Mark, hi. Sorry, I started to respond to the violence of God in the bible and got taken up by my portfolio, of all things!!
Anyway, my point about Yahweh being one among many gods and then chosing the Hebrews coming out of Egypt speaks to this. Throughout the early bible books, Yahweh does kill but not indiscriminately. Slaughtering whole groups of people is justified as a means of taking over the land of Canaan and also of keeping the tribes pure -- kind of ethnic cleansing, I guess; ick. Anyway, the killing is brutal and creepy but not senseless.
If you read Kings 1 and 2 not as a religious book but as a saga of civil war and political assassination in a newly conquered land with many factions, both religious and political, vying for power, it makes more sense and is fascinating.
Also, from what I've studied, individual people weren't considered that important before the time of Jesus. Many people who study world religions generally consider "the Christ event" a turning point in world consciousness in which the individual person became more important than the collective he or she (but mostly he, let's face it) belonged to. This is illustrated by Jesus' sayings such as "let the dead bury the dead" (when a young man wanted to become a disciple but not until after he had buried his dying father) and "unless you hate your father and mother you cannot love me." In other words, the person's own "salvation" if you want to call it that was more important than his responsibility to his family or government.
But before that, people belonged to their families, to their tribes, to their rulers; not to themselves. To wipe out a huge chunk of them because they didn't fit in with the plans of an opposing tribe was just part of the way things were. If you were victorious, well, your gods were stronger than their gods. It isn't that Yahweh was so particularly vicious. When the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem, they brought the Jewish king's children out before him and slaughtered them all. Then they put out the king's eyes! Vicious? Yes! [The reason they did it was to put the lie to Yahweh's promise that there would always be a descendant of David on the throne in Jerusalem.]
So it wasn't just Yahweh who was so murderous. And in many ways, he was less murdurous. He absolutely prohibited the sacrifice of children while other gods of the time were still "wanting" that. |
