Absolutely Most Awful Monsters of the Bible

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  I hope everyone's holiday was as restful as mine.  

This is my final installment of Monsters of the Bible in keeping with the recent, yet now faraway, celebration of Halloween.  

I really do need to plan these things before the holidays so I can write a little more deliberately.

The absolutely most awful monsters of the Bible are certain people who read it and preach it.

Let's face it.  There are a lot of people who read the Bible who can be very scary.  They are no different than volatile Muslim fanatics exploding themselves, and anyone else within dynamite distance, over a sarcastic comment about their book.

There are a lot of people who preach the Bible who can be as scary as a maniacal Muslim imam.

There are two kinds of monsters who emerge among fanatics. There are monsters who say, "Boo!" and monsters who burn other people.

MONSTERS WHO SAY, "BOO!"

We've all seen them.  The names have changed, but the deeds are the same.  Most of the deeds are expressions of condemnation.  

John Darby of the 19th century despised the world so much he imagined the rapture, a supernatural escape hatch that only his theological kind might flee through, and then he imagined a scenario where his god murders lots of people.  

Yes, people believe this rubbish today.  We recently had a president who may have geared his Middle Eastern policy on this lousy doctrine.  Boo!

Pat Robertson and his 700 Club Christians pray for jets to crash so their imaginary theological enemies might die...of course...along with the 700 Club members who might happen to be flying on that jet that day.  Boo!

Westboro Baptist members picket the funerals of our national human treasure sacrificed in war.  Boo!

Get the picture?

MONSTERS WHO BURN OTHER PEOPLE

Some monsters read the Bible and are inspired to murder our God's children.

The list is long, but below are honorable mentions:

Those who stoned Stephen in Acts

Those who burned heretics after the Edict of Milan

Those who murdered Jewish people

Martin Luther and John Calvin

Those who burned Protestants

Those who burned Roman Catholics

Bloody Hank VIII, Bloody Mary, and Bloody Beth

Puritans in Europe 

Puritans in America

Puritans in Salem, MA

John Brown

Hitler

Jim Jones

These are quite prominent in the way they read the Bible and then killed people in order to express their fervent desire to serve their lord.

They were certainly not acting as disciples of Jesus and his father of love.

So if you are reading the Bible today and the voices from it are not telling you to love your enemies, but to kill them, then put the book down and go to a shrink before you become a monster.

Blessings...

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… 

  

Dishonorable Monster Mention

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  There are a couple of other monsters I failed to mention who should be included.  

Cain murdered his brother.  Yahweh was not too happy about it so he marked him.    

What else could he do?  There were so few people on the earth at the time that he could not cast him out of the garden of life.

Doing the math of being fruitful and multiplying cannot happen if you are dead.  

Confused?  So am I, but I love the story.  It provides possibilities for all kinds of writers.  See East of Eden by John Steinbeck for a terrific Cain and Abel story.  

The unnamed Pharaoh of Egypt who ordered the murder of Hebrew boys was a monster.  Here we have another man with lots of power willing to do anything to keep his power.  

He seems like the type of person who would be willing to shut down his own government if he does not get his way and laws restrain him from murder.

We have no idea how many Pharaoh killed.  The person who wrote of battles in Joshua gave us death stats, but the person who wrote of the slaughter of the innocents did not.  Nor do we know which Pharaoh this is.

Of course, his is a story about oppression and liberation.  Although none of it happened, it is all true.  Even today innocents are being slaughtered.  The names of the monsters only have changed.

Now, that we have books and footage of Hitler, how untrue could this monster possibly be?

This Pharaoh does not need to be named for he is all the Pharaohs who ever lived and ever bled people.  

This Pharaoh's fiendish ways were etched into Hebrew lore so unforgettably that the writer of the Gospel of Matthew used it in his birth narrative with King Herod as the perpetrator.

Josephus tells us a lot about those days before and after Jesus was born.  He never mentions that Herod ordered such a slaughter.  It seems unlikely since the symbolism of that deed would not escape Herod.

However, we know Herod was a monster.  He had his wife and son murdered--and others.  So let's include Herod the Grisly on the monster list for this slaughter of the innocents did not happen, but it is true, indeed.

Next time, the two worst monsters of the Bible.

Blessings...

Village of the Damned

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome.  I hope my post today finds you well and happy.  For fun, I've been writing about monsters in the Bible in keeping with our recent celebration of all things horrific.

GIBEAH THE GRISLY

If you ever stray into a town, you would do well to avoid Gibeah.  A lot of Bible lovers, Bible preachers, and such seem to be unaware of its location on the Word of God map.  

I can understand why.  Tis a grisly tale told.

You can locate this town in Judges 19.  In Hebrew chronology, the story falls after Lot's story.  It can be said that Lot's story was so poignant that it had to be told twice.  

A BAD CHOICE

Once upon a time, a Levite was traveling in that region of Israel bounded by one of the twelve tribes of Israel known as the Benjamites.  The Levite sojourned with his second degree wife, called a concubine, and his servant.  It was getting late on the road.  They were getting tired.

The servant suggested they stay in Jebus, which was Jerusalem according to a scribe’s comment.  

The Levite declined, there were too many foreigners there.  He wanted to rest among his kin folk.

A DELIVERANCE HODOWN

They arrived in the town of Gibeah and waited in the open town square.  None of the relatives invited them to their house to stay overnight.  

That is always a bad sign in the ancient world, when hospitality goes awry.  It signals something wicked some way is coming.

A farmer, returning home, invited them to his place, warning them that it was not a good idea to stay in the open town square overnight.

SODOM NEARLY RETOLD

From here on the story follows the Lot story with a few exceptions.

Not all the men, only the base fellows, surrounded the farmer's home demanding that he send out, "the man who came into your house, that we may know him."  

The farmer, like Lot, went outside to confront his neighbors.  He offered his virgin daughter and the second degree wife for an evening of rape and recreation.  

Let me share his own words, "Behold, here are my virgin daughter and his concubine; let me bring them out now.  Ravish them and do with them what seems good to you, but against this man do not do so vile a thing."

THERE'S VILE AND THEN THERE'S VILE

I wonder if the extra inducement of the second degree wife was actually discussed or did the farmer presume.  The base fellows took the concubine and raped her all night long until they killed her.  

This again is story telling at its finest.  You can always tell the greatness of a story teller in the details told.  

In the morning, the farmer opened the door and saw the dead concubine’s hands over the threshold.  Now, that's a detail that is unforgettably vile.  

WITNESS OF THE TWELVE

So the Levite cuts her up into twelve pieces and shows her throughout Israel.  It was so grisly that the scribe who added the detail about Jebus being Jerusalem may have added this comment:  

"Such a thing has never happened or been seen from the day that the people of Israel came up out of land of Egypt until this day:  consider it, take counsel, and speak."

I agree.  We who are alive today know such true horror as this exists in our world.  Let us follow the scribe’s advice.

YAHWEH TO THE RESCUE

By the way, the other tribes were not happy to see what the Levite showed them.  They decided to make war on their kinfolk.

Judah, the tribe that took over this military operation, had a hard time destroying Gibeah’s army.  They got whipped in a couple of battles.  

The sought Yahweh to assume command.  He did.  The result was that they destroyed Gibeah: all of its men, beasts, and property. 

Think of all the blood that would have been spared if Yahweh had merely bombed Gibeah with brimstone.

Next time, a few more monsters of the Bible and the worst of all…in my opinion...

Blessings…

Monster Villages of the Bible

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Continuing the theme: Monsters of the Bible, I shall turn to two particularly nasty towns.  

One town everyone has heard about and the other, well...probably not.  

Imagine an entire town where every single person is evil.  Is that possible?  In the story of Sodom it is.  We suspect Sodom must be pretty awful when Yahweh tells Abraham that he will spare Sodom if there are ten  righteous people in the town.  

That's right, folks, THE Yahweh: Hebrew sky god too holy for Moses to gaze upon face to face, so holy-other that Moses had to glimpse his glory as Yahweh was departing—that is the deity who stood before Abraham and may have eaten cheese with him.  

While Abraham convenes his tête-à-tête with Yahweh, two of Yahweh's messengers, or angels, go to Sodom.  

Of course, the angels had traveled with Yahweh from Cloud City where the rest of the heavenly host dwells in the sky.  

When Lot meets the angels, he urges them to come to his home.  It was dangerous for them to be outside in the city at night.

The townspeople showed up and asked that the messengers, or angels, be given to them for a night of rape and recreation.  Lot implored his fellow citizens to not act so wickedly.  

Genesis tells us that all the men of the village, young and old, came to Lot's home.  

Genesis tells us that every single man in town was wicked.  

Wow.  I for one have never found an exception where there were absolutely no exceptions to generalizations concerning a group of people.  

Even in evil towns in the United States like Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 or Rosewood, Florida in 1923, there were good people who had to endure and survive the tumultuous violence of evil men and women in their towns.

However, this is story telling at its finest with a message.  The story is so good, it remains with us today.  The message is not so clear to people who know little about hospitality violations.

Lot goes outside and offers his virgin daughters.  No Father’s Day card for Lot next June.  That sigh of relief we hear within would be the not-so-virgin daughters in Lot's home.  

The Sodomites menace Lot.  They press him against his door after uttering ugly words about him.  The angels yank Lot back inside and smite the townspeople with blindness.

And we know the rest of the story with its salt-of-the earth ending.  

There be monsters in that town. 

Next time, a terrible town most Bible lovers have never heard about and probably do not want to know shall be recounted.

Blessings…

More Monsters and Some Near Monsters of the Bible

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. I hope your Sabbath was as restful and blessed as mine.  Today is Sunday, our Christian worship day.  I will continue what I began about monsters of the Bible.

Those horndogs among the heavenly host who gazed upon our women and desired them were monsters.  There is no indication in the story that our women found them equally desirable.  Were they taken?  Could Liam Neeson have saved them?

Abraham nearly became a monster, and he would have if the messenger from God had not stopped him from sacrificing his son, Isaac.  He didn't treat his wives very nicely either.

Esau probably could have been a monster, and felt justified in doing so after his little brother tricked him out of his birthright and his father's blessing, but he turned out all right.

Joseph’s brothers were pretty awful when out of spite and jealously they threw their little brother into a pit.  That turned out okay. 

Saul was totally bipolar.  One minute he likes David and asks him to play music for him, the next minute he throws a spear at him.  Thank God he never had a nuclear button to press.

Elisha's curse that sent bears to kill those children was quite monstrous.

Those religious nuts who killed Ahab and Jezebel were monstrous indeed.  So were the French during their revolution, but they are not in the Bible.  If only someone had thought of the idea of voting their rulers into office, those bloody messes might have been averted.

Joshua and the Israelites were monsters.  They stoned, and then burned, a kinsman, Achan, and, “his sons and daughters, and his oxen and asses and sheep, and his tent, and all that he had.”

Wow, they even burned his tent?  All this over stolen loot?  

Imagine that.  Apparently, it's okay to invade, murder, and pillage as long as the commanders get to keep the booty, but not the grunts.  

By the way, Joshua said Yahweh told him to do it.  He was just obeying orders.

Nations and their governments can be monsters.  The Babylonians who flung three good Hebrew boys into a furnace were quite wicked.  They were obeying King Nebuchadnezzar’s orders. 

They also put Daniel into a lion’s den.  Of course, these same Babylonians burned Jerusalem to the ground, destroyed Solomon’s temple, and carted off 10,000 rich Hebrews to Babylon.

The Romans were monsters.  They murdered Jesus, Peter, Paul, and just about every man, woman, and child in Jerusalem circa 60-70 CE.  They continued to kill Christians until the Edict of Milan when they all became Catholic.

After that, they murdered Christians whom they called heretics.

Next time, I'll write about two towns that were quite scary.

Blessings...

Scary Bible Charcters

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  In keeping with the Halloween theme, I would like to write about scary Bible characters.  I'll save the scariest for last.

Samson gets my vote for a scary Bible character.  Here is a man with lots of power, but no brains.  He's so stupid he tells Delilah his secret.  Although she has unquestionably demonstrated that she means him harm, Samson tells her that cutting his hair robs him of his strength.  Darwin Award for this guy.

Indeed, Samson is scary because his power weighs not on the balance of wisdom.  He is a danger to himself and others…and so the story goes when he is blinded because he is dumb enough to divulge his secret, and when he destroys a temple full of people because he is full of hate.  It was said of Samson that he murdered more people in his death than in his life.  

David is scary.  Here is a man with lots of political power, but no morals. He's king, right?, so he sees a woman he wants to roger, right?, and he takes her, right?, and he arranges for her husband to be killed, right?  Monster...for sure.  Let's not elect any Davids. 

Elijah was a nut.  Here's a guy with religious devotion so intense he murders the religious leaders of another faith.  Forget the fact that people who worship false idols are spinning their wheels and deserve to be left alone.  If someone tells me that they venerate an acorn, I'm not going to kill them.  If an entire nation of people is persuaded to worship acorns too, I will not murder anyone for the truth.  I will just read my books, rely on reason, emulate our God of love, and chalk national ignorance up to mob stupidity…pretty much what I am doing today.

Judah was a child abuser.  I suspect he was behind Onan's death when Onan refused to impregnate his brother's wife after his brother died.  He knocked up his daughter-in-law under the pretense of not knowing who she was.  

Are you kidding me?  Was Tamar fully clothed, saying nothing to disguise her voice, and was Judah fully drunk during intercourse?

How do you get that close to someone and not know who they are unless you are lying about it.  Judah was willing to let her die until he found out he was the father of her child.  No Father’s Day card for this wicked daddy.

More later.  Blessings...