The Penultimate Monster of the Bible

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back and thanks for reading.  In the spirit of Halloween, I've been writing about Monsters of the Bible.  Like any topic touching on scripture, this requires more than one post.  

The Bible has a generous portion of monster stories served within its pages as we have seen, but two monsters are the worst.  

One is scarier than the other, but I am saving it for last.

We are told to fear God.  As theological and reading sophistication grow upon us, we become aware that to fear God is not to be afraid of God, but to revere God.

However, taking the Bible literally, we must be mindful that there are places in the Bible where God is a menacing psychopath were he a man, and we would be terribly afraid.

Now, as I've written before many times, our God of love is not the Hebrew sky god.  Our tradition begins with that god, and as tradition, the stories about that god can be insightful.  

Indeed, Jesus told different stories about God.  His stories show our God of love's nature is revealed in our adoration, our love, and our trust.  

Our God of love is never to be feared...you know...like a loving daddy who is never ever ever a child abuser--for such evil can never be in this father's nature.

Besides, knowing that the one true God is a God of love, we can read those stories about the Hebrew sky god and learn a lot about ourselves.  

Let's face the truth.  In the stories, Yahweh is a monster.

He commits genocide.  He murders every man, woman, child, and (for my fundamentalist brothers and sisters) fetus on the planet short of eight people and two (or seven) of every animal on the planet.  Now, that's evil Hitler might envy.

Did every single man, woman, child, and fetus in Sodom deserve to die?  Really?  Yahweh showered the entire population with fire and brimstone.  

Why didn't he just smite certain individuals?  Although it might have hurt the local economy to have the baker who’s a psycho-rapist taken out, good people eventually would have learned how to make dough.

After persuading Moses to go back to Egypt and deliver his people from bondage, Yahweh meets him on the road to kill him.  

Had Moses' wife, Zipporah, not been around and not kept a flint handy to cut off Moses's foreskin to touch his feet with, Moses would have been out of a calling, out of the book of Exodus, out of Matthew's allusional birth narrative, and out of Cecil De Mille.  

The plagues seem harsh, unnecessary, and certainly not within the purview of our God of love.  Turning the Nile to blood and destroying that habitat for all the creatures living there inspires our desire for retribution akin to the anger we felt towards Saddam Hussein who bathed birds in oil.  Remember that?  

Killing all the first born of all the Egyptians and anyone else who did not have sheep blood smeared over their portals is just plain sicko?  That means the almost certain sympathizers among the Egyptians lost their babies too.  And what about those poor slaughtered sheep?

So who is more fiendish now, Pharaoh or Yahweh? 

When you think about it, if the fundamentalists are right, then Yahweh does not have to go to all this blood, sweat, and tears drama to show off his smite and might. 

Surely a god who can rapture people out of their cars, airplanes, and showers today could have raptured the Hebrews and dropped them into Canaan.  There would have been less fuss and bloodshed. 

The Egyptians still would have looked like fools and would have nary a clue where their slaves went.  Without the telegraph and telephone, they might have learned years later what happened to their slaves...maybe.

Most likely, they would have blamed the event on the wrath of Ra.

Now, that's how a supernatural God of love would act if our God of love reached into history and yanked its chains.

Think about how nice it would have been if those 19 slaves that first disembarked onto the shore of Jamestown had been raptured and returned to their homes instead.

A god who acts in the world is just like the rest of us.  He has to make choices.  He had to exert energy…somehow.

Any god who can drown the entire Egyptian army moments after his people cross the dry land of a parted sea can spend his energy rapturing any slave back home, or for that matter, rapture any slaver before he captures one single slave and set him on Gilligan’s Island. 

Why not?  With Yahweh, all things are possible, right?  If Yahweh were our God of love, the stories about him would have resembled the stories Jesus told of God.

However, Yahweh begins to distance himself from people and either urges them to do his dirty work or he condones the dirty work they do.  He is not a nice god of man.

So, for these and many other reasons, Yahweh gets my vote as the penultimate monster in the Bible.  

Next time: the ultimate Bible monster.

Blessings…