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Holy Moses! — How the Story of God´s Greatest Prophet Demonstrates the Depravity of the Bible

December 12, 2008 - By Steve Shives - American Chronicle

Near the end of his life Moses finds himself opposed by the Midianites. This tribe, descended from one of the sons of Abraham, has long been a thorn in his side, most recently by sending prostitutes into his camp to tempt the young men of Israel into idolatry. To avenge this soul-imperiling offense, God orders Moses to war.

Twelve-thousand Israelites gear up and take the battle to the people of Midian. Under the personal command of Moses, the Israelites kill every Midianite man. They also kill the kings of Midian, and their wicked prophet Balaam. And they don´t stop there. The Midianite women and children are taken prisoners, and their cities are burned. The Israelites claim their livestock as spoils of war. The twelve-thousand return victorious and present their captives to Moses.

And Moses says unto them, "Have ye saved all the women alive?" He reminds everyone of the sin to which they were tempted by these Midianite women, which he names a crime not just against the Israelites but against God himself. Moses orders his men to kill all the little boys among the prisoners, but to save the little girls and any other virgins. "Keep them alive for yourselves," Moses tells them. In all, the Israelites claim thirty-two-thousand virgins. Thirty-two are set aside for God himself. God asks Moses to see if Eleazar the priest wouldn´t mind looking after them for him. Eleazar receives the thirty-two virgins without protest.

Even a great man like Moses cannot outrun his sins. He´s led the children of Israel through the wilderness for forty years, seeking their promised land. But God punishes Moses, informing him that he will die before his people have reached the end of their trek through the desert.

Why is Moses penalized so severely, denied the completion of his long and arduous quest? It isn´t for the genocide, the infanticide, the enslavement and rape of thirty-two-thousand women. It´s for being mildly direspectful while following God´s directions to draw water out of a rock to slake the thirsty Israelites and their animals. Instead of soberly calling on the rock to bring forth the water, Moses, who has been having a hard time of it recently, gathers his people around and says to them, "Must we fetch you water out of this rock?" Frustrated, he hits the rock with his staff. God keeps his word and makes with the water, but takes the cynicism of Moses as a grave personal offense and condemns him to die in the desert.

Making war on an entire race, burning their cities, murdering their children and taking their young women as sex slaves is all well and good, but even God has to draw the line somewhere.

Fortunately, none of what I´ve just told you ever actually happened. I can´t take credit for making it up; the story of Moses slaughtering and enslaving the Midianites is found in chapter 31 of the Book of Numbers in the Old Testament. The factuality of the story is beside the point. It´s reasonable to assume that most of the stories of the Old Testament never actually occurred, at least not anything like how they´re described in the Bible — the world was not created in six days, there was no global flood, the Red Sea was never parted, and the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments (if they existed at all) were carved by the hammer and chisel of man, not by the finger of God. It´s not the Bible´s poor grasp of history that worries me — it´s the Bible´s even feebler grip on morality.

Moses is no minor figure. He is traditionally credited with writing the first five books of the Old Testament, and Christians, Jews, and Muslims all consider him to be one of the greatest of the ancient prophets. He receives the law directly from God, and leads the children of Israel through most of their exile in the wilderness. God thinks enough of him that, despite their falling out over that ugly rock-hitting episode, he buries Moses personally and keeps the site of the grave a secret (no doubt to prevent the inevitable vandalism of the final resting place of humanity´s first mass-murderer). Later on, Moses is one of the few Old Testament characters to reappear in the New Testament, when he and the prophet Elijah make cameo appearances at the transfiguration of Jesus. It´s also one of the two times in the New Testament God´s voice is heard directly.

So Moses and the Almighty are pretty tight. It wouldn´t be at all improper to say that Moses is considered a role model, both within the text of the Bible and by the billion or so people on the planet who take it to be the word of God. Given the story with which I began this article, I find that a bit alarming. And the massacre of the Midianites is only one war crime of several in the career of Moses.

When Thomas Paine came to this subject in his splendid book The Age of Reason, he wrote

"The character of Moses, as stated in the bible, is the most horrid that can be imagined. If those accounts be true, he was the wretch that first began and carried on wars on the score, or on the pretence, of religion; and under that mask, or that infatuation, committed the most unexampled atrocities that are to be found in the history of any nation."

This is a role model? This is the man to whom God chose to speak, to reveal his laws, to write his holy book? The only biblical character guilty of more murders than Moses is God himself, so it isn´t hard to reckon why they got along so well. He followed the old man´s example — that´s why God respected Moses. But why should we?

Leaders of all religions, but especially those of the monotheist triumvirate of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have always opposed secularism. One of the most common attacks against nonreligious, humanist philosophies is that they are morally inferior. To admit morality to be the invention of man rather than God strips it of its authority to govern human behavior, goes the argument. The believers will always hold the high ground over the nonbelievers because their opinions about right and wrong are shared by the creator of the universe.
But if our morality was placed in us by God, why is it that so many of us have such different definitions of good and evil? Why is it that our ideas about morality seem to develop based on factors like culture, experience, and education? Why isn´t there a single human conscience hardwired into each one of us, one that crosses these man-made lines and unites our species in a common morality?

And if when we waver the Bible is to be our moral guide, why do we find so much of it so offensive? Most of us would put genocide, infanticide and mass-rape among the most despicable crimes possible. They are senseless, and cruel, and inexcusable. What possible legitimate motive could there be for the extermination of an entire race of people, or the murder of children, or the sexual assault of tens of thousands? They´re certainly not acts we´d expect from the benevolent God Christians, Jews and Muslims are always going on about. Yet there they are in the Bible, over and over again.

The crimes of Moses, and the worst crimes of God, are confined to the Old Testament. For this reason, some Christians claim the right to disown them. They live under the new covenant of Christ, not the old law brought down by Moses from Mount Sinai, they say. That´s fine for them, but this narrow position leaves out the millions of religious Jews to whom Moses remains a hero of the faith. And what about the Christians who assert the New Testament is all that really matters? Aren´t they still worshipping the same God? How in the hell do you reconcile the ferocious, bloodthirsty God of Moses with the laid-back, nearly silent deity who sends Jesus down to rap about love and forgiveness? I´ve heard of people settling down when they have kids, but damn.

Consider it objectively, and I think it´s inarguable that the Bible is a very poor moral guide. Yet most Christians I know are not jealous, petty would-be ethnic cleansers; some of them are downright spectacular human beings. The credit for their decency doesn´t go to God or Jesus or the Bible. It goes to the individuals themselves, and to that toothless, impotent man-made morality.

Our morals don´t come from God. They come from us. We´ve been making them up all this time. That doesn´t render them meaningless or rob them of their credence. Just the opposite — it grounds them in reality and gives them actual relevance to our societies and our species.

Moral authority originates not with God, but with our true creator: the process of evolution. There is an evolutionary reason why we are moral creatures. We are social animals. We form communities and work together in order to improve our chances for survival. It´s against our common interest to be killing each other. It benefits humanity as a whole for us to treat each other with compassion and respect, to give aid to the needy, to be honest and faithful, and to exploit our resources and wield our technologies responsibly. No supernatural intervention is necessary for any of this. Our continued existence as a species depends on it.

There are exceptions. There are societies to this day that tolerate, even promote practices that most outsiders find deplorable — cannibalism, torture, animal sacrifice, slavery, subjugation of women, religious persecution. But I find it telling that many of these cultures suffer from a lack of scientific understanding, and nearly all of them are ruled by religious fundamentalists. You will find no more devout people on the planet than the Muslim radicals who blow up themselves and crowds of innocent people in order to wage jihad against the infidels. Sincere followers of all faiths, most of whom are good people, talk about the freedom they have gained through their beliefs — they have been saved, emancipated, granted salvation. Unfortunately, for countless people all over the world, now and throughout human history, religion has brought not freedom, but enslavement. Religion doesn´t liberate; it shackles. It doesn´t revive; it kills.

When children raised to profess faith in the God of the Bible nevertheless grow up to be loving, decent people, this only demonstrates the legitimacy of man-made morality. Even if they claim to accept the entire Bible as the perfect word of God, even if they criticize others for being selective in what biblical teachings they take to heart, most Christians reject, or at least ignore the most outrageous sections of their scripture. Even that Southern Baptist Bolshevik John Hagee would never try to justify modern genocide through the example of Moses. At least, I don´t think he would . . .

The point of all this is that when we do good, when we refrain from lying and stealing and killing, when we treat others with kindness and respect, when we stand up for the abused, persecuted and disenfranchised, we have ourselves — not God — to thank. Unfortunately this also means that when we fall short, either as individuals or as a society, when we kill, when we steal, when we practice racism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry, when we make war on each other, we have only ourselves to blame. We can´t justify our vices and prejudices by putting them off on God.

We´re guilty of this in America in a big, readily apparent way. Most people in the United States who oppose recognizing same-sex marriage claim to only be doing what´s commanded of them by God. Most of these folks routinely ignore other supposedly divine admonitions to avoid lobster, haircuts, nocturnal emissions, all sorts of fun stuff. This is dishonest and cowardly. It´s also a totally unacceptable reason for excluding millions of American citizens from one of the most basic institutions of their society.

"Because God says so" is no grounds for refusing a gay couple the right to a state-sanctioned marriage, or for anything else. God doesn´t determine our consciences; we do. And we can all be very glad of that. Moses does as God tells him and dies with the blood of tens of thousands of people on his hands. That´s an example no one should ever follow.

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/84617