Most people I know who were forced as children to attend Sunday school or to take some extracurricular Bible class when they could have been throwing a Frisbee or - and this really dates me - playing Atari were, naturally, bored by it. In fact, the experience has left them with the sense that the Bible itself is boring. But I always knew better. I always knew that if Jerry Falwell had ever actually read what ought to be called "the good book" only with the greatest of irony, there is no way he would urge his congregation to do so. The Old Testament is a crazy caricaturish catalogue of archetypal stories that rely on random events and the last-minute hand of God - the deus ex machina as real event, not literary convention - to make them work out, in which the good and noble suffer endlessly and the naughty often get off scot-free (with promises of hell in the afterlife, which we somehow never see - Hades being a Greek invention of the New Testament epoch). Any attempt to decipher a moral message is wasted. It is a grim view of the world, one where might makes right, where birthright makes right - and if hairy Esau is the firstborn, then it is acceptable for less hirsute and less savage Jacob to steal the blessing of the eldest through deceit and trickery.
Whatever prattling homilies are offered in the more conciliatory gospels that comprise the New Testament (and the book of Revelation pretty much destroys the good intentions of the earlier chapters by offering an anarchist's cookbook of diabolical fare), the unredacted worldview of the Old Testament is a history of families and clans that beget nationalities and wars - it's all Serbs and Croats, Cowboys and Indians, Hatfields and McCoys, Irish Catholics and English Anglicans, Arabs and Jews - in short, the beginnings of what Freud describes as "the narcissism of minor differences." And none of it is very pretty. You barely get into Genesis and out of the Garden of Eden before Cain slays Abel, his own brother, and adds insult to injury by claiming he's not responsible for his actions: "Am I my brother's keeper?" is the natural precursor to the Twinkie defense and the abuse excuse. For the impulsive sin of turning to look back at the funereal pyre of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot's wife is transmogrified into a pillar of salt as she flees the inferno; such a harsh punishment for such a thoroughly human impulse as looking back longingly - this is just an example of how God makes an example of those who just don't listen to Him. After being the dream boy born to a ninety-year-old, presumed-barren Sarah, fair Isaac is saved from sacrifice on Abraham's altar - an incident of God-mandated filicide that set the stage for a world in which the odds that a murdered child was killed by his own parents are twelve to one - by a whimsical Deity's last-minute interference, the rescuing hand of God that other victims of their parents' ill will - the children of Susan Smith, for example - were not granted.
But these acts of atrocity - occasionally alleviated by eleventh-hour episodes of Divine intervention - brought on by an Old Testament imagining of a Creator who is personified as both "jealous" and "vengeful," are small compared with the long, lingering pain that some of God's best-loved seem to endure. No sin can explain why Jeremiah suffered so much that he virtually invented the lament with his Jeremiads, no cinematic stage set of Herman Melville's dreams could justify Jonah doing time in the Leviathan, no bad behavior could be vindicated by forcing the prophet Ezekiel to lead the people through an atonement ritual that involved eating barley cakes mixed with excrement, nor did Daniel need to wrestle the lion to let us know that the Lord is God and what He wants, He gets, so heaven help us all. On a wager with Satan, God - as if heaven and hell were just a game of baccarat in a Las Vegas casino - takes the ever-faithful Job, smites his cattle with disease, decimates his wealth, sends a dust-bowl wind that bashes in his house, and when the roof caves in, it kills all ten of his children at once, all just to prove that nothing - nothing - will make this long-suffering servant of the Lord renounce righteousness and embrace the devil. "This man was blameless and upright," says the first sentence of the book of Job, describing the man it was named for. "He feared God and shunned evil."
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