God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible (15 page)
Read God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible Online
Authors: CJ Werleman
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The Lord will cause you to be defeated by your enemies.”
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Your carcasses will be food for all the birds of the air.”
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The Lord will afflict with you madness, blindness and confusion.”
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You will be pledged to be married to a woman, but another will take her and ravish her.”
(Who but a man could write this?)
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Your sons and daughters will be given as slaves to another nation.”
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The Lord will afflict your knees and legs.”
I think you get the point. One paragraph for the blessings you get for blinding obedience and multiple pages of wrath for disobedience.
At one hundred and twenty years of age, Moses was becoming frail and of ill-health. God came down from the sky and sat at Moses’ bedside and delivered him the news that he was dying and therefore it would not be him that led the Israelites into the Promised Land. God said to Moses:
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You shall not cross the Jordan. The Lord your God himself will cross ahead of you. He will destroy these nations before you and you will take possession of their land.” (Deuteronomy 31:3-5 NIV)
Before taking off on his cloud, God told Moses to anoint Joshua as his successor, to which he summoned him:
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(Joshua) Be strong and courageous, for you must go with this people into the land that the Lord swore to their forefathers to give them and you must go with this people into the land that the Lord swore to their forefathers to give them and you must divide it among them as their inheritance.” (Deuteronomy 31:1-7 NIV)
God then spoke directly to his new charge, Joshua:
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Be strong and courageous, for you will bring the Israelites into the land I promised them on oath and I myself will be with you.” (Deuteronomy 31:23 NIV)
As Moses’ final days approached he read a blessing to all the tribes of Israel, which finished with the words:
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Blessed are you, O Israel! Who is like you, a people saved by the Lord? He is your shield and helper and your glorious sword. Your enemies will cower before you and you will trample down their high places.” (Deuteronomy 33: 29)
Moses can’t even bring himself to offer a message of peace on his deathbed, as he continues with the rhetoric of conquest. Which I guess is fair representation of the leadership of this vicious, fictitious character, on which the story of the Old Testament hangs.
Moses died at one hundred and twenty years of age in Moab and according to the bible:
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but to this day no-one know where his grave is.” (Deuteronomy 34:6 NIV)
Here ending the books of the Jewish Pentateuch. And what have we learnt via these books of God given laws? Well, in summary, we have learnt that God orders us to: kill anyone who worships a different god; kill anyone who worships idols; kill anyone who blasphemes; kill anyone who dishonors their parents; kill anyone who works on Saturday; kill anyone who commits adultery; kill any woman who has sex before marriage; kill anyone who steals a slave; kill anyone who has homosexual sex and wage genocidal war against any city or country that permits religious freedom.
Deuteronomy Count: 70,000
The genocide of Anakim = 5,000.
The eradication of the King of Heshbon’s three cities = 5,000.
God ensured the defeat of the Bashanites and all citizens of Bashan’s sixty cities were butchered = 50,000.
Cumulative Count: 31,718,001
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Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.”
Blaise Pascal
The book of Joshua contains a history of the Israelites from the death of Moses to that of Joshua. After Moses’ death, Joshua, by virtue of his previous appointment as Moses’ successor, received from God the command to cross the Jordan River to receive the Promised Land. Unfortunately, God had failed to inform the many then current occupants of the said territory and hence begins hundreds of years of conquest and ethnic cleansing. Whilst bearing in mind that the Promised Land referred to is hardly the awe-inspiring vegetation of New Hampshire in the fall, but rather, is little more than a sand filled wasteland hugging a tiny strip of the Mediterranean Sea.
The book essentially consists of three parts:
The history of the conquest of the land.
The allotment of the land to the different tribes.
The farewell addresses of Joshua, with an account of his death.
What makes this book stand out is God’s love for extermination, eradication and elimination of any country, city, or person that could potentially or actually impede the Israelite land grab. There is more bloodshed in this book than any other in the Bible, as this accounts for Joshua wiping out entire civilizations, men, women and babies, whilst following the Lord’s orders. God said in Leviticus 19 that we should ‘love our neighbors’, it seems what he meant was ‘love them as long as they don’t occupy the land you want’.
I find it somewhat bemusing that Christians or Jews will debase Islam for ‘atrocities’ committed in the last thirty or so years but will not flinch when learning of the savage elimination of entire ethnic groups ordained by God on behalf of the Hebrews. Atrocities of the most gut-wrenching ever recorded in history.
After Moses had passed, God says to Joshua:
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Moses my servant is dead. Now then, you and all these people, get ready to cross the Jordan River into the land that I am about to give them – to the Israelites. I will give you every foot, as I promised Moses. Your territory will extend from the desert to Lebanon and from the great river, the Euphrates to the Great Sea on the west. No one will be able to stand against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave or forsake you.” (Joshua 1:15 NIV)
God tells Joshua to be strong and courageous and reminds Joshua that the Israelites stay true to the laws that Moses had given them via God. Joshua takes the required action and orders his officers to tell the people:
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Get your supplies ready. Three days from now you will cross the Jordan here to go in and take possession of the land the Lord your God is giving you for your own.” (Joshua 1:10-11 NIV)
Joshua now has his mission from God, cue ‘
Blues Brothers’
theme music, and whilst it may seem more than a small logistical problem that the land is already occupied by other prospering societies, that is but a small bump in the road with God as your landlord. The Lord so taketh and giveth.
Unfortunately, for the men, women, and children of Jericho, God had determined that the land within the confines of the city walls, that they had resided on for probably hundreds if not thousands of years, was now to be allotted to his favorite human beings, and for this they would all soon be skewered by the Israelite swords.
Camped on the outskirts of the city of Jericho, Joshua sends out two spies who sneak in behind the city’s fortified walls. The two spies take refuge with a Jericho prostitute named Rahab. Hey, if you are on a mission from God, why not rack up some ‘entertainment’ costs on his travel expense account?
It’s not long before the King of Jericho is informed that some Israelite spies are within the confines of the city and he learns soon thereafter that the spies are with Rahab the sex worker. The King sends a message to the accommodating hooker:
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Bring out the men who came to you and entered your house, because they have come to spy out the whole land.” (Joshua 2:2-3 NIV)
Rahab sent a reply that yes the two Israelites had come to ‘visit’ her, wink wink, but they left the city before dusk and the closing of the city gates and that she had no knowledge of where they had fled to. However, she had hidden the two spies in the attic of her roof. Later that night she went up into the roof to speak with her harbored fugitives:
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I know that the Lord has given this great land to you and that great fear of you has fallen on us, so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you.” (Joshua 2:9 NIV)
Fearing for her life, in what she is sure is a forthcoming attack on the city by the Israelites, she asks the Israelite spies to spare her life and that of her family in return for the kindness she displayed in offering them sanctuary from the King of Jericho. The spies agreed to make such a pact with her, “Our lives for your lives,” they said. Meaning that they will agree to her plea if she helps them out of the city alive. The two clandestine operatives:
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This oath you made us swear will not be binding unless, when we enter the land, you have tied this scarlet cord in the window and have brought your father and mother, your brothers and all of your family into your house. If anyone goes outside the house (at the time we attack), then his blood will be on his own head.” (Joshua 2:17-19 NIV)
The spies successfully fled and reported back to Joshua that all the men of the land tremble in fear of the Israelites. Joshua then assembled his troops and readied to cross the River Jordan. Once at the river banks, the water was flowing rapidly and they could not cross. That was until a little divine assistance, which, in the parting of the Red Sea style, miraculously stopped the flow of the entire river as soon as their feet touched the water’s edge. With the Jordan no longer an obstacle, 40,000 Israelite soldiers armed for battle crossed over to the plains of Jericho in readiness for war.
After repeating his predecessor’s maritime miracle, Joshua ordered each tribal leader to collect one stone from the riverbed as reminder to future generations that God had helped the Israelites cross the Jordan just as he had helped them cross the Red Sea, more than 40 years earlier.
If you can imagine, because I can’t, 40,000 grown men being circumcised at the same time in the same place, then you are successfully imagining what took place in days prior to the attack on Jericho. 40,000 men having the protective sheaf of their penis carved off with flint knives, so that they would be ‘clean’ again and in honor of God’s covenant. And according to the Bible, this is what necessitated this group genital mutilation:
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All those who came out of Egypt – all men of military age – died in the desert on the way after leaving Egypt. All the people that came out had been circumcised, but all the people born in the desert during the journey from Egypt had not.” (Joshua 5:4-5 NIV)
Can you imagine the guy standing way up the back laughing with his buddy, “Hey, I thought Joshua just said we had to cut off the protective layer of our cocks! He must have meant socks, eh?” What?
40,000 men mutilating their most treasured apparatus in preparation for war is just something that I can’t even begin to put words to. I’m speechless – I have no speech. Except for my puerile default position in nicknaming this event the world’s first ‘Great Sausage Fest’!
Jericho was now on lockdown, in anticipatory fear that the Israelites would soon attack. The King of Jericho decreed that no individual was permitted to leave the city, nor was anyone granted entry into the city. As Joshua continued the military build-up on the city outskirts, God spoke to him:
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See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands, along with its king and its fighting men. March around the city once with all the armed men. Do this for six days. Make seven priests carry trumpets of ram’s horns in front of the ark (of covenant). On the seventh day, march around the city seven times, with the priests blowing trumpets. When you hear them sound a long blast on the trumpets, make all the people give a loud shout; then the wall of the city will collapse and the people will go up, every man straight in.” (Joshua 6:2-5 NIV)
Only a half decent fictional writer could possibly come up with the idea that blowing trumpets and shouting at the top of your lungs could make a fortified city perimeter come tumbling down. This miraculous military operation to be performed after the troops had needlessly exhausted themselves by trudging around the city boundaries prior to the attack. It puzzles me why God being as powerful as he is, would order such trivialities when he had demonstrated time and time again that he has the power to make the walls come down himself.