God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible (28 page)

Included in Ecclesiastes is a poem that many book and movie titles and song lyrics have drawn their inspiration from:

Fred Allen

This book is a love song between two characters, Solomon and his maid, a Shulamite woman. Before you get swept away by the romance of this song, as did singers Kate Bush and Sinead O’Connor who drew inspiration from here, remember that Solomon had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. This was a man who had a lot of love to hand around.

The song reads as a dialogue between Solomon and his maid, with a few interjections from some random women of Jerusalem. The book is one of the shortest of the Bible consisting of a mere 117 verses, as it depicts the courtship through to consummation of a fledgling romantic affair.

The authorship, whilst claiming to be that of Solomon himself, is more likely to be that of an anonymous third-party and begins with the maid declaring her infatuation:

You can’t blame her for wanting to get her knickers off in quick time when she was competing for his attention against 1000 of his other women.

Solomon replies:

The maid obviously takes no insult in being likened to a horse and replies with subtle sexual provocation:

Admittedly, this song is filled with beautiful imagery throughout, and hence little wonder it has inspired many song writers throughout history, all the way back to Bach. To paraphrase this book would certainly not do justice to its poetry and thus I will leave you with one of my personal favorite verses:

The next time you arrive late home from the pub, you should modify the words of this song to your own situation and attach them to a bunch of roses. Whatever misdemeanour you have committed in the eyes of your wife, her wrath surely cannot withstand this kind of prose that typically makes women go weak at the knees.

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It has been said that the aforementioned books of poetry, that include Psalms and Proverbs, reflect the period known as the golden age of the Israelite nation, whereas the books of the prophets belong to the dark ages of God’s chosen people. A period of time that saw the two kingdoms, Judah and Israel, divided into separate monarchies before eventually falling into captivity (exile) at the hands of the respective Babylonian and Assyrian empires.

As we will review in the coming sixteen chapters, there are a total of sixteen prophets, four of which are considered the ‘major’ prophets and the remaining twelve as the ‘minor’.

God instituted the office of the prophet to communicate his message to the respective kings, with his primary duty being to remind the people of his time to walk the righteous walk. In this sense, you can more or less think of the prophet as your high school hallway monitor, who ensured you were never late to class, guided you to the right doorway and snitched on you if you mucked about with your prankster buddies.

The period of the prophets covered approximately five hundred years from the tenth to fifth century BC.

I freely admit, I do love the books of the Prophets. Arguably, they were the few men of the Old Testament who displayed an appreciation and understanding of social justice, as they protested against corruption and unfair treatment. And they didn’t just protest via scribbling away on a few pieces of papyrus. They protested through street demonstrations, making them the Biblical ancestors of famous street performer David Blaine. The prophet Isaiah walked the streets naked to get his point across; Jeremiah walked the streets with a wooden yoke around his neck to symbolize his warning that the Israelites would soon be captives of neighboring enemies as punishment for turning their backs on God; Ezekiel slept on the street for 430 consecutive days eating nothing but bread and human feces.

Let us now learn the teachings and warnings of the prophets.

Aristotle

The first book of the prophets is that of Isaiah who wrote of his communication with both God and the Israelites of Judah in the final years prior to the exile into Babylon, whilst Israel was already in exile to Assyria.

Isaiah prophesized during the period of the kings of Judah, that included the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah. An interesting factoid is that Isaiah includes exactly sixty-six chapters, that being the same number as the Bible.

During the reign of kings Uzziah and Jotham, Isaiah continually preached that the kingdom of Judah was on path to follow the destructive fate of Israel and this is reflected in Isaiah’s first telegram from God, which reads:

He adds worldly emphasis to his warning with:

Later, adding symbolic warning by walking naked for a continual period of three years amongst the people of Judah. The message being that if Judah followed Israel’s wicked ways they too would end up naked as prisoners in exile.

Isaiah is quick to remind the kingdom of Judah that God will protect their way of life if they continue to follow his laws, forsake other Gods or Idols and pursue the righteous path, whilst simultaneously offering a not so subtle reminder of what fate awaits if they choose the wrong option:

Despite Isaiah’s promise of God’s intervention for disobedience, the house of Judah continued to follow in the wayward footsteps of its sister kingdom Israel and evidently his prophetic words fell on deaf ears.

Matters continued to deteriorate in Judah in the eyes of God, with the death of Uzziah and Jotham and the arrival of Ahaz as new king. Ahaz was an open idolater and followed many pagan traditions, which really ticked God off, and likewise his proxy, Isaiah. In the background, Assyria was readying itself to invade Judah and, with a much superior military, King Ahaz panicked that doom was surely heading his way. God summoned Isaiah to offer encouragement to Ahaz that he would protect the Judahan army and people. The message from God to Ahaz via Isaiah read:

Ahaz’s faith in God was flimsy at best, and he sought the comfort of praising other idols in his place. Isaiah, growing impatient, told Ahaz in what is a stand out passage for Christians as false evidence that Isaiah foretold the arrival of Jesus Christ, that God would provide a sign of his power:

The above passage, as we will see, will become ammunition for the Jesus crew later in the New Testament. All this jibber-jabber of meta-physically impossible virgin births, a story told countless times throughout numerous ancient civilizations did little to impress or sway Ahaz, and as promised by God, the Assyrians invaded and took capture of Judah, with God sounding the trumpet for the enemy:

God continues to call on Ahaz to fear him and bow to his power, whilst Isaiah continues with the foretelling of a messianic like child:

Christians interpret these passages as Isaiah’s prediction of the birth of Jesus Christ, whilst Jews believe it to be the promise of a new king to deliver Israel back to the Promised Land in unity. Depending on what side of the fence you sit, you are free to interpret this meaning in whatever way you will.

A common theme of the Bible is that God permits nations to inflict carnage on his chosen people when he deems their behavior deserves punishment, but in all instances the conquerors are smashed in swift God-led retribution upon such time that Israel corrects itself.

This is continued with Isaiah’s prophecy of Babylon’s doom, whom the house of Israel are captive to. The prophet does not attempt to cover God’s baby killing lust when he says: