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: 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.

Loki

I doubt anyone has read back this far (no one blames you) but a while ago, I made a post about fire gods and included Loki as one. I don't know if this is painfully obvious at all, but Loki is one of my favorite mythological characters. And with me, mythological characters are my equivalent of superheroes/athletes. Maybe I should make baseball cards or comic books for them.
(Though they already made a comic book out of the Norse stuff. ...it's called Thor.)
Anyway, I watched Thor recently (I'm slow at watching movies. I still haven't seen The Avengers or The Hunger Games or the recent Sherlock episodes). As you may guess from the pantheon, Loki is a character in this movie, and, not shockingly, because trickster gods always have to be the main villains, Loki is the main villain. This in and of itself was fairly distressing because Loki's not really the main villain type. He's sort of a chaotic neutral, bordering on chaotic evil. Oftentimes he's a complete douche bag, but sometimes he works with the Aesir and Odin in a non-murderous way. He's also wicked clever, if not always good at not pissing people off.
In the movie, the writers did manage to get one thing right: he's a bit of a misfit that no one likes. That's about it. In the movie, he's the main villain. He wears a stupid douche bag hat. Instead of disliking him or anything, the other characters just ignore him, which I think removes a lot of potential sympathy for the guy. Then he thinks up a crazy harebrained scheme that involves alienating his friends/family/colleages? and culminates in not working even a little. Then he dangles off of a cliff, which is something villains should really never do, and then proceeds to fall into the void. (You know, I have no idea how they got him back in The Avengers. I should really watch that).

See? Douche bag hat.

Basically, he makes me very sad. Granted, the movie did a few things acceptably. The actor was very good. Loki was Odin's adopted relative, and a frost giant (or something. I forget what it is in mythology). He's kind of a douche bag. But in the end, none of this makes up for the fact that he has a stupid hat, can't plan or manipulate or lie to save his life (all kind of defining trickster god characteristics, in my opinion), and he dangles off of cliffs. NEVER DANGLE OFF OF CLIFFS. What, is it too realistic or complex to have a villain be executed, or imprisoned, or run off? Why must villains always fall off of cliffs?! This is a problem, writers! You need to think of a resolution in which the villain does not fall off of a cliff!

Anyway, done ranting for a while. (At least until I see The Avengers.) And, fortunately, I doubt anyone will make a movie about Lucifer or Prometheus soon (also great mythological characters), so I'm good. There is a movie called Prometheus coming out soon, but I think that's about aliens.