JOSEPH WHELESS I
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...it will be found that practically every single tenet and ceremonial of the Christian religion has practically its exact counterpart in - and was derived and adapted from - the beliefs and ceremonies of the pagan religions which preceded it and for centuries lived along side of it - Joseph Wheless
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Introduction
Only so far as the world has broken away from the superstition and thrall of the theological dogmas of this religion, and caught something of its better spirit, making "obsolete" the fires of the Church on earth and in hell, has civilization slowly and painfully progressed, and human liberty of thought and conscience, and political and civil liberty, become possible and been slowly and painfully realized in some parts of the "Christian" world - JW The earnest hope is cherished for this book, that the simple and sincere search here made of the Scriptures for truth's sake, will serve to make only theology and religious intolerance vain and ridiculous; that it shame contending Christians from an unfounded faith in the untrue, and encourage them and all men into the brotherhood of the only possible true and pure religion - to do good for good is good to do.
Religion & Pathology This Bible is indeed the fount of all the woes unnumbered inflicted by bigotry and intolerance of belief in its manifestly inharmonious presentation of facts, dogma and theology. Read any history of Europe, as a whole, or of any particular people of Europe: its pages are replete with next to nothing absolutely but fighting and wars, internecine and international, in every single year almost of its bloody annals. And wars about what? Without an exception they have been all of one of three inveterate classes: wars instigated by lust of conquest and power on the part of "Divine Right" Kings or even more popular rulers, seeking to rob and steal each other's territories or to force their will upon others; wars, and the most terrible and brutal of all, incited by this Holy Christian religion: before the Reformation, with the holy purpose of exterminating unbelievers, as in the Crusades and the Spanish butcheries of the Moors; or with the pious object of exterminating, at Popish instigation, dissenting "heretics," as the Albigenses, Waldenses, Netherlanders, Cathari, Huguenots, the Jews, and scores of other murderous instances; and after the Reformation, furious exterminating Wars of one fanatical faction of Christians against the other, all blasphemously in the name of God! And no war has been in which the name of God is not inscribed upon the bloody banners of the aggressor; while assailants and defenders alike swamp high heaven with frantic and fatuous prayers to God to give victory to each against the other. Converting the Noble Ones (Aryans) Christianity, they were the same: because they were of the Caucasian race, Aryan - which means "noble." All know the story of St. Augustine and his seeing a group of "barbarian" captives exposed for sale in the Christian slave-market of a Roman city; struck with their personal beauty, he asked of what country they were. Being told "They are Angles," he exclaimed, "No, they are angels," and was thus moved to go to their Teutonic homeland to "convert" their nation from paganism to the True faith. No Consensus or Unity The Christian religion depends for the sanction and validity of its beliefs upon the Bible as does the earth upon the sun for its light and heat and life. The Bible is the pregnant source - the only source - of the Christian faith; it is the unique fount of faith in its own truth - of the accepted belief in the truth of its own revelations. But of the whole body of Christians who accept it and believe in it, who found their faith upon it, no two sects believe it alike; all the schisms, and heresies, and persecutions, and religious wars, and religious intolerance and bigotries which past history has recorded and current history chronicles, are due alone to the differences of belief engendered by the indubitable inconsistencies and contradictions of the texts of inspired truth of this "Holy Bible, Book Divine." Of this remarkable "confusion of tongues" of inspirations and revelations throughout the Book we shall have the amplest instances in the chapters which follow. Ignorant Masses Fooled There were no books, save painfully-written and very costly manuscripts, worth the ransom of princes, and utterly unattainable except by the very wealthy and by the Church; not till about 1450 was the first printed book known in Europe. The Bible existed only in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and the ignorant masses were totally ignorant of it other than what they heard from the priests, who told them that they must believe it or be tortured and killed in life and damned forever in the fires of hell after death. It is no wonder that faith flourished under conditions so exceptionally favorable. Spreading to Rome ...the proselyting campaigns continued, pushed with much zeal among the pagans now almost exclusively; naturally the new faith drifted toward imperial Rome, the head and heart of the ancient pagan world. There, too, it took root and slowly spread, among the lowly and the slaves, hidden away in the slums and in the catacombs. Spreading Fear (End of the World) Under the spell of these promises and these threats, and of the assurance of a quick end of the then earth, the propagandists of the new Cult promptly established a strange new scheme of which they were the administrators - a scheme of pure communism. As the world would quickly come to an end, there was no reason and no need to take heed of temporal affairs; they must all watch and pray: and pool all their poor belongings in their leaders' hands for the common benefit. |
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It amazes us that many Christians believe that the Old Testament is real historical record of events, despite the fact that it portrays God as a vain, vengeful maniac without a drop of compassion. Besides ordering the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in the cities he ordained should be stolen from the indigenous population, he also was known to attack his friend for no apparent reason - Lomas & Knight (The Hiram Key)
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What is the Bible?
What, first, is this Bible? It is not one single and homogeneous Book, in the form we see it printed; indeed, it was first printed in the year A.D. 1452, by Gutenberg, in Mainz, And what we have and know - and fondly cherish - as the Bible, is not the Bible at all - but a translation, or version, more or less faulty and incorrect - and often intentionally very misleading, of ancient manuscripts of Hebrew and Greek writings, themselves very faulty and conflicting, forming together the so-called Bible. The name Bible is the Latin Biblia, from the Greek diminutive plural, ta biblia, or "the little books," a term first used, as referring to the Hebrew Scriptures, in 1 Maccabees 12:9. The Greek word biblos, from which comes the diminutive biblia, is from the Greek bublus, for papyrus, the name of the famous material, from Egypt, on which ancient books were written in manuscript. Jewish Roots of Christianity The Bible, thus so-called, is a compilation, or gathering into one volume, of sixty-six separate and different "little books," or fragmentary "sacred" writings, which compose it, from Genesis to Revelation. These sixty-six little books, or manuscripts, were written, or edited and compiled, in very different ages of the world, over the space of some centuries, by wholly different, and mostly unknown, persons, in different countries and languages, Hebrew and Greek principally; but, except maybe one Book, by Jews invariably. Hebrew Bible The Hebrew "little books," thirty-nine in number according to the accepted Hebrew and Protestant "Canon," forty-six according to the Catholic acceptance, were written of course, mainly in the Hebrew language, though Aramaic elements enter into some of the later compositions. This Hebrew language, like several others of the allied Semitic languages, was written entirely with consonants, they having no vowels, and no means of expressing vowel sounds; their words consist mostly of words of only three consonantal letters. The whole Hebrew Scriptures is a solid mass of words in consonants only, with not a single vowel among them. This consonantal mass of words was written from right to left, letter after letter unbroken, without separation or spacing between words, and without a single mark of punctuation from end to end. There were of course no divisions, as at present, into Chapters and verses, these divisions having been invented only some three or four hundred years ago to facilitate quotations and references; even now the chapter and verse divisions differ considerably between the Hebrew text and the English translations in frequent instances. The Hebrew Rabbis and scholars, somewhere between the fifth and eighth centuries A.D., devised and put into use in their manuscripts of the Bible, a system of so-called "vowel points" - dots and dashes like in modern shorthand - to express and preserve what they considered to be the probable ancient pronunciation of the Hebrew words. No wonder there are infinite doubts and difficulties as to the original words and their pronunciation. The most ancient manuscripts of the Hebrew texts date only from the Eighth Century of the Era of Christ; while of the Christian Books, said to have been written by the direct inspiration of the Holy Ghost within the first century of the Era, all, all are lost, and the oldest "copies" bear the marks of the Fourth Century. And even in this Fourth Century, so gross was the corruption of text, so numberless the errors and conflicting readings, that the great St. Jerome, author of the celebrated Latin Vulgate Version of the Scriptures, has left it recorded, as his reason for his great work, that the sacred texts "varied so much that there were almost as many readings as Codices" (manuscripts) copies of the text. And just now and for years past, the Papal authorities are collating all known extant versions and bits of Scriptures for the purpose of trying to edit them into one approved Version of the inspired Word of Yahveh. Bogus Hebrew Language Such a thing as the "Hebrew" language, as a separate and distinctive speech of the ancient Israelites, in which they held familiar converse with Yahveh, and which Yahveh spoke with Adam and Eve and with the Patriarchs and Moses, never existed. Abraham was a native of "Ur of the Chaldees" (Sumeria) and hence naturally, with all his family and people, spoke the Chaldean or Babylonian language, Catholic Encyclopedia on Hebrew "The name Hebrew (as applied to the language spoken by the ancient Israelites, and in which are composed nearly all the Books of the Old Testament), is quite recent in Biblical usage, occurring for the first time in the Greek prologue of Ecclesiasticus, about 130 BC" - (Cath Encyc. VII, 176). And further, as to the language of Abraham and the Patriarchs: "That it was simply a dialect belonging to the Canaanite group of Semitic languages is plain from its many recognized affinities with the Phoenician and Moabitic dialects. So, if Yahveh, God of Abraham and of Israel, spoke all these wonderful things to his Chosen People, he spoke them in the common language of the peoples and gods of Canaan and Assyria, and not in some choice and peculiar "Hebrew language." A Lost Language So obsolete and "dead" had the "Hebrew" language become, following the world-conquests of Alexander the Great and the almost universal spread of the Greek language and culture throughout the Orient, that several centuries before the time of Christ even the form and proper pronunciation of the name YHVH of the Hebrew tribal deity were lost and unknown; though a few Jews, as Philo of Alexandria and Josephus, about the time of Christ, professed to know it, but held it unlawful to pronounce or divulge it. Pagan Polytheists And right under the shadow of Sinai, the very next day after the first giving of Law to Moses, Moses came down from the Mount, and himself "builded an altar under the hill, and twelve pillars (phallic mazzebahs) according to the twelve tribes of Israel; and he sent young men of the Children of Israel, which offered burnt offerings and sacrificed peace offerings unto Yahveh" (Ex 24:4-5). The truth is, that Israel worshiped the same Gods as the Assyrians and the other nations, and never believed in or worshiped Yahveh, except as a local phallic Baal, one of their many gods. Just at the time of the first Captivity this fact is admitted: "They served idols, as did the heathen whom Yahveh carried away before them" (2 Kings 16:11) ; and although Yahveh "testified against them by every prophet and by every seer, notwithstanding, they did not believe in Yahveh their God;" but they persisted in idolatry and departed not therefrom, "until Yahveh removed Israel out of his sight" (5:23). And this idolatry is admitted to have been continuous from first to last, some seven hundred years: "Because they have done that which was evil in my sight, and have provoked me to anger since the day their fathers came forth out of Egypt, even unto this day." ...for Abraham and all the Patriarchs all the time "served other gods" (Joshua 24:2), and they all, while in Egypt and for ages after the Exodus, worshiped and continued to "worship the gods of the Egyptians" (Joshua 24:14). Jews, Judea & the Pagans The new religion rose there (Judea) but met with little acceptance in its native place, where the Jews could not recognize in the humble Carpenter of Nazareth the tokens of the kingly "Messiah" of their older prophecy. It spread with readier acceptance among the neighboring pagans, who believed all Gods and had no objection to taking on another; they were familiar with Virgin-births and with Gods coming to earth in human form. The new religion, Christianity, was not so new or novel as we are very generally disposed to think it. Practically, in all its essentials, it was not new at all, and had hardly a new thought in it - except hell fire and the oft-repeated and never realized "the end of all things is at hand" (1 Peter 4:7). Instead of the plurality of Gods of the pagan religions, it adopted the One God Yahveh as finally evolved from old Hebrew mythology, into Three-in-One Christian Godhead. Bel, Ashtoreth, and the "Asherah" were integrally part and parcel of the fervent worship of the Hebrew Semites in the Land of Canaan, just as they had been in the Land of Chaldea whence they came, and so continued from first to last, as their Scriptures vividly portray. Thus we see pretty well connected up all the Semitic peoples, and see the Biblically identical origin, traditions, deities, religion, and worship of the Hebrews and all their Semitic neighbors and kindred. Phallic Worship We have early, and many, Biblical instances and illustrations of this ancient, Hebraic, Semitic, universal, Phallic worship. The sanctity attached by the Hebrew religion to the male organs of generation, is clearly recognized by various passages of the Law. These phallic organs must not be profanely touched or injured, and the injury or loss of any of them wrought an excommunication from the worship of Yahveh. ...in Deuteronomy chapter 23:1, excommunication is pronounced against the unfortunate one: "He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the assembly of Yahveh." The Assyrians, no less than the Egyptians, the Hindus, the Canaanites, the Israelites, the Christians, and many other religious peoples, had and have their Trinity, purely phallic in origin and significance. The virile male phallus was noted to be not alone efficient in the great and divine work of procreation: its creative labors were shared by two coefficient mates, the two testes, or tests of efficient manhood. Hence these were likewise honored, personified, and deified, with distinctive names: the right-side one, supposed to be prepotent in the generation of a man-child, was named Anu or On - that is, "strength," "power;" while the left-side, or female-producing test was called Hoa or Hea. One of the sons of Jacob and of his other wife Leah, was given the selfsame name of his old Semitic ancestor: "and she called his name Asher...and this Asher gave his phallic name to one of the twelve Tribes of Israel. Principal among the idols or images of their Yahveh were, throughout Hebrew History, the phallic objects of worship mentioned a thousand times in the sacred pages under the euphemistic but very misleading terms "pillar" and "grove." These so popular and venerated emblems were nothing more or less than the phallic reproductions of the virile and erect male organ of procreation, the symbolic "staff of life," and the receptive and fecund female "door of life," to ourselves euphemize them. In the English translations the term "pillar" is used for the representation, called in Hebrew "mazzebah," of the male organ; and "grove" for the "asherah" or female organ of reproduction of the species. For public and outdoor worship these images were of large size and bold design, often actual, sometimes conventional or symbolic, representations of the living sex-organs. Smaller idols of the same nature, more for household worship, were images of Yahveh, the peculiarly sacred alias of the Hebraic "El," with an enormous "phallus," or male organ, erect in situ. The names given to these household images were "ephods" and "teraphim," words constantly occurring together throughout the Hebrew Bible to as late as Hosea iii, 4. These phallic idols, as we shall see, were used for worship, and for the purposes of divination or oracular consultation of the God Yahveh, in seeking his advice and receiving his awful decrees, as appears from many instances. That these teraphim were idols used in divination or the oracular consultation with Yahveh, is plain from the passage of the Prophet Zechariah. Thus the religion and worship of the Hebrews and their Semitic neighbors were frankly and purely phallic. The first mention of the mazzebah or "pillar," as it is deceptively rendered in the English translation, is the one piously set up by Jacob at the place where he dreamed of the Ladder, in Genesis 28; where he "took the stone which he had used for a pillow and set it up for a mazzebah ("pillar"), and poured oil on the top of it. And he called the name of that place Beth-El - the House of God. and he said, "This stone which I have set up for a mazzebah shall be God's house" This mazzebah was a representative of the sacred phallus, for which a tall or pointed stone, or even a heap of stones, was used when nothing else was available. These phallic pillars or "mazzeboth" were regarded as being the actual abiding-place of the deity who "put his name" on them; he verily lived in the stone, and it became sentient and possessed of human or divine faculties, as of sight, hearing, understanding, the power of protection. We have noticed the mazzebah which Jacob set up "for God's house" (Gen. 28:22); and the mazzebah and stone heap which Jacob and Laban set up as a "witness" and "watch tower" between them, saying "this heap be witness and this pillar (mazzebah) be witness," to keep them from harming each other. This superstition that deity, or spirits, or jinn resided in the sacred stones, was almost universal among ancient peoples, and persists today among low tribes from Alaska to equatorial Africa. And not only did the deity reside in the stones, but "Stone" or "Rock" was, and yet is, a favorite name or appellation of the Deity: Jacob calls Yahveh "Stone of Israel;" Moses "the Rock of our Salvation;" "the Rock that begat me;" "he is a Rock;" and so says Samuel; and David: "Yahveh is my Rock; Elohim is my Rock; my high tower, in whom I trust;" Jesus says "on this Rock will I build my church," etc. All these inspired allusions are purely phallic in terms and in signification; and so of our "Rock of Ages, cleft for me." There could be no clearer evidence that the phallus, and the stone representation of it, was regarded religiously as the emblem of Deity. Amos quotes Yahveh as commanding, "Seek not Bethel, Bethel shall come to nought;" and Josiah, as one of his "reforms" in abolishing the phallic heathen practices of the Chosen, destroyed this holy phallic altar of Beth-El, and burned the bones of its prophets and priests upon the polluted altar. This proves that the very sacred Bethel was, from its beginning to its end, a place of heathen phallic Yahveh-worship, and somewhat discounts the eulogies heard upon it from modern Christian pulpits. Pagan Idolatry Until the traditional "giving of the Law" to Moses on Sinai, there is not the slightest hint in the Hebrew Scriptures, covering a space of 2500 years, that the El or Yahveh of the Patriarchs was different from any other El, or had or claimed any different cult or form of worship. He never made any such intimation, in all his reputed appearances and talks with men, from Adam to Abraham, and from Abraham to Moses. Laban, the father-in-law of Isaac, is called "Laban the Syrian," and he and his family worshiped teraphim-idols (Genesis 31:30). Abram's grandson Jacob, in the third generation, is called "a Syrian about to die," when he migrated to Egypt, 250 years after Abraham. It was therefore 70 Syrians who went into Egypt, speaking the Chaldean tongue, and becoming in 430 years good Pagan Egyptians. After 430 years in Egypt, worshiping their ancient and the local gods, Moses had never even heard of the El-Yahveh: when he first met the strange God, there at the Burning Bush, Moses had to ask, "What is thy name?" so that he might report it back to the elders of the People in Egypt. Nearly a millennium after the death of Moses, we are expressly told that the Chosen People persisted up to date in the worship of the foreign gods: "they did not forsake the Gods of Egypt" (see Ezekiel 20:8). Besides all the phallic worship and idolatrous practices above noticed, and which were throughout their history associated with the cult of Yahveh, as a sort of specially Hebraic Super-El or Baal, the Chosen People never even for a season gave up the common heathen idolatry into which they were born and bred and with which they were everywhere surrounded among their kindred peoples. We remember that Aaron made the Golden Calf right at the foot of Sinai while Moses was up there with the new-found god Yahveh (if he ever was); and Aaron proclaimed to the People, then but three months out from Egypt: "These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt," this Golden Calf being the reproduction of the sacred bull Apis of Egypt. Moses himself, in addition to the "twelve mazzeboth" which he set up just after receiving a "Law" against them, also made the famous brazen image of the Fiery Serpent, which healed the plague-stricken Children, and was preserved and worshiped as a god by the Chosen until it was finally destroyed by King Hezekiah; "for unto those days the Children of Israel did burn incense unto it" (2 Kings 18:4). Gideon, as we have seen, also encouraged idolatry; his other and proper name was Jerubbaal, showing his dedication to the Canaanite-Hebrew Baal; he "made an ephod of gold, and all Israel went a-whoring after it" (Judges 8:27). The holy King David worshiped Baal religiously, and in public and near-naked, as the custom was in the Baal-worship, danced the Baal-dance "with all his might" before the Holy Ark of the Covenant of Yahveh; and his wife "Michal, looking out the window saw King David leaping and dancing amain before Yahveh; and she despised him in her heart" - as is graphically related in 2 Samuel 6:14-17. Absolam "reared up for himself a mazzebah (or phallic "pillar"), for he said, I have no son to keep my name in remembrance; and he called the mazzebah after his own name" (2 Sam 18:18). The Wise Man, Solomon, it is recorded, "loved Yahveh: only he sacrificed and burnt incense in high-places" (1 Kings 3:3) ; the Bamah or "high-place" being the popular shrine of Baal-worship universal throughout Israel. King Solomon also "loved many strange women," having 700 wives and 300 concubines, of all the heathen peoples; and impartially he built a phallic Temple for Yahveh (constructed by the Pagan Hiram of Tyre), and "an high-place for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, and for Molech the abomination of Ammon," and went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians. These "heathenish" practices were not confined to sundry "bad kings" who backslided from Yahveh: they were universal and constant throughout the rank and file of the Chosen; and these practices were part and parcel of the "orthodox" worship of Yahveh: "For they also built them high-places, and mazzeboth and Asherim, on every high hill, and under every green tree; and there were also sodomites in the land: they did according to all the abominations of the nations which Yahveh drave out before the Children of Israel" (1 Kings 14:23-24) - only Yahveh never did drive them out, but they stayed there until the Chosen were themselves driven out into captivity. The whole Books of Kings and Chronicles, and the "Prophets" are filled with these records of continuous idolatry under the successive Kings of Israel and Judah, to the very end of the national record. Goddess Worship The "grove" or graven representation of the female "door of life," also makes a very early Scriptural appearance, and runs hand in hand, or in phallic parlance, "linga in yoni," with the mazzebah, through the whole record of the Hebrew Bible. In Genesis 21:33 it is recorded: "And Abraham planted a grove (asherah) in Beersheba, and called there on the name of Yahveh, the everlasting (El) God." It is another instance of the many of "pious fraud" on the part of the Bible translators to use the deceptive euphemism "planted a grove," as if it meant the commendable horticultural work of setting out trees, instead of the actual truth of the original, "erected an Asherah," or visual phallic image of the female "door of life" penetrated by the male "staff of life," as is the truth of fact. The idea of planting out a grove of trees, besides being actually false, is negatived by so many expressions in sundry passages even in the oft-falsified English Version of the Bible, that the "pious fraud" to hide it, of the translators becomes absurd. "And Aliab served Baal, and made a grove" (1 Kings 16:33), under Jehoahaz "there remained a grove in Samaria" (2 Kings 13:6). "The Children of Israel set them up pillars and groves in every high hill and under every green tree" (2 Kings, 17:10), while previously the Prophet Abijah had declared "Yahveh shall smite Israel because they have made their groves, provoking Yahveh to anger" (1 Kings 14:15). A grove of trees could not be planted under a tree, nor would such innocent and useful work of forestation provoke the Lord Yahveh to anger. Witches and Oracles ...Saul said unto his servants, "Seek me a woman who hath a familiar spirit, that I may go to her and inquire of her." Thus a Witch was as good an oracle of Yahveh as another, or better, judged by the results. And they told Saul, "Behold, there is a woman who hath a familiar spirit, at Endor" and Saul disguised himself and went to her by night. Sacred Prostitution One feature which was common to all the ancient religions, was the consecrated women, or priestess-prostitutes, who were always in attendance in the temples and at the Asherah "groves," to participate in the worship with the True Believers who had the price of this oblation. Their earnings in this sacred calling went into the "Treasury of Yahveh," and were a large part of its legitimate income. True, the "Law" prescribed: "There shall be no harlot (kedeshah) of the daughters of Israel, neither shall there be a sodomite (kadesh) of the sons of Israel." ...the practice prevailed even in the Holy Temple of Solomon, which was planned by Yahveh himself (1 Chron 28:19) and built with particular reference to this phallic practice, with small "chambers" ah 1 around (1 Kings 6:5, 6, 10) for the Temple-whores and their sportive cult. It may be mentioned, that the Hebrew word "kadesh" which was the name for these consecrated devotees of Phallism, is exactly the same word as "holy" or "consecrated" or "sanctified;" in the Ten Commandments it is recited "wherefore Yahveh blessed the sabbath day and hallowed (kadesh-u) it" (Ex 20:1). Moses' Descendants are Idol-Worshipers (!?) A most conclusive proof of Post-exilic composition or editing of these Books now appears. In Judges XVII is the account of Micah and the elaborate Idol-worship which he established, and of the silver phallic ephod which he set up in his house; how he hired a Levite to be his idol-master and priest; then these sacred trophies were captured by the Danites; and this remarkable historical recital is made: "And the children of Dan set up for themselves the graven images...and Jonathan, the son of Gershom, the son of Moses, he and his sons were priests to the Tribe of Dan until the captivity of the land" (Jud. xviii, 30). Here we have the grandson of Moses himself, and his descendants for generations, acting as heathen priests of idol-worship in Israel, so fearfully forbidden by Moses in his Law. This "until the captivity of the land" proves that Judges was not written for nearly a thousand years after the events related, and after the Captivity.
Elohim These records prove to demonstration that the Hebrew People never, at any time, before the "Return from Captivity," knew or worshiped any such God as we are taught in modern Sunday Schools as the "One True God" of Israel; but the same El or Baal, and the same Elohim, or gods, exactly, as all their neighbor heathen nations. Thus, Jacob said of the place where he dreamed that he saw the Ladder, "this is none other but the house of the gods (Beth-Elohim)"; and he set up a phallic "pillar" or "mazzebah," and called it "Beth-El - the house of God." And Elohim (gods) came to him in a dream and said, "I am the El of Beth-El" (Gen 31:13) ; and Jacob built there an altar and called the place Beth-El, "because there Ha-Elohim - the Gods - were revealed unto him" (Gen 35:7). Here the Hebrew text expressly uses the plural, noun and verb—"the-gods were revealed;" but the Authorized Version falsely translates as "God appeared unto him," while the Revised Version correctly reads "revealed," but uses wrongly the singular "was." Gradually, towards the close of the Hebrew Sacred History, particularly after the return from Captivity, out of all this jumble of confused local Baalim and Elohim, evolved a more or less definite idea of the Hebrew Yahveh as a higher or super-El or Baal of and above all the others; then as a supreme El or Baal or Lord of Heaven and earth; and then as One and Only True God. Pagan priest of the gods of Midian, seeing some of the wonders of Sinai, admits to Moses, "Now I know that Yahveh is greater than all the Gods" (Exodus 18:11). Moses exults to Israel: "For Yahveh thy God is God of Gods - Elohe ha-elohim - and Lord of lords - adonai ha-adonim - the great El" (Deut 10:17). Moses surveys the gods of the nations around, and appeals to Israel: "What nation is there so great, who hath GODS (Elohim), so nigh unto them as Yahveh our God is?" (Deut 4:7). "For Yahveh is a great God - El - he is to be feared above all gods (elohim)" (Psalms 96:4), and "Yahveh is exalted above all gods" (Psalms 97:9). Who Wrote Genesis? (Elohist vs. Jehovist) there were at least two older, independent, and contradictory sources of the present "Scriptures," that have been used, and very uncritically and carelessly patched together by later compilers who have worked them into more or less their present form. This is very apparent and very easily followed through the Books. One of the older writers or schools of writers, of the Scripture records, always, in speaking of the Hebrew deity, makes use of the generic words "El," "Elohe" or "Elohim" (God, Gods), to designate their tribal divinity; the other or second school invariably uses the personal name "Yahveh," or Jehovah. ...these two original "Elohim" and "Yahveh" records were at some later time combined into one record, in more or less its present form, evidently by reckless and "priestly" editors, adding much material of their own; this composite product is designated by the initial "P," for priestly. A critical study of the Hebrew Scriptures by competent scholars reveals that their present form results from much and very uncritical editing and patching together of ancient traditions, folk lore tales, and older written records, long after the times usually attributed to the several Books; ...the personal God-name "Yahveh" occurs some 6000 times in the Hebrew Scriptures; the noun "El," meaning God or Spirit, occurs but two hundred and sixteen times, while "Elohim," which is the plural and means Spirits or gods, is found some 2570 times. Repeat, Repeat, Repeat There are, moreover, numerous passages and even whole Chapters of the Hebrew Bible which are in identical words, showing that the one was copied bodily from the other, or from a common older source, as is mostly the case, and without giving the customary editorial credit to the original authors. A God would hardly "repeat himself" thus. Instances of these duplications of text may be multiplied: they very materially discount the theory of original inspiration of the copyists. Other whole chapters practically identical, are the accounts of the buildings of Solomon's Temple, in 1 Kings 2:7 & 2 Chronicles 2:4 though in 1 Kings it is stated that the two pillars Jachin and Boaz were each 18 cubits high (7:15 & 2 Kings 25:17), while in 2 Chronicles it is affirmed that they were each 35 cubits high. What a Mess It is also evident on the face of these two conflicting accounts, that two different writers, "E" and "J" wrote them, and not Moses; and also that the third man, "P," who patched them together, did it in a very apprentice-like manner, and without any inspiration or critical knack at all. The composite origin and character of these Hebrew Scriptures, and the fact of distinct and contradictory sources worked up into a sort of composite hodge-podge with utter lack of literary or historical criticism and total disregard of self-contradiction, is further very evident from the many double and contradictory accounts of the same alleged event. Some minor instances of this we have just noticed. If we find that the "Word of God" tells the same story in two or more totally different and contradictory ways, or that one inspired writer is "moved by the Holy Ghost" of Yahveh to tell his tale one way, and another inspired writer is so moved to tell it altogether another way, totally different and contradictory in the essence of the alleged facts of the same recorded event, we are forced to know and confess that one or the other record at least is wanting in God's inspiration of truth and is If we find that the "Word of God" tells the same story in two or more totally different and contradictory ways, or that one inspired writer is "moved by the Holy Ghost" of Yahveh to tell his tale one way, and another inspired writer is so moved to tell it altogether another way, totally different and contradictory in the essence of the alleged facts of the same recorded event, we are forced to know and confess that one or the other record at least is wanting in God's inspiration of truth and is inevitably false. This being so, and there being no possible way or manner of determining which version is the false and which may not be, both must be rejected as equally false, or equally uninspired and incredible; and in either event, the theory of inerrant inspiration and of revealed truth of the "Word of God" is irreparably damaged and destroyed. Confusion Over Creation of Woman Most notorious of these creation contradictions, is that of the creation of the Woman. In the Elohim account, as we have seen, on the sixth day - after all else was created and done - "Elohim created man in his own image, male and female created he them (i.e. man and woman); and Elohim said, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth"...thus both man and woman were created on the sixth day, and were sexually equipped and commanded to multiply and reproduce. But in the second or Yahveh account, we have man created all alone, put into the Garden of Eden alone, afterwards Yahveh considers "it is not well for the man to be alone, I will make a help meet for him." Then we have the very remarkable, not to say ridiculous, episode of Yahveh making all kinds of animals and parading them before the man, for him to choose a female animal help-mate or wife, but none was "meet," or fit, or satisfactory to him — "but for the man there was not found an help meet (fit) for him." Then follows the Rib story, of woman being made from the rib of the man, and brought to him to be his wife. These are two totally contradictory stories of the creation of the earth, and of living creatures, and of man and woman. So, one is false. Hence, the notion of the inspired truth of God in one or the other of them must be abandoned as impossible. What Existed Before Creation? From before the "beginning" of creation, or its constructive works, the material earth itself existed, but simply was "without form and void"...And the material waters existed, for "the spirit of Elohim moved upon the face of the waters," the waters not being collected together into seas until the third day. Slaves in Egypt? In Egypt the Chosen soon became a race of slaves, under circumstances truly remarkable, arid utterly incredible anywhere outside the Bible. "...and the Children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty; and the land was filled with them. Now there arose up a new King over Egypt, which knew not Joseph; and he said unto his people, Behold, the Children of Israel are more and mightier than we:" so he proposed making slaves of them, and proceeded at once to carry this plan into effect), without opposition. How 70 persons, after one generation, could fill all Egypt and be "more and mightier" than the population of the greatest Empire of those times, is passing strange. And all this in only 30 years after the arrival of the 70; for we know through inspiration that the Chosen "sojourned in Egypt 430 years." ...in these only 30 years the 70 had become "more and mightier" than all the Empire of Egypt. Passing strange indeed. And stranger still, that without a word of protest nor a blow of resistance, this "more and mightier" Chosen People should submit to be made a race of slaves by a confessedly weaker and inferior Nation, passeth all but inspired understanding. |
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Reading the story of the Exodus carefully and objectively left us horrified. The view that had been formed in our minds during our Christian-focused upbringing was quickly turned on its head. Instead of a noble and great people winning their freedom and finding their ‘promised land,’ we read a disturbing catalogue of primitive demonology, betrayal, mass murder, rape, vandalism and grand theft. It was the most disgraceful statement of origin for a new nation imaginable - Lomas & Knight (The Hiram Key)
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Escaping Israelite Slaves Possess Slaves
A truly remarkable circumstance may be noted here: this "mixed multitude" of fugitive slaves are represented as having slaves of their own which they carried away with them; and their truly provident Yahveh, in his ordinance of the Passover, the very first Law he ever gave them, just as they fled from slavery in Egypt, made provision for the observance of that pious ceremony by "every man's servant that is bought for money," after the bloody violence of circumcision had been perpetrated upon him (Ex 12:44). Tents of the Israelites Moses commands the Chosen to take, every year at harvest time, "boughs of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, and the boughs of thick trees, and willows of the brooks," wherewith to construct "booths;" and, says Yahveh, "ye shall dwell in booths seven days; all that are Israelites shall dwell in booths. That your generations may know that I made the Children of Israel to dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I am Yahveh your God." It needs no comment that the waste howling wilderness "where no water is," could not afford trees such as these "goodly" ones, nor any trees at all, and certainly not trees enough to build "booths" for forty years for 2,414,200 (Israelites). If the Children were in the Wilderness at all, and lived in anything, it was in tents. So for a moment we will consider these tents, and the holy camp, and several truly curious features connected with their encampments. Where did the Chosen get their tents, and how did they manage to lug them along on their flight out of Egypt? The inspired history tells us that the Children fled in such haste that they carried only some unleavened dough and their kneading troughs bound up in their clothes on their shoulders, without even any victuals (Ex 12:39); not a word about heavy and cumbersome tents. Tents are heavy, with canvas or hair-cloth, ropes, poles and pegs; in the US Army a little "dog-tent" merely to shelter two soldiers lying down, is divided between its two occupants as luggage. But these tents of the Israelites must have been big family affairs, for men, women and children to live in decency and some degree of comfort, and must have been very heavy: how did they carry them? But first, how did they get them? As they lived in houses in Egypt, it would be remarkable indeed if each family should have a well-equipped tent in the garret, awaiting marching orders for the Promised Land, which until a single day previously they had no premonition of. And how many tents must they have had? To crowd indecently ten persons, male and female, old and young, and sick and dying, into each tent, would have required at least 241,420 quite large and heavy tents, to be lugged in their first flight, and for forty years wandering in the waste howling wilderness. We are nowhere told that the Children had any horses, or knew even how to ride horseback. As for their encampments, who shall justly estimate their size and extent, for a host of two and a half million people, with all their "mixed multitude" of slaves and camp-followers, and with more than that number of sheep and cattle? The question would be of no concern, if it did not involve some further strains on faith, as we will now notice. Every time the camp was pitched, forty-one times (Num 33), there must be suitable space found for some 250,000 tents, laid out (Num 2) regularly four-square around the Holy Tabernacle, after that was constructed, and with the necessary streets and passages, and proper spaces between the tents. A man in a coffin, dead, occupies about six feet by two, or twelve square feet; of course living people would not be so packed, like corpses or sardines, within their tents; they must have at least say three times that space, or 36 square feet or 4 square yards each. A tent, to house ten persons, with minimum decency, must occupy therefore an average of 40 square yards. If the 241,420 such tents were set one against another, with no intervening space or separating streets, they would occupy 9,656,800 square yards, or over 1995 acres of ground; a little more than 3 square miles. But the desert was vast, there was no need for such impossible crowding; ample room was available for seemly spacing of tents, for streets and areas, for the great central Tabernacle and its Court, and for the 22,000 Levites, not counted in the soldier-census, who must "pitch round about the Tabernacle," as well as space for the rounding up of the millions of cattle. These allowances for order, decency and comfort would much extend the circuit of the camp, and make more reasonable the accepted estimate that "this encampment is computed to have formed a movable city of twelve miles square," or an area of 144 square miles, which is certainly modest for a population equal to that of Chicago, which covers 198 square miles. The Tabernacle stood in the center, thus six miles from the outskirts of the camp in either direction. Fiery Sacrifices Impossible Moreover, there is the question of fires and fuel. The myriads of sacrifices and burnt offerings at the Tabernacle, besides the terribly wasteful burning "without the camp" of practically the entire animals, and that too when the Children were starving and rioting for "flesh to eat," required many fires and hence very much firewood. Where, there in the "waste howling wilderness," did they get the wood for so much fuel?—a burning question nowhere answered by Revelation. And there in the Arabian wilderness, at certain seasons, and always at nights, when the fiery sun had set, the cold was fearfully intense; the Chosen must have been grievously beset to find firewood to keep themselves from freezing: and it is never once recorded that stove-wood was miraculously provided either to keep them warm or to cook that wonderful honey-oily manna, to say nothing of the big quail feast. The inspired Word tells us much of the fires and of the ashes, but vouchsafes not a word about the immense forests of goodly trees which must have quite covered that "waste howling wilderness" in order to supply a population like that of modern Chicago with firewood for heating, cooking, and burning hecatombs of sacrifices, every day for forty years. The Tabernacle Yahveh and Moses spent a good part of forty days on Sinai, again without eating or drinking (Ex 34:28), engaged in framing up plans and specifications for a big portable Tent called the Tabernacle or Sanctuary, in which were kept the holy altar and the wonder-working wonder-working Ark, and in devising the whole system of priests and priestly services. This Tabernacle, as described in Exodus xxvi, was a portable Tent about 18 feet broad by 54 feet in length, with a door in one end: it and the Ark, with their furnishings, must have been marvels of luxurious beauty (or the product of remarkable imagination) - gold, and silver, and brass, and blue and purple and scarlet fine linen cloths, and precious stones galore. One may wonder where all this finery - the property of slaves - came from, there in the howling wilderness, unless a part of the spoils "borrowed" from the Egyptians, after midnight of the Passover Massacre - only that we are told that the Children hurried off with nothing except their bundles of clothes and kneading-troughs and a little dough (Ex 12:34). Killing the Freed Slaves Moreover, as Yahveh got angry with his Chosen, whom he had so repeatedly promised to bring into the Promised Land, and refused to bring them, but caused every one of them to die, except Joshua and Caleb, there in the wilderness, there were on the average 1700 deaths and funerals per day for forty years, at the rate of 72 per hour, more than one for every minute of every day: all which remains must also be carried "without the camp" for burial, an average of six miles going and returning; which must have kept the Children pretty busy all day long. And as the census taken at the end of the forty years shows but a slight decrease under the census at the beginning, the entire host was renewed by a birth-rate of over one a minute for forty years; and all the debris of this operation must be lugged without the camp and disposed of. Verily, the Chosen had their troubles. Yahveh kept his awful Word of wrath and killed off the entire original millions who set out with Moses from Egypt, with the exception of the "little ones, your children, which in that day had no knowledge between good and evil," as divine inspiration assures us in Deut 1:39, and if the balance of the whole millions which reached the Promised Land was from new births during the forty years in the wilderness, then, as we have seen, these births must have averaged some 1700 for every day of the forty years. What Priests? Before seeking to unravel what next is related, we may note another big mistake that Yahveh made, as to which one might think a God should have known better. In sending Moses back this last time to do what had already been done, Yahveh expressly commanded: "And let the priests also, which come near to Yahveh, sanctify themselves;" and he told Moses that Brother Aaron might come up with him next trip; but, said Yahveh, "let not the priests and the people" try to come up. This is a remarkable slip on the part of Yahveh: for there were no Priests at that time; the Priests were not instituted until some time later in the Siniatic proceedings, when Brother Aaron and his four sons were first designated to be the first priests (Ex 28:1). and it was made death for any one else to presume to act as priest. And Brother Aaron, as a priest during Moses' next forty-day sojourn up on the Mountain, made gods of the golden calves, and sacrificed to them: thus again proving that there was no "Law" as to "priests of Yahveh," and that "thou shalt have no other gods before me" was not yet Law. Priesthood of Death Having gotten this divine commission in perpetuity for Brother Aaron's family, it was necessary to sanction it with awful Jahvistic pains and penalties, so as to prevent sacrilegious meddling with the monopoly. The penalty of death was therefore decreed for any interference with the priestly monopolists: "Thou shalt appoint Aaron and his sons, and they shall keep their priesthood: and the stranger that cometh nigh shall be put to death"! (Num 3:10). And it was reiterated: "The man that will do presumptuously, and will not harken unto the Priest, even that man shall die" (Deut 17:12). The priests of Yahveh were as jealously exclusive as was their God whose name was Jealous; and they were protected in their monopoly by the fatal enactment on Sinai: "He that sacrificeth to any god, save unto Yahveh only, he shall be utterly destroyed" (Ex 22:20) Of course, none of this ever historically happened; it was put into mouth of "Yahveh by the hand of Moses" many centuries later, by Ezra or his priestly successors after the return from Captivity, when the ritualistic priestly system was established in the restored remnant of Israel, to give sanction and sanctity to their exclusive system. |
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Then I heard the Lord say to the other men, “Follow him through the city and kill everyone whose forehead is not marked. Show no mercy; have no pity! Kill them all—old and young, girls and women and little children. But do not touch anyone with the mark. Begin right here at the Temple.” So they began by killing the seventy leaders. “Defile the Temple!” the Lord commanded. “Fill its courtyards with corpses. Go!” So they went and began killing throughout the city - (Ezekiel 9:5)
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Yahveh Who?
THE first that we know of the Hebrew Yahveh, after the fabled Flood of Noah and the fabulous Tower of Bab-el, is his appearance to the Chaldean Heathen Abram at Haran, telling him to move on West to the Land of Canaan, which Yahveh then and there promised to give to Abram and his descendants as an inheritance and possession forever (Gen. 12:13) It is in Exodus 3:13, that Moses asks the strange new God "What is thy name?" and in reply "Elohim said unto Moses: I Am that I Am"; and he said, "Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: I Am has sent me unto you." It is not until Moses returns from his first trip to the elders and the Pharaoh, that the God is made to make the wonderful "revelation" of his "ineffable name" Yahveh (Ex 6:2-3). This frankly admits Yahveh, with all the inspired revelations of him—to have been naught but an imaginative and local pagan divinity, and no true God at all. Moreover, he (Moses) admits that he was very unsuccessful in his teachings, for 40 years later he complains to them, "Yet in this thing ye did not believe Yahveh your God" (Deut 1:32). Murderous Jehovah The alleged atrocities which Yahveh willfully and maliciously perpetrated by the universal destruction of the Flood, and on the Egyptians with his inhuman Plagues, and the wholesale massacre of the firstborn of Egypt, and the drowning in the Red Sea of the Pharaoh and his army, also score for his alleged inhumanities and murders. He is pictured as no less atrocious and murderous in his treatment of his own Chosen People, condemned to a miserable wandering in the howling wilderness for forty years and to entire extinction in death, because simply the People were frightened at the majority report of the Spies sent to prospect in Canaan, and they wept all night, and wanted to go home to Egypt (Num 13:14). So Yahveh was "provoked," and his "anger kindled," and he said: "I will smite them with a pestilence, and disinherit them"; but Moses again held up the specter of "what the Egyptians would say - because Yahveh was not able to bring this People into the land which he swear unto them, therefore hath he slain them in the wilderness," so Yahveh sees the point and relents, a little; but "Yahveh's anger was kindled against Israel, and he made them wander in the wilderness forty years: As I live, your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness." Just after the departure from Sinai, the People for some reason murmured., "and when Yahveh heard it, his anger was kindled; and the fire of Yahveh burnt among them, and devoured in the uttermost part of the Camp" (Num 11:1). And then a little later, the People lusted for meat to eat, "the anger of Yahveh was kindled greatly, and Moses was displeased," and Yahveh sent the holy oily Manna, also a lot of quails; and when the Children started to eat them, "the anger of Yahveh was kindled against the People, and Yahveh smote the People with a very great Plague." Later, because the People got tired of eating Manna, Yahveh in his anger "sent fiery serpents, and they bit the People, and much People of Israel died." Because his Chosen took up with the Moabitish maidens, "the anger of Yahveh was kindled against Israel," and he murdered 24,000 of them. Against the man who should worship any other god, "the anger of Yahveh and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this Book shall lie against him"; and the People must do this and do that, or not do this or that, all through the Book of Curses, "that Yahveh may turn from the fierceness of his wrath." Because Achan kept out a little of the spoils at the battle of Ai, "the anger of Yahveh was kindled against the Children of Israel"; and Yahveh ordered Achan, and his sons, and his daughters, to be murdered by stoning them to death. The sons of Eli "lay with the women that assembled at the door of the Tabernacle," and Eli reproved them; "notwithstanding they harkened not to the voice of their father, because Yahveh would slay them" and Yahveh said, "because he restrained them not," and he murdered them, and brought ruin on the whole house of Eli. Because Uzzah put forth his hand and touched the malignant Ark to keep it from jolting off the ox-cart when it struck a rut, "the anger of Yahveh was kindled against Uzzah, and Yahveh smote him, and he died by the Ark of Yahveh." And "again the anger of Yahveh was kindled against Israel," for what reason I cannot clearly gather, "and he moved David to number Israel and Judah," and because David did so, Yahveh sent his holy Angel and murdered 70,000 of his Chosen, from Dan to Beersheba, in one daylight (2 Sam 24:15). Time and again Yahveh repeats the infernal commands of Deuteronomy vii, ordering the indiscriminate murder of men, women and children, the total extermination of the teeming populations of the Promised Land by the savage Soldiers of El: "thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; nor shalt thou show mercy unto them; thou shalt not spare; thine eye shall have no pity; lest the anger of Yahveh be kindled against you, and he destroy thee suddenly;" and his brutal soldiers execute his holy will to the letter, pitilessly, though totally ineffectively, for they never did succeed in exterminating the populations. These ebullitions of Jahvistic temper and terror, with their trains of frightful murder, might be multiplied indefinitely; but these suffice to prove our point of constant rage, terrorism, and murder against the Hebrew Yahveh. For murderous "Schrecklichkeit" the crimes of the War-Lord of the leagued Huns and Turks in the World War were trivial brutalities in comparison. All the miseries, and rebellions, and abominations of the Chosen People of Yahveh during these forty years in the wilderness, nor all the murders inflicted upon them by their merciful Yahveh, cannot be recounted for number and contradictions. Their Yahveh himself denounced his Chosen as a "stiff-necked and rebellious People;" and on the theory, maybe, that "whom Yahveh loveth he chasteneth," he made their whole life a miserable failure, and time and again they wept and wailed and wanted to die. Yahveh liberally answered this prayer; and several Special Providences to the People of Yahveh assisted in this work of death and destruction. The People murmured, saying, "Who shall give us flesh to eat?" and when Yahveh heard of it, "his anger was kindled, and the fire of Yahveh burnt among them throughout the Camp," and later, for a like offense, he smote his People with a very great Plague. How many were massacred by the fire and the plague Yahveh, who committed it, only knows. A man gathered some sticks on the tabooed Sabbath; Yahveh was speedily consulted as to his fate, and he commanded all the People to stone the guilty culprit to death. The next day, because "the People murmured" about this massacre, saying "Ye have killed the People of Yahveh," the good God said "consume them as in a moment," and he sent a Plague and murdered 14,700 of them (Num 16:49). Because Moses smote the Rock instead of simply speaking to it, he was prohibited from entering the Promised Land, despite Yahveh's oft-repeated promises. The Chosen People got tired of their steady diet of Manna, and said, "our soul loatheth this light-bread;" so "Yahveh sent fiery serpents among the People, and they bit the People, and much People of Israel died," (Num 21:6) - the statistics of this massacre not being preserved. Just before starting across into the Land of Promise, some of the chosen took to loving some of the daughters of Moab, "and the anger of Yahveh was kindled against Israel, and Yahveh said unto Moses, Take all the heads of the People, and hang them up before Yahveh against the sun, that the fierce anger of Yahveh may be turned away from Israel" (Num 25:4-7), and 24,000 of Yahveh's chosen children were murdered and their heads strung up, to appease the angry God. The most revolting villainy in history...in "the Camp at the plains of Moab, which are by Jordan near Jericho" - therefore several hundred miles from Midian, with all the great and terrible wilderness of their forty years' misery stretching between their Camp and the land of Midian. Of a sudden Yahveh says to Moses, "Avenge the Children of Israel of the Midianites," though only Yahveh knows what the Midianites had done to Israel or to Yahveh to merit the monstrous barbarities which the Holy Word of Yahveh says were now inflicted upon them. So Moses told off 12,000 of his warriors, 1000 for each Tribe, and "sent them to the war." They marched across the hundreds of miles of wilderness, "warred with Midian," slew all the male Midianites, slew the Five Kings of Midian (a rather numerous Royalty for a small Desert Tribe), and they slew poor old Balaam, him of the Talking Ass (though he lived hundreds of miles away at Pethor in Mesopotamia), they took all the women of Midian captives, with all their little ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods; they burnt all their cities, and all their goodly castles, with fire (it is a wonder how many "cities" and how many "goodly castles" a Tribe of Bedouin Arabs living in a corner of the desert would have), and they took all the spoil, and prey, both of men (but they had already "slew all the males," and of beasts; and they brought the captives, and the cattle, and the spoils back hundreds of miles across the wilderness into the Camp near Jericho, and delivered all to Moses. And, if anything could be more wonderful, all this was achieved without the loss of one single Soldier of Yahveh. These 12,000 wonderful Soldiers of Yahveh took, according to the inspired account, about 100,000 human captives, women and children, over 675,000 sheep, more than 72,000 beeves, and over 61,000 asses, a total of over 808,000 head of live animals, and brought them all across the wild terrible deserts "where there was no water," for some 300 miles to the sacred camp. Yet, with all this addition of live-stock to their already great flocks and herds, "even very much cattle," the poor beef-famished Children had nothing to eat but that "loathsome Manna" - "until they came unto the borders of the land of Canaan" Kill All Disbelievers "If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee, saying, Let us go serve other gods; Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thy hand shall be the first upon him to put him to death, and afterward the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones that he die" (Deut 13:6-9). "The man that will do presumptuously, and will not hearken unto the priest, even that man shall die" (Deut 17:18). "He that despised Moses' Law died without mercy: Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy who hath trodden under foot the Son of God" (Heb 10:28-29). "...that they might all be damned who believed not the truth" (2 Thess 2:12) "...he that doubteth is damned" (Rom 14:23). "Fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matt 10:28) A Jealous and Vengeful God As for vengeance - "Vengeance is Mine, I will repay," is the crown-jewel of Yahveh's Gorgonic Godhead. "Yahveh, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God" (Ex 34:14), "and Jealous for my holy name" (Ezek 39:25). Again, "Yahveh he is an holy God; he is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions, nor your sins" (Josh 24:19); "Yahveh is Jealous, and Yahveh revengeth" (Nahum 1:2). One must not dare to even dislike him: "Yahveh repayeth them that hate him to their face, to destroy them" (Deut 7:10). In his Holy Ten Commandments he stigmatizes himself to infamy with: "I Yahveh am a Jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation" (Ex 20:5). This is Yahveh's own Law of relentless vengeances and persecutions of innocent and guilty alike. Fortunately it is simply a monstrous terroristic "bluff," for, despite all its repetitions, in multiplied blood-curdling iteration, it was perfectly innocuous. The Jahvistic decree against "other Gods" is repeated scores of times, and thus in Leviticus 27:1, "Ye shall make you no idols, nor mazzebahs (graven images)," etc; and are a perfect hell of sulphuric penalties denounced against the poor idolater, as all the Hebrews were, who naturally would prefer some milder deity to the terrible Jealous Yahveh: "I also will do this unto you: I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart: and I will set my face against you, and ye shall be slain before your enemies; and I will bring seven times more plagues upon you; and I will send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children; I will walk contrary unto you also in fury, and ye shah I eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters also shall ye eat" (Lev 26:16-21); so spake the long- suffering and Merciful God. While most of these things did, quite deservedly, one might think, befall the Chosen People, it certainly "just happened," as it did to all the other nations about them, from their incessant bloody warfares, as the Sacred History itself makes perfectly evident. Raper and Enslaver So the Chosen of Yahveh, at Yahveh's holy command, to the eternal glory of God, straightway put into pious execution this holy command of their God, and in holy zeal butchered some 68,000 women and young children; then these "peculiar treasures unto Yahveh" took the remaining 32,000 tender young virgins to glut their hallowed lusts upon in God-ordained rape! The Ten Commandments There are generally recognized two, but as we will see, there are actually three, versions of the well-known "Ten Commandments," and the giving of the "Law" is quite variously reported, by the Elohist and Jahvist scribes. But these first Tables, broken by Moses, assuredly were not the "Ten Commandments" of Exodus xx and of the Sunday Schools. The Ten Commandments are quite short; while these first Tables of Stone broken by Moses, and which Yahveh declared contained "two Tables of Testimony" whatever that was, were evidently quite lengthy, as described. For when Moses rushed from the mount down into the camp to destroy the Golden Calf, "The two Tables of Testimony were in his hand: the Tables were written on both their sides; on the one side and on the other were they written" (Ex 32:15). As the Hebrew writing is very abbreviated, consisting entirely of consonants in words mostly of only three letters each, two Stone Tables written on both sides would not have been required to contain the brief "Ten Commandments," but maybe rather the extensive "Testimony." if there were ever any "Commandments" written on Tables of Stone, these 15 verses of Exodus 34:12-26), contain them. The so-called "Ten Commandments" in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 are therefore, not the genuine Ten Commandments written on the first and second Tables of Stone, nor was either set "written by the finger of God"; but they were both, first and last edition, dictated to and written down by Moses. They were strikingly different from the popularly so-called "Ten Commandments" of much later date. ...nearly all the "Laws of Moses," like many other ancient laws, run in series of tens - the number being evidently derived from counting the fingers of the two hands - as may be verified by checking them up in the Books of Exodus and Leviticus. The "Ten Commandments" most nearly resemble the "Ten highest Laws of Buddha;" the "Ten Virtues of Brahma" are also enumerated by Manu. From the innumerable "internal evidences" in the Hebrew Bible itself which we have pointed out here and there, it is shown to demonstration that Yahveh did not "give the Law" to Moses on Sinai, or anywhere else, and that Moses did not write the "Book of the Law;" that Moses never even heard of the "Law" attributed to him. In a word, that the Books containing the "Law" were not written until many centuries later, and were never in existence at all, until the "Law" was framed up, by the Priests, many hundreds of years after the time Moses is supposed to have lived, if ever such person lived at all, outside of legendary tradition. |
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The revelation which is made in the inspired pages of the Hebrew Scriptures, of the personality and characteristics of the Hebrew God, cannot but be amazing and even revolting to those whose con- cept of the God of the Bible is of a God of Mercy and Truth - Joseph Wheless
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Glaring Contradictions
Moses himself for the first thing he did after descending from Sinai and writing the "Law" in his Book and swearing the people to it, erected the twelve phallic "pillars" or mazzebahs for the twelve tribes of Israel, and sent young men to offer sacrifices on earth-made altars (Ex. 24:4-5); though the very "Law" he is said to have just that day revealed, enacts: "Thou shalt not plant an asherah nor set thee up a mazzebah, which Yahveh thy God hateth;" and which time and again decrees that no sacrifice shall be offered except by the holy monopoly of Priests, and upon the wonderful altar in the Tabernacle of the congregation. His successor Joshua erected phallic pillars of stone, and built an altar of unhewn stone, on which he is said to have written the very "Laws of Moses" forbidding such practices, and although Joshua was not a Priest, he "offered thereon burnt offerings unto Yahveh, and sacrificed peace offerings" (8:30-31), in violation of the "Law." Temple of Solomon And Solomon built the famous Temple of Yahveh, erected by the heathen Hiram King of Tyre, which was adorned with the two notable phallic pillars, Jachin and Boaz, hung about with the phallic pomegranates, and built around with houses of Sodomites and Temple-whores, and abundantly provided with "pillars and groves" right in "the House of Yahveh;" and there they remained and were worshiped by all Israel till temporarily removed by Josiah, in accordance with the new-found "Book of the Law," right at the end of Hebrew national existence. Old Gods of Israel Joshua conjured the people to "put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the river (Euphrates), and in Egypt, and serve ye Yahveh" (24:14); which proves the unbroken idol-worship from Abraham to the last days of Joshua, and he repeated, "put away the strange gods which are among you" (5: 23); and the people promised they would, but they never did. The other Prophets, as Amos, Hosea, Micah, while they deplored the Canaanite Baal practices performed at the altars of Yahveh, never a single time declared them illegal, as contrary to the "Law of Moses," or sought to abolish them. Phallic Worship The universality of the Phallus Worship, and the peculiar significance and sanctity of its emblems, especially the Cross, the Tri- angle, the Spire, and the Oval, are indicated in the universality of the use of these sacred emblems in nearly all lands and among nearly all peoples, both ancient and modern. The very Christian emblem, the "cross of Christ," is simply the ancient conventional emblem of the "phallus" and "testes." We have early, and many, Biblical instances and illustrations of this ancient, Hebraic, Semitic, universal Phallic worship. The Assyrians, no less than the Egyptians, the Hindus, the Canaanites, the Israelites, the Christians, and many other religious peoples, had and have their Trinity, purely phallic in origin and significance. The virile male phallus was noted to be not alone efficient in the great and divine work of procreation: its creative labors were shared by two coefficient mates, the two testes, or tests of efficient manhood. Hence these were likewise honored, personified, and deified, with distinctive names: the right-side one, supposed to be prepotent in the generation of a man-child, was named Anu, or On, that is, "strength, power;" while the left-side, or female- producing test was called Hoa or Hea. When Jacob's youngest son was born, his mother Rachel with her dying breath "called his name Ben-oni," "but his father called him Ben jamin" "son of my right hand" The Assyrian Asshur was not the only one of the name to whom the Hebrew Scriptures introduce us. One of the sons of Jacob and of his other wife Leah, was given the selfsame name of his old Semitic ancestor: "and she called his name Asher, for, she said, "Happy am I" (Gen. 30:13); and this Asher gave his phallic name to one of the twelve Tribes of Israel. Abraham and the patriarchal family and tribes which he is said to have established, were in common with all their Semitic kindred, ordinary Semitic idolaters; he and his descendants worshiped phallic idols; and they retained and worshiped these same common Semitic idols through all their history down to the times of the last of the Prophets, as the Hebrew Bible a thousand times makes evident. Principal among the idols or images of their Yahveh were, throughout Hebrew History, the phallic objects of worship mentioned a thousand times in the sacred pages under the euphemistic but very misleading terms "pillar" and "grove." In the English translations the term "pillar" is used for the representation, called in Hebrew "mazzebah," of the male organ; and "grove" for the "asherah" or female organ of reproduction of the species. Smaller idols of the same nature, more for house- hold worship, were images of Yahveh, the peculiarly sacred alias of the Hebraic "El," with an enormous "phallus," or male organ, erect in situ. The names given to these household images were "ephods" and "teraphim," words constantly occurring together throughout the Hebrew Bible to as late as Hosea iii, 4. These phallic idols, as we shall see, were used for worship, and for the purposes of divination or oracular consultation of the God Yahveh, in seeking his advice and receiving his awful decrees, as appears from many instances. The first mention of the mazzebah or "pillar," as it is deceptively rendered in the English translation, is the one piously set up by Jacob at the place where he dreamed of the Ladder, in Genesis 28, where he "took the stone which he had used for a pillow and set it up for a mazzebah ("pillar"), and poured oil on the top of it. And he called the name of that place Beth-El the House of God (18-19); and he said, This stone which I have set up for a mazzebah shall be God's house" (5:22). Now, Beth-El was a very sacred "high place" and holy shrine throughout Hebrew history. It was a center of phallic idol worship; and as such was railed against by the later Prophets, who were trying to reform the religion of Israel. They "cried against the altar in Beth-El" (1 Kings 12:4-32); and Amos quotes Yahveh as commanding, "Seek not Beth-el, Beth-el shall come to nought" (v, 5) ; and Josiah, as one of his "reforms" in abolishing the phallic heathen practices of the Chosen, destroyed this holy phallic altar of Beth-El (2 Kings, 23:15), and burned the bones of its prophets and priests upon the polluted altar. This proves that the very sacred Beth-el was, from its beginning to its end, a place of heathen phallic Yahveh-worship, and somewhat discounts the eulogies heard upon it from modern Christian pulpits. Jeremiah declared: "the house of Israel was ashamed of Bethel their confidence." So all through the Hebrew Scriptures runs the relation of this popular phallic practice, as perfectly proper and "Orthodox." A thousand years later, the raptured vision of the great Prophet Isaiah foresaw the glory of Yahveh in the heathen lands, and this is his ideal of the supreme emblem of that glory: "In that day there shall be an altar to Yahveh in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a Mazzebah at the border thereof to Yahveh" (19: 19).
Jacob calls Yahveh "Stone of Israel;" Moses "the Rock of our Salvation;" "the Rock that begat me;" "he is a Rock;" and so says Samuel ; and David : "Yahveh is my Rock; Elohim is my Rock; my high tower, in whom I trust;" Jesus says "on this Rock will I build my church," etc. All these inspired allusions are purely phallic in terms and in signification; and so of our "Rock of Ages, cleft for me." There could be no clearer evidence that the phallus, and the stone representation of it, was regarded religiously as the emblem of Deity. The "grove" or graven representation of the female "door of life," also makes a very early Scriptural appearance, and runs hand in hand, or in phallic parlance. In Genesis XXI, 33 it is recorded: "And Abraham planted a grove (asherah) in Beersheba, and called there on the name of Yahveh, the everlasting (El) God." It is this selfsame phallic device, the Asherah, which, not in wall- carvings but in practical altar-form, filled the Holy Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem, for the worship of Ashtoreth, Baal and Yahveh, and there remained in constant and fervid "orthodox" Hebrew worship until Josiah "cleansed the Temple," and "brought forth out of the Temple of Yahveh all the vessels which were made for Baal, and for the Asherah (groves), and for all the host of heaven"
Asherah? The Assyrian supreme masculine Creator, Bel, was manifested in this male Triad of Asshur-Anu-Hoa, with the female creative consort, Ashtoreth, the whole symbolized and worshiped under the symbolic "Asherah." More Phallic Worship Jeroboam, the son of Solomon, King over Israel, made two golden calves and set them up, one in Bethel and the other in Dan, saying, as did Aaron, "Behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt" (1 Kings 12:28). Moses himself, in addition to the "twelve mazzeboth" which he set up just after receiving a "Law" against them, also made the famous brazen image of the Fiery Serpent, which healed the plague-stricken Children, and was preserved and worshiped as a god by the Chosen until it was finally destroyed by King Hezekiah; "for unto those days the Children of Israel did burn incense unto it" (2 Kings 18:4). The holy King David worshiped Baal religiously, and in public and near-naked, as the custom was in the Baal-worship, danced the Baal-dance "with all his might" before the Holy Ark of the Covenant of Yahveh; and his wife "Michal, looking out the window saw King David leaping and dancing amain before Yahveh; and she despised him in her heart" as is graphically related (in 2 Samuel 6:14-17). Absolam "reared up for himself a mazzebah (or phallic "pillar"), for he said, I have no son to keep my name in remembrance; and he called the mazzebah after his own name" (2 Sam. 18:18). ...the Bamah or "high- place" being the popular shrine of Baal-worship universal throughout Israel. King Solomon also "loved many strange women," having 700 wives and 300 concubines, of all the heathen peoples; and im- partially he built a phallic Temple for Yahveh (constructed by the Pagan Hiram of Tyre), and "an high-place for Chemosh the abomi- nation of Moab, and for Molech the abomination of Ammon," and went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians; "and so did he for all his strange wives, which burnt incense and sacrificed unto their gods" (1 Kings 11:18). These "heathenish" practices were not confined to sundry "bad kings" who backslided from Yahveh: they were universal and constant throughout the rank and file of the Chosen; and these practices were part and parcel of the "orthodox" worship of Yahveh: "For they also built them high-places, and mazzebbth and Asherim, on every high hill, and under every green tree; and there were also sodomites in the land: they did according to all the abominations of the nations which Yahveh drove out before the Children of Israel" (1 Kings 14:23-24) only Yahveh never did drive them out, but they stayed there until the Chosen were themselves driven out into captivity. The whole Books of Kings and Chronicles, and the "Prophets," are filled with these records of continuous idolatry under the successive Kings of Israel and Judah, to the very end of the national record. Even under the few and scattering so-called "good Kings" (i.e., Yahveh devotees), who made some reforms, it is always related, as of Josiah: "But the high-places were not taken away; the People still sacrificed and burnt incense in the high-places" (2 Kings 12:3).
"There shall be no harlot (kedeshah) of the daughters of Israel, neither shall there be a sodomite (kadesh) of the sons of Israel. Thou shalt not bring "he hire of a whore, or the wages of a sodomite, into the house of Yahveh thy God for any vow" (Deut. 23:17-18). When Solomon erected the magnificent Temple of Yahveh (built by the pagan Hiram of Tyre), from plans drawn by Yahveh himself (1 Chron. 28: 19), he made liberal arrangements for the comfort of these consecrated Temple-attendants, and for the convenience of the phallic worshipers. Although these few "good Kings" held personally maybe, to only Yahveh, and some Prophets thundered against other Idols and other idolatry, in favor of the "Jealous God" Yahveh, the universal idol-worship of the Chosen People was never once interrupted. This clearly proves that the early "Prophets" who "raved" against the "gods of the nations," which were also the gods of the Chosen People, were but as "a A voice crying in the wilderness" against the popular religion, and were wholly without effect upon the prevalent popular practices, from Moses to the conquest by the Assyrians. Just before the Captivity we find (2 Kings 23) the "good King" Josiah, he who "found" the "Book of the Law," making a crusade against the idols. Solomon's great Temple to Yahveh was the consecrated shrine of the Hebrew idolatry and Sex-Worship. Josiah "brought forth out of the Temple all the vessels which were made for Baal, and for the Asherah, and for all the host of heaven, and he brought forth the Asherah from the house of Yahveh; and he brake down the houses of the sodomites, that were by the house of Yahveh, where the women wove hangings for the Asherah." The first Bible mention of this sportive cult is some 500 years before the time of Moses, when the fair young widow Tamar, despairing of getting the man so often promised her, dressed herself in the garb of a "Kedeshah" or Temple-harlot, with a veil over her face, and went and "sat in an open place" where she knew that her father-in-law Judah would pass by; and Judah came by, and fell into her trap, |
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As shown in my Trees of Life books, the date palm (known as Tamar) symbolized the female cults and their sexual rites on the "high places." The succulent fruits represent the sexual pleasures offered by the temple prostitutes. (Here for more...)
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While yet in the midst of their wanderings in the wilderness, "the People began to commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab, and bowed down to their gods; and Israel joined himself to Baal-Peor" (Num. xxv) ; that is, to "Baal the hymen-breaker," so-named because the Moabitish maidens were wont to break their hymens on the Idol- phallus before becoming "kedeshoth" or religious prostitutes, for the holy People of Yahveh.
...the Temple-whores and sodomites, whose sacred earnings went into the "treasury of Yahveh." When the Holy Temple needed repairs, the "good King" Jehoash said to the Priests, "All the money of the kadashim (translated 'dedicated things') that is brought into the House of Yahveh" (2 Kings 12:4). Meaning of the "Testament" Of another phallic practice of the Hebrew religion, of universal sanctity among them and their Semitic neighbors, we have frequent testimony, from first to last, in their sacred Scriptures. This was the solemn phallic form of oath prevalent among them. As the "phallus" was the object of most sacred reverence in Israel, as every elsewhere, the most solemn oaths and vows were taken upon it; the form of ceremony being for the person to be obligated to take in his hand the sacred member of the person to whom he swore (euphemistically translated "under the thigh"), and register thus his oath. Thus in Genesis 24, Father Abraham called his major domo, and said to him: "Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh: and I will make thee swear by Yahveh.
The sanctity attached by the Hebrew religion to the male organs of generation, is clearly recognized by various passages of the Law. These phallic organs must not be profanely touched or injured, and the injury or loss of any of them wrought an excommunication from the worship of Yahveh. Witches, wizards, familiar spirits, and demons, were as plentiful and popular as angels and devils in modern Christianity, and as real. Yahveh, on Sinai, enacted (Ex. 22:18), "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." This one sentence, among all the inspired unrealities of the Bible, is in itself sufficient to utterly discredit the whole Book as "the Word of God." Book of the Law The first and most cogent proofs are to be found in the "Book t>f the Law" itself; this Book, said to have been laid down by Yahveh on Mt. Sinai, and written by Moses in the wilderness, and deposited in the Ark of Yahveh for a perpetual memorial and Law to the Chosen People in all their generations. In the first place, the "Book of the Law" itself expressly declares there was no such body of Law in existence during the forty years wandering in the wilderness, though the "Law" is supposed to have been given at Sinai in the very first year of the Exodus from Egypt. And this declaration of the non-existence of the "Law" is curiously put into the mouth of Moses himself, in the fortieth year, just before the Chosen were to pass over Jordan into the Promised Land. Moses says: "And ye shall observe to do all the statutes and judgments which I set before you this day (Deut 11: 32). These are the statutes and judgments which ye shall observe to do in the land, which Yahveh thy God giveth thee to possess it (Deut 12: 1). ...Ye shall not do after all the things that we do here this day, every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes" (verse 8). A more positive evidence that the "Law" had not been enacted forty years previously on Sinai could not be; for that "Law" left nothing to be done according to "right in his own eye," but minutely prescribed and regulated every act of life of the Chosen. That the "Law of Moses" was not given on Sinai and preserved in a Book kept by the High Priest in the Ark of the Covenant, and that it did not exist until "discovered" by the priests of Josiah, and was in fact unknown and unobserved by all the holy "Men of God," priests, prophets and kings, from Moses to Josiah, may be further instanced. Moses the Murderer ...his first recorded act being the murder of an Egyptian, for which crime he fled from justice into the Midian desert (Ex 2:12), where he married the daughter of the Heathen Priest of Midian, by whom he had one or two sons, as later we shall notice with curious interest. Moses & the Law We have abundantly seen by the many instances cited, that the so-called "Five Books of Moses" relate many supposed historical facts which occurred, if they ever at all occurred, hundreds of years after the traditional time of Moses, who is said to have died 1451 years BC. And we have seen many other such "anachronisms" in the other Books of the Hebrew Scriptures, as Joshua, Judges, Samuel: thus proving that they were not written until after those alleged facts had supposably occurred, long after their times.
Moses a Polygamist But it is either an error about Moses marrying the Midianite, or he became a polygamist; for there at Sinai we are told that Moses "had married an Ethiopian woman" (Num 12:1), a Negress, to the great scandal of his family, and in flagrant violation of his own prohibitory Law against marrying heathen and strangers. Moses a good Mountaineer Just how these things did pass at that mysterious place, all these different appearances of Yahveh, and the numerous errand-boy trips of 80-year-old Moses up and down the steep mountain during a year's time, is a veritable Chinese Puzzle, which we need not try to work out. In any event, Moses went down and "sanctified the People" in the manner and form indicated, and built the big fence. On the third day, Yahveh, amid thunders and lightnings, descended in fire upon the mountain, which was altogether on a smoke; and Moses went up for the third visit. Jehovah the All-Knowing Curiously enough, Moses had hardly gotten to the top of the mountain, than Yahveh, without so much as "Good Morning, Moses," told him, "Go down, charge the People" about washing up and sanctifying and making the fence around the mountain. Moses expostulated that all this had already been done; but Yahveh cut him short, saying, "Away, get thee down;" so, meekly enough, "Moses went down unto the People, and spake unto them;" though apparently he did not tell them of Yahveh's peculiar command to do what had already been done three days previously. Jehovah Forgets Before seeking to unravel what next is related, we may note another big mistake that Yahveh made, as to which one might think a God should have known better. In sending Moses back this last time to do what had already been done, Yahveh expressly commanded: "And let the priests also, which come near to Yahveh, sanctify themselves;" and he told Moses that Brother Aaron might come up with him next trip; but, said Yahveh, "let not the priests and the people" try to come up. This is a remarkable slip on the part of Yahveh: for there were no priests at that time; the priests were not instituted until some time later in the Siniatic proceedings, when Brother Aaron and his four sons were first designated to be the first priests; and it was made death for any one else to presume to act as priest Miracles & Wonders In Leviticus 8:3-5, as in many similar instances, Yahveh said unto Moses: "Gather thou all the Congregation together unto the door of the Tabernacle of the Congregation. And Moses did as Yahveh commanded him; and the assembly was gathered unto the door of the Tabernacle of the Congregation. And Moses said unto the Congregation," etc. This Congregation, or Assembly, as appears scores of places, was the whole People, the entire "Hosts of Yahveh," 2,414,200 plus strong... ...Needless to calculate, the millions of the Chosen, packed their tightest, would have extended for miles all around and about the Tabernacle, even if the hundreds of thousands of surrounding tents were not there to prevent such a massing. So it cannot be perceived, as the inspired Word relates, how that "the Assembly was gathered unto the door of the Tabernacle." ...the truth is, as it surely was, that the total horde of fugitive slaves, if it ever existed at all, was no more than the three to five thousand to which Nature would have increased the original 70 in four generations, as we have already figured it out. if Yahveh kept his awful Word of wrath and killed off the entire original millions who set out with Moses from Egypt, with the exception of the "little ones, your children, which in that day had no knowledge between good and evil," as divine inspiration assures us in Deut 1:39, and if the balance of the whole millions which reached the Promised Land was from new births during the forty years in the wilderness, then, as we have seen, these births must have averaged some 1700 for every day of the forty years.
Working Overtime Of course these lambs and turtle-doves must be slain, cleaned, washed, burnt, the blood smeared on the bloody holy altar, and the offal and feathers "carried without the Camp," twelve miles there and back. If Aaron and his two sons team-worked like Trojans every second of their time, day and night, and only took five minutes for each of these elaborate bloody ceremonies, three going on unceremoniously at the same time, they could perform only 36 sacrifices in an hour, or 864 in all the 24 hours of the day, without even stopping to eat or sleep; while for 1700 births 3400 sacrifices would be required, 1700 burnt-offerings and 1700 sin- offerings per diem. And where these 1700 spring lambs and 1700 pigeons or turtle-doves per day, and the water to wash them, in the howling waste desert came from, is also a divine mystery, and the children always crying and rebelling for "meat to eat," and wailing for water to drink. The Children did not carry bird-cages containing turtle-doves in their hasty flight from Egypt, and no miracle of grace, blowing pigeons into Camp, like the quails, is recorded in Sacred Scripture. We needn't go into the details: indeed, we cannot, for the poor priests need have worked so fast and furious, killing, skinning, cleaning, cutting up, sprinkling blood, etc., that the motions of their hands and arms, like the spokes of a mighty fly-wheel, could not be followed with the naked eye; only the eye of faith can follow such performance. Levites Kill their Families The Levites, too, received their full share of the bounties of Yahveh. They were the Chosen of the Chosen, as a reward for their holy zeal there at Sinai, when Moses was angered about the Golden Calf: he "stood in the gate of the Camp, and said, "Who is on the Lord's side? Let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him;" and at his command, they proceeded to "consecrate themselves to Yahveh" by slaying "every" man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor," and massacring 3000 of Yahveh's Chosen Children. Now, if there were 8580 "operative" Levites, every man of them evidently did not "consecrate himself" in murdering only 3000 of the Children; while, if there were only 44, the 3000 assassinated would seem to have deserved their fate for submitting to it. It may be noted, that Aaron, who made the golden calf, was not among the massacred, nor was he ever punished; and the Levites, who did the bloody work, were of his own family. ...for this pious service, these Levites were not numbered among the common hosts of the Chosen, but separately; they were then appointed "over the Tabernacle of Testimony, and over all the vessels thereof, and over all things that belong to it: and they shall bear the Tabernacle, and all the vessels thereof ; and they shall minister unto it: and the stranger that cometh nigh shall be put to death." At the first Census, as we have seen, these Levites, "from 30 years old and upward even unto 50 years, every one that came to do the service of the ministry in the Tabernacle of the Congregation," numbered 8580; and all this Army Brigade to do the kitchen-police work and 'tend the pots and kettles of this little 18-by-54-foot Tent in the Wilderness, and to lug it and its holy Ark from place to place, while only three priests were provided to do all the bloody heavy work of the service of Yahveh. And the Levites were made perpetual pensioners on the bounty of all Israel, and were assigned 48 cities and their suburbs for their residence. All the miseries, and rebellions, and abominations of the Chosen People of Yahveh during these forty years in the wilderness, nor all the murderings inflicted upon them by their merciful Yahveh, cannot be recounted for number and contradictions. Their Yahveh himself denounced his Chosen as a "stiff-necked and rebellious People;" and on the theory, maybe, that "whom Yahveh loveth he chasteneth," he made their whole life a miserable failure, and time and again they wept and wailed and wanted to die. Unclean ...according to the Holy Law of God, child-bearing was the worse defilement which could come upon the holy Children of Yahveh: the mother of a child was "unclean," for forty or eighty days according as her child was a boy or a girl baby; for 40 or 80 days, on the same basis, she must undergo a humiliating "purification;" she must "touch no hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purifying be fulfilled." Then, at the end of that God-imposed penance, "she shall bring a lamb of the first year for a burnt-offering, and a young pigeon or a turtle-dove for a sin-offering, unto the door of the Tabernacle of the Congregation, unto the priest, who shall offer it before Yahveh, and make an atonement for her, and she shall be cleaned from her issue of blood." A sin-atonement and purification for obedience to Yahveh's very first command: "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth!" Sick Book of the Priests The Book of Leviticus is almost wholly a Priestly Code of most elaborate and intricate and burdensome regulations of priestcraft and bloody sacrifices. One grows dizzy and nauseated in simply scanning the insanguinated catalogue of burnt-offerings, meat-offerings, peace-offerings, sin-offerings, trespass-offerings, superstitious and blood-reeking butchery which fills these pages ad nauseum. Nearly every act of life and of death involved some pious propitiatory sacrifice, thousands of them every day, on the part of nearly every one of these more than two millions of poor victims of their Yahveh. It would seem that whole regiments of priests would be required for these holy services. How many priests then does divine revelation afford us for these millions? Three! "Thou shalt appoint Aaron and his sons, and they shall wait on their priest's office: and the stranger that cometh nigh shall be put to death;" a murderous priestly monopoly in the Moses family, limited to Brother Aaron and his sons in perpetuity, under penalty of death. Book of Numbers Preserves the account of the mass slaughter of the Midianites. No reason is given as to why Jehovah orders their annihilation. The most signal single instance of Yahveh's utter depravity as a monster of murder and debauchery is on the occasion of the battle with the Midianites, where Master Procurer Yahveh delivered 32,000 tender captive maidens to the holy lusts of his holy People (Num 31). Ten Commandment Absurdity ...during this fourth trip...Yahveh very unexpectedly turns to Moses and summons him for a fifth trip, saying: ''Come up to me in the Mount, and be there," and, said Yahveh, here for the first time referring to this matter, "I will give thee Tables of Stone, and a Law, and com- mandments which have written; that thou mayest teach them;" though all these commandments are already on record as having been dictated by Yahveh and written in a book by Moses and taught to the people several chapters previously, following his third mountain climb. So Moses went up again, for the fifth trip, into the Mount of the Gods, and Yahveh kept himself hidden from Moses for six days in a cloud while Moses had to pass the time as best he could up there in the dark ; and on the seventh day Yahveh called Moses into the cloud, "and Moses was in the Mount forty days and forty nights," without anything to eat or drink. At the end of these forty days of the fifth trip, Yahveh, we are told, "gave unto Moses two Tables of Testimony, Tables of Stone, written with the finger of Elohim;" and presumably containing all the "Law and commandments which I have written," about which Yahveh spake when he invited Moses up for this fifth trip, and which Moses had already written in his Book of the Covenant, following his third mountain trip. Golden Calf Incident Yahveh, looking down from the Mount of the Gods, saw this and got very angry, and said to Moses: "Now let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them and that I may consume them." But Moses cajoled the Lord Yahveh, saying that the Egyptians would mock him (Yahveh) about it; and reminded Yahveh of his promise, and asked him to "repent of this evil against thy people." So Yahveh, who "is not a man that he should repent," thereupon "repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people."
New Commandments Wheless shows that after Moses broke the two tablets in front of the "idolators," he was forced to return up the mountain for a sixth time. Before ascending he himself made two new slabs which he carted up the mountainside for Jehovah to write upon. He ended up writing the inscriptions himself. Jehovah now chose to utter by mouth the Commandments. Why he didn't just do this originally isn't explained. After another sojourn of forty days and nights, without food or drink, Moses carts the heavy stone tablets back down the mountainside - Mtsar
It suffices to show that the "Ten Commandments," as we are taught them in the Sunday Schools, are not the "Ten Words" of the two fabled Tables of Stone ; and to demonstrate that the whole muddle of the "giving of the Law" to and by Moses is a thing apochryphal and impossible, and never happened that way at all - JW |
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...thine eye shall not pity, neither shalt thou spare; but thou shalt surely kill; thine hand shall be the first upon him to put him to death, and afterward the hand of all the people - (Deut. 13:610)
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Promise of Conquest & Genocide
...mighty Yahveli had repeatedly promised them that he would "put his fear" upon the seven "greater and mightier" nations, and that not a man of them would be able to stand against them; that he would completely drive them out of their country, even using hornets to rout out those that hid in the mountain recesses; and Yahveh commanded and assured that every single inhabitant, male and female, young and old, should be all exterminated, so that not one of them should be left alive to vex and lead astray his holy People. Yahveh repeatedly promised to accomplish this annihilation of the nations, and to help his Chosen People to execute this program of universal extermination. Kings & Chronicles The whole Books of Kings and Chronicles, and the "Prophets" are filled with these records of continuous idolatry under the successive Kings of Israel and Judah, to the very end of the national record. Even under the few and scattering so-called "good Kings" (i.e., Yahveh devotees), who made some reforms, it is always related, as of Josiah: "But the high-places were not taken away; the People still sacrificed and burnt incense in the high-places" (2 Kings 12:3). Asa "took away the sodomites out of the land, and removed all the idols that his fathers had made;" he also removed his mother Maachah from being queen because she had made "an abominable Asherah" "but the high-places were not taken away," where the People continued their idolatrous worship of Yahveh-Baal.
...the universal idol-worship of the Chosen People was never once inter- rupted. Elijah, Prophet of El-Yahveh, murdered the 450 prophets of Baal and 400 "prophets of the groves"...Still the idol-worship throve, and the Chosen People "did not believe in Yahveh their God. (See 1 Kings 28.)
Pagan Worship Thrives And the Children of Israel built them high-places in all their cities, from the tower of the watchman to the fenced city. And they set them up Mazzebotk and Asherim in every high hill, and under every green tree. And there they burnt incense in all the high-places (Bamoth); and wrought wicked things to provoke Yahveh to anger. For they served idols, whereof Yahveh had said unto them, Ye shall not do this thing. Notwithstanding they did not believe in Yahveh their God. And made them molten images, even two calves, and made Asheroth, and worshiped all the host of heaven, and served Baal. And they caused their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire (to Moloch), and used divinations and enchantment. Josiah Just before the Captivity we find (2 Kings 23) the "good King" Josiah, he who "found" the "Book of the Law," making a crusade against the idols. Solomon's great Temple to Yahveh was the consecrated shrine of the Hebrew idolatry and Sex-Worship. Josiah "brought forth out of the Temple all the vessels which were made for Baal, and for the Asherah, and for all the host of heaven, and he brought forth the Asherah from the house of Yahveh; and he brake down the houses of the sodomites, that were by the house of Yahveh, where the women wove hangings for the Asherah." "And he put down the idolatrous priests whom the Kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high-places in the cities of Judah, and in the places round about Jerusalem; them also that burnt incense to Baal, to the Sun, and to the Moon, and to the Planets, and to all the (starry) Host of Heaven."
This is a graphic description of the polytheistic and phallic idolatry of the Hebrews, identical in every respect with that of all; the other Semitic peoples around them and among whom they lived. These records prove to demonstration that the Hebrew People never, at any time, before the "Return from Captivity," knew or worshiped any such God as we are taught in modern Sunday Schools as the "One True God" of Israel; but the same El or Baal, and the same Elohim, or gods, exactly, as all their neighbor heathen nations. It is preposterous to pretend that the Hebrews as a nation were not "heathen" or "pagan," like all their kindred and neighbors, but were worshipers of "only one true and living God" such as we are erroneously taught was their great, peculiar worship. Temple Prostitutes When Solomon erected the magnificent Temple of Yahveh (built by the Pagan Hiram of Tyre), from plans drawn by Yahveh himself (1 Chron. 28:19), he made liberal arrangements for the comfort of these consecrated Temple-attendants, and for the convenience of the phallic worshipers. In 1 Kings 6 it is recorded: "And against the wall of the Temple Solomon built side-chambers round about, both of the temple and of the oracle; (16) even the most holy place." These side-chambers (tselaoth), the small size of which is stated, were the habitations of the "kedeshoth" and the "kadeshuth," the Temple-whores and sodomites, whose sacred earnings went into the "treasury of Yahveh." These chambers, "where the women wove hangings for the Asherah," which were even in the Temple itself, were broken down by Josiah: "And he brake down the houses of the sodomites, that were in the house of Yahveh, where the women wove hangings for the Asherah" (2 Kings 23:7).
Notwithstanding, so profitable, as well as pleasurable, a form of worship continued unabated in Israel, as in the rest of the heathen world. Of another phallic practice of the Hebrew religion, of universal sanctity among them and their Semitic neighbors, we have frequent testimony, from first to last, in their sacred Scriptures. This was the solemn phallic form of oath prevalent among them. As the "phallus" was the object of most sacred reverence in Israel, as every elsewhere, the most solemn oaths and vows were taken upon it; the form of ceremony being for the person to be obligated to take in his hand the sacred member of the person to whom he swore (euphemistically translated "under the thigh"), and register thus his oath. Dreaming Prophets Most of the principal inspired events in the Hebrew Scriptures were dreamed, all its miraculous happenings were of such stuff as dreams are made. Abraham dreamed the Promise and the Covenant, as did Jacob at the Ladder; Joseph was a "Baal of dreams." Yahveh himself prescribes dreams as his predilect medium of revelation of his awful Will. Jeremiah derides the whole horde of self-styled Prophets gadding about the land crying "I have dreamed, I have dreamed; and they prophesy (Jer 23:25). That Jesus Christ was "conceived by the Holy Ghost" is an admitted dream (Matt 1:20). The Book of Revelation is all a dream. Abraham the Pagan Abraham, when he first comes to our knowledge, was as we have seen, a nomadic Chaldean Semite, of "Ur of the Chaldees," and speaking, of course, only the Chaldean language. Naturally, like the rest of his people, he shared their religion, and was thus a "heathen" or "pagan." He came with his father and family into the land of the Canaanites, descended from Canaan, one of the sons of Ham, another son of Noah, to follow the Scriptural genealogies...according to Genesis, all these peoples were of like origin and close kindred, living together in the same section of the country between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. These peoples, the Babylonians, the Assyrians (originally a Babylonian colony), the Syrians, the Canaanites, the Hebrews and Arabians when they came along, and the peoples generally of Palestine and Western Asia, were all akin; they spoke practically the same language, and had practically the same religion and forms of religious worship the same God or Gods. The Hebrews (so named from Heber, forefather of Abraham), were also called Israelites; because Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, had his name changed to Israel.
...the Hebrews had the same gods as their kindred and neighboring nations, and never did, in Bible times, abandon their "false gods" for the worship of the "one true and living God of all the earth," as Yahveh was ultimately "evolved" by some of the later Prophets of Israel, after the Captivity. The whole world, in other words, in those parts, had the same gods and one common form of religion and worship; and the Israelites were identical in this respect with all the other kindred peoples, and so persisted until the return from Captivity, as the record proves. Nearly a millennium after the death of Moses, we are expressly told that the Chosen People persisted up to date in the worship of the foreign gods: "they did not forsake the Gods of Egypt" (Ezek 20:8). Yahveh is himself quoted as saying, "Thou shalt not revile the gods." El and Bel The word usually applied by the Hebrews to designate God, any god, true or false, Hebrew or Heathen, was the common noun "El," as the word was pronounced among them. With the Babylonians, the name of God in general was called Bel; with the Canaanites the form of the name was Baal: they are identical, the same common name for the same idea of God or Lord. It was simply a Semitic word meaning "Lord." This is the selfsame "El," "Ilu," Bel, Baal, of the Hebrews, Canaanites, Babylonians and Assyrians. In the Hebrew Bible, the ancient Semitic word "Baal," the same as Hebrew "Adon," or the English "lord," in every sense, is constantly employed as a common noun meaning "lord," "master" or owner of this or that. As the term is applied to deity, the word Baal, which is then always used with the definite article, the-Baal, the-Baalim, the word Baal retains its idea of lordship or ownership. The-Baal was the local deity or "lord" who had "put his name" in this or that place, as the-Baal of Tyre, to whom Solomon's friend Hiram built a magnificent Temple in his capital; the-Baal of Lebanon, the-Baal of Heaven; also often, Baal-zebub, lord of flies; Baal-peor, the Lord Hymen-opener. Jerub-baal, "who is Gideon," died, "and the Children of Israel went a-whoring after the-Baalim, and made Baal-Berith (the Lord-of-the-Covenant) their gods elohim." Exactly so was it with the other word "El" Yahveh, as the local Lord or Baal of sundry places or things rendered sacred by his "putting his name" there or thereon...proving that Yahveh was just one El or God of or over the other gods or spirits which abounded in the Hebrew and neighboring Pagan mythologies.
Jehovah: Man or God? This primitive Hebrew God-man, named Yahveh, used to come down to the very near-by earth and walk about, and talk to the people he had created, and he made coats of skins for Adam and Eve. He came down as a man and watched the Tower of Babel abuilding (Gen 11:5); and a thousand times he came in man-form to earth, to talk with people and to do this and that. At Horeb he stood on the Rock and watched Moses smite it for water; and on Sinai "Yahveh descended in the cloud, and stood with him there;" and he came down as an, angel and had an all-night wrestling-match with Jacob. To Moses he always appeared on Mt. Sinai in man-form "and Yahveh spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend;" although in the same Chapter this is contradicted, for Moses asked Yahveh to let him see him, and Yahveh replied, "Thou canst not see my face: for man shall not see me and live." ...he put Moses into a little cleft in the rocks, and placed his (Yahveh's) hand over Moses's face, and paraded by and showed Moses his man-like "back parts." ...previously Yahveh was more sociable and seeable; for after writing the Tables of Stone with his finger, he celebrated the occasion by inviting Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu and seventy Elders of Israel, to a big banquet up on the "Mountain of the Gods;" and there "they saw the Gods (ha elohim) of Israel," whose feet were upon a paved work of sapphire stone; and they all "beheld the Gods, and did eat and drink" (Ex. 24:10-11). ...we have the positive assurance of John that "No man hath seen God at any time" (John 1:18); though St. John the Divine contradicts this by his own claim to have made a personal visit to highest Heaven, where he saw both God himself and his Son (two wholly distinct Persons), sitting side by side on the Throne of Glory, circled around by a rainbow. At Horeb he stood on the Rock and watched Moses smite it for water (Ex 17:6); and on Sinai "Yahveh descended in the cloud, and stood with him there" (Ex. 34:5); and he came down as an, angel and had an all-night wrestling-match with Jacob. To Moses he always appeared on Mt. Sinai in man-form - "and Yahveh spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend" (Ex 33:11). Moses asked Yahveh to let him see him, and Yahveh replied, "Thou canst not see my face: for man shall not see me and live." But the God wished to be complaisant, as far as possible without danger of death; so he put Moses into a little cleft in the rocks, and placed his (Yahveh's) hand over Moses's face, and paraded by and showed Moses his man-like "back parts." "I also saw Yahveh sitting upon a throne" (Is 6:1), and he reports that "the breath of Jahveh is like a stream of brimstone" (Is 30:33). And, says Job (a Heathen), "Now mine eye hath seen thee" (Job 42:5); while Amos saw him in quite a belligerent mood: "I saw Yahveh standing upon the altar, and he said, Cut them in the head, all of them; and I will slay the last of them with the sword" (Amos 9:1). Also, Ezekiel toured around Jerusalem with Yahveh, whom he calls a man, measuring the City, Yahveh being in his usual man-form: "The man (Yahveh) stood by me" (Ezek 43:6), and "Yahveh said unto me" (Ezek 43:2) - this arrangement of the texts identifying the man with Yahveh. A Very Earthly God Yahveh is throughout the Book credited explicitly with human body and all its parts: head, hair, face, beard, eyes, lips, mouth, tongue, nostrils, breath, arms, hands, horns on his hands, fingers, legs, feet, loins, heart, "back parts," even wheels ; he wears garments, and makes them for our First Parents; he has voice, uses words, talks and speaks: "We have this day seen that Yahveh doth talk with men" (Deut 5:24); he laughs, sleeps, loves, hates, is pleased, de- lighted, angry, in wrath, in fury, takes vengeance, is grieved, jealous, weary, promises, threatens, repents, changes mind, forgets, remem- bers, swears, takes oaths, lies, swears he will not lie to David, has a soul. He is a "man of war," and fights, and slays, and throws down stones (like Jove) from Heaven, and fights with a sword, bow and arrows, a quiver full of arrows, and has a whole armory of weapons from which to equip himself for war; he walks, marches, "and he rode upon a cherub, and did fly: he was seen upon the wings of the wind" (2 Sam. 22: 11 & Ps 28:10); "Yahveh rideth upon a swift cloud" (Is 19:1), and he also rides in a chariot.
The God "revealed" in the Bible is therefore, by its every text and test, altogether a sort of magnified Man, created by his votaries as were all the "gods of the nations" about them in their own form and image, with ah 1 their own traits and qualities, but magnified. An Evil God Yahveh was himself known and worshipped by the Patriarchs as "El Shaddai"...This seems very curious, for the word means, or is often used as meaning, demon or devil, as in many instances.
God of War & Death The celestial Yahveh was also par excellence "El Sabaoth;" the Lord of the (starry) Hosts. Judges 5:20 says, "They fought from heaven; the stars in their courses fought for Sisera." In 2 Kings (6:17), when the King of Syria came to war against Israel, "Behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about." ...the chariots of Yahveh are twenty thousand, even thousands of Angels; Yahveh is among them - (Ps. 18:17). "Yahveh cast down great stones from heaven" upon the Amorites, and killed more of them than the Chosen Warriors slew by the sword, while the Sun stood still to watch and aid the slaughter. "Yahveh is a man of war: Yahveh is his name." Miriam, sister of Moses, and the women take up the exultant refrain: "Sing ye to Yahveh, for he hath triumphed gloriously" - (Exod 5:21). ...he breaketh the bow and cutteth the spear in sunder - (Psalms) Yahveh shall be seen over them, and his arrow shall go forth as the lightning" - (Neh 9:14) I come and smite the earth with a curse - (Malachi Moses, who had occasion to know him quite intimately, if he is to be believed at all, declares, "Yahveh thy God is a mighty God and terrible" (Deut 7:21); and "Yahveh is a great God, mighty and terrible" (Deut 10:17): a description repeated in nearly every Book of Hebrew Scripture: by Nehemiah (1:5); by Isaiah many times; by David very often; by Jeremiah, as "a mighty, terrible one" (20:11); by Daniel, as the "great and dreadful God" (9:4); and so times without number. |
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A passing comet tears up the world and parts the waters. It causes ten plagues and a great deluge. When the story of a comet's destruction merges with the personality of a tribal god, we get the infernal Jehovah of Judaism and Christianity. (Here for more...)
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Not a Nice God
The Hebrew-Pagan God Yahveh has all the gods of Greece and of every other known Theogony paled into innocuous shades of villainy in comparison. Yahveh, to credit his inspired biography, is the greatest criminal on record: he reeks with the blood of murders unnumbered, and is personally a murderer and an assassin, by stealth and treachery; a pitiless monster of bloody vengeances; a relentless persecutor of guilty and innocent alike; the most rageful and terrifying bully and terrorist. Time and again Yahveh repeats the infernal commands of Deuteronomy vii, ordering the indiscriminate murder of men, women and children, the total extermination of the teeming populations of the Promised Land by the savage Soldiers of El: "thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; nor shalt thou show mercy unto them; thou shalt not spare; thine eye shall have no pity; lest the anger of Yahveh be kindled against you, and he destroy thee suddenly;" and his brutal soldiers execute his holy will to the letter, pitilessly, though totally ineffectively, for they never did succeed in exterminating the populations. "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" - (Hebrews 10:31) Genocide in Canaan From Kadesh, Moses, as a prudent leader, sent the twelve spies "to spy out the Land of Canaan." The majority report of the spies was of an alarming nature, they reporting, "We saw giants there, in whose sight we were as grasshoppers." There- upon, all the People "lifted up their voice and cried, and wept that night," crying, "Would to God we had died in Egypt, or in the wilderness," and they wanted to elect a captain and go back home to Egypt. Yahveh had now one of his frequent mad spells, and said, "I will smite them with the pestilence," and kill them all; but Moses again cajoled Yahveh out of his fatal purpose by an argument to his divine vanity, saying: "Now, if thou shalt kill all the People as one man, then the nations which have heard of the fame of thee will speak, saying, Because Yahveh was not able to bring this People into the Land which he swore unto them, therefore hath he slain them in the wilderness." So Yahveh, seeing the force of this, compromised by swearing, "As I live, surely they shall not see the Land which I swore unto their fathers, save Caleb and Joshua; but your little ones, them will I bring in; but as for you, your carcasses they shall fall in this wilderness. And your children shall 1 wander in the wilderness forty years." So Yahveh commanded Moses, "Tomorrow turn you, and get you into the wilderness by the way of the Red Sea." "Thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword: but the women, and the little ones, and all the spoil of the city shalt thou take unto thyself" (Deut 20:13-14); and the women and children were consigned to debauchery and slavery for the "holy nation" of Yahveh. Moses Wiser than Jehovah The alleged atrocities which Yahveh wilfully and maliciously perpetrated by the universal destruction of the Flood, and on the Egyptians with his inhuman Plagues, and the wholesale massacre of the firstborn of Egypt, and the drowning in the Red Sea of the Pharaoh and his army, also score for his alleged inhumanities and murders. He is pictured as no less atrocious and murderous in his treatment of his own Chosen People, condemned to a miserable wandering in the howling wilderness for forty years and to entire extinction in death, because simply the People were frightened at the majority report of the Spies sent to prospect in Canaan, and they wept all night, and wanted to go home to Egypt. So Yahveh was "provoked," and his "anger kindled," and he said: "I will smite them with a pestilence, and disinherit them"... ...but Moses again held up the spectre of "what the Egyptians would say because Yahveh was not able to bring this People into the land which he sware unto them, therefore hath he slain them in the wilderness;" so Yahveh sees the point and relents a little; but "Yahveh's anger was kindled against Israel, and he made them wander in the wilderness forty years: As I live, your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness."
Father of Lies With respect to bald lies attributed to Yahveh by his inspired biographers and votaries, and lies instigated by this so distant God of Truth, we have several edifying instances. In Exodus, Yahveh told Moses to lie to the Pharaoh, as a pretext for escape, by saying that the People wanted to go "three days journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice unto Yahveh our God;" but as Yahveh was quite new to Moses, and totally a stranger to the people and to the pharaoh, the latter, when the inspired lie was repeated to him, was skeptical and retorted, "Who is Yahveh, that I should hearken unto his voice to let Israel go? I know not Yahveh." His own Prophet Ezekiel attributes all prophetic lies directly to Yahveh, and quotes Yahveh as shamelessly declaring, "If the prophet be deceived when he speaketh a thing, I Yahveh have deceived him." Several times Jeremiah frankly taxes Yahveh to his face with deception and lies, to wit: "Then I said, All, Yahveh, surely thou hast greatly deceived this People and Jerusalem;" and again, "O Yahveh, thou hast deceived me, and I am deceived;" and Jeremiah is so mad with Yahveh that he declared, "I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name;" and for the climax, he puts it straight into the teeth of Yahveh: "Wilt thou be altogether unto me as a liar?" All this would seem to make Yahveh a rival with Baalzebub as the "Father of Lies," a glorious conception of the boasted "God of all Truth." |
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Lunatic Prophets
The job of prophet was a free-for-all occupation, which any one who pretended to feel the "divine afflatus," or was a fluent liar, could take up at will and without license. A shining example, Samuel, will be noted in another connection. The Prophet Amos frankly states his own case, which was typical, and has passed into a proverb: "I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's son; but I was a herdsman; and Yahveh took me from following the flock, and said unto me, Go, prophesy unto my People Israel." Elisha, the Bald-Pate, was a farmer, and was out plowing one day when Elijah passed by, and Elisha dropped his plow and ran after him, and became a prophet too. After this manner are many modern "Divines" self-"called" unto this day. Jeremiah, who was a big one among them, describes their single qualification: "every man that is mad (ish meshuggah) and maketh himself a prophet." Hosea also declares the same truth: "The prophet is a fool, the man that hath the spirit is mad - Meshuggah." Elisha is called "this mad fellow - Meshuggah" (2 Kings 9:11). A thousand instances prove the truth of these candid admissions - that the prophets were a rabble of "Meshuggah" or frenzied fakirs. We have seen the example of Saul, when "the spirit of Yahveh came mightily upon him, and he prophesied" (Heb. raved}, along with the whole band of howling, naked prophets (1 Sam 19:6); and frequently afterwards it is recited of him, "an evil spirit from God came upon Saul, and he prophesied." "Saul also stripped off his clothes, and he also prophesied (raved) before Samuel, and he fell down naked all that day and all that night." And by this token of rank insanity and phallic idolatry, was "Saul also numbered among the prophets," to the derision of the public. Elijah the Tishbite was a typical "Meshuggah;" he was "an hairy man and girt with a girdle of leather about his loins" (2 Kings 1:8); he lived in deserts and caves, and angels and ravens fed him; he saw and talked with Yahveh in great and strong winds which rent the mountains and brake in pieces the rocks, in earthquakes, in fires, and in a still small voice. Elijah murdered two companies of fifty soldiers and their captains by calling down fire from heaven to consume them in order to prove "if I am a man of Yahveh" (2 Kings 1:12); and he murdered the 450 priests of Baal and the 400 "priests of the groves" (Asherah), for the same purpose. Even old Elisha...had Yahveh to murder forty-two little children because, in their childish simplicity and want of good manners they said, "Go up, thou Bald Head." Isaiah the great Isaiah was a "Meshuggah of the Meshuggahs," if that is good grammar in Hebrew. He admits it himself, and every- thing which he uttered attests it: he appears never to have had a lucid interval. He was certainly stark mad when, as he says, at Yahveh's dread command, he took the old bran-sack from off his loins and the shoes from his feet, and "walked naked and barefoot three years for a sign and a wonder (as indeed it must have been!) upon Egypt and upon Ethiopia" (Is 20:2-3); and he had not recovered when he wrote about it, or he would never have told it on himself. Isaiah had chronic intestinal trouble, which may have been what caused him to go so "meshuggah," for he groans "my bowels sound (or, will boil) like a harp" and he tells how "my loins are filled with pain: pangs have taken hold upon me, as the pangs of a woman that travaileth; my heart panted, fearfulness affrighted me," and he despairingly avowed, "therefore I will weep bitterly; labor not to comfort me" (Is 22:4). Jeremiah the Wailing Prophet, Jeremiah, was little less "Meshuggah" than Isaiah himself. He says, "Since I spake, I cried violence and spoil." He also was diseased inside: he agonizes and cries out, "My bowels, my bowels! I am pained at my very heart; my heart maketh a noise within me," he cries aloud, "I am full of the fury of Yahveh; I am weary with holding in!." He avers that "Yahveh put forth his hand and touched my mouth, and said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth," and told him to "Go, cry against Jerusalem." Jeremiah fulfilled his divine mission to the letter; and then, for good measure, added his weeping Lamentations, in which he again complains, "Behold, O Yahveh, I am in distress: my bowels are troubled." And yet after these two pitiful appeals, the "Great Physician" did not so much as prescribe any stomach bitters for his poor sick Meshuggah. The most perfectly frenzied of the whole troupe of Meshuggah-Prophets, so far as the record goes, is Ezekiel. His regular diet seems to have been bread made of human dung; but for some reason, unrevealed, Yahveh indulgently gave him a substitute of cow's dung, and thus commanded him: "Lo, I have given thee cow's dung for human dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith." And he assures us that Elohe-Yahveh "put forth the form of a hand, and took me by a lock of mine head and the spirit lifted me up between the earth and the heaven;" and that "the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of Yahveh" and things unspeakable. Ezekiel too had awful cramps of the stomach, even worse than Jeremiah, if may be, for Yahveh made him "eat the roll of a book, and fill his belly with it" and it tasted in his mouth as honey for sweetness. The apoplectic John of Patmos had to eat a similar book (or maybe it was the same one rehashed), which also tasted like honey, but he says it made his belly bitter (Rev 10:10): in both instances it was a divine proof of the Shakespearean prophecy - "things sweet to taste are to digestion sour." And their dyspepsia must have been something awful, to judge from the nightmare visions they had and the excruciating things they saw and uttered. Daniel...certainly saw some fearful and wonderful things: he describes his "control" as having a "face as the appearance of lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet like in color to burnished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude." No wonder that when Daniel saw such as this, all his "comeliness was turned into corruption" within him and he was scared so that all his strength left him and that he had abdominal disorders and pains in his head, as he says, "I was grieved in my spirit in the midst of my body, and the visions of my head troubled me." Poor Daniel spent much time in "prayer and supplications, with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes" and would mourn for three full weeks of days at a time, without eating or making his toilet. It was enough to derange anybody. ...and while in this graceful but uncomfortable all-fours posture, Yahveh told him many wonderful and incomprehensible things, which Daniel himself frankly admits, "I heard, but understood not" (12:8). Nor has anyone else ever since. These "meshuggah" prophets had other peculiarities which we may notice, which are not overly to their credit nor to that of their Yahveh. Hosea was apparently the subject of neuropathic erotomania. His induction into prophecy was a vision in which Yahveh commanded him: "Go, take thee a wife of whoredoms" which he proceeds to do without any recorded reluctance. He has by her a couple of children, without being married to the Lady Gomer, who is very sportive, for he has to make these children "plead with your mother, plead: for she is not my wife, neither am I her husband," begging her to "put away her whoredoms and her adulteries" so as to indulge them only with this Holy One, who threatens to "strip her naked," if she doesn't quit it. But she kept it up; for Hosea tells us, she "went after her lovers and forgat me;" and Yahveh tried to help him out and win her back, for Yahveh says, "Behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness." This kindly Divine Go-between seems to have failed of success, for Yahveh tells Hosea, "Go yet, love a woman beloved of her friend, yet an adultress" (3:1); which also he does without delay. This ends the unprofitable tale of the prophets, told in their own frenzied, incoherent, fury-breathing jargon; and proves their just right to their title of Meshuggah. All the frenzied fakirs whom we have seen wander up and down Israel naked and crazed and "raving," were not "prophesying" truths of God nor revelations of the future; but crazed to start with, and worked into a howling frenzy by wild "Jazz" music of a barbarous kind, they truly "raved" frothy and incoherent non-sense; for in the Revised Version, more honest than the King James, the word "raved" is given in the margins as the correct sense of "prophesied" used in the text. Divided Kingdoms With the division of the kingdom after the death of Solomon, followed by constant civil war and partisan hatreds, the prophets split into factions filled with all the hatreds of their respective factions just like some Christian Churches at the time of the American Civil War; and they prophesied lies against each other right patriotically.
The Holy People Such as we have seen are confessedly the holy Prophets of Israel, as pictured by Inspiration. These are the meshuggah old fakirs and Howling Dervishes of Israel over whom for a score of centuries the credulous Christian world has ecstasized and called inspired of God, and the almost divine oracles and ambassadors of their fictitious pagan Yahveh Jehovah. Upon their frenzied incoherent "ravings" the dogmatists of Christian theology, errantly, as we shall more than amply see, citing and perverting their "ravings" into inspired "prophecies of Jesus Christ," have founded and built up the labored system of dogmas and creeds, sanctioned by dire threats of hell fire and eternal damnation to him who believes not their Holy Word. |
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NT Contradictions
These tales of the Christ are marvelous and incredible, impossible, according to all human standards of reason, as shown in every detail and circumstance of the confused and contradictory records of the four Gospels as the simple comparison of their texts will demon- strate them to be. We have seen their Subject stripped of every vestige of claim to "fulfillment of Prophecy," appealed to by his four posthumous Biographers, in support of their accounts of the most salient features of his life and acts. No less unreal will be found the much-heralded "Harmony of the Gospels" with respect to the most signal events of his life and deeds, his trial, crucifixion, death, resurrection, ascension, related of this Jesus by the spirit and pen of inspiration. Such things, so contradictorily chronicled and vouched for, could not be accepted as truth, if testified on oath before a Court of human justice. But where, as here, it is assured that every word of the record is inspired of truth by God the inevitable rule of logic and of law: "Of two contradictories, one must be false," makes their "harmony" and truth incredible and impossible. Jesus the undivine Paul, the most dogmatic Theologian of them all, avers and admits that Jesus Christ was altogether human in origin, for that he "was made of the seed of David according to the flesh" (Rom 1:3), and was simply "declared to be the Son of God (Yahveh) with power, according to the spirit of holiness." Mark, the first and earliest of the Gospel biographers, mentions no miraculous or Virgin birth, either of Jesus or of John; Mark is therefore a potent witness in silence against the controverted fact. Luke, although quoting Gabriel, seems to forget all about it in Chapter 2, where he simply relates that Joseph went from Nazareth to Bethlehem "to be taxed, with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child...and she brought forth her first-born child"... John says not a word of miraculous or Virgin birth. Thus two of the four Gospel biographers wholly ignore, and thus tacitly deny, any pretense of miraculous or Virgin birth the most transcendent Dogma of later Christian Faith; and Paul, the greatest author of Dogma of them all, expressly declares Jesus to have been of purely human procreation and birth "made of the seed of David according to the flesh," which he could not have been if of Yahvistic paternity.
Astro-Theology Although Wheless does not cite the subject of Astro-Theology, we see that many of the stories contained in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments do in fact relate to celestial happenings. The first and foremost account involves the so-called Virgin Birth, which turns up not only in the New Testament, but in the earlier Book of Isaiah. Add to this the scene of the Nativity, the journey into Egypt, the visitation of the three shepherds (or kings), journey to Jerusalem on an ass, Sermon on the Mount, Betrayal in the Garden, Crucifixion on Skull Hill, Entombment, Resurrection, Scarlet Woman, Great Beast, War in Heaven, New Jerusalem, etc, etc, and we have a fascinating sidereal testament to explore, replete with imagery entirely familiar to the entire pagan world. Conclusion We see from Wheless' extrodinary work that, for the most part, the Pentateuch is simply a story put together at a late date by Jewish mythmongers. This means that few if any of the events cited in the Pentateuch actually occurred. Little of what we read has historical validity, even though Jews and Christians have been expertly duped into believing so. What we have is largely mythology. The fictive elements of each book, from Genesis onwards, works well as propaganda. Wheless' text leaves us in no doubt of this. It was enough to program the minds of preliterate peoples disinclined to doubt, judge or investigate the facts for themselves. It took researchers such as Wheless, Massey, Graves, and others to demonstrate beyond all doubt that the scriptures contain the world of men not God. The reaosns why the masses believe the nonsense of the Testaments are the following:
The situation wa not very different for the pagans, in their veneration of various deities. In fact, Gentile nations found it easy to add one more god to the many others already worshiped by their forefathers. This is why Jewish propagandists and mythmongers found a receptive audience among the Gentiles, and why many precepts of Judaism were, in simplistic form, adopted by the latter. After all, as far as most Gentiles and pagans were concerned, Jehovah's behavior and personality didn't differ radically from that of well-known gods such as Jupter, Zeus, Ares, Mithra, Poseideon, and so on. |
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