On Prayer and Related Matters

What's the deal with prayer? Think about it: it seems aimed at getting Yahweh to do what he otherwise would not have done. Let's leave out the football players who pray for victory and stuff like that. We'll confine ourselves to serious things: praying that your very sick child will recover, or that you'll be able to feed your family, or that we won't go to war. Why would Yahweh need to be prayed to about such things? Doesn't the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good Supreme Being and Creator of the Universe know the right thing to do without being begged by suffering supplicants? And besides, wouldn't Yahweh have foreseen the whole thing: the tragedy, the prayerful response, and his own response? Is this a game he plays, sort of like the cruel game he and the devil played with regard to Job?

I just don't get it.

By the way, whenever a pope is deathly ill and looks to be heading to his great reward, I hear Catholics urged to pray for him. Come again? If we can't be sure that the pontiff will be treated right, what hope can the rest of us have? And what exactly are Catholics to pray for on behalf of a pope -- one ticket to paradise or an extension of his term in this vale of tears?

Related to praying are the biblical tales in which Israelites directly confronted Yahweh and persuaded him to reverse a ruling. Abraham and Moses did this, but so did some less-exalted foks. An especially interesting case is related in Exodus 32 after the Israelites, led by Moses's brother, Aaron, made a golden calf and had a big party. Recall the context. The Israelites hadn't heard from Moses for 40 days -- he was up on Mount Sinai with the Lord -- and they probably and reasonably suspected he was dead. Now, stuck in the middle of a large desert without much food or water, they wondered what to do next. So they made a golden calf, which according to some interpretations wasn't a new god at all, but an image of Yahweh. (Ancient people weren't idiots; they didn't think manmade figures were gods, just representations of gods.)  

Yahweh and Moses got wind of all this, and the Almighty was ... well, let's just say annoyed. Moses's people had sinned (at this moment in Yahweh's eyes, suddenly they were Moses's people) and now they, per Yahweh's earlier vow, must die. 

An aside: why must they die? Because they sinned? How so? True, the Ten Commandments (#2 in all three versions, Exodus 20, 34, and Deuteronomy 5, the last of which is actually 11 commandments) forbids making graven or molten images of Yahweh (or of anything else in versions 1 and 3, actually!) -- but the tablets had not yet come down from the mountain! The Israelites had no notice! Was ignorance of the law really no excuse in this case, when capital punishment by fire was the penalty?

Back to our story. Moses didn't want to see the children of Israel wiped out. A leader needs people to lead, after all. So he pleaded for leniency. He even pointed out that if Yahweh smote all the Israelites, Egypt would have won a moral victory. In effect, Moses argued: "The Egyptians will be able to say the God of Israel took his people out only to kill them in the wilderness. Some God!" 

Yahweh's first reaction to Moses was to order him to leave so that he could unleash his fiery anger. But Moses didn't back off. He told Yahweh to "repent," and after more argument, repent Yahweh did. Hear that again: Yahweh, under prodding from a mere mortal, repented. Amazing.

Now this is a very strange story. Unsurprisingly, over the years rabbis have interpreted it in many ways. I learned from Yale University biblical scholar Christine Hayes that some rabbis read the story to say that Yahweh was begging Moses to stop him from punishing Israel. According to this interpretation, when Yahweh said, "Now therefore let Me alone, that My wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them" (Exodus 32:10), he really meant that Moses shouldn't let Yahweh alone because if he did, Yahweh would execute his death sentence. I'm no rabbi, but I don't see how anyone could read the passage that way. But authorities do. (I'm using the 1917 English translation of the Hebrew Bible published by the Jewish Publication Society.)

The story also shows Yahweh asking Moses to release him from the commitment Yahweh had made earlier to exterminate sinners. Pride or something like that apparently kept Yahweh from releasing himself from his own commitment! (Again, didn't he foresee all this?) It's as though Yahweh didn't really want to kill everyone, but since he had vowed to do it, he couldn't back down. How would that look? Who'd believe his bluster the next time?

Moses absolved him and that was that. But not all Israelites were off the hook. On Yahweh's instruction Moses later told the tribe of Levi to "go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour. And the sons of Levi did according to the word of Moses; and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men" (Exodus 32:27-28). As the reward for carrying out the death sentences, the Levites were made a privileged class forever; they'd get all but the top temple sinecures. It might have been three million killed, so I guess Moses accomplished something.

What are we to make of this story (besides that it never happened)? It makes Yahweh out to be capricious, insanely jealous ("the Lord, whose name is Jealous," 34:14), prone to fits of genocidal rage, and ... at times rather needy and unsure of himself. Yahweh depended on Moses's support and restraint: "Moses, stop me before I smite again!" Whether Moses was Yahweh's partner or adversary in the story, it's not a pretty picture.

The Lord here more resembles a deeply flawed and impressionable human being or, at most, an imperfect pagan god, perhaps the offspring of a mixed god-mortal union. It is certainly not the portrait of a perfect Supreme Being.

Yahweh wouldn't have had to be omniscient to know that the only reason anyone would (pretend to) worship him would be to avoid his deadly wrath. Was he so insecure that he was okay with that basis for adoration? Pitiful.

If you were shown the books we call the Bible today and told they had just been discovered, you'd never believe it was anything but fantasy.