With the spectacle of religious violence on the rise, particularly by Islamists; I think it is time to take a hard look at the monotheistic vision of God from its inception. Not from the time of Mohammad, though his followers were spectacularly violent, but further back to the effective birth of the monotheistic religion that is the basis for Islam, Christianity and Judaism.  I think we need to look at the story of Moses and his general Joshua.  Actually, we need to look at the vision of God that is presented in the story of the Exodus and the conquest of the land of Israel and the actions of those two key figures.

I know most people in the US know the story, but the question is have you ever really thought about what it says beyond the feel good story of an oppressed people being freed?

Consider this.  The story opens in the empire of Egypt, ruled by a god-king, Pharaoh Ramses the Great.  In this world, everyone, rich and poor, are essentially owned by the Pharaoh.  In the story God tells Moses that his people should be released from bondage and leave Egypt. Significantly, not all people should be freed from slavery and oppression, but only a select group.  This clearly indicates that the God of Moses did not believe in universal human rights, but only in rights for his chosen people.  Thus the concept of justice by race and/or group affiliation is given divine sanction. 

The story goes on that when Pharaoh refuses to let the Hebrews go that God sends a series of plagues of increasing severity.  Again significantly these plagues are not limited to the Pharaoh’s person, but on all the peoples of Egypt, nearly all of whom are slaves or poor working people.  The purpose of these plagues was to undermine Pharaohs wealth and power. The harm to ordinary people is blithely justified by the harm it will do to Pharaoh.  Then the last plague, where the first-born child of every woman, rich and poor, slave and free would die unless they effectively join the revolt by putting the sign on their door.   This is a horrendous act of violence committed almost entirely on the innocent. Given the lack of modern instant communication, the vast majority of those who died would never have heard of Moses nor of his God’s promise to spare all those who put lamb’s blood over their doorposts.  Even Hebrews who were traveling, or simply didn’t get the word would also have died.   Imagine if a time traveler made a YouTube video of the piles of corpses with over 10% of the population dying overnight.  As we know from the black death, following these series of plagues, the hardship, disease and more death resulting from burned crops, dead farm animals and general social displacement would surely have lasted long after Moses and his people were gone.    That would instantly change the public view of this event to most of the population from a story of deliverance to one of capricious violence.

But why does Moses say God did this?  According to the words attributed to Moses, it happened because Pharaoh, someone over which the grieving population had no control, was in an argument with Moses over one group of slaves.

The story continues, and the Hebrew slaves are freed, that is what people like to remember, not the pain left on the entire population after their departure.  These people just don’t matter to the narrative after Moses gets what he wants.

It is important to note that Moses records that many, who were not descendants of Abraham, escaped with the departing Hebrews to form a more heterogeneous group. It was to this mixed group that Moses presented the laws of the Hebrew God. These laws had two purposes. First the law would unify the multi-ethic group of people with a single cultural identity; and second it provided the legal framework for a new civil society.   In the first goal, these set of laws worked better than anything to come before or since. The Jews are the only tribal group from that era to maintain their cohesion and identity to this day; and the rules laid out in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy are still the basis of that identity.

With this new found unity, the people receive orders from God, via Moses, that they are to invade the land across the Jordan River and claim it for their own.  There was only one problem. People already lived there.  However, God had a ready solution. Kill them all. Not just the soldiers and leaders, but everyone.  The Bible specifically spells out that the population was told, that the commandment not to murder did not apply in this case. Based on Moses, and later Joshua’s word that this was God’s will, average men were supposed to go in and murder men, women and children indiscriminately.  Moreover in several cases they were to kill all the animals as well and destroy all the goods they found. The goal was total obliteration of these societies.

We tell kids about how God brought down the walls a Jericho, but we leave out the bloody slaughter that followed.  Imagine whole family’s huddled in the corner of their homes begging for mercy  for their children only to be clubbed to death or cut to pieces with dull bronze swords because Joshua had said it was God’s direct order to do so.  Imagine the image of soldiers running their sword through a begging mother and then bashing her baby’s head into the stone floor.  This is the real story of Jericho, not the walls falling down. Yet, we just leave this part out. Again, a YouTube video of this event would forever change people’s vision of this ancient view of God.

So, at God’s command the army of Joshua fans out killing everyone in their path. It matters not to them if these people were kind or cruel, just or unjust. They were just so many “others” to be killed. Imagine a landscape filled with burning houses containing the dead bodies of people whose only crime was to be living in land God gave to “His People.”   Remember photos of the NAZI’s killing whole villages as they moved across Ukraine and Russia, that is exactly what it was like (except the killing was done with knives and swords, and they killed literally everyone).

The Bible records that when one Israelite man failed to destroy some of the goods he found in one house, God punished the whole tribe. That was how serious he was about his call for genocide.  When one town was saved by subterfuge, God pronounced judgement on the future of the new nation for not killing everyone they came across.

Why am I dwelling on this? Because my friends in the Christian conservative camp quite loudly proclaim that the Bible is a perfect record of history, not a book of allegories.  They insist that the creation story and Noah’s flood happened just the way it says. Since they are quite clear that the Bible is literal and not figurative, then I think they need to take another look at what they are endorsing.  If they are right and God is eternal and never changing, then our entire society is built on a lie. People are not all equal, and God does not value the life of individuals, nor does he expect them to be judged based on their individual actions; but rather people are judged first upon their membership in the right religious group and only afterward do their individual actions matter.

If we continue to claim, for instance, that homosexuality is a grievous sin against God because Moses said so, then good Christians must endorse ISIS putting gay men to death; because that is what Moses said to do.  Not only that, we would have to say that their killing of non-monotheists is also a good thing since that is what Joshua did at God’s command. There is no way to claim both that the Books of Moses are infallible history and should still guide our laws and  actions today without also endorsing the  brutality of enforcement.

The simple truth is that if one is to be intellectually honest, one must either say the writings regarding the Exodus and settling of Israel were mythical allegories written well after the fact, or they are an accurate record of not only what happened, but of the nature of God and his view of justice.  If you embrace the former, then one can literally believe the words of Jesus promoting a view of a God that promotes love and justice over vengeance and conformity.  If we believe the latter, we have to believe in a God that holds no value on human life and individual justice.  If we believe the latter we must then  interpret the words of Jesus in a very different light, discounting their literal meaning and twisting them not to mean what they say.

Of course it is not just Christians who are faced with this problem. My step-family are Jewish and they, like the vast majority of Jews, do not believe that God is brutal and that the stories are important allegories, but they are not literally historically accurate.  There are a few Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel that embrace the old brutal God and advocate the expelling of all Muslims from the lands that God told Moses and Joshua to occupy.  However, there are actually far more right-wing Christians who embrace this view than Jews.  There is a significant strain of fundamentalist Christianity that wholeheartedly and with eyes open embrace the genocidal vision of God.  But I do not write to them, I write to those who have never really considered the intellectual quandary that these two very different visions of God presents.

Of course, there is one other choice, God changed. We could say that the brutal God of the Exodus saw the error of his ways and became a loving God for all humanity.  That would solve the problem, but to me the idea of an all knowing and all powerful God changing like that just doesn’t make sense.  The whole point of being God is that you are always right, and a God that can make such a mistake would not be a God in which we can have faith.

And let me mention one other quandary that the literalist position presents.  In the Biblical record, God did not reveal his “exceptions” to the “do not kill” commandment to everyone, but literally to one person.  Everyone who actually killed babies was doing so based on the orders of his superiors, who believed that Moses and Joshua had the right to counter the clear law that was literally written in stone.  There is no guidance as to who speaks for God and who are just charlatans.  Does this ability to speak for God continue to this day? If so is it the Pope, Mohammad, Joseph Smith or Jim Jones we should believe has the power to override the commandments?  Or do we just have to choose one and having chosen one, obey his every command, no matter how it contradicts the ten commandments or Jesus or any other code of conduct. It would seem this is the lesson of Joshua and the genocide he attempted.

I know this will offend some who just don’t want to look too carefully at what they believe, but it is the truth none the less.

In closing, I’ll put it bluntly, if the God of the Exodus is alive today, then the only sin of the NAZI’s was they committed the holocaust on the wrong people, not that systematic slaughter of innocents is inherently wrong.   Can you embrace such a God?