“Our Bible reveals to us the character of our God with minute and remorseless exactness. The portrait is substantially that of a man—if one can imagine a man charged and overcharged with evil impulses far beyond the human limit; a personage whom no one, perhaps, would desire to associate with, now that Nero and Caligula are dead. in the Old Testament His acts expose His vindictive, unjust, ungenerous, pitiless and vengeful nature constantly. He is always punishing—punishing trifling misdeeds with thousand-fold severity; punishing innocent children for the misdeeds of their parents; punishing unoffending populations for the misdeeds of their rulers; even descending to wreak bloody vengeance upon harmless calves and lambs and sheep and bullocks, as punishment for inconsequential trespasses committed by their proprietors. it is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading, by contrast.”
At the age of one hundred and eighty years, Abraham passed away, but on his deathbed he anointed his eldest son Isaac to lead the family. Isaac inherited all that was Abraham's and in his new role as patriarch, he wasted no time in impregnating one of his favorite wives, Rebekah.
His people were the Israelities, not any other country in the world, or any other time of history. Which seems at odds with the Genesis claim that God created all of man, but now seems eager to play ‘favorites’. Wouldn’t an all knowing creator surely see that favoring a ‘chosen people’ would surely lead to war, conflict and divisiveness down the track? Wouldn’t a god of peace, justice and love promote unity rather than division? Still, Yahweh had latched on to them, like an obsessed lover who will go to any lengths to conquer and own the object of his fixation.
Moses and his followers fled persecution in Egypt to find refuge in the land of Canaan.
After that implausible escape from the Egyptions, Moses lead the Israelites on a directionless meandering path through barren middle-eastern wasteland for the next forty years. Yahweh was not to be seen; and it uttered not a whisper. Unknown to all, Yahweh was in a hibernative state following the exhaustive work of the plagues, the infant killing and the parting of the Red Sea.
They believed that God had bequeathed this land to them, which would come to be known as Israel. Unfortunately, there were already peoples who lived in Canaan, a problem that Moses and his followers rectified via military might. The native Canaanites were subsequently occupied, exterminated, or run off their ancestral lands. When the natives fought back, the Israelites attributed this to their innate and infernal hatred of the Jewish people.
Under Yahweh's reign, the Israelites practiced divinely ordained infanticide, genocide, kidnapping, slavery and rape. They killed thousands of animals in religious rituals. They treated their wives and daughters as disposable property. They proudly executed interracial couples, homosexuals, heretics, nonbelievers, and the disobedient. The Canaanites were no more corrupt than other cultures.
After ruling the “promised land” for a time, the Israelites were themselves conquered by outsiders. The Babylonian Empire captured the Kingdom of Judah and expelled the Jews. Jeremiah, the "weeping prophet" was tasked with explaining to the Israelites why they had suffered defeat, destruction and exile at the hands of the Babylonians. The Lord Yahweh invited foreigners to attack his chosen people because, like a cheating wife, they had defamed his honor, wounded his pride, and hurt his fragile feelings. To lay it on thick, Jeremiah penned one of the most shocking passages in the entire old Testament. Not content with being merely misogynistic and bloodthirsty, Yahweh bragged that he was also Israel's rapist. Historically, it was the Babylonians who committed this atrocity against the Israelites; but biblically, Yahweh took the credit: "I myself will lift up your skirts over your face." From the point of view of Yahweh and his followers, the invasion was not simply territorial expansionism by King Nebuchadnezzar. Jeremiah said that the Lord caused it to happen to his own people as a punishment for their betrayal. Nebuchadnezzar's troops might have done the deed, but the Lord Yahweh wanted them to know that they were being raped by God himself.
Though the Israelites felt no remorse over occupying, slaughtering, and running off the native inhabitants of Canaan, they were mortified when they received similar (albeit milder) treatment.
In exile, the Jews prayed for vengeance.
The 20th Century
Man and woman alike independently fostered a history of genocide, slavery, rape and murder. Millions were slaughtered in the Holocaust, in both World Wars, in the acts of slavery waged by the Western world. The evil of Yahweh knew no bounds, not only did he create evil, but did nothing to prevent it. When small children were being thrown alive into the burning furnaces during the Second World War, Yahweh did nothing to prevent their agonizing deaths, therefore permitting evil to take its course.