First: urg, this is literally Moses giving speeches recounting the events and rules of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. It is called Deuteronomy because it’s the second telling. Urg.

Second: There is more than a bit of revisionist history going on here, not so much regarding the major events themselves as the motivations and details of intent and blame.

Third: Some of the rules that hadn’t been mentioned before are surprisingly specific. For instance:

Deutronomy 25:11-12:

If men get into a fight with one another, and the wife of one intervenes to rescue her husband from the grip of his opponent by reaching out and seizing his genitals, you shall cut off her hand; show no pity.

It sounds to me like there’s a story there, possibly involving Moses fighting with a married man and getting grabbed by the wife.

Fourth: Oh the genocide. The amount of genocide that god is demanding is more than a little disturbing. It is explicit that God is “giving” the Israelites land that is already inhabited by other peoples and plans to either kill or enslave the current inhabitants. The killing of all the current inhabitants is a recurring theme throughout the whole book, but chapter 20 is particularly specific. For instance:

Deuteronomy 20:10-13:

When you draw near to a town to fight against it, offer it terms of peace. If it accepts our terms of peace and surrenders to you, then all the people in it shall serve you at forced labor. If it does not submit to you peacefully, 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.

And

Deuteronomy 20:16-17:

But as for the towns of those peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them – the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites – just as the Lord your God has commanded,

Fifth: In the U.S. we have (in theory at least) a rule of “innocent until proven guilty.” In Deuteronomy 31-32, by contrast, there appears to be the rule of “guilty even before you are guilty.” Moses, and in his recounting God as well, do this thing that I find extremely irritating: They go off on what their audience is going to do and how mad they (Moses and God) are with their audience regarding what they (the audience) are going to do. Moses is giving this speech to the Israelites before they cross the river Jordan in order to take over the lands (and commit a minimum of six different genocides*), but apparently they’re going to get rich and fat off the land and forget the lord their god and worship other idols and God is going to be so furious with them that he’ll cast them out of the land and let their enemies defeat them, while sending plagues and disasters to bring the Israelites down. Moses even makes up a song all about the disasters God is going to bring down on the disrespectful heads of the Israelites after they betray God after they’ve grown fat and forgetful in the land that they haven’t even entered yet.

I’m not quite sure how this message is supposed to be taken: Don’t worry about the future? Because the immediate future is going to be so wonderful that you’ll forget about your extremely temperamental God and in the long run he is going to beat you down into the dirt?

Anyway:

Sixth: God treats the Nation of Israel as a single entity rather than as a group of individuals. It’s possible (likely) that I’m biased by living in a society that focuses so much attention on individuality, but it’s kind of disturbing how little the concept of individuals seems to mean to this god, as anything other than a part of the whole. Thus, one person acting in a displeasing manner can cause God to abandon the whole Nation, while one person acting in a pleasing manner can cause God to change his mind. But, even more to the point, God has promised to make of Israel a great nation, but also seems to think that as long as there is one survivor, it doesn’t matter how many of them he kills, because he can just rebuild the bloodline from the single survivor. Not only does this point towards the necessity of unpleasant levels of incest (something that God had just made illegal!), but also seems to imply that God figured the whole flood/Noah/ark thing was a great idea and could definitely be repeated, by means of plague this time, because he wouldn’t be breaking any promises as long as there is a single surviving descendant.

Summary: Moses is about to die and so he gives three sermons on the past, the present, and the future of the Israeli tribe: how God rescued them from Egypt, the rules of society and sacrifice, and their future of wealth, betrayal, and punishment.

Moral: You (yes: you) are too stubborn to be blindly obedient like you should be, so you’ll be beaten down into the dirt for your sins.

* (1) Hittites, (2) Amorites, (3) Canaanites, (4) Perizzites, (5) Hivites and (6) Jebusites

Next up: Joshua

While not neatly divided into sections, there are really two themes in the book of Numbers*: ledgers and travelogues. Plus a really disturbingly positive view on genocide.

First: Ledgers

This book is appropriately named Numbers because it’s chock full of them. We have the results of two census, instructions on camp layout, a donation ledger, descriptions of a bunch of maps, plus a lot of additional instructions for how to make sacrifices.

The camp layout and census information was long and detailed enough that I thought it would be useful to create an info graphic, to get a sense of what all the numbers mean. You can see the results below:

The donations ledger was both detailed and incredibly repetitive. Each day for twelve days, the exact same offerings/sacrifices were made, in the same order and for the same amounts. And over the course of 77 verses, those offerings/sacrifices were listed twelve times. I decided that this needed an infographic too, so I’ve included one below:

Second: Travelogues

There are also a bunch of stories about different characters. These stories are each so complex and yet so concise that there’s not much point in summarizing them. They include several failed rebellions against Moses’ leadership, several stopped (or at least restricted) massacres by God of the Israelites**, and a foreign magician who is repeatedly hired to curse the Israelites but blesses them each time instead.

The one story that really stood out to me*** was in Numbers 20:14-21. This is the first time I felt any real sense of apprehension about the events. Moses sends a message to the King of Edom requesting permission to pass through the lands of Edom. The message is all nice and sweet, asking for permission and promising to do no harm, and I just thought to myself: say ‘no’, something terrible will happen to you if you say ‘yes’. And luckily Edom said ‘no’—politely, firmly, and without insult or excuse—and the Israelites traveled a different way and I felt so much relief for Edom managing the avoid so many travesties.

Not many other people were able to avoid the repercussions of coming into contact with them.

Keep in mind that at this point the Israelites are a landless, traveling army-nation of between 603,550 and 601,730 warriors along with their families and their herds of cattle, sheep, and goats. God is appearing to them as a fire at night and a dark cloud during the day. When the dark cloud moves, the whole army nation packs up and moves too, settling down only when the dark cloud stops and they can settle the temple around/under God.

And this God has given them many rules to live by but also promised them a land of milk and honey that already belongs to other people, with the instructions that they will simply take that land from those other people.

Which brings us to the prevalence of genocide.

While there’s many examples of genocide in this book, Numbers 21:3**** and Numbers 21:34-35***** are good examples of casual slaughters, Numbers 31 contains the one I find the most horrific because it’s the most specific.

Back in Numbers 25, we discover that some of the men of Israel had started to date some of the women of Moab and been invited into Moab homes and temples. God was infuriated and started a plague that killed 24,000 Israelites and only ended when one of the Israelite priests skewered an Israelite man and a Moabite woman on a spear in the man’s tent.

Well, in Numbers 31, God demands “revenge” on Moab, apparently for their women dating the men of Israel. So Moses calls together a war party of 12,000. These soldiers go into Moab kill every last man and burn to the ground every last town, but took back with them all the treasure they could carry, all the herds of animals, and all the women and children.

When the war party returns to the Israelite encampment, Moses is enraged because the soldiers hadn’t killed enough people. They weren’t supposed to take the women and children captive, they are only allowed to take the female children captive.

Numbers 31:17-18: Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.

And because this is the Book of Numbers, we know the numbers: once the soldiers were done slaughtering their prisoners, there were still 32,000 virgin girls as prisoners to distribute to the various tribes. Making the (somewhat dubious) assumption that the Moab population consisted of equal numbers of adult men, adult women, male children, and female children, this means that the soldiers invaded and killed 32,000 Moab men in the land of Moab, and then killed an additional 64,000 of their prisoners (adult women and male children) at the border of the Israelite camp.

I’ve actually been researching various genocides of the 20^th century for my day job and there are some pretty horrifying details. And knowing the details of some of those genocides gives me a more realistic perspective on these biblical genocides which I might have been able to skim past when I was much younger.

I really want some door-to-door missionaries to come around soon so I can ask them about their take on the Old Testament and then possibly yell at them.

Summary: God is a micromanager and the Israelites are a landless army-nation that is traveling across the land killing wherever they go.

Moral: You want as little to do with God as you can get away with.

* I’ve switched translations from the English Standard Version Bible (that I was reading on my kindle) over to The New Revised Standard Version Bible (for which I have a hardcopy.)

** The argument that really seems to hold weight with God regarding why he shouldn’t just kill all the Israelites is that so many people saw God claim the Israelites as his own and God would be seen as weak and ungodly if they were to all die. (Numbers 14 and 16)

*** Although Numbers 23:19 actually made me laugh out loud, because Balaam (the magician) speaks his prophesy and talks about how God never changes his mind. God changes his mind all the time, mostly about whether or not to kill all of his chosen people.

**** Numbers 21: 3 The Lord listened to the voice of Israel, and handed over the Canaanites; and they utterly destroyed them and their towns; so the place was called Hormah.

***** Numbers 21:34-35: But the Lord said to Moses, “Do not be afraid of him; for I have given him into your hand, with all his people and all his land. You shall do to him as you did to King Shihon of the Amorites, who ruled in Heshbon.” So they killed him, his sons, and all his people, until there was no survivor left; and they took possession of his land.

Next up: Deuteronomy

I had a road trip recently, so I checked out the book-on-tape version of Leviticus and am quite glad I did so, because, wow, would I have bogged down in this if I had tried to read it. It is pretty much a combination how-to manual for sacrifices and a law-book combined.

Chapters 1 – 9 cover sacrifices. All the sacrifices. There are burnt offerings and grain offerings and incense. There are sacrifices to remove sin, to please the Me, and to make requests. There are all the different animals that can be used (although only those without blemish!) depending on intent and income. And grains and oils. (No yeast. Yeast is bad for sacrifices. God is quite repetitive and adamant on the topic of yeast.)

And then there are the ways in which the sacrifice is to be performed by the priests, and what is to be burned entirely (to make an aroma pleasing to Me) and what can remain to be eaten, and who can eat it and where they can eat it.

(I’ll address Chapter 10 below.)

Chapters 11 – 17 list the many (many, many) reasons for needing to make a sacrifice. There are the many holy days that require celebrating over many days and many sacrifices. And then there are the many ways in which a person naturally becomes unclean (having a rash, women having their period, men having a wet dream, anyone having sex, eating something unclean, touching a dead body, touching something that has touched something unclean, a leader or priest in power becoming unclean, etc.)

Listening to this in the car with the modern translation by the American Bible Society, I was really struck by how much God comes across as a picky kid listing all the things that disgust him. (Bodies. Bodies disgust him. And all the things they do. Age and blemishes and sex and reproduction.) But there’s also the sense that he wants to keep the sacrifices coming on a regular basis, so you’d better keep getting unclean and needing to make regular sacrifices. But don’t worry if you’re not getting unclean often enough: there are still all the holidays and regular sacrifices!

Chapters 18 – 27 still talk some about sacrifices, but focus more on just rules rather than shilling for sacrifices. The rules are many and varied but there’s a large focus on how selling property and slaves works. (It works, incidentally, differently for Israelites than for foreigners, and differently for Levites than for any of the other Israelites, and is all structured around a seven-year cycle, at the end of which purchases of land and people largely disappear and ownership reverts.)

Anyway, Chapter 10 is the only part of this book that involves plot and characters. God once more demonstrates questionable behavior: The high priest Aaron has four sons who are also priests. Two of them manage to burn incense in a manner displeasing to God, so God kills them. Since they were killed for displeasing God, their bodies got dragged out of camp and their father and brothers told they weren’t allowed to mourn for them. Because those guys burned incense incorrectly.*

And finally, I can’t review Leviticus without at least acknowledging the two infamous Leviticus verses:

18:22 You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.

20:13 If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.

These were so embedded in the lists of things that deserve death and/or exile that they lost some of their power, especially as the incorrect usage of incense apparently also deserved death. I think if I were an orthodox Jew who kept strictly kosher, I would need to do some soul searching on these strictures, but I’m not. I agree with the rules against incest** and bestiality, but I come to that agreement from a different motive than just differentiating myself from the Hitites et al (as in chapter 18) or avoiding a stoning (as in chapter 20). I don’t agree with the rule against homosexuality and because I don’t agree with God’s reasons as stated here, I see no reason to not disagree with the rules. It did occur to me for the first time, though, that it’s a very gender-specific law. God has plenty of issues with women and menstruation and childbirth (women must spend about a quarter of their lives “unclean”), but there’s nothing saying they shouldn’t have sex with one another.

Summary: How and why to perform sacrifices. How and for how much, to sell property and people.

Moral: Obedience. Blind obedience or else you will die a horrible death. Wowza.

* Admittedly, I kind of assume that the historical basis is that the two priests somehow managed to set their fancy robes on fire while burning the incense.

** Nearly the entirety of Chapter 18 consists of the different forms of incest that are now unlawful. Many of these forms, I recognize as being applauded in Genesis. Hopefully this means that going forward, there will be less incest. Here’s hoping.

Next up: Numbers

So…

That happened.

I’m familiar with the story, of course, but reading this felt a bit like reading an original Grimm fairy tale after growing up on Disney.

I had three main reactions:

First:

I’m not sure how to say this without being horribly offensive, so I’m just going to say it:

In my opinion, the god in Exodus reads a whole lot more like a demon than a god.

What really got to me in this book was that not one person wanted God’s attention or intervention. God makes demands of and threatens his chosen people and his enemies alike.

The Israelis were unhappy as slaves, but it had been generations since God had paid them any attention at all so they never asked for anything, and when God did decide to intervene, their situation got so much worse that they begged God and Moses to just let them be.

Moses himself was an unwilling prophet. He had committed murder and had run away before he ever met God. Out in the wilderness, God gets to Moses and demands that Moses be his prophet and doesn’t take “no” for an answer.*

Repeatedly, the Israelis tell Moses and God to stop trying to help them.

Instead, God intentionally makes things worse for them in order to demonstrate His power. Every time Pharaoh decides to give in to Moses demands to let the Israelites go, God hardens Pharaoh’s heart** so that Pharaoh refuses to let the Israelites go and God gets the chance to kill more Egyptians in a display of power. The death-toll is both tremendous and also completely intentional.***

Second:

After the Israelites get out of Egypt, Moses goes up Mount Sinai to speak with God and comes back with the stone tablets with the Ten Commandments. That’s pretty common knowledge. I was also already pretty familiar with the rest of the judiciary-type rules stated in Exodus 20-23.

However, somehow I had never before noticed God’s demands in Exodus 25-31 where Moses is given detailed instructions for how God wants his temple to be constructed and what he wants his priests to wear. God has some extremely specific concepts of what he wants and how he wants it. I can only assume that God gave Moses some illustrations in addition to the verbal descriptions written down for me to read, because the instructions for how to take large expanses of cloth and turn them into a tent by means of 50 loops didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.

One thing that wasn’t immediately evident from the text but that Anna pointed out when I was talking it through with her later, was that the rules set forth in Exodus 25-31 were revolutionary for the time. They were both revolutionary and extremely liberal, because they defined rule of law. Here is potentially a first step away from a straight-up might-makes-right culture, with God setting down a basic code of laws that everyone must obey, poor and wealthy alike.

But the rules are not actually that long. There’s a lot more time spent describing exactly how the temple was to be constructed and then how it was constructed, along with what the priests were to wear, down to their high quality linen underwear so that they don’t expose themselves in the temple.

And third:

There’s a lot of foreshadowing of future conflict, for all that God promises a land of milk and honey for his Chosen people. He promises this glorious land, but also specifically states that he’s going to run off a whole bunch of other people who were there first.**** I am strongly reminded of Nina Paley’s This Land is Mine animation.

Summary: God is playing a game and using all the people as pawns.

Moral: Maybe blind obedience? When a power as strong as God decides to pay attention to you, your best bet is to be unquestioningly obedient because nothing else will help and obedience just might? I don’t know. I’m certainly not a religious scholar. If anyone else has any ideas, please comment and let me know.

* Moses apparently really does not like confrontations and gets stage fright too awful to be able to demand anything of anyone. God, who apparently can only work miracles through Moses at this point, assigns his mouthpiece a mouthpiece of his own, and Aaron comes along to speak for Moses who speaks for God.

** That level of mind control also makes me deeply uncomfortable. I couldn’t help but sympathize with Pharaoh who must have felt like he was going insane.† Pharaoh wasn’t capable of making logical decisions or react naturally to events because every time he did something to make himself less evil, God made him change his mind.

† Not that he was particularly sane to begin with. Example: Pharaoh refused Moses’ first few demands because the first few miracles Moses performed were things that Pharaoh’s own magicians were capable of replicating, ie, Pharaoh doubled several of the early plagues by having his magicians duplicate them. Why did he think that was a good idea?

*** God is quite bloodthirsty. Even after the Isrealites have left Egypt behind, when they make God angry, the Levites are the clan to follow Moses’ command to slaughter their friends and families. They killed 3,000 of their own in a single night and are much rewarded for that.

**** Exodus 33:2   And I will send an angel before thee; and I will drive out the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Prizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.

Next up: Leviticus