Bible Study: Did You Even Read This Thing? Part II

Priceless poem placement.
On the right page is some sixteen-year-old's terrible poetry:

Page 151 - "Silence"

"How is it 

You're always with me; 

Yet sometimes,

I can't feel a thing?

 Never condemning. 

Never forsaking. 

You're too powerful for words; 

So gentle all the same."

And on the left hand side of the page is this gem of a story:

Numbers 16 - Basically, how the story goes:

The Levites have a rebellion. They say that Moses is acting way too chummy with God, and also they've been wandering around in the wilderness for like ever. They also want the priesthood (For some reason. The priests seem to have a high mortality rate. God kills a lot of them).

Moses tells them to light some incense, and then we'll see who's really holy. Or something.

Korah refuses. (I don't think this ends well for Korah). (Valid assessment, past self). 

Moses tells God not to accept their offerings, and tells Korah and his men to bring their incense burners the next day, and stand before God.

The next day, everyone's there, incense and all. Also, Yahweh makes an appearance, and tells Moses to get out of the way so he can smite these darn people. As usual, Moses has to persuade him not to kill everyone, just the ones that were making a fuss. Yahweh grudgingly agrees, so Moses tells everyone to get away from Korah and company, and not to touch their stuff.

Moses says, “Well, if I'm not the Chosen One, and I'm not speaking for God, then nothing will happen to Korah and his friends. But if I am, then the ground will swallow them up.”
Shockingly, the ground proceeds to open, and Korah and friends are no more. And then Yahweh burns the two hundred and fifty men that were burning the incense, and tells Aaron and friends to use the bronze to coat the Tabernacle or something.

Next day, everyone goes to talk to Moses and Aaron, being all, “You just killed a crapload of people!” And, as usual, Yahweh says, “Moses, get out of the way so I can kill everyone!” And as usual, Moses and Aaron grovel. However, Yahweh ignores them and sends a plague down on everyone. Moses tells Aaron, “Quick! Go get the incense burner and purify everyone so Yahweh won't kill them all!” So Aaron runs and starts purifying people, but the plague has already started and 14,700 people had died, not including the ones that died in the Korah affair.

Guys, guys, guys - copy editing. MAN. How did they think it was a good idea to place poetry proclaiming the goodness of God across from a page where the self-same God burns people alive for questioning Moses? Did they think it would cancel it out? It doesn't work that way! Maybe the most likely explanation for the poetry placement is that they literally could not find a page where God didn't brutally murder people. 

Come to think of it, that's probably it.

I'm thinking that the sixteen-year-old poet Anna did not actually read Numbers. I'm not feeling the whole "gentle" line...

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?

___
*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!

Bible Study: Not Understanding Sarcasm

When I first read this line in Deuteronomy, I was certain it was sarcastic, or at the very least hyperbolic. It was intended for emphasis, surely, and not to be taken seriously.

6:8 - "Tie [the ten commandments] to your hands and wear them on your forehead as reminders."

This was written in a long list of things to do to remember the Ten Commandments, such as telling your children and thinking about them when you're going to bed and getting up in the morning. I figured this was just another way of explaining how important the Ten Commandments are. But they didn't actually tie the Ten Commandments to their heads and foreheads, surely. That would look really silly!

This illustration was actually in my children's Bible.

Have you heard of the pharisees?
I don't know if this is still a practice in Judaism, but I know the pharisees of the Bible did, in fact, put the Ten Commandments on scrolls into little boxes, and tie the boxes to their hands and foreheads.
I don't mean to deride anyone's cultural practices, because, culture, hey, culture is great. In my culture we wear funny things, too.
But, doing this religiously, don't you think you're taking this a bit literally? This seems pretty obviously hyperbolic.

On the other hand, I guess you can't blame them for taking everything God says literally, given his propensity for incinerating people who step out of line in the slightest.
"We're starving and have been wandering in the desert for years!"
*ZAP*
"Why is Moses constantly telling us to do stupid things, like not eat bacon?"
*ZAP*
"Do the sacrificial goat intestines go on the left side of the altar, or the right?"
*ZAP*

Yeah, I guess I can't blame them for their caution.

Bible Study: WHAT.

Numbers 16. Yahweh kills 14,950 people. Fourteen thousand, seven hundred he kills by plague, and two hundred fifty he kills by burning them alive. The only reason he doesn't kill all the Israelites is because Moses and Aaron do some timely groveling, and some magic stuff with incense.

I...I don't even...I just...

Bible Study: Lord of Threats

Leviticus 26:14-46
Yahweh starts chapter twenty-six by saying how he looks favorably upon the Israelites and doesn't despise them and will help them in battle and bless them and all that jazz. I was impressed upon reading this, because normally Yahweh just talks about how he hates everyone.
One paragraph later, and he graphically details for seven paragraphs the punishment he'll rain down on them if they ever spite him. There's the Yahweh we know and love!

If the Israelites ever disobey him, Yahweh will cause:
-wasting diseases and burning fevers "that will cause your eyes to fail and your life to ebb away."
-enemies to eat your crops
-you to be ruled by those you hate
-you to run even when no one is chasing you
-your land to yield no crops or fruit
-wild animals to eat your children and livestock
-armies to attack you
-(more) plagues
-the destruction of your food supply "so that ten women will only need one oven to bake bread for their families."
-you to eat the flesh of your own sons and daughters.
-your lifeless bodies to be placed on top of your lifeless idols
-you to become scattered through all nations
-paranoia
-your children to be punished for your crimes as well! How sweet. I guess this is assuming your children weren't all eaten by wild animals or yourself?

Granted, he does finish up this diatribe with a little addendum that even while viciously torturing his people, he will not utterly reject or despise them because of that old covenant thing. Of course, I imagine his people might not find that ridiculously comforting while their eyes are falling out and they're starving to death.

Bible Study: The Eleventh and Twelfth Commandments

Fun fact: Did you know that in the Bible, the Ten Commandments are never explicitly stated? When Yahweh talks to Moses on Sinai in the desert, he doesn't give him ten discrete commands. He actually gives him a significantly longer list of laws, and the orders we recognize as the Ten Commandments are just mixed in there, with no special prefix. Therefore, it is apparent that when the Ten Commandments list was being created, someone just went through Exodus and decided that they liked these certain laws better than the other ones, completely disregarding the fact that Yahweh presented them all in equal importance.

We call this cherry-picking, kids.

Anyway, I've decided we need to right this historical wrong. Humans shouldn't just be picking what parts of the Word of God they like and which they don't! I propose we add an additional two commandments to the Ten, taken exactly from Scripture Itself. They are:

11. Thou shalt not eat yeast.
Yahweh hates yeast. I'm keeping a running tally, and so far we have about ten instances in which he expressly forbids the use of yeast, punishable by death. Therefore, we should all keep him happy by only eating pita bread.

12. Thou shalt not boil a baby goat in it's mother's milk.
Apparently this was a real problem in its day. It may seem a little archaic, but it's not like there aren't already archaic things in the Ten Commandments. For instance, keeping holy the Sabbath, or not coveting wives (wives are not possessions!), or keeping only one god. What, are you calling Hindus archaic? Way to go. That's so xenophobic.

I now thoroughly expect these to be posted wherever the Ten (now Twelve) Commandments are listed. You know, in churches, in public schools, in courthouses, in municipal buildings... You know.
Of course, if we're going to start taking the Bible literally, we're also going to have to stone everyone to death and start sacrificing animals.

Bible Study: Bacon

So, lately I've been reading the Bible. I won't bore you with the details of why precisely I'm reading the Bible, but let it suffice to say it's not because I think it's fascinating literature. Well, it's certainly fascinating, sort of in the same way that Twilight is fascinating, or a horrible train wreck is fascinating, but what I'm saying is, the "Good Book" is possibly the worst misnomer since the history of nomenclature.

Anyway, I've bludgeoned my way through Genesis and Exodus, and now I'm partway through Leviticus, which is a book that mostly contains chapters and chapters of outdated laws that repeat themselves a lot. For instance, I discovered that Yahweh really hates yeast. And animals. And people. But mostly yeast. I've also learned that in ancient Mesopotamia, you can get excommunicated from the Israelite community for touching a dead animal, which makes me wonder how they sacrificed all the animals they spent 6 chapters detailing precisely how to kill in order to make Yahweh happy.
I could really go on all day about all the things I've found in Leviticus, but the reason I'm writing this today is that I have specifically one very exciting thing I wanted to share with you. One very special law that was repeated 3 times as of chapter 7, is that you are not allowed to eat the fat of an animal. If you do, you will be excommunicated from the community. (You can get excommunicated for a lot of things, by the way). This means, as I immediately realized, that eating bacon is akin to blasphemy.

Catch that? Bacon is blasphemy. BACON IS BLASPHEMY. Every time you eat bacon, YOU ARE COMMITTING A DEADLY SIN.
So, basically...bacon's better than ever now, am I right?

Mmm... Tasty, atheroschlerosis-causing blasphemy.