Authors: Unknown
In
November 2005, the citizens of Dover, Pennsylvania, voted off their
local school board the entire slate of fundamentalists who had brought
the town notoriety, not to say ridicule, by attempting to enforce the
teaching of 'intelligent design'. When Pat Robertson heard that the
fundamentalists had been democratically defeated at the ballot, he
offered a stern warning to Dover:
I'd
like to say to the good citizens of Dover, if there is a disaster in
your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected him from your city, and
don't wonder why he hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they
begin, and I'm not saying they will. But if they do, just remember you
just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, then don't ask
for his help, because he might not be there.
93
Pat
Robertson would be harmless comedy, were he less typical of those who
today hold power and influence in the United States.
In
the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Noah equivalent, chosen to
be spared with his family because he was uniquely righteous, was
Abraham's nephew Lot. Two male angels were sent to Sodom to warn Lot to
leave the city before the brimstone arrived. Lot hospitably welcomed
the angels into his house, whereupon all the men of Sodom gathered
around and demanded that Lot should hand the angels over so that they
could (what else?) sodomize
them: 'Where are the men which came in to thee this night? Bring them
out unto us, that we may know them' (Genesis 19: 5). Yes, 'know' has
the Authorized Version's usual euphemistic meaning, which is very funny
in the context. Lot's gallantry in refusing the demand suggests that
God might have been onto something when he singled him out as the only
good man in Sodom. But Lot's halo is tarnished by the terms of his
refusal: 'I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly. Behold now, I have
two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them
out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto
these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my
roof (Genesis 19: 7-8).
Whatever
else this strange story might mean, it surely tells us something about
the respect accorded to women in this intensely religious culture. As
it happened, Lot's bargaining away of his daughters' virginity proved
unnecessary, for the angels succeeded in repelling the marauders by
miraculously striking them blind. They then warned Lot to decamp
immediately with his family and his animals, because the city was about
to be destroyed. The whole household escaped, with the exception of
Lot's unfortunate wife, whom the Lord turned into a pillar of salt
because she committed the offence - comparatively mild, one might have
thought - of looking over her shoulder at the fireworks display.
Lot's
two daughters make a brief reappearance in the story. After their
mother was turned into a pillar of salt, they lived with their father
in a cave up a mountain. Starved of male company, they decided to make
their father drunk and copulate with him. Lot was beyond noticing when
his elder daughter arrived in his bed or when she left, but he was not
too drunk to impregnate her. The next night the two daughters agreed it
was the younger one's turn. Again Lot was too drunk to notice, and he
impregnated her too (Genesis 19: 31-6). If this dysfunctional family
was the best Sodom had to offer by way of morals, some might begin to
feel a certain sympathy with God and his judicial brimstone.
The
story of Lot and the Sodomites is eerily echoed in chapter 19 of the
book of Judges, where an unnamed Levite (priest) was travelling with
his concubine in Gibeah. They spent the night in the house of a
hospitable old man. While they were eating their supper, the
men of the city came and beat on the door, demanding that the old man
should hand over his male guest 'so that we may know him'. In almost
exactly the same words as Lot, the old man said: 'Nay, my brethren,
nay, I pray you, do not so wickedly; seeing that this man is come into
mine house do not this folly. Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and
his concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do
with them what seemeth good unto you; but unto this man do not so vile
a thing' (Judges 19: 23-4). Again, the misogynistic ethos comes
through, loud and clear. I find the phrase 'humble ye them'
particularly chilling. Enjoy yourselves by humiliating and raping my
daughter and this priest's concubine, but show a proper respect for my
guest who is, after all, male. In spite of the similarity between the
two stories, the
denouement
was less happy for the
Levite's concubine than for Lot's daughters.
The
Levite handed her over to the mob, who gang-raped her all night: 'They
knew her and abused her all the night until the morning: and when the
day began to spring, they let her go. Then came the woman in the
dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the man's house where
her lord was, till it was light' (Judges 19: 25-6). In the morning, the
Levite found his concubine lying prostrate on the doorstep and said -
with what we today might see as callous abruptness - 'Up, and let us be
going.' But she didn't move. She was dead. So he 'took a knife, and
laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones,
into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel'. Yes,
you read correctly. Look it up in Judges 19: 29. Let's charitably put
it down again to the ubiquitous weirdness of the Bible. This story is
so similar to that of Lot, one can't help wondering whether a fragment
of manuscript became accidentally misplaced in some long-forgotten
scriptorium: an illustration of the erratic provenance of sacred texts.
Lot's
uncle Abraham was the founding father of all three 'great' monotheistic
religions. His patriarchal status renders him only somewhat less likely
than God to be taken as a role model. But what modern moralist would
wish to follow him? Relatively early in his long life, Abraham went to
Egypt to tough out a famine with his wife Sarah. He realized that such
a beautiful woman would be desirable to the Egyptians and that
therefore his own life, as her husband, might be endangered. So he
decided to pass her off as his sister.
In this capacity she was taken into Pharaoh's harem, and Abraham
consequently became rich in Pharaoh's favour. God disapproved of this
cosy arrangement, and sent plagues on Pharaoh and his house (why not on
Abraham?). An understandably aggrieved Pharaoh demanded to know why
Abraham had not told him Sarah was his wife. He then handed her back to
Abraham and kicked them both out of Egypt (Genesis 12: 18-19). Weirdly,
it seems that the couple later tried to pull the same stunt again, this
time with Abimelech the King of Gerar. He too was induced by Abraham to
marry Sarah, again having been led to believe she was Abraham's sister,
not his wife (Genesis 20: 2-5). He too expressed his indignation, in
almost identical terms to Pharaoh's, and one can't help sympathizing
with both of them. Is the similarity another indicator of textual
unreliability?
Such
unpleasant episodes in Abraham's story are mere peccadilloes compared
with the infamous tale of the sacrificing of his son Isaac (Muslim
scripture tells the same story about Abraham's other son, Ishmael). God
ordered Abraham to make a burnt offering of his longed-for son. Abraham
built an altar, put firewood upon it, and trussed Isaac up on top of
the wood. His murdering knife was already in his hand when an angel
dramatically intervened with the news of a last-minute change of plan:
God was only joking after all, 'tempting' Abraham, and testing his
faith. A modern moralist cannot help but wonder how a child could ever
recover from such psychological trauma. By the standards of modern
morality, this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child
abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power relationships, and the first
recorded use of the Nuremberg defence: 'I was only obeying orders.' Yet
the legend is one of the great foundational myths of all three
monotheistic religions.
Once
again, modern theologians will protest that the story of Abraham
sacrificing Isaac should not be taken as literal fact. And, once again,
the appropriate response is twofold. First, many many people, even to
this day, do take the whole of their scripture to be literal fact, and
they have a great deal of political power over the rest of us,
especially in the United States and in the Islamic world. Second, if
not as literal fact, how should we take the story? As an allegory? Then
an allegory for what? Surely nothing praiseworthy.
As a
moral lesson? But what kind of morals could one derive from this
appalling story? Remember, all I am trying to establish for the moment
is that we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from
scripture. Or, if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for
the nice bits and reject the nasty. But then we must have some
independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a
criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture
itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are
religious or not.
Apologists
even seek to salvage some decency for the God character in this
deplorable tale. Wasn't it good of God to spare Isaac's life at the
last minute? In the unlikely event that any of my readers are persuaded
by this obscene piece of special pleading, I refer them to another
story of human sacrifice, which ended more unhappily. In Judges,
chapter 11, the military leader Jephthah made a bargain with God that,
if God would guarantee Jephthah's victory over the Ammonites, Jephthah
would, without fail, sacrifice as a burnt offering 'whatsoever cometh
forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return'. Jephthah did
indeed defeat the Ammonites ('with a very great slaughter', as is par
for the course in the book of Judges) and he returned home victorious.
Not surprisingly, his daughter, his only child, came out of the house
to greet him (with timbrels and dances) and - alas - she was the first
living thing to do so. Understandably Jephthah rent his clothes, but
there was nothing he could do about it. God was obviously looking
forward to the promised burnt offering, and in the circumstances the
daughter very decently agreed to be sacrificed. She asked only that she
should be allowed to go into the mountains for two months to bewail her
virginity. At the end of this time she meekly returned, and Jephthah
cooked her. God did not see fit to intervene on this occasion.
God's
monumental rage whenever his chosen people flirted with a rival god
resembles nothing so much as sexual jealousy of the worst kind, and
again it should strike a modern moralist as far from good role-model
material. The temptation to sexual infidelity is readily understandable
even to those who do not succumb, and it is a staple of fiction and
drama, from Shakespeare to bedroom farce. But the apparently
irresistible temptation to whore with foreign gods is something we
moderns find harder to empathize with.
To my naive eyes, 'Thou shalt have no other gods but me' would seem an
easy enough commandment to keep: a doddle, one might think, compared
with 'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife'. Or her ass. (Or her
ox.) Yet throughout the Old Testament, with the same predictable
regularity as in bedroom farce, God had only to turn his back for a
moment and the Children of Israel would be off and at it with Baal, or
some trollop of a graven image.* Or, on one calamitous occasion, a
golden calf . . .
*
This richly comic idea was suggested to me by Jonathan Miller who,
surprisingly, never included it in a
Beyond the Fringe
sketch.
I also thank him for recommending the scholarly book upon which it is
based: Halbertal and Margalit (1992).
Moses,
even more than Abraham, is a likely role model for followers of all
three monotheistic religions. Abraham may be the original patriarch,
but if anybody should be called the doctrinal founder of Judaism and
its derivative religions, it is Moses. On the occasion of the golden
calf episode, Moses was safely out of the way up Mount Sinai, communing
with God and getting tablets of stone graven by him. The people down
below (who were on pain of death to refrain from so much as
touching
the mountain) didn't waste any time:
When
the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the
people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up,
make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man
that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become
of him. (Exodus 32: 1)
Aaron
got everybody to pool their gold, melted it down and made a golden
calf, for which newly invented deity he then built an altar so they
could all start sacrificing to it.
Well,
they should have known better than to fool around behind God's back
like that. He might be up a mountain but he was, after all, omniscient
and he lost no time in despatching Moses as his enforcer. Moses raced
hotfoot down the mountain, carrying the stone tablets on which God had
written the Ten Commandments. When he arrived and saw the golden calf
he was so furious that he dropped the tablets and broke them (God later
gave him a replacement set, so that was all right). Moses seized the
golden calf, burned it, ground it to powder, mixed it with water and
made the people
swallow it. Then he told everybody in the priestly tribe of Levi to
pick up a sword and kill as many people as possible. This amounted to
about three thousand which, one might have hoped, would have been
enough to assuage God's jealous sulk. But no, God wasn't finished yet.
In the last verse of this terrible chapter his parting shot was to send
a plague upon what was left of the people 'because they made the calf,
which Aaron made'.
The
book of Numbers tells how God incited Moses to attack the Midianites.
His army made short work of slaying all the men, and they burned all
the Midianite cities, but they didn't kill the women and children. This
merciful restraint by his soldiers infuriated Moses, and he gave orders
that all the boy children should be killed, and all the women who were
not virgins. 'But all the women children, that have not known a man by
lying with him, keep alive for yourselves' (Numbers 31: 18). No, Moses
was not a great role model for modern moralists.