The ongoing genocide in Gaza at the hands of Apartheid Israel has brought the question of biblical interpretation from the margins to the center.
The impetus to do so has come from Benjamin Netanyahu. Think of his pronouncements about his Amalek strategy justifying his attacks in Gaza. Couple that with his IOF (Israel Occupation Force) song and dance celebrating the same. It has all raised the perennial question of the very nature of the God of the Jewish Testament.
And the question is simple. It was articulated by the ancient fathers of the Christian community – men like Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and the hereticated Marcion of Sinope. All of them wondered how anyone with a drop of humanity or possessed of the most elementary moral compass could believe in a God who commanded complete genocides directed specifically against women, children, infants, cattle, and sheep?
Of course, similar questions might be addressed today to Bibi Netanyahu or Genocide Joe Biden. Where’s your humanity? Have you completely lost your moral compass? What kind of God would justify your crimes?
So, let’s examine the question of Apartheid Israel’s genocidal God. Let’s think about divinity bereft of moral compass. Start with facing the fact that the Hebrew Bible might not be about God at all. Next look at the powerful beings who are presented there. And finally, consider Jesus’ attitude towards the so-called God of Israel.
No God in the Hebrew Bible
On this first and second points, I’m following the direction of scholars like the Australian Paul Wallis and the Italian biblical scholar Mauro Biglino. They question entirely the traditional interpretations of the biblical God.
According to Biglino and Wallis, the Hebrew Bible’s genocidal God is no God at all. In fact, the Hebrew Testament itself is not about God. Instead, close examination reveals that it is about “Elohim,” i.e., “Powerful Ones.”
These were Beings from Beyond who in the ancient world vied for control of our planet. Stories of such paleo-contacts with extraterrestrials (ETs) are found throughout revered texts across the planet from China to Egypt, and Babylon; from the Philippines to the Mayan Popol Vu. In fact, every ancient civilization holds that we came from above – from the sons of the stars.
Most often these foreign entities appear in reptilian forms or as fire-breathing dragons, Sometimes they possess wings. At others, the Powerful Ones appear in human form and are recognized as giants, witches, magicians, governors, lawgivers, as “Sons of God” or simply as kings whose specific names were forgotten, but who were remembered as divine. Still elsewhere the Powerful Ones take the form of “angels,” (messengers from beyond) or demons. Invariably, they possess super-human powers.
In biblical texts these “Powerful Ones” had names such as El, El Shaddai, Elion, Baal, Ruach, Ashera, and Yahweh. Together they comprised a family that included 70 sons of El. Among them Yahweh was an inferior subordinate of his father who apportioned to his offspring control of various geographical regions. Yahweh’s assignment was to protect the nation of Israel. (Note El’s name in the term Yisra-El itself.)
Only at the beginning of the first millennium BCE was El replaced by Yahweh as the supreme and only God. That is, Jewish polytheism and henotheism morphed into monotheism for the first time around 530 BCE – after the Babylonian exile. It was then that Judah’s elite in the persons of Ezra, Josiah (640-609 BCE), and Nehemiah reformulated the nation’s longstanding traditions. Their patriarchal work removed, downplayed, and/or reinterpreted all references acknowledging the existence and power of Gods from above other than Yahweh, Judah’s national deity.
Put otherwise, the Jewish biblical tradition was rewritten with the name Yahweh pasted over references to the Elohim as if Israel had always been monotheistic. This is how Yahweh became responsible for the genocides of El Shaddai and other “divinities” who lacked human feeling or moral compass.
The reformers took special pains to erase references to goddess worship. Against great resistance, Israel’s beloved goddess Ashera was consigned to the biblical memory hole.
Not God for Yeshua
The impoverished and imperialized prophet, Yeshua of Nazareth, had little to do with the Yahweh pasted over the traditions of the Elohim. Nowhere does he even refer to God using that name.
On the contrary, the prophet was highly critical of and even rejected any understandings of an exclusively national God, much less as one who commanded the slaughter of enemies.
Instead, Yeshua spoke of God as a Universal Father and as the One his disciple Paul of Tarsus described as the Source of the universe and everything in it – as the One in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28).
For Yeshua and his disciples, God was international, universal, and unconcerned with Temple worship and sacrifice. This eventually led Yeshua’s followers to reject not only Judaism’s limited understandings of God, but Judaism and its law in general.
Still, the Christian tradition continued to embrace the Jewish Testament as part of the Holy Bible as though Jesus was a worshipper of Yahweh. It did so because Christians understood Jesus as fulfilling Jewish testament prophecies.
The resulting process of distortion was straight forward. Christianity started out as a sect of Judaism that followed the teachings of the Jewish prophet, Yeshua. After his execution around 30 CE, his followers inspired by his international and universal vision had grown geographically and numerically far beyond the Jewish community. Their movement had spread to all parts of the Roman Empire to become a largely gentile association that for various reasons even came to despise its Jewish origins.
These international characteristics led to the Bible’s becoming a world book by the 4th century CE. For it was then that the Roman Emperor Constantine’s Edict of Milan legalized Yeshua’s Jewish movement now called “The Way.”
The change was necessary because the Roman Empire’s unifying religion (also for various reasons associated with the increasing cultural diversity of its subjects) had lost credibility across its ever-expanding territories. It needed an international unifying religious ideology that would uphold the belief that the Emperor was supported by divine authority.
So, in the early 4th century and after long years of persecuting “Christians,” the Empire’s Office for Religious Affairs (under Constantine) decided to legalize the sect that had become more universal than what the Roman pantheon had come to represent. Eventually, by 380 CE Christianity became Rome’s official religion (under Theodosius).
Afterwards, widely diverse beliefs about the identity of Yeshua of Nazareth (and about the Bible and its tales) were streamlined into official doctrines, while alternative understandings were condemned and punished as heresies.
Thus Jesus became understood as a worshipper of the Elohim-become-Yahweh with all their contradictions, instead of as a prophet who rejected all but the Mosaic tradition as championed by Israel’s prophets and as universal father and spirit in whom we live and move and have our being.
Conclusion
To summarize: the Bible is not a world book written for humankind in general. Instead, it is a memoir of a small marginal and relatively insignificant group in the ancient Mideast called “Hebrews.” It was written for them, not for Christians.
Neither is the Bible about a universal “God.” Rather, it is about various kings and generals and Powerful Ones from the world above. In their various ancient pre-literate oral traditions Hebrews called them “Elohim,” “El,” “El Shaddai,” “Ruach,” “Baal,” “Ashera,” and “Yahweh.” The Powerful Ones included generals and kings who were often gradually elevated to divine status, just as happened with kings in other Mideastern cultures. Many of these Elohim were cruel and violent colonizers interested only in accumulating herds, gold, and virgin girls to improve their DNA.
“Yahweh” was the member of the Elohim to whose protection the Hebrew people were assigned, while (according to pre-literate traditions) other peoples were assigned other protectors drawn from the supra-human “Powerful Ones” who might even have been extra-terrestrials referenced in their own ways by virtually all ancient traditions across the planet.
In the 6th century BCE under Josiah, the Hebrew religion was streamlined and was rendered monotheistic. Biblical texts were rewritten as though Yahweh had always been the only God recognized by Israel.
In effect, what’s recorded in the Jewish Testament is a “Battle of the Gods,” i.e., contradictory, and incompatible understandings of powerful entities presented side-by-side with the inconsistencies ignored.
Today’s Palestinians in Gaza are the latest victims of the cruelest of the biblical Elohim.
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