The seventh chapter of Barker's book is 'Bloodthirsty'. "The Lord has a sword; it is sated with blood", it ominously starts out with (courtesy of Isaiah, which comes to appear more & more like a 'usual suspect' of brutal scripture. Only Leviticus seems to appear more.)
Barker starts us out reviewing the 'Korah incident' with the story continuing thence:
"On the next day, however, the whole congregation of the Israelites rebelled against Moses & against Aaron, saying, 'You have killed the people of the Lord'"
I feel that many of us reading these turgid books today would come up with a similar response. We would petition in the name of humanism that this is not right; that Moses & his theocracy, supported by YHWH is committing atrocities. & the lord would have dispensed with us. For those again 'in rebellion', he proceeds in this manner: (according to Numbers 16:42-49)
"For wrath has gone out from the Lord; the plague has begun"
According to Barker, "Those who died by the plague were 14,700, besides those who died in the affair of Korah." In explaining the attribution of 'bloodthirstiness' to this deity, Barker explains:
"'Bloodthirsty' does not mean simply a thirst for blood. It includes a desire to kill or maim by any method"
YHWH's preferred methods seem to be smiting with his 'glistening sword' (that is, glistening with blood), death by plague, and even impaling decapitated heads on pikes. One may pain at the fact that the way the Jews were historically treated was uncomfortably similar to how the Jews appear to have treated other cultures and religions as they migrated around the 'Holy Land'. It is, in fact, remarkable, to take a broad survey of the violence both described & engendered by the Bible, & to see how de-mobilized & peaceful most of the Jewish world is today minus that of Apartheid Israel. (Jewish communities were almost never sources of political instability, though they were constantly pursued by Christian & sometimes Muslim authorities) Jewish culture has come such a long way from the days of slaughtering thousands of animals & people, obeying God's commands that unbelievers be slain, & punishing disobedient children, sexually active women, & bi-sexuals with death. Yet in this 'holy land', there is still much bloodshed. Israeli political Judaism seems like it is just a modern, non-starving, non-nomadic version of the type of practice accorded to those who are 'other'. But these relations- between that of Hebrew scripture, & modern Israeli political expansionism- is an issue best left for another essay, outside of this review. The Old Testament certainly brings up questions of latent violence in the Hebrew culture.
As Barker points out in this chapter on 'bloodthirstiness', the first command that YHWH gives after the Ten Commandments is to kill animals in ritual sacrifices, & then goes on to discuss "how to buy & sell slaves." Charming. In Ezekiel The Lord tells his people that he works in their interests, so that they may enjoy their life of-
"eat(ing) flesh & drink(ing) blood" (39:17-18) (KJV)
Many of Baker's subtitles are sensational ('Mountains soaked with blood', 'Blood on a rock', 'Blood on the wall', 'Incest blood', 'Homosexual blood') & one has to admit that, even though he may be compressing these themes, they are nonetheless present in the text. There is an awful lot of blood in the Old Testament and, as Barker points out, 'blood' is in fact one of the commonest topics of all in the 'holy books.' It is apparent that the god of the Israelites is pretty-much obsessed with blood. Ew.
The never-ending 'love' of 'god' continues to be narrated in....what other book? Isaiah, of course:
"The lord is angry with all nations; his wrath is on all their armies. He will totally destroy them, he will them over to slaughter. Their slain will be thrown out, their dead bodies will stink, the mountains will be soaked with their blood" (34:2-3)
One wonders why the engineers of Christian Orthodoxy did not just eject the Old Testament, for it, unparalleled, demonstrates the vengeful & hateful nature of God. The Old Testament certainly does not do very much to improve the attractiveness of the messianic/evangelical message of Jesus (Or does it? Perhaps this is beyond my level of understanding), & the Jewishness of the Old Testament would have been a liability in an empire in which widespread dislike of the rebellious minority was common. There was a very emphatic stream of pre-orthodox Christianity (Marcionism) in which all Jewishness was stamped-out. Early Church fathers & priests eliminated this tradition out over about a century, but it is a curious subject to ponder-- again, not in this essay.
"...cursed is he who keeps back his sword from bloodshed" (Jeremiah 48:10) (RSV)
So the history of bloodshed in the name of YHWH & Christ does have scriptural backing. These are not books of love. These books only posses an ounce of humanity if one is willing to overlook passage after passage of brutality, hostility, Hebrew propaganda, religious intolerance, bigotry, sexism, & absolute desiccation of our animal friends. The Old Testament is an anti-humanist text, heck, an anti-life text as Baal, oxen, sheep, goats, & assorted other non-humans are also caught in the crossfire. In the book of Ezekiel (32:6) (RSV)-
"I will drench the land even to the mountains with your flowing blood; & the watercourses will be full of you"
Again, gross. & the god sounds like a serial killer. This is disgusting literature. Not because of its content, but because many see this text as non-fiction. This is not presented like the various Horror flicks I love to watch, because for so many of the faithful, this is supposedly their manual of life. Luckily for humanity, not that many of them actually read it.
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| Luckily for us, "Blood Feast" is fiction; for many, The Bible is not |
YHWH states that he is behind those woes that befoul you sinners:
"Again, when a righteous man doth turn from his righteousness, & commit iniquity, & I lay a stumbling-block before him, he shall die; because thou hast not given him warning, he shall die in his sin, & his righteousness which he hath done shall not be remembered; but his blood will I require at thine hand" (Ezekiel 3:16,20) (KJV)
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| I like to think that Jezebel would look like a sort-of sexed-up Bette Midler |
Another heart-warming piece of 'wisdom' in the 'holy book' of 'god'. Highly-doubtful if this is the product of anything that most humans would recognize as 'love'. Barker also quotes from the story of the infamous Jezebel:
"'Throw her down!' Jehu said. So they threw her down, & some of her blood spattered the wall & the horses as they trampled her underfoot...On the plot of ground at Jezeel dogs will devour Jezebel's flesh" (2 Kings 9:33-37) (NJV)
A note on the famous passage in Leviticus 20:13, commonly cited as the anti-homosexuality provision in the Bible; here is the KJV translation of the passage:
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| I, for one, do not believe the two are necessarily the same |
"If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them"
'As he lieth with a woman.' But wouldn't many homosexuals not lieth with woman at all? So therefore he may 'lieth' with men, but not in the way that the passage states, because he doesn't 'lieth' with any women. In this sense, the passage seems more anti-bisexuality or anti-sexual experimentation than it does to be strictly anti-homosexual. The passage seems more concerned with keeping heterosexual people inside the fold, so to speak-- to prevent them from having non-heterosexual experiences that may de-stabilize their families, scandalize their communities, or cost their family status etc...20:13 seems, to me, to be more about protecting the separateness of the homosexual & heterosexual spheres. It seems to me that YHWH, should he 'hath' wanted to outright prohibit homosexual activity, could have done so in a more direct way. But again, I digress for the third time. In a book that will eventually tackle Christianity, 3 is a good stopping-point anyways.
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| lol |
May your blood be upon him!
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