Judges. We’re in our second installment, where the Israelites are starting a cycle of turning away from God, getting oppressed, having a heroic judge save them from oppression (usually by killing the oppressors) and turn them back to God, then the judge dies and they turn away again. Over and over and over. This cycle is their punishment for not killing every last non-Israelite in Canaan.

Kicking off, we’re told how the Israelites forgot about Yahweh and served the “Baals and the Asheroth,” so God let the king of Mesopotamia get medieval on them for a bit. The Israelites were forced to serve him for eight years before they got around to asking God for help, at which point he allowed a guy named Othniel to defeat the Mesopotamian king in battle. Then the Israelites were free (in the sense of only being oppressed by Yahweh via Othniel instead of a foreign king) for about forty years until Othniel died, before they went back to worshipping other gods.

That story is barely any longer in the Bible than that paragraph above, by the way, without really any more detail.

Anyway, once the Israelites resume their wicked not-exclusively-kissing-God’s-ass ways, he lets the Moabite king Eglon defeat them with the help of the Ammonites and Amalekites. The Bible only mentions him taking over the “city of palms,” then goes on to say that the Israelites served him for eighteen years – it’s not really clear whether it’s meant that just the Israelites in that one city were subjugated, or whether it was all Israelites.

After those eighteen years the Israelites finally got back around to crying out to God for help, so he “raised up” some guy named Ehud. This Ehud made a short double-edged sword for himself, small enough to be hidden under his robe strapped to his thigh (his right thigh, since he was left-handed). He headed up one of the tribute deliveries to king Eglon, and after all the porters had finished dropping off the tribute he sent them away and told Eglon that he had a secret message for him. Eglon, being the trusting sort that all despotic kings are, sent away all of his guards and attendants so he could hear the secret message. Now, for what happened next to make sense, you need to know that Eglon is described as being very fat.

“Judg 3:21 And Ehud reached with his left hand, took the sword from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly. 22 And the hilt also went in after the blade, and the fat closed over the blade, for he did not pull the sword out of his belly; and the dung came out.”

Yes, that is the Bible describing a man getting stabbed in the stomach and dying either shitting himself or with shit pouring out of his gut wound (not terribly clear which). I wonder why Ehud’s story wasn’t featured in my Sunday School classes.

So Ehud leaves, locking the doors of the room behind him. And Eglon’s servants concluded the locked door must mean the king was relieving himself in his bath chamber (ha ha… get it? He died crapping himself, and they thought he was just taking a dump... I actually think that was meant to be funny to a certain mindset), so they didn’t go in to check on him. Thus Ehud had time to make good his escape before anyone found the body.

Ehud then went back to Israel and rallied the people to go and seize the fords over the Jordan in a battle in which they killed 10,000 Moabites. This resulted in a peace that lasted for eighty years.

“Judg 3:31 After him was Shamgar the son of Anath, who killed 600 of the Philistines with an oxgoad, and he also saved Israel.”

That’s the whole story of Shamgar. That single verse. Why he killed 600 people, and what he saved Israel from and how… who the hell knows?

And then, once again, the Israelites fall back on their wicked ways, and so God allows Jabin the king of Canaan to oppress them for twenty years. But then, Jabin had 900 iron chariots, so maybe there wasn’t anything God could have done to prevent it.

Anyway, this time the judge was a woman named Deborah (holy shit! A woman portrayed as a leader?!), who was a prophetess that the people regularly went to for judgment. And she calls up this guy named Barak (that’s right, Barak is a Biblical name) and tells him that God has commanded him to gather up 10,000 men from the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulun so that they can go and defeat the Canaanite army (commanded by a general named Sisera). When Barak says he’ll only go if she goes with him, she agrees but also tells him that Sisera will be taken down by a woman and not by him. And off they went to summon up their army. Meanwhile…

“Judg 4:11 Now Heber the Kenite had separated from the Kenites, the descendants of Hobab the father-in-law of Moses, and had pitched his tent as far away as the oak in Zaanannim, which is near Kedesh.”

That is now the third fucking name we’ve been given for Moses’ father-in-law. Jethro, Reuel, and now Hobab. Author, make up your mind!

Also, coming where it does in the story, this was a bit of a non-sequitur. But it becomes important later on.

Sisera hears about Barak and Deborah’s army and set out with his 900 iron chariots and an unspecified number of men to give battle. The 10,000 Israelites win (hey look! They figured out that the way to beat iron chariots is not so much having God on your side as having a ten-to-one advantage in numbers), and when he sees the battle is lost Sisera flees on foot. Barak is busy chasing down and slaughtering the remainder of Sisera’s army, so he doesn’t notice the general slipping away.

This is where the non-sequitur about Heber up there becomes important: Sisera flees to Heber’s encampment, because Heber is supposed to be at peace with his king. There he is taken in by Heber’s wife Jael. She promised him he would be safe, and hid him under a rug. So, thinking himself safely hidden in the care of an ally, Sisera fell asleep.

“Judg 4:21 But Jael the wife of Heber took a tent peg, and took a hammer in her hand. Then she went softly to him and drove the peg into his temple until it went down into the ground while he was lying fast asleep from weariness. So he died.”

Now that is one hardcore, treacherous bitch. Especially in light of the fact that the text doesn’t really give any particular motivation for this brutal killing. But at when Barak follows along later searching for Sisera, she shows him the body and is roundly praised. Hell, Deborah and Barak even composed a song about the events in which they praised the tribes that came to fight, rebuked those who didn’t, praised Jael as the most blessed of women, and finished off by gloating about how Sisera’s mother must have felt waiting for her son to come home from battle not knowing that he was dead. Classy.

This was the beginning of the end for king Jabin. The armies of the Israelites went on to overthrow him, thus earning themselves another brief period of peace.

So that’s our first set of judges. These aren’t the really famous ones, and the stories are noteworthy more for their brutality than anything else. God doesn’t even perform any overt miracles. All in all it reads like a bunch of savages squabbling back and forth over territory, with the authors throwing in credit to God for whichever outcomes suit the theological narrative they want to support. They must have noticed that trend, though, since in the next story they have God taking a more personal hand in things.

But that’ll be in my next post, starting with the story of Gideon. Until then, be well!

Judges: I Find Your Murder-Fu… Lacking

Hello again, my fine friends, and welcome back to my Bible blog. We just finished whipping through the Book of Joshua, which now brings us to the Book of Judges. We find the Israelites in the promised land, riding high on the wave of bloodshed that allowed them to claim the land as their own.

Judges starts out after the death of Joshua, and the first thing we discover is that there’s still some conquering to do. Which is kind of confusing, since the Book of Joshua pretty clearly states that the conquest was complete before Joshua died. It gets even more confusing when you read further and realize that some of the conquests related in Judges are some of the exact same conflicts that were described in Joshua. At least one story (in which Caleb rewards his nephew for conquering a city by giving him his daughter as a wife) is an exact, word-for-word retelling of the same event from Joshua. Except that the event in Judges is explicitly said to be after Joshua’s death, and the one in Joshua is explicitly before Joshua’s death.

Yeah… inerrant and perfect. Totally self-consistent.

But to get to the text, Judges starts off with the following lines:

“Judg 1:1 After the death of Joshua, the people of Israel inquired after Yahweh ‘Who shall go up first for us against the Canaanites, to fight against them?” 2 Yahweh said ‘Judah shall go up; behold I have given the land into his hand.’ 3 And Judah said to Simeon his brother ‘Come up with me into the territory allotted to me, that we may fight against the Canaanites. And I likewise will go with you into the territory allotted to you.’ So Simeon went with him.”

So just out of curiosity… with their prophet dead and no one in particular set up to replace him, just how did the people inquire of God? Supposedly nobody but his chosen guy can hear his voice and live. Back in Numbers 12, God said that other than when speaking to Moses, he only spoke to prophets in dreams and riddles. And back when Moses died, the Bible stated that there was never anyone since that was like him in that God spoke to him plainly face-to-face (although when Joshua got put in charge, God promised to be with him in exactly the same way he was with Moses, so who the fuck really knows who God spoke to and who he didn’t?). And if God could have talked to “the people” directly at any time, why did he need prophets in the first place? The whole thing is confusing as hell.

Also, in that passage it’s kind of unclear whether God chose some actual guy named Judah to lead the fight and Judah literally spoke to his brother named Simeon, or whether the passage is speaking of the tribes of Judah and Simeon metaphorically as if they were singular persons. But as you read further, in context it comes a bit clearer that it’s speaking of the tribes.

Moving on, what follows is basically a repeat of the info from Joshua about Judah claiming its inheritance. Some is word-for-word repetition, but there’s some elaboration. Like this little gem:

“Judg 1:19 And Yahweh was with Judah, and he took possession of the hill country, but he could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain because they had chariots of iron.”

So there you go. If for any reason you need to go to war against God, iron chariots are your weapon of choice. He can’t defeat them. I wonder if it has to be literal horse-drawn battlewagons, or if tanks will do.

We’re actually treated to a list of places where the Israelites either failed to or chose not to completely destroy or drive out the inhabitants. In many of these places, they made the Canaanites perform forced labor for them instead. This kind of displeased God, so we get:

“Judg 2:1 Now the angel of Yahweh went up from Gilgal to Bochim. And he said ‘I brought you up from Egypt and brought you into the land that I swore to give your fathers. I said “I will never break my covenant with you, 2 and you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land; you shall break down their altars.” But you have not obeyed my voice. What is this you have done? 3 So now I say, I will not drive them out before you, but they shall become thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare to you.”

Now, I went ahead a quoted that because it illustrates another little thing that’s been nagging at me from time to time. See how we’re told it’s an angel that is doing the speaking, but his words are written as if God is speaking first-person? This isn’t the first time that sort of thing has happened. We saw it with Moses and the burning bush, for instance, and from having read ahead a little I know we’ll see another instance shortly. Which leads me to wonder if the idea we have of angels these days isn’t what the original writers actually had in mind. We tend to think of them as these individual beings who run around heaven (and occasionally on earth) acting on God’s orders. But in these instances it seems more like the angel is meant as some sort of manifestation or vessel that God projects on earth in order to interact with people – a sort of avatar, if you will.

That might also explain why it is that “the commander of God’s army” showed up for the incredibly idiotic purpose of telling Joshua to remove his shoes, and then two verses later Joshua seems to be talking to God in person. If the commander was just some God avatar, that passage makes a little more sense (although still not exactly free of nonsense). Perhaps that commander and the angel in this passage are one and the same.

Perhaps this is a lot of fucking conjecture to try to string together some sense from this stuff.

Incidentally, the punishment God is levying against the Israelites (some of the people you just invaded and dispossessed are going to do their best to be a pain in your ass, and others you might get along with well enough to start adopting their religious practices) is exactly what one might expect to see happen if there were no divine influence going on as well. It’s called assimilation, and it happens every damn time one people conquers another. So what, exactly, is God actually contributing to this situation?

And remember, we’re to understand that God is intending to punish them for not committing enough genocide.

As a fun aside… anyone they drove out of their land would, presumably, have gone to live in the neighboring nations. Israelites are explicitly told that they can buy slaves from neighboring nations. One could argue that by enslaving the conquered people rather than driving them out, they’re just kind of cutting out that middle step and the associated expense of actually buying the slaves.

But anyway, moving on we’re told that after about a generation past Joshua’s death the Israelites enter a cycle where they become wicked and start worshipping other gods, then Yahweh gets angry and punishes them by letting other peoples dominate them militarily for a bit, followed by the Israelites turning back to Yahweh and he raises up a hero (called a judge, from which this book gets its name) who leads them to defeat their enemies. Then the Israelites obey the judge until he dies, at which point they become wicked again and the cycle repeats.

The bulk of the Book of Judges is dedicated to telling the stories of a bunch of these individual judges, who are some of the more famous “heroes” of the Bible. We’ll start getting into those stories in my next post.

So I’ll take my leave for today. Take care and be well!

Joshua: Setting the Borders

Hello again, my friend. The blog continues today, with the second installment in discussing the Book of Genocidal Conquest, aka the Book of Joshua. In our first installment, Israel gained a foothold in their promised land by killing every man, woman, and child in the cities of Jericho and Ai. We rejoin the horde as they celebrate the glorious victory by ambush of 40,000 armed men over 12,000 people (counting women and children) at Ai. For truly only by divine intervention could so many have defeated so few.

They gather at Mount Ebal, and build an altar of unworked stones. And, in accordance with Moses’ orders, Joshua writes the law out on the stones of the altar, then reads them aloud to all the people. Then they give the blessing and the curse that Moses had also ordered.

Meanwhile, the inhabitants of the nearby city of Gibeon had heard of the invasion, and also that the Israelites were forbidden to make covenants with or spare the lives of anyone living in this land. So they came up with a plan. They sent envoys to Joshua, but gave them worn out clothes and equipment, and stale food. The envoys claimed that they had come from a far distant land to make a treaty with the Israelites (since the Israelites were allowed to make covenants with people from outside the promised land, just not the ones inside it), and offered the crappy state of their food and equipment as evidence of their long journey. Joshua fell for it, and made a treaty with the Gibeonites which he swore to in the name of God.

Well, a few days later he finds out that the Gibeonites were lying about where they came from. And now he has a dilemma: he was under orders from God to kill everyone in the promised land and not make any covenants with them, but he’d sworn in the name of God to make a covenant with the Gibeonites (and if you recall, God’s law says that you must keep any vow made in his name). He’s required to kill them all, but he’s not allowed to kill them. What to do?

His solution: keep the covenant, but relegate the Gibeonites to servant status for all time.

It’s actually kind of funny, the scene where he goes to the Gibeonites and whines “Why did you deceive me?” Because, obviously, they didn’t particularly want to get killed to death. And not getting killed to death was not an option in any honest dealing with Joshua and his ravening horde. Duh.

The king of Jerusalem heard about the treaty with Gibeon, and it kinda freaked him out on account of Gibeon having a largish army. He wasn’t terribly thrilled by the idea of getting attacked by an army of combined Gibeonite and Israelite forces, so he got together with the kings of Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, and Eglon to make a preemptive strike at Gibeon.

When the combined army of those Amorite kings showed up, Gibeon sent to Joshua for help. So the Israelites marched out to fight the combined armies, and when they attacked God threw the Amorites into a panic so that they ran away and could be cut down easily. And as they ran, God threw rocks from heaven at them, killing more people that way than the Israelites killed in battle. But even with all that going on, it didn’t look like there was going to be enough time in the day to slaughter all the people that Joshua wanted to kill. So he asked God to stop the sun in the sky to give him enough light to kill by, and God did it for him. Supposedly, the sun stood still for a full day’s time so that Joshua could slaughter everyone.

Afterwards, the Israelites returned to camp at Gilgal, until they heard that the five kings from the defeated armies were hiding out in a cave near a place called Makkedah. So he had some guys roll a big stone over the mouth of the cave to trap them in there while he wiped out all the people in the surrounding area, except for the few who were able to flee to the fortified cities. Once the area was cleared, he had the kings hauled out and instructed his officers to place their feet on the kings’ necks (presumably as a symbolic belittlement) before having them executed. He then proceeded to sack the city of Makkedah and kill everyone in it.

The next several verses are dedicated to recounting briefly the destruction of more cities without going into any details. We’re basically told repeatedly that Joshua attacked City X and killed all of its inhabitants and its king. It lists five more cities, plus the defeat of an army in the field, before Joshua took a break from the genocide campaign to return to his camp at Gilgal.

After this is a brief story about how the king of Hazor organized the kings of Madon, Shimron, and Achshaph, along with a bunch of others in the surrounding lands to gather together and fight Israel. But of course with God’s help Joseph kicked all their asses as well, and then went on a rampage through all their cities and killed every last living person. The Bible then takes some time out to list all the kings Israel defeated under Moses, and then all of those defeated under Joshua up to this point.

After this, they set about the business of divvying up the land. I’m not going to go into the details of who got what, though the Bible goes on about describing the borders in some detail since it actually mattered to the people who had to live there. It’s pretty irrelevant to me, and probably most everyone else.

The tribes of Judah, Manasseh, and Ephraim were given their allotments first. Then Joshua had the remaining tribes send out people to survey the rest of the land, then he broke it up and divided it among those tribes by drawing lots.

Here’s a little something from the section about Judah claiming their territory:

“Jos 15:63 But the Jebusites, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the people of Judah could not drive out, so the Jebusites dwell with the people of Judah at Jerusalem to this day.”

Notice that wasn’t “did not drive out,” which one could interpret as the tribe choosing to disobey God’s commandment to drive out everyone. It was “could not drive out,” which suggests that even with God’s help they attempted it and failed.

The tribe of Ephraim didn’t destroy the people of the city of Gezer, but enslaved them instead.

The tribe of Manasseh encountered some difficulty as well with the cities of Beth-shean, Ibleam, Dor, En-dor (damn Ewoks), Taanach, Megiddo, and Napath:

“Jos 17:12 Yet the people of Manasseh could not take possession of those cities, but the Canaanites persisted in dwelling in that land. 13 Now when the people of Israel grew strong, they put the Canaanites to forced labor, but did not utterly drive them out.”

Once again, we see a failure to defeat the inhabitants of the land.

Then the people of Joseph (Manasseh and Ephraim) whined that they had so many people they deserved an extra portion of the land. Joshua pretty much told them they could have it, if they clear that land on their own.

There’s also something in there about the tribe of Dan losing their land, then attacking Leshem and taking that land as their own. Not enough detail, though, to draw any conclusions about what actually happened.

After all those tribes had their land allotted to them, Joshua then declared the remaining cities of refuge, and then lots were drawn to see which cities were to be given to which clans of the Levite tribe (remember that the Levites weren’t to have a separate land of their own, but rather to dwell in their own cities in the midst of the other tribes’ lands). Altogether, they were given forty-eight cities. So the land is now basically conquered and divided up, and we get:

“Jos 21:44 And Yahweh gave them rest on every side just as he had sworn to their fathers. Not one of all their enemies had withstood them, for Yahweh had given all their enemies into their hands. 45 Not one word of the good promises that Yahweh had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass.”

Really? It takes some balls for the author to flat-out lie like that. I mean, we saw at least two examples of enemies who did, in fact, withstand the people of Israel, and they weren’t even far enough back in the narrative for the reader to forget about them by the time we get to this passage. And didn’t God promise that he would drive all of the people out? Because he certainly didn’t succeed. Sure sounds to me like a promise that failed.

Anyway, with the land as secure as they can make it for the time being, Joshua allows the fighters from Reuben, Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh return to their land on the other side of the Jordan. When they cross over, they put up and altar to God. This provokes a little altercation with the rest of the Israelites, who think that altar will piss God off because he ordered that sacrifices will only be conducted at his temple. But once they are reassured that the purpose of the altar is only to remind the descendants of the Gadites, Reubenites, and Manassehites that they’re the same people as the rest of Israel, and not to have sacrifices performed on it, then all is well.

The rest of the book is kind of epilogue. It skips ahead to several years later when Joshua is old and dying. First we see him calling together the elders of the tribes to remind them how God has blessed them, that there are still lands they’re supposed to conquer, and that if they turn away from God he’ll punish the shit out of them. Then he calls all the people together at Shechem to extract a promise from them that they will continue to serve God. Once that’s done with, he dies and is buried on his own lands. We also get a brief paragraph on the high priest Eleazar, the son of Aaron, also dying and being buried before the book of Joshua comes to an end.

Well, that was kind of a quick book! Only two posts to get through the whole thing. And now the Israelites are ensconced in their promised land after a bloody and brutal (if slightly incomplete, though they claim otherwise) conquest. The next book is the Book of Judges, where we’ll get a taste of how they govern themselves in the age before they set any kings above them. Looking forward to it.

Until then, be well!

Joshua: And the Walls Come Tumbling Down

Hello, and a grateful welcome to those of you who may be reading. Hope you’ve been enjoying yourself so far. And more importantly, hope you’ve been thinking about things so far, whether you agree with my interpretations or not.

Today we are inaugurating our discussion of the Book of Joshua, which describes the Jewish invasion of Canaan (aka “the Promised Land”). Over and over up until now, God has been promising this land to the Israelite people, and commanding them to utterly obliterate (down to the women, children, and livestock) the people who already live there. So now we shall see how the people carry out that commission.

We start out with God commanding Joshua to lead the invasion, promising that they will claim all the land of Lebanon and the wilderness, and the land of the Hittites from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean. He further promises that “no man shall be able to stand before you all the days of your life.” Joshua then commands the people to start making ready, because in three days’ time they are going to cross the Jordan and start to take possession of the land.

While they’re getting ready, Joshua sends a couple men to spy out the land they’ll be coming to first. And the process starts out with hilarity.

“Jos 2:1 And Joshua the son of Nun sent two men secretly from Shittim as spies, saying ‘Go, view the land, especially Jericho.” And they went and came into the house of a prostitute whose name was Rahab and lodged there.”

Go on… tell me that’s not hilarious! He sends some guys out, and the very first thing they do after getting out of sight is shack up at a whorehouse? Bwahahaha!

Although, to be fair… nothing in any of the draconian sexual laws presented so far actually forbids men (married or otherwise) from seeing a prostitute. For that matter, nothing prevents a divorced or widowed woman from seeing one either. It’s just that Israelites are not allowed to be prostitutes.

Anyway, somehow the king of Jericho found out about the spies, and sent men to arrest them. But Rahab hid them in the thatching of her roof, and told the would-be captors that the men had already left the city. So they took off in hot pursuit. Since it was nighttime, the city gates were closed after them.

Then Rahab went to the spies and told them that the people of Jericho had heard all about how God had given the land to them, and that all the men were afraid of the coming invasion. And how she was eager to sell out her own people. So she asked them to promise that if she helped keep their business secret, the Israelites would spare her and her family when they invaded the city. The spies agreed, and told her to tie a scarlet ribbon in her window when the invasion started, so the Israelites would know to spare everyone in the house. Then Rahab advised them to head into the wilderness to avoid the king’s patrols, and helped them get out of the city by lowering them from a rope out of her window (since her house was built into the city wall).

So… remember how God ordered the Israelites not to make any deals with anyone in the promised land, or to allow any of them to live? The invasion hasn’t even begun, and that command is out the window. Rahab didn’t even promise to start worshipping Yahweh exclusively or anything! But, y’know… who won’t go that extra mile for someone who gives them sex (even if it is for money)?

Anyway, the spies then hid out in the wilderness for a few days until the patrols had stopped, then crossed back over the Jordan to report to Joshua. So Joshua told everyone that they’d be marching across the Jordan the next day.

In the morning, Joshua sent a group of Levitical priests ahead of the people carrying the ark. God promised Joshua that he’d start doing miracles to prove to everyone that Joshua was in charge, and that to start with he should have the priests with the ark walk out into the Jordan. As soon as the priests’ feet touched the water, the flow was cut off upstream of them, so that the water raised up in a heap behind the cutoff point and the people could proceed across just by walking over the dry river bed. The priests stood in the middle of the river with the ark while everyone else trooped across.

Once they were across, God told Joshua to have a man from each tribe pull up a river stone from the place where the priests were standing, and take that to their encampment to set up as a memorial. They did so, and then the priests followed them up out of the Jordan. As soon as they were clear of the riverbed, the water started flowing again.

Now for some odd reason, although it had been the custom of the Israelites to circumcise their sons all the time they were living in Egypt, none of the boys born on the trip through the wilderness after the exodus had been circumcised. There had been no order to that effect, heck it wasn’t even mentioned anywhere in the four books written to describe that journey, but here we are told that the whole people had apparently abandoned the practice for no particular reason. And because of that, once they crossed the Jordan, everyone had to be circumcised.

The people remained in camp until they healed, and from then until Passover. And the very next day after Passover, they started to live off the food of the land and the manna ceased to fall.

As they approach Jericho, Joshua comes across a man with a drawn sword in his hand. So Joshua demands to know whether the man stands for them or against them. I’m certain the ensuing exchange is meant to be meaningful, but I think it falls under the heading of unintentional hilarity. The fellow answers:

“Jos 5:14 And he said ‘No; but I am the commander of the army of Yahweh. Now I have come.’ And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshipped and said to him ‘What does my lord say to his servant?’ 15 And the commander of Yahweh’s army said to Joshua ‘Take off your sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy.’ And Joshua did so.”

That’s it. That is the whole conversation between them. God sent the commander of his army to tell his chosen prophet on earth to take off his damned shoes. And that’s where Chapter 5 ends.

Then we jump into Chapter 6, and by verse 2 God is speaking directly with Joshua again. So what the hell was even the point of having the commander as the intermediary two verses earlier? Was God just unwilling to put in an appearance in the presence of unholy sandaled feet?

Sometimes I feel like the author put shit in here for no other reason than to make the reader do double takes.

But anyway, when God speaks to Joshua he lays out the battle plan for taking Jericho. You all may be familiar with this – they made us sing the song in Sunday School. Though both the song and the Sunday School lessons left out a few details (not least of which is the fact that the people of Jericho had never done a fucking thing to the Israelites).

The people are supposed to line up in front of the ark, with seven priests bearing rams’ horns directly in front of it. For six days in a row, they’re supposed to march around the city once, with the priests blowing on the horns. On the seventh day, they’re supposed to march around seven times, and after the last time the priests are supposed to give a long blast. When they hear the long trumpet blast, everyone is supposed to shout as loud as they can, and the walls will fall flat.

So they do all that marching around and blowing trumpets stuff. And just before the final trumpet blast, Joshua pauses to give some instructions about what they’re supposed to do once the walls fall. Which is kill everything that moves, set aside the gold, silver, bronze, and iron stuff for the Lord’s treasury (i.e. Joshua) because they are holy to God (i.e. valuable), and burn everything that’s left.

So then they give their mighty shout, the walls fall flat, they storm the city, and they kill everything: “men and women, young, and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys…” Except for Rahab and her household, whom the men are instructed to retrieve from her house (you know… the house that was built into the walls… that had just collapsed… but whatever, poor storytelling is poor). And Rahab and her family are allowed to live happily ever after among the Israelites.

Then Joshua lays a curse on the remains of Jericho that anyone who tries to rebuild the city will do so only at the cost of his children’s lives. ‘Cause if you’re already being a dick, you might as well piss on people too.

Oh, but then a problem arises…

“Jos 7:1 But the people of Israel broke faith in regard to the devoted things, for Achan the son of Carmi, son of Zabdi, son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took some of the devoted things. And the anger of Yahweh burned against the people of Israel.”

The “devoted things” here refers to the stuff they were ordered to destroy when sacking the city (i.e. anything other than the precious metals). Achan, one guy, secretly kept some of that stuff as plunder, so everyone is considered to have broken faith with God.

But before any of this comes to light, Joshua sends some spies to a nearby town called Ai. And when they come back, they tell him there’s no need for everyone to go all the way there – about two or three thousand men should be enough to take Ai. So Joshua sends a force of three thousand me. But when the people of Ai come out to fight, the Israelites suddenly turn chicken and run, so the people of Ai give chase and kill thirty-six of them before the Israelites make good their escape.

When Joshua hears about this, he turns into a little bitch, wailing and crying to God about how now they’re all doomed to be destroyed. God then basically tells him to quit his whining, the Israelites sinned by taking some of the stuff they were supposed to destroy in God’s name, and they won’t be able to stand in battle anymore until Joshua finds that shit and actually destroys it. Oh, and burns the person responsible to death along with all he has.

So God tells him that he’ll find the culprit by drawing lots, first to narrow down to the tribe, then to clan, then to household, and finally down to the man. ‘Cause, y’know, God couldn’t just say a fucking name or anything. Or, for that matter, maybe mentioning something about it before getting a bunch of men killed in battle as punishment for it? Less theater that way, I guess.

The next morning Joshua gathers everyone around, and goes through the rigmarole of drawing lots until he finally gets down to Achan. Confronted, Achan admits that he’d taken a cloak, a gold bar, and some silver and buried them under his tent. Joshua sends messengers to dig them up and bring them back to complete the proof of Achan’s guilt.

“Jos 7:24 And Joshua and all Israel with him took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver and the cloak and the bar of gold, and his sons and daughters and his oxen and donkeys and sheep and his tent and all that he had. And they brought them up to the Valley of Achor. 25 And Joshua said ‘Why did you bring trouble on us? Yahweh brings trouble on you today.” And all Israel stoned him with stones. They burned them with fire and stoned them with stones.”

Now, I gotta say, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Achan. After all, as a participant in the sacking of Jericho, he is no doubt a murderer of women and children several times over in addition to being a thief. But so is everyone who’s stoning him. Nobody here seems to give a flying fuck about the child murder, though, because God ordered it. Whereas stealing against God’s command is a capital offense.

Also, it’s rather strongly implied up there that his children were stoned and burned as well. Which, in addition to being abhorrent, is explicitly prohibited even by the fucked up moral sense of Mosaic law which states that a child shall not be put to death for the sins of his father (Deuteronomy 24:16).

It’s shit like this that makes it hard to take seriously the claims of Christians that they have an objective moral basis. Because even if you were to buy into the moral laws presented in the Bible, God overrides them all the fucking time. Which means the only consistent law here is “obey,” and “obey” is not a moral basis – it’s the complete abrogation of personal moral responsibility. To say nothing of the fact that no one can even objectively demonstrate that they receive any communication from this God thing in the first place, which boils all of it down in the end to “do whatever arbitrary shit you can convince yourself to believe strongly enough to think God wants you to do.”

Ok, rant over, and back to the story. Now that they’ve killed the sinner, the Israelites are ready to take a second crack at Ai. This time they take their full fighting force of 40,000 men, and God orders them to lay an ambush by hiding the large majority of their fighters on the other side of the city. Joshua takes a smaller force toward the gates, then has them turn and run away just like they had done the first time. The fighters from Ai, seeing them run and thinking this will be just like the first fight, stream out of the city to give chase.

So while the fighters are away chasing the decoy force, the ambushers bust into the city and kill all the undefended women and children. They set the city on fire, and at this signal the decoy force turns back to attack their pursuers. Then the ambushers came out of the burning city to catch Ai’s fighters between the two groups and slaughter them. Finally, everyone returns to the city to make sure they kill any remaining women and children, and to loot the place (this time, arbitrarily, they’re allowed to keep plunder). They hang the king, but then take him down and bury him beneath a pile of rocks at the city gates by nightfall (sure, that law they follow).

Seems a little odd that earlier in the story, Joshua’s spies tell him that a force of 3,000 men should be all that’s needed to take Ai, but his full army of 40,000 needs this elaborate ruse of an ambush to pull it off. Methinks I detect the gently wafting scent of bullshit on the air. Not sure where it is, so we’ll just let it float on by as we bring today’s post to a close.

So there we go. Through sheer, wanton brutality mixed with a bit of whoring about and internal injustice, the Israelites have gained their first foothold in the promised land. Can’t wait to see what they do next!

Until then, you all take care.

Deuteronomy: The Day The Music Died

Hey, I just realized that my last entry was my 50^th post! Wow, am I full of hot air or what?!

And since that only gets me to about 17% of the way through the Bible, that leaves me with an estimate of about 295 total posts (245 to go from here) to complete the whole thing. And at my current pace, that would be sometime in October of 2015. That’s… a long way to go. Probably best not to think about it, and just focus on one post at a time.

We’re approaching the end of Deuteronomy, and Moses has just invested a lot of time and creative effort in enumerating the many horrific curses God will delight in inflicting on the Israelites should they choose to disobey him. Now he goes on to talk about making a covenant between the people and God.

He talks about it as if it’s some new covenant, but it really seems to be the same one he’s been going on about since Sinai. The Israelites will be God’s people, worship him, and follow his laws, and as long as they do then he’ll bless them with good stuff. And if they turn away to worship other gods, he’ll fuck them up like nobody’s business. It’s the same line, really, that’s been getting repeated over and over since way back in the Abraham stories, although back with Abraham there was far less emphasis on the “he’ll fuck you up,” portion of the deal.

Actually, come to think of it, I don’t recall God ever saying to Abraham that there was an “I’ll fuck your descendants up if they don’t obey me” portion of the deal at all. That just seems to have been added after Moses entered the picture. I’m kinda reminded of what Darth Vader said to Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back when Lando protested that he hadn’t agreed to have Han Solo turned over to Boba Fett: “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”

Was Darth the hero, or the villain in this story? And was this behavior consistent with his hero/villain status? It’s OK to say the answer if you know it.

Anyway, back to Moses and his Covenant. After going on at great length about how anyone who violates the covenant will have Bad Shit^TM happen to them, he gets on to a part about how after all those horrors happen, the people turn back to God, then he will forgive them, bring them back to the promised land, and start blessing them again. Then he’ll start pouring out all the same curses he had been inflicting on the disobedient Israelites on the people who persecute them instead. How swell.

He repeats this bit, with variations, over and over (any lie repeated often enough, and all that), before getting on to telling people that since God won’t let him cross the Jordan with them, Joshua will be taking his place as their leader.  Afterwards, he writes down the law and gives a copy to the priests, ordering them to read it out loud to all the people every seven years when they gather at the temple for the Feast of Booths.

So then God summons Moses and Joshua to the tent of meeting so that he can “commission” Joshua as the new leader. The meeting starts off with God appearing as a pillar of cloud, and telling Moses that he already knows that the people will turn away from following his laws once they have taken over the promised land. But fear not, God has a solution: he wrote a song to rebuke them with, which Moses is to write down and teach to them before he dies.

The song is… not particularly inspiring. It kisses God’s bum for a little bit, then gives a brief and fanciful history of things God did for his people before getting to the “but then you spurned him,” part. From there it kinda devolves into a violent rant filled with insults and threats of blood-drenched vengeance.

After Moses taught everyone the song, it was time for him to die. So God told him to go up Mount Nebo so he can look out from it and see the promised land before he dies. Before departing, Moses gives Israel his final blessing. This is long and drawn out, blessing each of the tribes uniquely and individually. You can read Deuteronomy Chapter 33 if you’re really interested in the details.

With the blessing done, Moses climbs the mountain, sees the promised land, and dies. God supposedly buried him in a valley, though no one know his exact resting place. So Joshua took charge, the people spent thirty days in mourning, and Deuteronomy comes to an end.

Wasn’t that a fun book? Next post, we’ll dive into the Book of Joshua, which is much like a fantasy novel about an invasion by an evil horde, as told from the horde’s perspective. There’s war, sex, betrayal, defeat, and triumph… should be a blast!

Until then, be well!

Deuteronomy: Are you Going to Eat That?

Blogging, blogging, blogging, keep on Bible blogging… oh! Hello there! Welcome back to my Bible blog!

We’re in Deuteronomy, and for the last several posts Moses has been laying down the law in a protracted and rambling speech. And it seems that I have once again fallen into the trap of trying to put down everything in the interests of completeness. But since it’s not my intention to lay out a list of laws for people to follow (and actually, I’d be pretty opposed to anyone following quite a large number of these), there’s not really much value in doing that. It just makes things difficult to read. So, I’ll once again try to reign myself in and restrict my commentary to just those things that actually catch my interest.

And the first of those is…

“Deu 24:16 ‘Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin.”

This is of interest for a couple reasons. First of all, doesn’t this imply that the Original Sin doctrine (you know, the one that says we are all stained by Adam & Eve’s sin of disobeying God, and that death is the penalty we pay for it) is complete bullshit? Secondly (spoiler alert), during the coming invasion of the promised land, the Israelites are going to be killing children, and even infants, by the truckloads. Since the infants, obviously, wouldn’t have been able to commit the sins for which God supposedly wants those nations wiped out, it stands to reason that they are being put to death for the sins of their fathers. So this is a contradiction, or at the very least blatant hypocrisy.

Maybe it’s just another of those laws that’s meant to apply only to God’s chosen people, and fuck everyone else. Or a case of “this is what you will do, but God will do whatever the fuck he wants.”

There’s an interesting bit at the start of Chapter 25 about beating the guilty party in any dispute brought before the judges, with the number of lashes being proportional to his offense. To my recollection so far, there’s only one offense for which beatings are recommended (falsely accusing a woman of not being a virgin on her wedding night), and there aren’t really degrees of that offense by which to give a proportionate number of lashes. Pretty much everything else requires death, a monetary payment, a sacrificial offering, or has no actual penalty specified. Are we to assume that the offenses for which penalties aren’t specified are punished with beatings? Or that there are whole categories of offenses for which beatings are required that simply aren’t covered in the Bible? In either case, the fact that none of this is specified kind of suggests the Bible is incomplete, doesn’t it?

If two men are fighting, and one guy’s wife tries to rescue her husband by grabbing the other guy by the balls, then her hand should be cut off. Guess God feels pretty strongly about going after a man’s junk in a fight!

Seems like an oddly specific rule, though. Sounds to me like it’s something that happened to the author, and he was pissed off enough about it to feel like he needed to make a law.

In a more generally applicable vein, there’s an actually good law that requires the people to be honest and fair in commercial dealings by forbidding them from using doctored weights or measures for determining the value of goods.

Moses finally meanders on to the end of his speech without saying much else truly new or interesting. But then he has some proclamations to make about some specific actions the people are to take once they cross the Jordan into the promised land.

Among them are: set up piles of stones on Mount Ebal, cover them with plaster, and then write the whole law on them; build an altar to God out of unworked stones and sacrifice burnt offerings on it, and then write the words of the law on those stones. Then the tribes are supposed to divide themselves between Mount Gerizin and Mount Ebal while the Levitical priests stand in the middle and declare a series of curses.

The Levites are to declare a curse for anyone who does the following: makes a carved or metal image, dishonors his father or mother, has sex with an animal, has sex with his sister (Abraham, still looking at you), has sex with his mother-in-law, strikes down his neighbor in secret, takes a bribe to kill an innocent, or does not follow the law.

Then we get yet another repetition of how God will bless them as long as they obey his laws. Riches, bountiful harvests, victory over their enemies, healthy children, etc., etc. The blessings (fourteen verses of these) are pretty commonplace stuff (not even any promises of mind-blowing orgasms), but it’s in the curses that follow for disobedience (fifty-four verses of these, so you know where the priorities lie) where the author gets really creative.

Let’s see a sampling of the curses God has in store for the Israelites should they disobey him. We start off pretty tame, with frustration and confusion in all their endeavors. But we quickly move on to wasting diseases, droughts, blighted crops, and rains of dust rather than water. God will cause them to be defeated by their enemies, and their dead bodies to be eaten by wild animals. They’ll get boils, tumors, and scabs that can’t be healed. They’ll be struck blind and mad, and people will oppress and rob them all the time while nobody comes to their aid. Their betrothed will be raped by other men before they can be married, their food, livestock, and children will be taken by other people. Locusts and worms will consume their crops (before or after they’re stolen by other men?). Then God will bring another nation to conquer and rule over them, who will consume all of their food and destroy all of their cities. And here’s the best one of all.

“Deu 28:53 And you shall eat the fruit of your womb, the flesh of your sons and daughters, whom Yahweh your God has given you, in the siege and in the distress with which your enemies shall distress you.”

That’s right, kiddies, if you disobey the all-loving and benevolent creator, he will make you eat your fucking children! Are you feeling the infinite compassion and love yet?

Oh, and just for a little extra added kick, you’ll become the kind of dick who won’t share his dead baby flesh with the rest of his starving family either. Guess the only thing worse than a cannibal is a selfish cannibal.

There are a few more curses after that, including scattering them among other nations where they’ll be so poor they have to sell themselves as slaves (except no one will want to buy them), but none of them come close to topping the cannibalizing-your-own-children thing. Though there’s an entertaining aside near the end about how God will “take delight in bringing ruin upon you and destroying you.” Isn’t that the sort of thing we generally classify as evil?

So that pretty much brings us to the end of what Moses has to say about blessings and curses for the time being. He’s going to move on to another part of the speech, but we’re going to go ahead and call it a day here. We’ll pick up the next section in my next post.

In the meantime, be well! Oh, and seriously... don't eat your kids.