Virgins
saved for later use
"Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every
woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls
who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves."
Numbers 31.17,18
Moses flies into a rage
because his returning Israelite war party has slaughtered only the
adult male Midianites!
Uzzah learns the hard way
to keep his hands to himself
"At that Jehovah's
anger blazed against Uzzah so that he struck him down because he
had thrust
his
hand upon the ark, and he died there before God."
(1Chronicles 13.9,10)
(1Chronicles 13.9,10)
Korah finds no democracy in Israel - Rebels
consumed by earth, fire, plague
"But on the morrow all the congregation of the children of Israel
murmured against Moses and against Aaron, saying, Ye have killed the
people of
the LORD.
And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Get
you up from among this congregation, that I may consume them as
in a moment ..." (Numbers
16.41,45)
Run for Your lives!
"And as the ark set out Moses would say, Arise, O Yahweh, may
your enemies be scattered and those who hate you run for their lives before you!' "
– Numbers
10:35,36
Gross
''The Bible has been interpreted
to justify such evil practices as, for example, slavery, the slaughter of prisoners of war, the sadistic murders of women believed to be witches,
capital punishment for hundreds of offenses, polygamy, and cruelty to
animals.
It has been used to
encourage belief in the grossest superstition and to discourage
the free teaching of scientific truths."
–Steve Allen (Bible
Religion & Morality)
Who Jew?
According to Israeli law a person is considered 'Jewish' if his/her
mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother were
Jewesses by religion; or if the person has converted to Judaism in a way
satisfactory to the Israeli authorities.
Eye-full of purity
According
to post-Talmudic rabbinic law the conversion of a non-Jew to Judaism
requires that conversion
is performed by authorised rabbis in
a 'proper manner' – which entails for females, their inspection
by three rabbis while 'naked
in
a bath
of purification'!
Racial Purity
"We want assimilation
to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish
nation and Jewish race...
For only he who honors
his own breed and his own blood can have an attitude of honor towards
the national will of other nations."
Dr Joachim Prinz, vice-chairman of the World Jewish Congress (Wir
Juden, 1934, pp 150-1) quoted by Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish
Religion)
A Good Book?
" Happy the one who takes and dashes
your little ones against the rock! "
-- Psalm 137.9.
God's work?
Charred remains of baby girl, partially eaten by dogs. A victim of the Israeli assault on Gaza."I form the light, and create darkness. I make peace, and create EVIL.
I the LORD do all these things." – Isaiah 45.7.
All cultures
have anthropomorphized their gods into humanoid (if
sometimes grotesque) form. Were the Jews the exception? Hardly.
We know precisely
what the Hebrew god looked like. We are, after all, fashioned in
his own likeness! "Yahweh", in fact, is an abbreviation
of the longer name, "Yahweh Sabaoth." It means, "He who musters armies."
Thus Yahweh's name identifies the god primarily as the military leader
of the tribe. No wonder the God bequeathed to the world by the Jews turned out to be a monster.
A
God in Man's Image
"The Lord is
a man of war; Yahweh is his name." – Exodus
15.3.
Yahweh was a man, no doubt looking remarkably like the bearded sage asking us to worship him.
If we believe the Bible, he has body
parts: eyes and a face (‘they are not hid from my face,
neither is their iniquity hid from mine eyes’ – Jeremiah
16.17); nose and a mouth (Psalms 18.8); lips, tongue and breath
(Isaiah 30.27,33); loins (Ezekiel 1.27); even ‘back parts’ (Exodus
33.23). He also has several ‘human’ emotions, manly appetites,
and a worrying disposition towards pathological violence.
Yahweh feels regret for
his own evil (‘And God saw their works, that they turned
from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had
said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.’ -
Jonah 3.10); and grief (at the wickedness of men) (‘and
it grieved him at his heart’ - (Genesis 6.6). He actually
gets down and wrestles with Jacob, dislocating
his thigh (Genesis 32.24). He forgets (he goes on calling
Jacob ‘Jacob’ even after re-naming him ‘Israel’ -
Genesis 35.10, 46.2). He practises favouritism (choosing
the Israelites ‘above all people’ - Exodus 19.5;
but he just does not like Cain or Esau!). He holds grudges (‘I
the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the
fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation’ – Exodus
20.5).
For an omniscient
god he is surprisingly unknowing (‘They have set
up kings, but not by me; they have made princes, and I knew it
not.’ – Hosea 8.4). And for an omnipotent god he
has his limitations (‘The Lord was with Judah; and
he drove out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive
out the inhabitants of the valley because they had chariots of
iron.’ - Judges 1.19).
And after his
creation of the world, he even has to rest from his labour (‘And
on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he
rested on the seventh day from all his work’ - Genesis
2.2) – to the endless bemusement of pagan critics, whose own
gods didn’t need to rest!
Carnivore
The most disturbing
aspect of Yahweh’s humanoid personality, however, is his blood-lust.
The smell of burning flesh is a ‘sweet savour unto the
lord’ – so sweet, in fact, that the phrase appears
in the Old Testament no fewer than twenty-three times. The butchery
demanded by god is truly monumental. Believers are required to
sacrifice two lambs day-by-day continuously – and that’s
just for starters! Just as well Yahweh had several thousand priests
to help him trough through the banquet!
Livestock bears
the brunt of god’s appetite but humans could so easily get
the chop from the big guy. God kills Uzzah for simply steadying
the tumbling Ark (1Chronicles 13.9,10). Poor Onan was zapped
for using the withdrawal method of birth control (Genesis 38.10).
But such isolated vindictiveness palls in comparison with the mass
killings of the Lord. When the autocratic Moses faces a rebellion
led by Korah, God uses an earthquake and fire to consume two
hundred and fifty rebels. When indignant sympathizers protest
at the injustice, God wipes out another fourteen thousand seven
hundred with a plague (Numbers 16). What a guy!
In Joshua’s (supposed) wars of conquest, God gets right in there. He throws down ‘great stones from heaven’ (Joshua 10.11) and scores a better body-count than his Israelites with mere swords. When the Lord gets up a real head of steam the slaughter reaches a truly epic scale. For merely looking into his Ark, Yahweh wipes out fifty thousand and seventy unfortunate men of Bethshemesh (1 Samuel 6.19). When King David slips up and orders a national census, an enraged God zaps seventy thousand.
Quite apart from
the celestial superman’s
own killing, he animates his favourites into wiping out whole
cities
and nations. Jericho, Sodom, Gomorrah, Ai, Makkedah, Libnah etc.,
etc., are ‘smote and consumed’ – men, women, young,
old, ox, sheep and ass!
‘You shall annihilate them - Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites – as Yahweh your God commanded you.’
– Deuteronomy 20.11,18.
In the largest single god-inspired massacre in the Bible, one million Ethiopians are slaughtered! (2 Chronicles 14).
But then we
have been warned!
Terrorism
All this carnage,
of course, is allegorical, albeit that certain stories may have
a tenuous link with an ancient skirmish somewhere. The point
is to terrify people into obedience of the priesthood.
‘Moses’ is
an archetypal ‘wise priest’, who rules with a rod of
iron and brooks no opposition.
‘Take
heed’ is
the warning. ‘Look what happens when you
disobey the word of the Lord!’
10
Commandments? Intolerance writ large
Despite the
apparent early date for Moses and his commandments, it is really
only in the post-Babylonian period that we can speak of ‘Mosaic’ Judaism,
when a priestly caste and a fantasy history of race
origins are in place. It is only after the Babylonian experience
that the Jews adopted a monotheistic religion, with Yahweh as
sole god, not merely as chief god. And with this single ‘jealous’ god,
the priests imposed a rigid liturgical year, a regimen in which
readings from the Torah (Genesis through to Deuteronomy) were
to be read successively and completed within the year.
|
By the closing
years of the 6th century BC the priesthood had codified their
tribal rules, and were writing with all the authority of their
singular deity.
The famed ‘Ten Commandments’ – even
today erroneously accepted in the popular mind as absolute and
universal rules to live by – are nothing other than a codification
of Jewish male property rights.
In their original
full versions, two of the commandments endorse slavery; the taboo
on adultery
was an attempt to stop polygamous Jewish males taking each
others wives (‘foreign’ concubines and wives had no rights);
the ‘honour’ to be accorded parents merely endorsed a
draconian patriarchal social structure; even the taboo on murder
was open to interpretation, since the slaying of enemies and wrong-doers
would not be ‘murder’ but the Lord’s will!
Here was intolerance
writ large. No spirit of ‘live and let live.’ In essentials,
these barbarous ‘Laws’ ratified the correctness of
annihilating enemies, the subjugation of women, the enslavement
of conquered tribes, the suppression of dissent and the curtailment
of any liberality, especially relating to the body or sexuality.
The priests
of other cults were to be murdered; their ‘altars,
images and groves’ to be destroyed (Exodus 34.13).
Libidinous ‘foreign’ women
were a particular cause for concern (just look how Delilah
had brought Samson down by cutting his strength-giving hair!) – and ‘foreign’ in
this context meant from a town a whole 25 miles from Jerusalem!
Captured war-brides
were to have their head shaved (Deuteronomy 21.14) but otherwise
could ‘give delight.’ However
Jewishness could only be inherited from a Jewish female. The stress
was upon racial purity and in the real politic of the 6th
century, even the original Jewish ‘people of the land’ were
summarily excluded from ‘the Jewish race.’
Subsequently,
Jewish numbers grew rapidly. Neighbouring tribes were conquered
and forcibly converted to the Yahweh cult! They were made part
of the ‘Jewish race’ – and were circumcised accordingly – giving
the lie to the latter-day notion that circumcision had something
to do with ‘health’!
In fact, the
Bible tells us that circumcision
is purely symbolic and that the obligation extended to purchased
slaves. We are led to believe that ‘the LORD appeared to Abram’ (who
was ninety nine years old at the time!) and (of all possibilities)
told him:
"And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you … He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised: and my covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant. And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant."
– Genesis 17.11,14.
Thus, for the Jews, ‘race’ was determined by one’s mother and/or forced genital mutilation, unless that is, political expediency stepped in and required otherwise!
Having thus ‘defined’ their race in a conveniently flexible way, Jewish hostility to marriage outside the cult, fussy dietary laws, and generations of inter-breeding, protected the Jewish gene-pool. Certain physiological traits may have become pronounced, though hardly unique. By the time Greek civilization advanced across the eastern Mediterranean, the Jews were an in-bred cult of several generations, a ‘pseudo-race’, possessors of a sacred text of racial superiority.
Sources:
Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (Phoenix Grant, 1987)
Dan Cohn-Sherbok, The Crucified Jew (Harper Collins,1992)
Henry Hart Milman, The History of the Jews (Everyman, 1939)
Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion (Pluto, 1994)
Josephus, The Jewish War (Penguin, 1959)
Leslie Houlden (Ed.), Judaism & Christianity (Routledge, 1988)
Karen Armstrong, A History of Jerusalem (Harper Collins, 1999)
Jonathan N. Tubb, Canaanites (British Museum Press, 1998)
Norman Cantor, The Sacred Chain - A History of the Jews (HarperCollins, 1994)
Thomas L. Thompson, The Bible in History (Pimlico, 2000)
Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (Phoenix Grant, 1987)
Dan Cohn-Sherbok, The Crucified Jew (Harper Collins,1992)
Henry Hart Milman, The History of the Jews (Everyman, 1939)
Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion (Pluto, 1994)
Josephus, The Jewish War (Penguin, 1959)
Leslie Houlden (Ed.), Judaism & Christianity (Routledge, 1988)
Karen Armstrong, A History of Jerusalem (Harper Collins, 1999)
Jonathan N. Tubb, Canaanites (British Museum Press, 1998)
Norman Cantor, The Sacred Chain - A History of the Jews (HarperCollins, 1994)
Thomas L. Thompson, The Bible in History (Pimlico, 2000)
