Old Testament oddities
From RationalWiki
Religious fundamentalists, especially those of the late-20th and early-21st century American Protestant Evangelical variety, rely heavily on the Old Testament of the Bible. Whatever the specific reason for that might be, the Old Testament contains a great number of oddities.
[edit] The oddities
We recommend Bible Gateway for reading up on the Bible. These "oddities" are more general observations so don't necessarily have direct verses and passages that can be referenced.
- The Garden of Eden
- Simply put - why is that friggin' tree even in there!
- Adam and someone
- All of the other animals go boy, girl, boy, girl. Why does Adam get jerked around? And, all of the other animals were POOFed into existence by God, why does Adam have to go through an invasive body-cavity search?[1]
- Cain and Abel
- God shows a remarkable lack of omniscience when he asks Cain for directions. Notably the whereabouts of Cain's brother Abel. This is all the more odd considering that there are apparently only four humans on Earth to keep track of.[2]
- Moses - The
LawgiverStage Magician - God commands Moses to go see the Pharaoh and demand that he let His people go. Moses being a poor public speaker and a generally unpersuasive fellow, God decides to spice up Moses' act by teaching him some magic tricks. Such crowd-pleasers as the old "stick-to-snake-and-back-again", the "My hand has leprosy, and now it doesn't!", along with the family favorite "water-to-blood" trick. After hearing of the plan Moses said "Please send someone else." Exodus 4:13
- God having control issues with Israelites all the time in Judges and needs prophets to turn them back towards him
- The Israelites are always turning away from God in Judges. You'd think that an omnipotent god could do a better job of making people stick to him. He, for some reason, punishes them violently when they stray away from him in other chapters, which could have been easily avoided by giving them the Judges treatment. Also, if he is omnipotent and can do pretty much anything, including performing miracles in front of non-believers, why does he need prophets in the first place?
- Job
- The whole thing seems like a pretty sick joke with God and Satan in cahoots for a few lulz, ending with god getting angry at Job for questioning why god was punishing him and admonishing him for not being God. Also, Job's old sons and servants are all killed and are replaced. This is pretty traumatic to anyone who's ever lost a child, because you can't just simply replace a person you've lost.
- The plague of the firstborn
- Another lack of omniscience. God needs a reminder as to which firstborn children are Hebrew and which are not. A slap of lamb's blood on the front door does the trick.[3]
- Mt. Sinai
- Moses turns his back for two seconds and the Hebrews devolve into crazy pagan idol-worshipers. These are people who have quite likely personally witnessed at least eleven miracles, some with significant SFX (Special effects). Particularly, the supposed descending of their god down upon the mountain and speaking to them so that they will "always trust in Moses" just prior to his ascent. Kind of surprising that their god's almighty power was unable to convince them to wait around a bit. And er, Moses sees this and slaughters nearly 3,000 of them, even though the commandments, which he had just brought down from the mountain, say, "Thou shalt not kill". Possibly, he hadn't gotten around to reading them yet.
- An eye for an eye
- Grammy Flash always used to say that "the trouble with an eye for an eye is that everyone ends up blind."[4] One would think that a sacred religious text would have more wisdom than the grandmother of a fictional comic book superhero. Go figure.
- YHWH - the Chatty Cathy of the ancient middle-east
- Long ago, God would seemingly talk to anyone who would listen. You couldn't shut the guy up. He doesn't seem to do that too much anymore, nor for a long time. Many would say that he does indeed speak to a great many people. It is fairly certain that those people did hear him. This is called mental illness or drug abuse now-a-days though. However, the Old Testament's implication is the very deep, very "James Earl Jones" bellowing associated with speaking out-loud.
[edit] See also
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ This oddly inspired people to think that men have one less rib than women, even until the modern day. Despite over 400 years of medical evidence pointing to a wealth of dead-bodies showing otherwise. To be fair though, back then the laws of Biology could be modified to allow it to be grown back. Or, He could have just created Adam with one more rib than what we have today.
- ↑ Unless you count the ones which do not have names, like Cain's wife, then you may come up with a lot more, but then they can as well be made up on the way, since they don't have a name as the unique identifier.
- ↑ That, and the Egyptians are stupid enough not to learn something or notice the oddity when hundreds of thousands of doors are slapped with lamb's blood, not to mention the increased mortality rate of lambs.
- ↑ This is, more-or-less, a quote from an episode of the first season (series) of Justice League Unlimited.