The Logical Atheist

It's more than plausible that the Five Books of Moses and the rest of the Hebrew Bible are about political domination and submission. (The other bibles may well be that too, but I haven't read them.) It's reasonable to think that the authors wrote them on behalf of, or to curry favor with, their rulers in an attempt to make the masses afraid to think for themselves and perhaps defy the ruling elite. (They may have had more than one motivation, of course.)  There were 12 tribes that a ruling class wished to hold together through anticipation of divine rewards and fear of divine punishment. The objective was to promote allegiance. (I can imagine an honorable but misguided motive for this -- group survival in a violent world.) The scriptures were a warning: do what we say your god commands or Yahweh will be so angry he will do some or all the horrible things that are threatened and in some cases perpetrated throughout these books. Follow his commands to a T (as conveyed by us)...

Leaving aside all of the logical problems with a supernatural being, how can the Hebrew Bible be the basis for a religion that claims to be about justice, righteousness, and goodness?

2 Samuel 24:10-25 (Emphasis added.) And David said unto HaShem [literally, "The Name," that is, Yahweh]: 'I have sinned greatly in what I have done; but now, O HaShem, put away, I beseech Thee, the iniquity of Thy servant; for I have done very foolishly.' [Among his sins, David committed adultery with Bathsheba, impregnating her, and then had her husband, Uriah, sent to a battlefront where he was killed so David could hide and sin and marry her.] And when David rose up in the morning, the word of HaShem came unto the prophet Gad, David's seer, saying: 'Go and speak unto David: Thus saith HaShem: I lay upon thee three things; choose thee one of them, that I may do it unto thee.' So Gad came to David, and told him, and said unto him: 'Shall seven years of famine come unto thee in thy land? or wilt thou flee three months before thy foes while they pursue thee? or shall there be three days' pestilence in thy land? now advise thee, and consider what ans...

And [the prophet Elisha ] went up from there to Bethel, and he was going up on the road and some little boys came out of the city and jeered him, and said to him, "Go away, baldy; go away, baldy!" And he turned around and saw them, and he cursed them in the name of God. And two she-bears came out of the forest and tore apart forty-two boys of them. --2 Kings 2:23-24

With tongue firmly in cheek, the other day I suggested that the Hebrew Bible was written and edited by people who seem, to put it mildly, to have disliked the Israelites and their god; that is, by antisemites. My point is that the 24 books consist virtually of nonstop defamation of an entire population over millennia along with its tribal deity. (The children of Israel were polytheists most of the time.) Mass murder, slavery, collective punishment, and divine petulance and vindictiveness are to be found on nearly every page. How else to explain these illustrative passages? 2 Kings 21:10-14   The Lord said through his servants the prophets: “Manasseh king of Judah has committed these detestable sins. He has done more evil than the Amorites who preceded him and has led Judah into sin with his idols. Therefore this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: I am going to bring such disaster on Jerusalem and Judah that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle. I will stretch o...

Who are the antisemites who wrote the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)? Those books are most unflattering to the Children of Israel and their god, Yahweh. The authors and editors make the Protocols' scribes look like pikers.

  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...

You cannot read the Book of Numbers without realizing that Yahweh is the Donald Trump of deities: a petty, self-absorbed, vain, vindictive, and cruel god. Who'd want to worship that?