The interior of Canaan, less productive than Mesopotamia to the northeast and the Nile floodplain in Egypt to the southwest, remained primarily pastoral as powerful civilizations grew up around it. The area was subject to repeated foreign domination in the second millennia BC. Prior to 1,000 BC the Phoenicians and Philistines maintained prosperous settlements along the fertile strip of land bordering the Mediterranean coast in what is the State of Israel today. But the more arid and rugged interior was sparsely populated, with towns like Jericho, near the small fertile delta where the Jordan River emptied into the Dead Sea, being uncommon amongst predominant rocky hills and desert.
It was near the beginning of the first millennium before the common era, legend says, when the ten northern Hebrew tribes refused allegiance to Rehoboam after the death of his father Solomon. But even under kings David and Solomon, before splitting apart, the Hebrew nation was small, comparable in size to the Italian island of Sicily; and it was insignificant as a regional power.
Not all is as it seems in the Bible and Tanakh. In the 8th century BC Judah and Israel often opposed one another, and Judah was alternating between alliances with Egypt and Assyria. Many instances of biblical slander against the Israelites was not self-criticism by the Israelites as popularly perceived, but rather they were directed at Israel from leaders of bitter, impoverished Judah. In fact, the Christian and Jewish bibles are full of threats to all of Judah’s neighbors as the poor Hebrew tribes alternately attempt to conquer territory, assert their independence, keep their independence, and long for independence.
Israel and Judah remained separate until King Sargon of Assyria, with the assistance of Judah, conquered Israel in 722 BC. In order to maintain control and prevent rebellion, King Sargon scattered many Israelis throughout the Assyrian Empire and settled Assyrians in their place. Those that remained in Israel were assimilated into the Assyrian culture and the Nation of Israel disappeared from the face of the Earth. The Hebrews of Judah, masters of little more than the Negev desert, and most often subjects of the regional powers, were bitterly disappointed in their own circumstances.
Bitter as they may have been however, the land that seemed like the armpit of the world to some, was the center of the universe to them. They longed for greatness, yet their people lived in tents and herded goats. Their utter anguish and frustration would show itself in Jewish culture; with insecurities and savagery ever near in sacred writings that they would rely on as the basis of their quest for self advancement.
Even so, the Hebrews shared many of their religious beliefs with their neighbors, picking from among the wealth of traditions in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The lunar calendar that Jews still cling to is the old Babylonian calendar that was in-turn derived from the Sumerian calendar, and a few of the months of the Jewish calendar are even named after Mesopotamian gods.
Jewish stories that later became the Jewish bible and Christian Old Testament, the Tanakh, relate that King Saul humbly consulted the witch of Endor to conjure the ghost of the recently deceased prophet Samuel. Saul, David and many other Biblical figures consulted magical objects, sought omens and cast lots to determine the will of their god. And it was also a common belief in the area that the god YHWH (Yahweh), alternatively known by the names El or El Shaddai (God of the Mountain), Jehovah, Adonai, Elohim, and others, was married to Asherah, the equivalent of the Mesopotamian goddess, Ishtar. Solomon, who built the Temple in Jerusalem, was also reported in First Kings 11:5 to have “…went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians, and after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites” in addition to building altars for the gods Chemosh and Molech.
Ask a Christian, Jew or Muslim today, and he'll tell you there's only one god. However, that's not the environment their god grew up in, and the wholesale borrowing of foreign religious traditions posed challenges that early Jewish writers, wanting so desperately to set themselves above fellow men, couldn’t overcome. They went about trying to weave a variety of borrowed concepts into a compelling history entitling them to advantage and blessing. Yet they never reached a consensus on something as basic as eternal life, or even an afterlife. In their world of fantasy, their god, all-powerful like Ahura Mazda, brought forth Earth and sky from the ocean, as did the gods of Egypt and Sumer. The lords of Jewish thought, even included a genealogy in their sacred books to allow Jews to track their birthright from God, so that the people of Israel might be “above all nations that are upon the Earth” as stated in Deuteronomy chapter 14, verse 12 (14:12). According to Jewish authority, God created heaven and earth about 6,000 years ago.
There were those in ancient times that believed outer space to be constituted of water and on occasion the firmament of heaven would open to allow some water to rain down on Earth. Today we know it’s not true, but it made sense in those days because people could see the rain fall down, but they never saw it go back up into the sky. That primitive belief is represented in the book of Genesis where, “God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven.”
By the time the Jews returned from exile in Babylon after King Nebuchadnezzar banished them and smashed Jerusalem in the sixth century BC, they were anxious to share the wrath of their God by incorporating the Gilgamesh Flood Epic into their sacred writings as the story of Noah and his ark. And as the early zealots wrote and rewrote their books they were able to make stories more fantastic. One such example was the story of a champion of David’s army, Elhanan, slaying the warrior chosen to represent the Philistines; it was transformed over time to become the story of a young David using a mere sling to slay the fearsome giant warrior Goliath, who stood nine feet tall and carried a spear so large its iron tip weighed fifteen pounds.
As told in First Samuel, Saul’s army had cowered for forty days before the Philistine giant as he repeatedly challenged them to fight, but the Israelites, lined up for battle, fled from his path. According to the Jewish myth, David was just a small shepherd who happened upon Saul’s army that was paralyzed with fear. To add even more awe to his story the author had David smiting both a bear and a lion who had unexplainably partnered to abduct a lamb from his father’s flock not long before David’s encounter with the mighty giant.
Goliath was just one of numerous instances when Jewish writers injected giants of popular myth. Well before Christians imagined a divine conception for Jesus, the authors of Genesis, in chapter six, verse four stated the children of gods and human women roamed the Earth as giants: “There were giants in the Earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” That mixing of gods and humans that was so common in Egyptian, Greek, Mesopotamian and unnumbered other myths, helped explain why the Bible includes a lengthy list of men that lived in excess of nine hundred years.
While popular myths contributed much colorful fantasy to add excitement and build interest in Jewish writing, they also added to the confusion and contradictions present in the works. David’s introduction to Saul before he lodges a stone in Goliath’s head was accompanied by another first meeting between the two described in the Bible. The other version involved a young David brought in to play music to make Saul feel better. In that story David did such a fine job that Saul had him stay on as a personal arms bearer.
In a similar ilk there were two versions for Saul’s death, wherein he committed suicide by falling on his own sword in the one and was slain by an Amalekite just a few verses later. Hebrew authors didn’t even make it far in Genesis, the first book of the Tanakh and Bible, before contradicting themselves. In Genesis it’s written that God created day and night on the fourth day; curiously, there’s no mention of how it came to be the fourth day before day and night were even created, that might explain why reference to creation of day and night was also included as an activity of the first day.
The writers worked independently through the ages and all had their own experiences and reasons for writing. Contradictions were so abundant that it appears some authors purposefully rebuffed others. The evolution of God can be seen in the pages of scripture. The Jewish God would later be considered all-knowing, but in Genesis, he asks Adam and Eve where they are when they are hiding from him in the Garden of Eden. And in Hosea, Israel had made princes and God knew it not.
Even the debate between having one god or many was long in settling and Bible editors failed to remove all of the references to other gods. Long before Christian churches were torn by schisms over the nature of the Father, Word, Son and Holy Ghost; the concepts of which are strikingly similar to Zoroastrian and Hindu traditions; Jews were arguing about the singularity of god. In Genesis God is repeatedly referred to in the plural, and in the following book, Exodus, the Jewish God executes judgment against the gods of Egypt and is acknowledged as greater than all other gods.
Deuteronomy 10:17 states: “For the LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords.” Psalms 97 goes on to say that he is exalted far above all gods and ye gods worship him. Clearly, the Hebrews knew their god was one of many. Gods were plentiful in those days, and the Hebrews didn’t question the abundance of other gods, they only concerned with how their god could raise them above other tribes and nations. It wasn’t until generations were born and lived knowing of only the one Hebrew God, that the concept of him being the only god began to take firm root among the Hebrews and through them with later Christians and Muslims.
Time and time again the Jewish authors portrayed their god triumphing over other gods. What made him special wasn’t that he was the only god, but he was their god. He was the god of the Twelve Tribes and would deliver the world unto them. Judaism wasn’t meant to be a universal religion. The authors of ancient Israel weren’t creating a religion for all people, and certainly not for all life, they were seeking advantage for themselves by creating a god of Israel.
Even Jesus was quoted in Matthew 15 as saying he was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel. Just as people are shaped by their environment, so too were the gods. They were invented for specific purposes by people with certain motivations. And the god of the Hebrews that grew up while the Hebrews were trying to establish their own nation was invented to help his chosen people slay and smite their enemies. Still today, that warrior god of David and Constantine lives on among Islamic Fundamentalists.
Like many contemporary religions, the Hebrew religion was dominated by secretive priests and prophets that kept the people of Israel and Judah from questioning why they never saw their God, by issuing stern warnings of terrible punishments he would execute upon them should they try to learn his true nature. Certain death awaited any that should come too close to god. Even to say his name was a deadly offense, which is why you see many Jewish references to this day that abbreviate whatever name they use for their G-d. For looking upon the Ark of the Covenant Yahweh killed over fifty thousand men of Bethshemesh as related in First Samuel 6:19, “and the people lamented, because the LORD had smitten many of the people with a great slaughter."
More outlandishly, people and even animals were to be put to death for even touching the mountain upon which God dwelt in the early days; of course that was before others ascended the mountain, showing there was no resident god to be found, and the unknowable god had to be moved to heaven, or revealed as a fraud. In keeping with the great secrecy that shielded gods from questioning, early Hebrew authors even refused to disclose a name for their god, referring to him as the one who shall not be named, though later authors thought it more practical to assign names to their deity.
As the Israelites fought with their neighbors for supremacy and identity, they made their god violently jealous to win and hold converts, and steal the rank and file of other gods. In Zephaniah 3:8 God said “…all the Earth shall be devoured with the fire of my jealousy.” Their god was also made to say in Ezekiel, chapter six, verses 4&5: “And your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken: and I will cast down your slain men before your idols. And I will lay the dead carcasses of the children of Israel before their idols; and I will scatter your bones round about your altars.”
Having only a meager literary tradition, authors of Jewish scripture elevated the art of hateful expression to unknown heights. Unfortunately, the god of the Jews and later Christians, Muslims, and a few more religions, was exceedingly evil. Before Saul and David went to war against each other, David sought to marry Saul’s daughter Michal. The price Saul set for his daughter was the foreskins of 100 Philistine penises. But David was a much greater killer than that. “Wherefore David arose and went, he and his men, and slew of the Philistines two hundred men; and David brought their foreskins, and they gave them in full tale to the king, that he might be the king's son in law. And Saul gave him Michal his daughter to wife.”—1 Samuel 18:27
David would gain fame for much greater slaughters, but well prior to David, the Jewish God had warred against the Egyptians, smiting the firstborn of the people and all the beasts of the field, and killing all the cattle in Egypt, and smiting all the men and beasts in the field with stones of hail. Psalms 136:10 reads “To him that smote Egypt in their firstborn: for his mercy endureth for ever.” “For his mercy endureth for ever,” says the ancient Psalm. It’s true that some people have neither concept of the purpose of life, nor redeeming quality. Like too much of humankind, many of those who conspired on the Bible didn’t know the value of promoting a world of peace and pleasure, but rather obsessed and raved of violence, great slaughter and suffering, because they were too dumb to see or say anything else. They succeeded in inventing a cruel and wrathful egomaniac, who’s persona would contribute to perhaps as much iniquity and devastation as they falsely gave him credit for.
In Deuteronomy 7 in furtherance of the Israelites’ conquest of their “promised land” as God’s chosen people, and in furtherance of their god’s war it was said:
"When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;
And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them:
Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.
For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly.”
And so it was written that the people wantonly butchered as the jealous god commanded them, as described in First Samuel 27:8-9: "And David and his men went up, and invaded the Geshurites, and the Gezrites, and the Amalekites ... And David smote the land, and left neither man nor woman alive, and took away the sheep, and the oxen, and the asses, and the camels, and the apparel. And David saved neither man nor woman alive"
Still, prior to David, God fought alongside Joshua, after the passing of Moses, to conquer the promised land they were invading, that stretched from Lebanon even unto the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun. In Deuteronomy 20:16-17 it was written: “But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee…”
The Hebrew authors went on to describe great slaughter of every kingdom and every city except the Hivites and Gibeonites. In all the rest, Joshua utterly destroyed all that breathed, the men and women, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword. And the Israelites kept the valuables for themselves, and burned certain cities to the ground. Similar slaughter is listed in Deuteronomy, chapter two. In that accounting the Israelites took all the cities of Heshbon and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones; leaving none remaining.
The god of the Hebrews continued to battle with humanity: “Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee, and shall pursue thee, and overtake thee, till thou be destroyed; because thou hearkenedst not unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which he commanded thee,” Deuteronomy 28:45. Another account of sensational suffering illustrating a woman’s depravity after being afflicted by God’s famine is told in Second Kings 6:29: “So we boiled my son, and did eat him: and I said unto her on the next day, Give thy son, that we may eat him: and she hath hid her son.” And the theme was repeated in Deuteronomy 28:56-57 where it was written the delicate woman would eat the young one that cometh out from between her feet and the children that she bore. Again and again the religious fanatics that the world flocks to for guidance wrote that their God would cause father to eat son, son to eat father and women to eat their children.
In the book of Joshua, Saul killed all the men, women, children, and animals in the city of Nob. And in First Samuel 15 Saul utterly destroyed all the living things of Amalek except Agag the king and the best of the sheep, oxen, fatlings, lambs and all that was good. And after all the utter destruction, God was still disappointed that he had set Saul up as king of his evil empire because Saul had spared some lives in Amalek. But the conditioning of unquestioned obedience so pervades society that the wisdom in gruesome tales of shameless violence simply isn’t questioned by the masses In Letters from the Earth Mark Twain asserted that the Bible, in describing God, is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere, and that God is a malign thug.
As children with immature minds, or someone who is semi-conscious or whose mental faculties are impaired, primitive people convinced themselves of a need to sacrifice to the gods of their imaginations. Such people were true slaves of their own making; failing to realize their own fallacy or rise above the self for any purpose. And the god of Judaism could display no other quality than the depravity of his creators.
Throughout the Old Testament it was written that the smell of the smoke of burning victims was as sweet savor unto the Lord. Most any act or occasion was deserving of slitting some innocent animal’s throat with a knife, sprinkling or smearing its blood around, and burning it for the Lord. Great volumes of Jewish literature were devoted to torturing their fellow earthlings to earn blessings and absolve themselves of sins against their imaginary God. So lost were the believers in their own confusion that spirits, demons and omens became their reality.
Priests, in their constant striving to dominate all aspects of Jewish life, assigned animal sacrifices for just about everything they could think of. They maintained a continual burnt offering of two lambs every day and to that they added sacrifices for the new year, the new month, the seventh day, the planting, the harvest, in times of conquest, in times of defeat, in times of sin, in times of celebration, in times of feast, in times of famine, and so on and so on. To make the obsession complete, they designated sacrifices for normal bodily functions. Leviticus 15 states: “And if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven days: and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even… And on the eighth day she shall take unto her two turtle[dove]s, or two young pigeons, and bring them unto the priest, to the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. And the priest shall offer the one for a sin offering, and the other for a burnt offering; and the priest shall make an atonement for her before the LORD for the issue of her uncleanness.
Taking pause for one moment to ponder the motivation of such malignant writing, it’s easy to see how absurd Jewish, Christian and Islamic writings are. But still today many people are too weak to break free of such ancient barbarity. Though many know how evil it is, they refuse to renounce the cruelty. In time, society at large rose above animal sacrifices, but there are still a few that persist in the ways of evil ignorance. A great number of Jews use the excuse of the Temple being destroyed by the Romans to resist sacrificing animals to that old wrathful mythical being. It’s in that way fortunate that there will never be a messiah to rebuild the Temple and deliver the world unto the Jews and Yahweh.
But the delirious creators of Jewish practices didn’t stop at sacrificing animals. After conquering their neighbors and annihilating cities, human sacrifice was quite common according to the Jewish and Christian bibles. The Bible says that the Israelites sacrificed people, as well as the followers of Baal and other contemporaries. There are many instances of the earliest Hebrews burning their firstborns, which they called passing through fire, for their Lord. In time many such references were toned down, but there are a few examples that remained as symbols of devotion to a primitive god.
The most famous example was Abraham, the legendary father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. People of reason are put off by the story of a man who was so selfish he was willing to kill his firstborn son in order to gain favor for himself. That’s the paradox of sacrifice, the true sacrifice was demanded of some innocent third party while the one offering the sacrifice was motivated by personal gain. In generosity God allowed Abraham to kill a goat instead of his son. But primitive people made Abraham out to be a brave and great man, when he was in fact a weak minded coward.
The Book of Judges relates a story of Jephthah in chapter 11. Jephthah asked the king of the children of Ammon why he would not possess only that which his god Chemosh had given him to possess. But the king of Ammon kept a desire for the land of Israel. As Jephthah prepared to make war against the Ammonites, he sought the favor of his god:
“ … Then the spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah, and he passed over Gilead, and Manasseh, and passed over Mizpeh of Gilead, and from Mizpeh of Gilead he passed over unto the children of Ammon. And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, Then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord’s and I will offer it up for a burnt offering.
So Jephthah passed over unto the children of Ammon to fight against them and the Lord delivered them into his hands. And he smote them from Aroer even till thou come to Minnith, even twenty cities, and unto the plain of the vineyards, with a very great slaughter. Thus the children of Ammon were subdued before the children of Israel.
And Jephthah came to Mizpeh unto his house, and, behold, his daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances: and she was his only child; beside her he had neither a son nor daughter. And it came to pass, when he saw her, that he rent his clothes, and said, Alas, my daughter! thou hast brought me very low, and thou art one of them that trouble me: for I have opened my mouth unto the Lord, and I cannot go back.
And she said unto him, My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord, do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth; forasmuch as the Lord hath taken vengeance for thee of thine enemies, even of the children of Ammon. And she said unto her father, Let this thing be done for me: let me alone two months, that I may go up and down upon the mountains, and bewail my virginity, I and my fellows.
And he said, Go. And he sent her away for two months: and she went with her companions, and bewailed her virginity upon the mountains. And it came to pass at the end of two months, that she returned unto her father, who did with her according to his vow which he had vowed: and she knew no man. And it was a custom in Israel, That the daughters of Israel went yearly to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in a year…”
Child sacrifice may not be all that surprising considering the selfish nature of the Middle East two to three thousand years ago. Children were not valued much beyond the value of their labor. The Book of Leviticus states “For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall surely be put to death.” But surely daughters were of much less worth than sons. Girls received so little recognition that Jephthah’s daughter, murdered for the sake of Israelite military conquest, wasn’t even referenced by name. Boys received the inheritance of their fathers’ estates, not girls. Girls were actually treated as property to be bought from fathers by husbands.
A man was traveling home with a servant and concubine, or mistress, for whom he had just recently paid her father. When it drew late, they sought a house to stay for the night and found an old man kind enough to take them in. The story from the Book of Judges, chapter 19, continues as follows:
“…Now as they were making their hearts merry, behold, the men of the city, certain sons of Belial, beset the house round about, and beat at the door, and spake to the master of the house, the old man, saying, Bring forth the man that came into thine house, that we may know him. And the man, the master of the house, went out unto them, and said unto them, Nay, my brethren, nay, I pray you, do not so wickedly; seeing that this man is come into mine house, do not this folly.
Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you: but unto this man do not so vile a thing. But the men would not hearken to him: so the man took his concubine, and brought her forth unto them; and they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning: and when the day began to spring, they let her go.
Then came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the man's house where her lord was, till it was light. And her lord rose up in the morning, and opened the doors of the house, and went out to go his way: and, behold, the woman his concubine was fallen down at the door of the house, and her hands were upon the threshold.
And he said unto her, Up, and let us be going. But none answered. Then the man took her up upon an ass, and the man rose up, and gat him unto his place. And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel...”
That story is a near copy of one about Lot in the Book of Genesis, chapter 19, where he also responds to men of the city gathered around his house by saying, “Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof.”
Females were indeed treated as property in the Bible. Solomon alone had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines according to the First Book of Kings chapter 11, verse 3. And men guarded over their women with cruel and bitter jealousy; no better than rutting baboons fighting over a harem that would kill the children to accelerate heat in the females. Such savages had an absurd obsession with virginity, and it’s a clear parallel of jealousy, insecurity and rage among God and man in Judaism. In the Book of Numbers the Israelites killed all of the Midianites except for the female virgins which they kept for themselves. And in Leviticus 21:9 it’s said “And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire.”
The punishment listed in Deuteronomy 22:13-21 for girls who weren’t virgins at the t