Sadistic and Genocidal Scripture

Reflections on Actually Reading The Holy Bible

Years ago I published an academic essay titled “By All Means Study the Founders,” dedicated to the propositions that (a) progressive thinkers should follow the advice of right-wing American nationalists by digging into the writings, speeches, and correspondence of the United States’ “Founding Fathers” and (b) doing so with clear and un-biased eyes enhances one’s understanding of how remarkably anti-democratic, propertarian, racist, sexist, genocidal, and imperialist those holy slave-owning Founders were, contrary to the standard US-nationalist depiction of them as great champions and pioneers of liberty and democracy.   

I feel the same way about the Christian Holy Bible (hereafter the “CHB”).  Study the scripture all our preachers are constantly going off about if you have the time and energy to do so. It’s good to read the HCB to grasp how truly horrific much of it is.  It will help you understand the unspeakable evil that far too many Christian and Jewish[1] people embrace today – appalling malevolence and criminality like the despicable and genocidal ethnic cleansing Israel has been conducting against Palestinians in Gaza with US weapons, funding, backing, and protection for the last three months.  

The Gibeonites Avenged

I have this morbid habit of randomly opening the Bible to see what insane level and type of mass slaughter and sadism the LORD is ordering and/or approving on the pages I land on. Yesterday I turned to pages 353 and 354 in  The King James version of the CHB (World Publishing Company, 1945) and read this in “II. Samuel 21”:

21 During the reign of David, there was a famine for three successive years; so David sought the face of the Lord. The Lord said, “It is on account of Saul and his blood-stained house; it is because he put the Gibeonites to death.”

² The king summoned the Gibeonites and spoke to them. (Now the Gibeonites were not a part of Israel but were survivors of the Amorites; the Israelites had sworn to spare them, but Saul in his zeal for Israel and Judah had tried to annihilate them.) ³ David asked the Gibeonites, “What shall I do for you? How shall I make atonement so that you will bless the Lord’s inheritance?”

⁴ The Gibeonites answered him, “We have no right to demand silver or gold from Saul or his family, nor do we have the right to put anyone in Israel to death.”

“What do you want me to do for you?” David asked.

⁵ They answered the king, “As for the man who destroyed us and plotted against us so that we have been decimated and have no place anywhere in Israel, ⁶ let seven of his male descendants be given to us to be killed and their bodies exposed before the Lord at Gibeah of Saul—the Lord’s chosen one.”

So the king said, “I will give them to you.”

⁷ The king spared Mephibosheth son of Jonathan, the son of Saul, because of the oath before the Lord between David and Jonathan son of Saul. ⁸ But the king took Armoni and Mephibosheth, the two sons of Aiah’s daughter Rizpah, whom she had borne to Saul, together with the five sons of Saul’s daughter Merab,^[a] whom she had borne to Adriel son of Barzillai the Meholathite. ⁹ He handed them over to the Gibeonites, who killed them and exposed their bodies on a hill before the Lord. All seven of them fell together; they were put to death during the first days of the harvest, just as the barley harvest was beginning.

¹⁰ Rizpah daughter of Aiah took sackcloth and spread it out for herself on a rock. From the beginning of the harvest till the rain poured down from the heavens on the bodies, she did not let the birds touch them by day or the wild animals by night. ¹¹ When David was told what Aiah’s daughter Rizpah, Saul’s concubine, had done, ¹² he went and took the bones of Saul and his son Jonathan from the citizens of Jabesh Gilead. (They had stolen their bodies from the public square at Beth Shan, where the Philistines had hung them after they struck Saul down on Gilboa.) ¹³ David brought the bones of Saul and his son Jonathan from there, and the bones of those who had been killed and exposed were gathered up.

¹⁴ They buried the bones of Saul and his son Jonathan in the tomb of Saul’s father Kish, at Zela in Benjamin, and did everything the king commanded. After that, God answered prayer in behalf of the land.’

Okay, let me see if I’ve got this straight. The LORD was pissed at Israel because the Israelite Saul had shown excessive zeal for Judah by killing a bunch of Gibeonites.

Bear in mind that Biblical Judeo-Christian God doesn’t have any problem with (ancient) Israel killing, maiming, and raping people because The Old Testament is loaded with nasty stories of the LORD ordering and approving genocide, rape, female sex slavery, mass enslavement, and the stoning of women who can’t prove their virginity on their wedding night.

But anyway, the heavenly Mafia Boss’s issue with Saul wasn’t that he had slaughtered masses of people but rather that he had slaughtered people God liked!  And God was so mad about Saul murdering the wrong people that he ordered a three-year famine, which must have killed a Hell of a lot of Israelites.

Jesus F’ng Christ! What kind of sociopathic asshole does something like that?!

Israel King David, who gets to talk to God, asks the deity “hey, what’s up with the famine?” and the LORD says “it’s because of that nasty shit Saul did to the Gibeonites.  I’m not against mass murder as such, I order and approve it all the time, but this motherfu#ker Saul is out of control.  He doesn’t seem to know who’s boss.  He killed some people he shouldn’t have. I say who gets butchered, not Saul, capiche?  So, yeah, I threw down some collective punishment on all you sorry ass motherfuckers to teach you a lesson. Get your shit together or it’s gonna be a ten-year famine, bitch!”  

David is looking to get Jehovah off his people’s back before they are all starved to death. So he goes to the surviving Gibeonites and says, “what can we do for you to try and make up for Saul’s mistaken murder of your people?” The Gibeonites say “well we have no right to kill anybody in Israel, but why don’t you give us seven of Saul’s male descendants so we can execute them and expose their rotting corpses to the Big Guy in the Sky. That should make the LORD happy.”

The executions take place. Then King David’s Israel Defense Forces do some weird shit with the dead bones of Saul and his male descendants and the big mafia don in heaven (or wherever) calls off the famine he imposed on his followers.  

Funny, the Gibeonites say they have “no right to put anyone in Israel to death,” but GOD has no problem killing untold masses of Israelites with famine because he thinks one of their genocidal war lords butchered the wrong people.

How fucked up is that?

“They Destroyed with the Sword Every Living Thing in It…Then They Burned the City to the Ground”

Here’s another one I flipped to the other day, on pages 236-37 of my copy of the HCB. This is from “Joshua 6,” which relates the holy Mafia Don giving a big thumbs up to the complete genocidal destruction of the city of Jericho and its inhabitants:

¹⁵ On the seventh day, they got up at daybreak and marched around the city seven times in the same manner, except that on that day they circled the city seven times. ¹⁶ The seventh time around, when the priests sounded the trumpet blast, Joshua commanded the army, “Shout! For the Lord has given you the city! ¹⁷ The city and all that is in it are to be devoted^[a] to the Lord. Only Rahab the prostitute and all who are with her in her house shall be spared, because she hid the spies we sent. ¹⁸ But keep away from the devoted things, so that you will not bring about your own destruction by taking any of them. Otherwise you will make the camp of Israel liable to destruction and bring trouble on it. ¹⁹ All the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron are sacred to the Lord and must go into his treasury.”

²⁰ When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city. ²¹ They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.

²² Joshua said to the two men who had spied out the land, “Go into the prostitute’s house and bring her out and all who belong to her, in accordance with your oath to her.” ²³ So the young men who had done the spying went in and brought out Rahab, her father and mother, her brothers and sisters and all who belonged to her. They brought out her entire family and put them in a place outside the camp of Israel.

²⁴ Then they burned the whole city and everything in it, but they put the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron into the treasury of the Lord’s house. ²⁵ But Joshua spared Rahab the prostitute, with her family and all who belonged to her, because she hid the men Joshua had sent as spies to Jericho—and she lives among the Israelites to this day.

²⁶ At that time Joshua pronounced this solemn oath: “Cursed before the Lord is the one who undertakes to rebuild this city, Jericho:

“At the cost of his firstborn son
 he will lay its foundations;
at the cost of his youngest
he will set up its gates.”

²⁷ So the Lord was with Joshua, and his fame spread throughout the land.

Holy shit!  They didn’t even spare some women and girls for sex slavey, a common LORD-approved practice in the CHB. And who knew that God had a Treasury Department?!

The CHB is full of insane mass-homicidal crap like this, ordered  and approved by the Big Guy in the Sky.

This is of course where a left Christian interjects that I am quoting the bad Old Testament whereas the beautiful socialist New Testament covering the coming of God’s son showing up in Judea two millenniums ago is much, much better, as if Jesus didn’t take the Old Testament as sacred text and didn’t justify slavery and the oppression of women and workers in his own time. I address the “Jesus as socialist” objection below.   

Theo-Idiocy: The Book of Job 

The copy of the CHB from which I have read these sick passages was owned by my grandfather, William Paul Street.  William P. Street was a zealous Methodist, a great outdoorsman, an education professor at the University of Kentucky, a New Deal and Great Society Democrat, and a fan of the all-white Kentucky Wildcats basketball team.  He was also a staunch public advocate of Lyndon Johnson’s Crucifixion of Southeast Asia – the so-called Vietnam War, during which the Christian United  States killed 3 to 5 million people in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.  

His father (my paternal great grandfather) was a circuit-riding preacher in rural Missouri.  His father was turned on to the literal word of the CHB after a country judge ordered to attend a Methodist tent revival meeting as punishment for committing the sin and literal late 19^th  Century state crime of playing baseball on Sunday.

Dring the Great Depression, William P. Street married a Finnish woman, a stern Lutheran named Lina Luhtala, who carried the gene for hemophilia, passed on by mothers to male offspring.  William and Lina’s only child, my father David Street (1935-1980), overcame this terrible disease enough to become a skilled jazz pianist, a liberal-left sociologist, a participant in Dr. Martin Luther’s King’s Chicago Freedom Movement, and an opponent of the “Vietnam War.” (He also once went on a Chicago late night television talk show with the assignment of discussing the latest research on prostitution only to blindside his fellow guest the National Football League legend Frank Gifford with troubling statistics about high school football deaths!)    

My youthful father wanted nothing to do with the CHB thanks to William P. Street’s habit of reading  vicious and moronic Biblical passages (like the ones I quoted above) to him while he was laid up as a boy and teenager with injuries related to his disease. He was in enough pain without having to hear about noxious shit like the Israelites killing and burning everything that moved in Jericho (kind of a role model for what the real-life state of Israel has been doing in Gaza)!   

My paternal grandfather elicited especially strong disgust from his son by reading from the CHB’s Book of Job.  I’m sure many readers here know the basic outline of that psychotic biblica tale. Here’s my Cliffs Notes summary:

Satan (the Devil) tells God that humans lose their faith in him when bad things happen to them – that they only believe in him when their lives are going well.  So God says “Oh yeah Satan? Well F you too. Guess what Devil, look at what I’m going to do to this poor bastard named Job in the land of Uz. Job is  a wealthy, happy, and pious guy with a beautiful, healthy and happy family. Watch what I’m going to do to this mortal. I’m gonna F’ng ruin his life. Watch me sicken and kill his family and make him poor.  And here’s the deal, Demon. Pay attention: it won’t F’ng matter; it won’t matter. He’s still going to believe in me.  He won’t lose faith.  This is what you don’t understand, Satan: people don’t just believe in me because they think I make them happy sometimes.  They believe in me no matter what, even when I ruin their lives, because I’m the fucking Master of the Universe! Got it? Capiche?”

As the story develops, Job does at first respond to the tragedy and destitution the sadistic LORD imposes on him (to make a point to Satan!) by questioning and cursing God. It seems like Satan might win the argument. But Job changes his mind after God  speaks to him through a whirlwind – that’s right, a motherF’ng whirlwind. God blows away Job’s little human mind. God puts poor Job in his place by saying "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?" Job mumbles a short response but the Big Guy just keeps talking, never directly addressing Job.  The LORD calls down to Satan and says “how you like them apples, Devil man!”

This sick parable concludes with Job “confessing” his awareness of God’s total awesomeness and his own lack of knowledge "of things beyond me which I did not know” (and here I am quoting the HCB).  Now that he has “seen God” (through a whirlwind) he says, "I retract and repent in dust and ashes.” 

The Book of Job lays out the doctrine of, “Theodicy, (from Greek theos, ‘god’; dikē, ‘justice’), the explanation of why a perfectly good, almighty, and all-knowing God permits evil. The term literally means ‘justifying God.’ Although many forms of theodicy have been proposed, some Christian thinkers have rejected as impious any attempt to fathom God’s purposes or to judge God’s actions by human standards.” (Britannica)

In short: what happens is God’s will, so shut the F up and don’t complain just because – for example – a United States-backed fascist state like Israel commits genocide in the “Holy Land.” It’s God’s will and God is God, see? Get it? Get over it and get with the program.

Jesus Fascist Christ.

A Head Start

Thank God, I mean thank natural human intelligence that my father came to loathe the CHB and married an educated woman (my mother Jane Marie Freed) whose Catholic parents’ alcoholism combined with the killing of her beloved (and devoutly Catholic) older brother Connie Freed by French fascist forces in 1942 (as I have spoken about here) and the arrogance of her girlhood priests to alienate her from Christian doctrine. I was thankfully raised without religion, something of a Head Start program on the path to scientific socialism.  

Read it and Weep

My mother recalled that “the priests used to tell us not to read the Bible. ‘We’ll read it and interpret it for you,’ they said. That never sat very well with me!”

I recommend actually reading the CHB to get a full sense of just how sadistic, irrational, genocidal, sexist and warmongering it is. Just like how I encourage folks to read The Federalist Papers and the Proceedings of the [1787] US Constitutional Convention to get a sense of just how conservative and propertarian, racist, imperialist, sexist and viciously opposed to the popular masses the US Founding Fathers were.

The fact that millions and millions of Amerikans are caught up in the literal word of the CHB ought to send chills down our spines. Christian fundamentalists can be heard right now joining with Zionist Jews quoting the Judeo-Christian Old Testament to “justify” Israel’s US-backed genocidal ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza today.

Afterword

While today’s commentary reflects my own personal and family history regarding Christian doctrine, there’s nothing original in my critique of the CHB. For a far more comprehensive dive into the madness of the CHB, see the Revolutionary Communist Party’s (Revcoms) “God the Original Fascist” series here. An essential  critical text is Revcom leader Bob Avakian’s important book Away With All Gods: Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World, which also takes on the Koran. Unlike me, Avakian has actually read the whole HCB. (John Hutnyk, professor and academic director, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, called Avakian’s volume “necessary, critical and timely. . . . Everyone should read Away With All Gods because it is necessary, critical and timely, but also because it is a book written with joy and humor.")

I expect someone to comment to the effect that “God’s son Jesus” was a “socialist.” Nope. Leaving aside the sticky empirical question of whether an individual named Jesus Christ ever actually existed, I say with full confidence that the Jesus portrayed in The New Testament was no such a thing.  Please read this statement from the bourgeois thinker Lawrence Reed.  I do not share Reed’s weak and insulting understanding of socialism or his embrace of capitalism (the system that may well soon cancel all prospects for a decent human future) but I do think he succeeds in showing that New Testament Jesus (NTJ) was not in fact a socialist and that NTJ’s counsel on questions of wealth and poverty are if anything more consistent with capitalism than with socialism. Avakian undertakes an excellent critique of the New Testament and the myth of radical Marxist/anarchist Jesus from a revolutionary communist perspective in Away With All Gods.

Endnote

+1. Wikipedia: “The Old Testament (OT) [of the CHB] is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew and occasionally Aramaic writings by the Israelites. The second division of Christian Bibles is the New Testament, written in the Koine Greek language.”