Thursday, January 31, 2013

Bible Study: Did You Even Read This Thing?

The Bible I am working with is a New Living Translation "Live" Bible, geared toward teenagers and other people with no critical thinking skills. It is therefore interspersed with bizarre additions, such as little articles proclaiming the goodness and glory of God, crappy amateur photography with ambiguous names that are completely irrelevant to anything, and chunks of pages left blank and dubbed "creative space", as if having a little 2 by 3 square to doodle in is going to inspire great masterpieces or spiritual revelations. (Maybe it's for writing "Jesus loves me" surrounded by little hearts. I'm not going to pretend to fathom their minds.)

What I find most interesting about this, though, is their painful attempts to tie in the sordid, sickening stories of the Old Testament into the lovey-dovey stuff of the New Testament. For instance, there a little article titled "Jesus Sighting" in Deuteronomy, which discusses the story in which Jesus says that the most important commandment is to love God and have no other God before him:

"Here, God commands us to love him above all else. Jesus' answer gives us a glimpse into who he really is - no some score-keeping, rule-obsessed* deity ready to whack your hand with a ruler when you misbehave. Rather, Jesus shows us that behind all of these seemingly nit-picky laws in Deuteronomy is a loving God" (Baker et. al 183).

This saccharine little line runs completely opposite to the past seven chapters of Deuteronomy. Exactly adjacent to it is this:

Deuteronomy 7:2 - "When the Lord your God hands these nations [of Canaan] over to you and you conquer them, you must completely destroy them. Make no treaties with them and show them no mercy."

Did you even read this thing!? You're going to go on about a loving, ineffable, infallible God, directly across from a section in which he instructs the Israelites to pillage and burn and kill indiscriminately. Commit genocide, effectively. Are you paying attention at all?! Sure, it's great that Jesus is the picture of Aristotelian morality, but you're going to proclaim that on the same page where the Israelites kill thousands of people?! Are you awake in there? How did your copy editors not see this?

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*Leviticus 10 - Nahab and Abihu, Aaron's sons, use the wrong kind of incense fire on the Tabernacle, and are summarily barbecued.
Numbers 15 - A man was gathering wood on the Sabbath, and so the community brings him before the Tabernacle and asks God what to do with him. God tells them to stone him to death. So they do.
Nope, not nit-picky at all! Ahahahaahah!

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