The Logical Atheist

  If you want to know what a leading Israeli archaeologist has to say about the stories told in the Hebrew Bible, you can make a good start by listing to a 26-part conversation with Israel Finkelstein, professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and the head of the School of Archaeology and Maritime Cultures at the University of Haifa. These half-hour conversations, conducted by Matthew J. Adams of the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, are directed at interested laymen, and I highly recommend them. Finkelstein's book, The Bible Unearthed:  Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts , written with Neil Asher Silberman, is a thoroughly enjoyable read. You already realize that the biblical stories are fiction (with a smattering of historical references), but these conversations will fill out your understanding in eye-opening ways. The important matters -- such as the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, the conquest o...

Would Abraham's religious liberty have been violated if someone had tried to stop him from killing his son Isaac as Yahweh had ordered?

 

Would you think differently of God if he had told Abraham to go ahead with the sacrificial killing of Isaac rather than substituting the ram at the last minute?

If first-time Bible readers don't walk away from the Abrahamic religions in utter disgust after reading the outrageous tales of Adam and Eve, Noah and the flood, or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah along with the murder of Lot's wife, then the story of the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22, not the video game) should do the trick. What an evil story in every respect!  I couldn't bear to rehearse the details, which everyone knows anyway. And I won't discuss the endless and pointless interpretations of medieval and modern rabbis and other so-called religious authorities. Calling the story an allegory gets you nowhere: what is its point? Nothing good, that's for sure. It's enough to know the broad plot. Abraham robotically agrees to carry out God's command to butcher and then burn his son Isaac (his wife Sarah's only child) as a sacrifice, and Isaac is robotically obeys his father command to prepare for the event. If I wanted to play at biblical interpretat...