Is YAWEH a Moral Monster?
In a major article my friend Paul Copan argues that the God of the Old Testament is not a moral monster. I haven't yet taken the time to read all of it, but I'm sure it's the best answer from an evangelical perspective. If it fails, and I think it does, then Christians should reject such a God. As you get the chance, tell me what you think.
24 comments:
Thats a long article, and maybe I'll read it, but honestly, if they discredit other scriptures as mythology, what is it about the old testament that insulates it from the same criticisms?
I have geared up for a series of articles on mythic parallels in the bible, and if all goes well, I'll start it this month.
I have to agree with Lee R. on this, when I started reading this the first impression I got was that this apology is long and convoluted. He says that the new atheist, "presents challenges" and that to understand we must, "navigate the waters."
If we obtain knowledge of God through "revealed theology" and it takes 40 lawyers, 30 theologians and a tribe of pygmies to understand it and interpret it; how can we call it revealed?
John,
After reading Paul Copan’s article, I would highly recommend that, should he not make it in the Philosophy and Ethics department, he would make one hell-of-a used car salesman!
By this I mean he can put a spin on a clearly stated Biblical text equal to selling a
worn-out Junker as a rare antique! Just look how he handles the plainly stated legal text in Deuteronomy requiring a woman’s hand to be cut off:
“On the surface, Deuteronomy 25:11-12 appears to suggest that a woman's hand must be cut off if she seizes the genitals of the man who is in a fight with her husband. If such a reading is correct, it would be the only biblical instance of punishment by mutilation; such would be the penalty, not simply for acting shamefully and humiliating the man, but also for her permanently damaging the man's private parts such that he could never father children (thus, P. C. Craigie, The Book of Deuteronomy, New International Commentary on the Old Testament [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976], 315-16). However, a more plausible interpretation comes from Jerome T. Walsh. He makes an excellent case for depilation-"you shall shave [the hair of] her groin"-not mutilation.” (End note, 58).
Notice his phases: “On the surface…”; “…appears to suggest…”; “If such a reading is correct…” and by the time he’s finished, Copan has spun the whole violent act of female hand removal into nothing more than public hair removal!! Copan could have at least used the LXX to understand how the Jews understood the Hebrew.
Secondly, look at his end notes and who published the books he used as references. Most of his books, supporting his thesis, are from the VERY CONSERVATIVE church publishing house such as: Baker (Southern Baptist), Zondervan, Inter-Varsity, Moody Press, to the more moderate, but still very religious Westminster-John Knox, Fortress and the church oriented subsidy of the academic publisher, E.J. Brill; Eerdmans.
Finally, Copan’s limited use in citing the P-Source of the Pentateuch is subjectively cited to arrive at his set conclusion. Plus, the fact that Copan quoted extensively though out his article from Deuteronomy, he never once placed his comparison of the much older ancient Near Eastern texts in relation to the much later Hebrew legal tradition in what scholars call the Deuteronomistic History.
Conclusion: Copan’s article is simply an apologetic defense based on the selective and manipulative use of the data drawn from conservative authors published by very conservative to moderate church presses. The anachronistic use of ancient material in relationship to the Bible is extremely disappointing.
I think the author is correct in asserting that in the context of the ancient near east the God of the Old Testament is not a "moral monster."
But there is a much deeper problem, nicely illustrated by the following, taken from the third page of the article:
According to Bruce Birch, we moderns encounter a certain barrier as we approach the subject of OT ethics. Simply put, the ANE world is "totally alien" and "utterly unlike" our own social setting. This world includes slavery, polygamy, war, patriarchal structures, kingship, ethnocentrism, and the like. His advice is this:
Any treatment of the Hebrew Bible with regard to ethics, especially as an ethical resource to contemporary communities, must acknowledge the impediment created by the simple fact that these texts are rooted in a cultural context utterly unlike our own, with moral presuppositions and categories that are alien and in some cases repugnant to our modern sensibilities.
I pose the following question: if indeed the world of the Old Testament is "totally alien" and "utterly unlike" our world, why then would we look to the Old Testament as a source of divinely-inspired, authoritative moral principles? Upon reading the old Testament, would we not be more likely to become confused than enlightened?
Another issue is that the author says that the God of the Old Testament should not be judged in the light of post-enlightenment morality. But at the same time the modern reader can only make sense of the OT in terms of post-enlightenment morality.
In other words, upon reading the OT text, the modern reader has to decide what are the lessons to be learned from the text. E.g., the reader has to understand that genocide is wrong and not to be emulated, and that justice and concern for the poor should be emulated.
But the only way that the reader can come to that understanding is through post-enlightenment morality. That being the case, how then is post-enlightenment morality insufficient? What exactly does the Old Testament "add" to our understanding of morality, if all of it must be judged in the light of our current understanding of morality?
Another problem is that religious stories and statements rarely clarify moral issues; they typically make them more complex. Instead of just trying to figure out what WE should do, we end up trying to figure out what Jesus would do, what Moses would do, etc. We then have to figure out what the real moral of the story is, what is the literary context of the story, the cultural context of the story, whether the message was intended only for that time and place or for all times and places, and so on.
And after all that, a hundred believers might come up with a hundred different conclusions. But to what end? Nothing has been clarified, no clear path illuminated, and we end up with needless complexity. And at the end of all that we still have to decide what WE should do. The thinking person would certainly be justified in asking what was the point of all that.
Labeling this as "philosophy" is wishful thinking.
Glancing through the last two pages of it, it seems the standard fare of
1. presuming the bible is what it says it is
2. conflating morality with christianity, without specifying why morality should not be 'conflated' with islam, buddhism, hinduism, etc
3. throwing up the mythical 'atheist body count' and overlooking the destruction of the world in the flood (I know its a myth but they don't, ssshhhh)
4. using loaded language to influence the reader subconsciously
5. Overlooking the fact that Judaism and christianity inherited much of their ethics from other cultures and religion
6. The Jews who are the experts in their scripture think christians are whacked for seeing christ proof texts in the OT.
Naturalism's foundations cannot account for ethical normativity; theism is better positioned to do so.
This ignores the fact that morality and ethics spans cultures and religions which cancels out the right for christians to associate it with thier god and ignores recent studies in biological bases for a 'moral sense' being done in harvard, and the naturally occurring Tit-for-tat behavior in the wild (such as the christmas truce in world war one and successive patterns of behavior throughout history), which is too primitive to be any divine gift and the fact that game theory can predict pretty well that more successful outcomes occur when agents are acting in thier own self-interest. Look at the various versions of the prisoners dillemma.
This looks to me like fodder for the mindless, and I'm sure they'll come over here and lob it at us.
It might do us some good to root through it and expose the fallacies, but thats all I can do today. We should use this to create a Frequently Offered Claims page. As in FOC! Not that again.
I'm not trying to make things difficult for us here by linking to Copan. Here at DC I try to link to the best that Christianity has to offer in our sidebar, which very few skeptical sites do, and almost no Christian apologetical sites do. I want a fairminded approach. I think we should look for the best they have and deal with it. And I think we can. I'll have to deal with it later, but I will. So far the comments are on target. Is this the best they've got?
Lee:
I look forward to your parallel myths article. Are you familiar with the concept Joseph Campbell discusses in the Occidental Mythology volume of his Masks of God series where the early Genesis stories are "inversions" of standard themes of the time? The idea being that all the same elements are there but have been flipped around to recas YHWH as the primary deity responsible.
Most of this seems to lie in J and also extends to older Canaanite concepts as well. The various etiological tales describing how certain groves and sacred sites (temples, groves, wells, etc...) became sacred in the first place, each case being a spot where YHWH appeared and something miraculous happened.
J seems to pick up on this from E (as he seemed to do with other themes as well) with the Exodus story. If you take the ideas suggested by Mark Smith and Donald Redford, you have a folk tale based likely on the Hyksos where expulsion becomes escape with an invented hero (with details later added by J based on Sargon) with El as originaly the deity. E (or maybe even a later version of E) replaced El with YHWH (having probably identified them by that time) and adds Moses as the hero with the El/YHWH revelation occuring with Moses. J takes the same story and adds in both inverted mesopotamian "origin of the world" myths and local Cannanite myths, ties everything together with common ancestory, and claims in all the events YHWH was there all along.
When you throw in J's etiologies for idividual people and place names, plus his hebrew puns, J come across really amazing.
Sorry if I babbled to much.
I'd like to make a specific rebuttal to one point he makes as a distinction between the code of Hammurabi and the Levitical laws. He states:
Also unlike the Code of Hammurabi and other Mesopotamian law codes are the various "motive clauses" in the Sinaitic legislation that ground divine commands in Yahweh's historical activity. For example, the first commandment with a promise is: "Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long . . ." (Exod. 20:12). Indeed, the prologue to the Decalogue affirms God's saving activity in history: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me" (Exod. 20:2-3). Or, "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy . . . for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth . . . and rested on the Sabbath" (Exod. 20:8-11). Such motive clauses would be most plausibly situated in Israel's redemptive, storied setting.
And indeed these would be interesting facts if any of the above statements were true history. But of course we know that they are not.
Claim one is that people who honor their parents will live long upon the earth, with a corollary idea within it that people who dishonor their parents will die early.
In fact, the vast bulk of parricides take place because of parental abuse of children (one would think the God of the universe would figure this out). If we assume that child safety networks in the ancient near east were on the whole worse than the ones that exist today, we can see that a large number of abused children would be commanded by God to sit quietly and take the abuse. It is indisputable that this has happened over history due to this very commandment. This is the action of a moral monster.
Claim two is that God brought the Egyptians out of slavery. But God did not bring the Egyptians out of slavery. There is no archeological evidence for any Exodus of any sort.
The mere suggestion that 2 million people could wander in the desert for 40 years and have an army that was capable of defeating anyone is absurd. With modern technology and logistics our armies perish after wandering in the desert for fractions of this time and they have no children or pregnant women in them.
Ancient armies became unable to fight after mere weeks in the desert (see Marcus Licinius Crassus at Carrhae). Yet we are to believe that lack of hygiene and sanitation for 2 million ex-slaves was no problem for God over a 40 year period.
The idea that people would be commanded to do something on the basis of a colossal lie of this sort is indeed the action of a moral monster.
The third and most outrageous claim is that the Sabbath should be kept because God made the earth in six literal days. The Sabbath is unique among commands because if it is to be taken seriously, the "yom" of the first book of Genesis must be taken as a literal 24 hour period. Of course, anyone who could write such a thing would not be aware of the shape of the earth (and thus ineligible for the job of God of the universe), but nonetheless if you believe the command to keep the Sabbath is binding because of its historical referent then you must accept a 6 day creation.
The disproofs of a literal 6 day creation are left to the reader.
Suffice it to say that again, to command something on the basis of a lie is indeed the action of a moral monster. Actually, it's the kind of thing an abusive parent might do repeatedly to his children.
I'm sorry but this is as far as I go:
Indeed, another Pentateuchal narrative, Numbers 12, gives an insightful theological perspective about race. Moses marries a black African woman-from Cush/Ethiopia, which was south of Egypt and under Egyptian control at that time. The term "Cushite" is mentioned twice for emphasis. Aaron and Miriam are very upset about this marital arrangement-perhaps a power struggle because a new person has entered into the circle of leadership. Despite the objections by Moses' siblings, Yahweh resoundingly approves of Moses' marriage to a black woman, highlighting his approval by turning Miriam's skin white!
I am proving that God was not a racist by proving that God was a racist ...
You guys will have to let me know if there's anything of substance after page 2.
Evan,
A few comments to add to your’s:
1. Copan states: “Also unlike the Code of Hammurabi and other Mesopotamian law codes are the various "motive clauses" in the Sinaitic legislation that ground divine commands in Yahweh's historical activity. For example, the first commandment with a promise is: "Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long . . ." (Exod. 20:12).”
So what’s the promise of Yahweh to the children who fail to obey their parents: Death by the hand of their Elder in public! (Deut. 21: 18 “If any man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father or his mother, and when they chastise him, he will not even listen to them, 19 then his father and mother shall seize him, and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gateway of his hometown. 20 “They shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey us, he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ 21 “Then all the men of his city shall stone him to death; so you shall remove the evil from your midst, and all Israel will hear of it and fear.)
2. Evan: “Ancient armies became unable to fight after mere weeks in the desert (see Marcus Licinius Crassus at Carrhae). Yet we are to believe that lack of hygiene and sanitation for 2 million ex-slaves was no problem for God over a 40 year period.”
This problem seems to be a major issue of reality for the editor as he needs to tell us that after 40 years of walking, neither their clothes nor shoes wore out! (“I have led you forty years in the wilderness: your clothes have not grown old on you, and your shoes have not grown old on your feet.” Deut. 29:5).
Copan seems to take the Fifth Amendment when it comes to the Bible after he quotes only what he needs to subjectively prove his case.
I thought I would give this article a chance.
Here is a telling quote from the second page:
The imago Dei establishes the fundamental equality of human beings, despite the ethnocentrism and practice of slavery within Israel.
This is not clear thinking. If the fundamental equality of human beings had actually been established, the ethnocentrism and slavery would not have existed.
Basically, this is another "if you interpret the bible differently than I do, then your wrong."
I'm still trying to figure out what the author was trying to say about in this statement:
Despite the objections by Moses' siblings, Yahweh resoundingly approves of Moses' marriage to a black woman, highlighting his approval by turning Miriam's skin white!
I don't want to jump to conclusions, because I am easily confused, but doesn't that sound a bit... racist?
What astounds me about apologist is that they keep trying to divine what the authors of the ancient holy texts meant, in light of the evolution of their own moral/ethical codes. It totally escapes them that the authors of the OT meant exactly what they wrote.
How many christian commentators today write with the worry of how their writing will be interpreted 2000 yrs later? They write what they mean at that time and place.
So did the OT authors.
I'm puzzled about this business about Moses's wife. Yes, Numbers 12 does identify her as Cushite. But in Exodus Zipora is the daughter of a priest of Midian (Jethro). I'd have to double check this, but I think Midian is around Sinai (for example Moses herded flocks around Mt Horeb). Also from Genesis 10 I don't see any evidence that Cush was associated with the curse on Canaan (Ham).
As to Miriam's 'whiteness', that is a punishment, the 'leprous' skin condition (probably fungal), that is prominent in Levitical law.
From years in a 'socially conscious' church, the main black/white 'race' passage in the OT, that I recall, is the Song of Solomon: 'I am black, but comely'.
paulj
Hi fw01,
you didn't babble.
Do you have some recommendations for study? You've piqued my interest.
Thanks for the link John.
This is an interesting read for me as I have read all 4 of the "horseman" he attempts to refute. As a recent de-converter, I understand the Evangelical spin on these passages all too well but have wondered what an Evangelical response would be to the astute charges leveled by Dawkins, Dennett et al as they demonstrate how the iron-age ethics of the OT YHWH fail to measure up to any modern measure of justice or compassion.
The logic (or lack thereof) of Copan's response is characteristic of the usual apologist methodology - i.e. divert the argument to peripheral issues & hope you won't notice.
The issue at hand is not how the OT YHWH compares to the cuneiform morality of the day, but how the supposedly transcendent creator of the universe, who is procalimed to be the ultimate representative of mercy, justice, love and compassion could be the same God documented in the OT. The author fails to address the incongruity of how the God of all love and justice could vigorously punish his people for failing to exterminate every last inhabitant of Canaan when they are seized by the irresistible urge to be merciful to their prisoners. The idea that YHWH is revealed in stages is a thinly masked rationalization for the fact that this YHWH of the Pentateuch is not compatible with justice, mercy or love by any reasonable standard.
All the rationalizations Copan uses fail to address this glaring issue.
Thanks for the reminder as to one of the many reasons why I am no longer able to live with these rationalizations at a personal level & why I am no longer in the fold.
-evan
I've have not read the article. I'm an ex-JW. Raised in it. When a was in the process of becaming atheist/agnostic (I just don't care about the notcion of a 'God') I've studied a lot of scholar work both from both sides (chistians/not chistians). It's confusing and a time loss.
I think that for inteligent people to defent chistianity requires stressfull intelectual contortions. Just to preserve the integrity of what they -want&need- to believe to be true.
A complex refutation to this people is finally no needed, in my opinion.
Simple common sense works, I just keep in mind something like this:
When a was a JW I preched to chinese people in their language.
They for the most part know nothing about the Bible. For them bible stories are like the indian myth of world creation for us.
One chinese guy started to read the bible from the start. After reading some chapters, we talked with him and they told us that he is not interested in our religion because "the god of this bible is very evil".
I think that this answers the whole article about I haven't read. ;)
Just take a fresh read of the Bible from the start, pretending that is a book about Indian history for example, and you will get a "correct" point of view about it's validity as a moral&historical account.
Paul Copan '''What then of the children? Death would be a mercy, as they would be ushered into the presence of God and spared the corrupting influences of a morally decadent culture.''
As always, good Christian citizens are not too abashed by the idea of children being killed.
In the cult of death that is Christianity, death is a mercy, and children are killed so that they can go to heaven.
I hope to come back and look at the comments, but I saw this while skimming the article (pg 2):
"Indeed, another Pentateuchal narrative, Numbers 12, gives an insightful theological perspective about race. Moses marries a black African woman-from Cush/Ethiopia, which was south of Egypt and under Egyptian control at that time. The term "Cushite" is mentioned twice for emphasis. Aaron and Miriam are very upset about this marital arrangement-perhaps a power struggle because a new person has entered into the circle of leadership. Despite the objections by Moses' siblings, Yahweh resoundingly approves of Moses' marriage to a black woman, highlighting his approval by turning Miriam's skin white![32]"
Right. You know that Yahweh loves all people, because he turned that Cushite woman white. Yep. No racism or xenophobia there. Any woman can be blessed and turned into a white woman. What the frigging heck was wrong with her as she was? Even if you read that as some kind of bleached/ivory/albino whiteness, it's still a denegration of her as herself. "She was good enough to marry Moses, but let's just make a few cosmetic changes, you know, just because..."
I think this is like the time Jesus said, "Hey, some of my best friends are Jews"
The whole 40 years wandering thing has bugged me too. Aside from the fact that various measurements of time and sizes seem to be similar (40 of something is very popular), I still feel strongly that these measurements can't be taken literally by modern standards because we don't know precisely the standards they used to base their systems.
At one point, I thought that maybe there were some misunderstandings between "year" and "month" (in this case, these are both lunar which is what the Hebrew calendar is based on instead of the more accurate 365 1/4 year we currently have), but while that would explain somebody having kids when they were 250 years old (approx 21 years old) it doesn't explain somebody in that era having a kid at 65 (5 years old?).
Of course, I wondered about most of this while in my agnostic/questioning phase. Then I realized the whole thing was just a bunch of stories written by people who thought the Earth was flat and stopped trying to figure out any actual correlation.
I still look for stuff from time to time on this and people don't really talk about much. One of my favorites though is this great apologist's site that "discusses" ages and Neanderthals. Fun.
Were people in the Old Testament really that Old?
"Right. You know that Yahweh loves all people, because he turned that Cushite woman white."
Where do you get that idea? That isn't what Copan wrote, nor is it in the Numbers passage. It was Miriam, Moses's sister, that was turned 'white' (leprous), not Moses's wife.
There's enough 'us v them' zenophobia in the Bible (as in most cultures), without importing modern black/white racism tensions into it.
Hello John Loftus:
Sir, I ordered your new book this morning. I'm looking forward to reading it.
BTW folks, be sure to donate to the John's fund. This blog and the books of the authors who post here are valuable and worth the ante.
Miriam was the sister not the wife.
The wife was not considered important enough in the story to be named.
"Apologetics - the fine art of explaining why the Bible does not actually mean what it says; or means what it does not actually say."
--unknown
Kind of sums up his approach...?
Apparently Miriam should be punished for opposing the marriage of Moses to a foreign woman , while Nehemiah was a great prophet, who in chapter 13 called marrying foreign women a great sin.
Apologetics is taking one bit of the Bible and ignoring all the contradictory bits.
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