JUST AS TODAY’S PALESTINIANS ARE FORCED TO PAY for what yesterday’s Germans did to yesterday’s Jews, the express purpose of the exodus was to take “great and goodly cities, which you did not build, and houses full of all good things, which you did not fill, and cisterns hewn out, which you did not hew, and vineyards and olive trees, which you did not plant” (Deuteronomy 6:10-11)—not from people who were portrayed as the Israelites’ victims-turned-oppressors, not from a Pharaoh and his legions, but from entirely separate people who had been living in Canaan long before Abraham left Iraq.
Above all else, to insure that the god who was the source of Israel’s solidarity would not face competition from the gods of the people that they were instructed to conquer … to guarantee that Israel would be The Jewish State of Israel9 … the original Zionists scripted their god to command his followers to commit clean-sweep genocide:
In the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites [the people of Jerusalem], as the Lord your God has commanded; that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices which they have done in the service of their Gods, and so to sin against the LORD your God (Deuteronomy 20:16-18).
They should be utterly destroyed and should receive no mercy but be exterminated, as the Lord commanded Moses … Utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling (Joshua 11:20 … First Samuel 15:3).
You will make them as a blazing oven when you appear. The Lord will swallow them up in his wrath; and fire will consume them. You will destroy their offspring from the earth, and their children from among the sons of men (Psalms 21:9-10).10
Although commandments to commit absolute genocide were limited to the ancient analogue of today’s Palestinians and Bedouins, pending acquiescence to slavery, the balance of the world’s out-groups were under threat of partial genocide (Deuteronomy 20:10-15):
When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the LORD your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies,11 which the LORD your God has given you. Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel (Psalms 2:8-9). And the peoples will take them and bring them to their place, and the house of Israel will possess them in the LORD’s land as male and female slaves (Isaiah 14:2). Thus says the LORD: “The wealth of Egypt and the merchandise of Ethiopia, and the Sabeans, men of stature, shall come over to you and be yours, they shall follow you; they shall come over in chains and bow down to you. They will make supplication to you, saying: ‘God is with you only, and there is no other, no god besides him (Isaiah 45:14). And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising … Foreigners shall build up your walls, and their kings shall minister to you … your gates shall be open continually; day and night they shall not be shut; that men may bring to you the wealth of the nations, with their kings led in procession. For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you shall perish; those nations shall be utterly laid waste (Isaiah 60:1-12).
According to aggrandized accounts, this foreign policy enabled King Solomon to inherit “all the kingdoms from the Euphrates to the land of the Philistines and to the border of Egypt” (I Kings 4:21) and spend much of his time enjoying the spoil of his enemies, including purloined women among his “seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines” (I Kings 11:3) … and massive protection payments (I Kings 10:14-15):
Now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred and sixty-six talents of gold, besides that which came from the traders and from the traffic of the merchants, and from all the kings of Arabia and from the governors of the land.
In addition to being the “number of the beast” (Revelation 13:15–18), 666 talents is about 60,000 pounds of gold7—approximately three times the amount of real gold that Attila the Hun was able to extort from Rome per annum prior to sacking it for late payment.
WHAT ABOUT “THOU SHALT NOT KILL?” An original Torah scroll required about seventy goatskins and a great deal of manual labor. Because durable, portable writing space was so expensive, the only punctuation allowed by phonetic languages of that time was small, sub-script tick marks to designate where one word ended and the next word began. Otherwise, ancient Hebrew writing was a continuous stream of block letters (all caps) read right-to-left. There were no periods, no commas, no first-word capitalization and no paragraph breaks. In modern translations, decisions about where sentences and paragraphs begin and end are courtesy of the translator. So instead of being spaced as five separate paragraphs of one sentence each (the only place in the Bible where short-sentence-paragraphing occurs), highlighting what has come to be interpreted as five of the Big Ten out of 613 commandments, as follows [Exodus 20:13-17 and Deuteronomy 5:17-21 (identical passages)]:
Thou shalt not kill.
Neither shalt thou commit adultery.
Neither shalt thou steal.
Neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbor.
Neither shall you covet your neighbor’s wife and you shall not desire your neighbor’s house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor’s.
Without changing any of the words, common sense favors translating these passages as two sentences in one paragraph—as a continuous admonition against behaving badly toward one’s neighbors, as follows:
Thou shalt not kill, neither shalt thou commit adultery, neither shalt thou steal, neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbor. Neither shall you covet your neighbor’s wife, and you shall not desire your neighbor’s house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor’s.
In this translation, the question, ‘Thou shalt not kill whom?’ is answered by the ‘Love Commandment.’ Here are four translations of Leviticus 19:18:
“Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” — First Jewish Publication Society translation (JPS ‘1712) and the King James Version (KJV13).
“You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” — Revised Standard Version (RSV4).
“You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. Love your fellow as yourself.” — TANAKH (JPS ‘8514).
In context, the word translated as neighbor meant “the children of thy people,” “the sons of your own people,” “your countrymen”—in other words, fellow Israelites—and “Thou shalt not kill” meant ‘Thou shalt not kill thy neighbor—the children of thy people, your countrymen’ … your fellow Israelites. So there was no conflict between the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” in reference to in-group members and the commandments to commit genocide against out-groups. On the contrary, the former facilitated the latter because just as modern Zionists need to cooperate in order to accomplish Greater Israel, ancient Zionists needed to cooperate in order to fulfill the genocide commandments (for details and corroborative interpretations in the balance of the Bible, the Talmud and from Maimonides, see reference 3).
THE STORY OF JEWISH SLAVERY IN ANCIENT EGYPT has served more purposes more effectively than any other foundation myth. The fact that it lacks historical validity makes it all the more revealing. It means that the Passover myth is unencumbered by facts that do not suite its creators’ purposes. It also means that the extent to which the myth has been effective in accomplishing its purpose is the extent to which it has been retrospectively considered prophetic, and thereby validated—a self-fulfilling prophecy perceived as a prophecy fulfilled. The same ex post facto logic works for establishing ‘facts on the ground’ by expanding Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territory to accommodate the ‘natural growth’ of one god’s people at the expense of space for natural growth of another god’s people.
That slight-of-mind notwithstanding, a claim to land believed to have been bequeathed by a god who delighted in killing out-group peoples’ children, and commanded his followers to commit genocide in order to make that claim exclusive, should not be honored. Everybody has a right to believe anything that they want to believe, but on the logic of United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ principle that a man’s right to swing his fists wildly about in the air stops at the tip of another person’s nose, people who worship the god that Jesus worshipped,8 whether Christians or Jews, do not have a right to promote the displacement of irredentist Palestinians—not by war nor by slow-but-steady ethnic cleansing.10
Unlike children who believe in Santa Claus, adults are responsible for the myths that they live by and perpetuate. Indeed, because we should have more control over what we believe than we have over future events, adults bear more responsibility for behavior that is inspired by myths than we bear for behavior in response to actual history. Most of all, adults are responsible for the myths that they use to indoctrinate their children’s existential foundations, and compared to a god of usury, enslavement and genocide…
A BETTER EXISTENTIAL FOUNDATION IS AVAILABLE. Prior to 1997, the prospect of gravity overcoming the momentum of the Big Bang was alive and well. Under that cosmological scenario, our universe was slated to stop expanding and then collapse into a giant black hole. That ‘Big Crunch’ hypothesis has since been discounted because observations from deep space indicate that the universe is still expanding at an accelerating rate, such that its momentum will clearly overcome gravity and, left to its own inanimate devices, the universe will slowly dissipate into nothing.15
An eternally expanding universe does not have a happier ending than a collapsing universe, but it does provide vastly more time for the evolution of living matter—matter that has purpose. Substantive conjectures have been devised for controlling the universe and making life a permanent component of a permanently extant universe.16 That outcome is not known to be impossible. If it happens, and the organisms who control the universe are our descendants, our lives will go from having had only terminal, self-attributed meaning, to having critically important eternal consequence, and so infinite real meaning.17
Unfortunately, the people who invented the god of The Bible wanted fealty. They wanted believers to be afraid. They wanted in-group members to believe that they were created from dust by a god who would give them a good life, at the expense of out-groups, before returning them to dust (Genesis 3:19). But that god would only provide a good life between the dust eternities if in-group members were sufficiently humble to not aspire to become “as gods” (Genesis 3:4-5, KJV)13 and so gain sufficient hubris to keep “the spoil of their enemies” for individual consumption, instead of handing it over to their god-inventing priests to support a trickle-down economy (e.g., Joshua 6:19-7:26). The threat of humans becoming gods was made out to be so great that the top god (“the LORD God”) found it necessary to warn his fellow gods18 and take preventive measures (Genesis 3:22-24):
Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”—therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.
But the flaming sword was not sufficient deterrence, so seeing the Tower of Babel heading towards him, the god of gods implored his sometimes-rival gods18 to lend a hand (Genesis 11:6-7):
The LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”
Charles Darwin was not ready to knuckle under:
Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long continued slow progress.19
And his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had the right question in 1794:
Would it be too bold to imagine that, in the great length of time since the world began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind—would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations, and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end?20
We Should Be Able To Become “All One People” because the internet has facilities like “Translate this page” to help us “understand one another’s speech” until we “have all one language”—such that nothing that we “propose to do” will “be impossible.” And “knowing good and evil” in a non-collapsing universe, we should have plenty of time to convert in-group morality into universal morality and thereby avoid self-annihilation. Given the enormity of Judeo-Christianity (about twice the size of Islam), step number one in that regard would be to reveal the god of The Bible for the fraud that he is, just as Dorothy pulled back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz.
