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In the first essay, "biblegod", we saw that, despite what Christians claim, the god of the Bible is not what they would have use believe. YHWH is not the benevolent and forgiving god that always excercises justice. In fact, he is a vengeful and unjust deity like the Israelites that created him. In this installement, I'd like to focus on another event that sent the Israelites reeling with "the fear of the LORD."
Let us turn in the Bible, if you will, to that fateful day when David was "moved" against Isreal and Judah, to take a census. Apparently this was a great offence against biblegod. Please read the passage below which I've included for your covenience, from The Bible in Basic English (BBE).
2Samuel 24: 1 ¶ Again the wrath of the Lord was burning against Israel, and moving David against them, he said, Go, take the number of Israel and Judah.
2 And the king said to Joab and the captains of the army, who were with him, Go now through all the tribes of Israel, from Dan as far as Beer-sheba, and have all the people numbered, so that I may be certain of the number of the people.
3 And Joab said to the king, Whatever the number of the people, may the Lord make it a hundred times as much, and may the eyes of my lord the king see it: but why does my lord the king take pleasure in doing this thing?
4 But the king's order was stronger than Joab and the captains of the army. And Joab and the captains of the army went out from the king, to take the number of the children of Israel.
5 And they went over Jordan, and starting from Aroer, from the town which is in the middle of the valley, they went in the direction of the Gadites, and on to Jazer;
6 Then they came to Gilead, and to the land of the Hittites under Hermon; and they came to Dan, and from Dan they came round to Zidon,
7 An they came round to Zidon,
7 And to the walled town of Tyre, and to all the towns of the Hivites and the Canaanites: and they went out to the South of Judah at Beer-sheba.
8 So after going through all the land in every direction, they came to Jerusalem at the end of nine months and twenty days.
9 And Joab gave the king the number of all the people: there were in Israel eight hundred thousand fighting men able to take up arms; and the men of Judah were five hundred thousand.
10 ¶ And after the people had been numbered, David's heart was troubled. And David said to the Lord, Great has been my sin in doing this; but now, O Lord, be pleased to take away the sin of your servant, for I have done very foolishly.
11 And David got up in the morning; now the word of the Lord had come to the prophet Gad, David's seer, saying,
12 Go and say to David, The Lord says, Three things are offered to you: say which of them you will have, and I will do it to you.
13 So Gad came to David, and gave him word of this and said to him, Are there to be three years when there is not enough food in your land? or will you go in flight from your haters for three months, while they go after you? or will you have three days of violent disease in your land? take thought and say what answer I am to give to him who sent me.
14 And David swho sent me.
14 And David said to Gad, This is a hard decision for me to make: let us come into the hands of the Lord, for great are his mercies: let me not come into the hands of men.
15 So David made selection of the disease; and the time was the days of the grain-cutting, when the disease came among the people, causing the death of seventy thousand men from Dan as far as Beer-sheba.
16 And when the hand of the angel was stretched out in the direction of Jerusalem, for its destruction, the Lord had regret for the evil, and said to the angel who was sending destruction on the people, It is enough; do no more. And the angel of the Lord was by the grain-floor of Araunah the Jebusite.
17 And when David saw the angel who was causing the destruction of the people, he said to the Lord, Truly, the sin is mine; I have done wrong: but these are only sheep; what have they done? let your hand be against me and against my family.
18 ¶ And that day Gad came to David and said to him, Go up, and put up an altar to the Lord on the grain-floor of Araunah the Jebusite.
19 So David went up, as Gad had said and as the Lord had given orders.
20 And Araunah, looking out, saw the king and his servants coming to him: and Araunah went out, and went down on his face to the earth before the king.
21 And Araunah said, Why has my 21 And Araunah said, Why has my lord the king come to his servant? And David said, To give you a price for your grain-floor, so that I may put up an altar to the Lord, and the disease may be stopped among the people.
22 And Araunah said to David, Let my lord the king take whatever seems right to him, and make an offering of it: see, here are the oxen for the burned offering, and the grain-cleaning instruments and the ox-yokes for wood:
23 All this does the servant of my lord the king give to the king. And Araunah said, May the Lord your God be pleased with your offering!
24 And the king said to Araunah, No, but I will give you a price for it; I will not give to the Lord my God burned offerings for which I have given nothing. So David got the grain-floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver.
25 And there David put up an altar to the Lord, making burned offerings and peace-offerings. So the Lord gave ear to his prayer for the land, and the disease came to an end in Israel.
First, I'd like you to notice is that in the above passage, it is YHWH himself who "moves" David into comitting this act. This is a different slant than that which is given in its parallel account of 1Chron. 21, its parallel passage, in which it is said that Satan provoked David into numbering Israel. Many Christians, in order to save face and their precious doctrine of divine inspiration, would say that this doesn't really mean there's an error: "it's just God in the second version using Satan to provoke David into numbering Israel. So, when the writer says that it was Satan provoking David, it simply means that it was Satan doing the will of God. In other words: it was God using Satan to accomplish his designs," they would say. However, when one starts adding up the discrepencies between the various accounts of the historical books of the Bible, one has to wonder if this isn't just a typical excuse by Christians to try and avoid facing the fact that their Bible contains contradictions, and that their god is simply the invention of a primitive and superstitious people.
Next, notice in 1Chron. 21:6, that Joab didn't number Levi and Benjamin, so that the dispcrepency would have been even higher between the counts given in this account and the one given in 2Sam 24. See below for a more complete treatment of the discrepencies between the two accounts.
Further note that in 2Sam 24:16 the verse states that "The LORD had regret for the evil" he was doing and he ordered the angel to cease. The Bible elsewhere states that God is not a man to repent (to change his mind, to regret things--Num. 23:19; 1Sam 15:29). That is an outright contradiction, no matter how much Christians try to justify it by saying that this is merely and anthropomorphism, that God doesn't really change his mind. An impartial reader would not make such an excuse, because he's got no ax to grind and he uses people terms the way people usually uses them, so as to be understood.
There are other discrepencies in these two passages. Notice that Joab, in the 2Sam. 24 account, numbers Israel and returns with figures that are different than in 1Chron. 21. These numbers, as we will see presently, just don't add up.
2Sam 24: 9 And Joab gave the king the number of all the people: there were in Israel eight hundred thousand fighting men able to take up arms; and the men of Judah were five hundred thousand.
1Chron. 21: 5 And Joab gave David the number of all the people; all the men of Israel, able to take up arms, were one million, one hundred thousand men; and those of Judah were four hundred and seventy thousand men, able to take up arms.
6 But Levi and Benjamin were not numbered among them, for Joab was disgusted with the king's order.
In 2Sam. 21, we have Joab returning with 800,000 men that drew the sword in Israel, and a 500,000 man count from Judah, making that 1,300,000 men altogether.
Now, compare these numbers with those of 1Chron. 21., in which Joab returns with numbers that are not the same: 1,000,000 men, and 100,000 men that drew the sword in Israel, and 400,000 men that drew the sword, in Judah. That adds up to 1,5000,000 men. Notice, however, that in the 1Chron. account, only 1,000,000 men are said to have drawn the sword in Israel, while in 2Sam., 800,000 men drew the sword in Israel. If we count the 1,000,000 men as those who drew the sword, we have a total of 1,100,000 men, which is a discrepency of 300,000 men. If we count only those who are actually said to have drawn the sword, we have a discrepency of 700,000 men. Now I ask you: by what stretch of the imagination can those numbers be made to add up? Perhaps by a Christian stretch, but certainly not by a realistic one.
After YHWH The Compassionate has manupulated David into numbering Israel, he decides to punish David. How does he punish David? He destroys 70,000 Israelites, what else? However, to be fair, he did give David a choice.
2Sam. 24: 11 And David got up in the morning; now the word of the got up in the morning; now the word of the Lord had come to the prophet Gad, David's seer, saying,
12 Go and say to David, The Lord says, Three things are offered to you: say which of them you will have, and I will do it to you.
13 So Gad came to David, and gave him word of this and said to him, Are there to be three years when there is not enough food in your land? or will you go in flight from your haters for three months, while they go after you? or will you have three days of violent disease in your land? take thought and say what answer I am to give to him who sent me.
14 And David said to Gad, This is a hard decision for me to make: let us come into the hands of the Lord, for great are his mercies: let me not come into the hands of men.
15 So David made selection of the disease; and the time was the days of the grain-cutting, when the disease came among the people, causing the death of seventy thousand men from Dan as far as Beer-sheba.
16 And when the hand of the angel was stretched out in the direction of Jerusalem, for its destruction, the Lord had regret for the evil, and said to the angel who was sending destruction on the people, It is enough; do no more. And the angel of the Lord was by the grain-floor of Araunah the Jebusite.
17 And when David saw the angel who was causing the destruction of the people, he sai destruction of the people, he said to the Lord, Truly, the sin is mine; I have done wrong: but these are only sheep; what have they done? let your hand be against me and against my family.
Here we see the concept of justice and mercy which prevailed among the ancient Israelites. Their god, YHWH, gives David three choices:
David then complains that "this is a hard decision." His god is going to destroy 70,000 men in Israel, and he complains because he has a hard decision. What about those who will be destroyed? Isn't their plight much worse than David's? Now notice what David says: "let us come into the hands of the Lord, for great are his mercies." Good grief! His god is going to punish 70,000 men with pestilence, for a "sin" that David was manipulated into committing by YHWH his god, and he still thinks that his god mercy is great (2Sam 21:14). He would have made a great Fundamentalist, n'est-ce pas?
I'd also like to draw your attention to another little problem. In v. 25, David makes burned offerings and peace offerings on a piece of land he just purchased for the purpose of building an alter, from which he makes these offerings. Wasn't that against the law? Hadn't God commisioned the Levites to offer sacrfices to him? And wasn't it their duty alone to offer such sacrifices? Moreover, hadn't "the LORD" ordered the angel to stop the slaughter? Why then does David have to make such offerings if "the LORD" had already repented? How much innocent blood is needed to satisfy this god?
How can any reasonable person accept this god as being merciful, after reading a story like this? Can you? Well, if you can, then there is something very wrong with your thinking. Reason tells us that first, David should not have been manipulted by his god into committing a "sin" against his god. Second, after David had "sinned," 70,000 thousand men in Israel should not have been punished, for those men that had nothing to do with it, since their god had manipulated David into numbering Israel, through the use of Satan of course, if the second story is to be believed.
The way things stand in those accounts, the only conclusion we can draw is that the Israelites invented this god, which is as clear as daylight from where I stand. How can anyone actually believe that 1) this god exists and that 2) is great in mercies when he kills 70,000 innocent men -- again, if the numbers are to be believed -- for what is considered the "sin" of another? And how, pray tell, can this "sin" be imputed to David, when his god, an alleged omnipotent deity, actually makes him do it? And what of the justice commanded by this same god in Deut. 24, and Ezek. 18?
Deut. 24:16 Fathers are not to be put to death for their children or children for their fathers: every man is to be put to death for the sin which he himself has done.
Ezek. 18:20 The soul which does sin will be put to death: the son will not be made responsible for the evil-doing of the father, or the father for the evil-doing of the son; the righteousness of the upright will be on himself, and the evil-doing of the evil-doer on himself.
The principle of justice, elucidated in these two passages, was not even practiced by the god of Israel. This god is not fit to be called just, good or great in mercies. The plain truth is that common sense tells us that when someone acts in such a fashion, he is manipulative, arbitrary, petulant and knows nothing of mercy or justice. The Hebrew people of the OT are in fact, the spittin' image of their creation, YHWH. They went about conquering, slaughtering people by the thousands--if it indeed happened as the Bible says--just like the other nations around them in those backward and barbaric times. YHWH was their excuse for doing this. For the Assyrian, the Egyptians, the Babylonians; there were other gods similar in "justice" and "mercy", to that of the Hebrew god, YHWH.
The Bible is chock-full of stories like this. YHWH uses various other nations against Israel, even calling one of these nations the "ax" in his hand to accomplish his sovereign will (Isa 10:12-15). People in the Bible are pawns in the hands of this god. He uses them, without even their knowing it, to accomplish his will, and then punishes them for doing his will and Christians, by-and-large, believe that this is just. When asked to justify such atrocities, they typically answer, as did Paul:
Rom. 9:20 But, O man, who are you, to make answer against God? May the thing which is made say to him who made it, Why did you make me so?
21 Or has not the potter the right to make out of one part of his earth a vessel for honour, and out of another a vessel for shame?
22 What if God, desiring to let his wrath and his power be seen, for a long time put up with the vessels of wrath which were ready for destruction:
23 And to make clear the wealth of 23 And to make clear the wealth of his glory to vessels of mercy, which he had before made ready for glory, 24 Even us, who were marked out by him, not only from the Jews, but from the Gentiles?
Well, excuse me, but if we're not in a position to judge their god then neither are they! Telling us that "God is good and merciful" is a judgment and it is a judgment based on human standards, so if they can do it, then we certainly can. Could any reasonable man take a Fundamentalist seriously when he answers in this fashion? I dare say that a reasonabale man most certainly couldn't!
When pressed, the Bible Believer will invariably say that he may not understand why his god does those things and it may even "seem" unjust to us, being the wretched sinner that we are, but he "knows in his heart" that his god is righteous, and that in the end, his trust in his god od will be vindicated. In other words, he has no answer so he dodges the issue. Passages like Romans 9 are the staples of those who, unable to give a reasoned answer, will simply mouth what they has been spoon-fed from the pulpit: biblegod is just, no matter what those "godless Atheists" say. So much for reason!
