The Christian Bible has two main sections, the Old Testament and the New. In my Bible, the Old Testament takes up 750 pages, the New Testament, the story of Jesus, only 231. Christians read both. I looked at the first five books of the Old Testament, the “teachings of Moses,” Genesis, Exodus, etc. These are often quoted from by conservative Christians.
The books were put into their current form by Jewish scholars during their Babylonian exile, which ended around 520 BCE. The narratives go back far before then. The events of the Jewish exodus from Egypt occurred around 1250 BCE, several hundred years before the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed. The stories in Genesis precede that. The books following Genesis tell the story of the Jews’ escape from Egypt, their arrival in Palestine, and the creation of the Jewish religion by Moses and his brother Aaron. The theme of the narrative is that people are incorrigible and need a heavy hand.
The book of Genesis tells the story before the Jews’ stay in Egypt. It portrays man and woman as created with no knowledge of good and evil, but acquiring it against the will of God and God’s companions. Knowledge of good and evil produce body shame in the first couple. Years pass and children are born despite this. When God rejected Cain’s offering of “fruit of the ground,” God “had no regard” for Cain’s offering. God warned Cain that he had not been accepted because he had not done well, and “if you do not do well, sin is couching (preparing to attack) at the door....” Cain murdered his brother Abel, and the ground no longer “yielded its strength “ to Cain. After ten generations, God “saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually,” so he drowned everyone and all flesh of the air and land, except Noah, his sons, their wives, and the menagerie of the ark.
When the flood receded, God gave all the plants and animals to Noah and his sons as food. “Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. For your lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning; of every beast I will require it and of man; of every man’s brother I will require the life of man.” (Genesis 9:4-6)
All men spoke the same language, and they built the tower of Babel. God made each group speak a different language so that they wouldn’t be able to cooperate. (Genesis 11)
God chooses Abraham to make a covenant. (Abraham, Jacob, and Isaac are to be the forefathers of the Israelis.) Abraham and his descendants will all be circumcised and Abraham’s descendants will possess Canaan after sojourn in Egypt. (Genesis 17) Abraham is to charge his descendants to “keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice.” (Genesis 18:19)
God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah after all the men of Sodom try to sodomize the two angels whom Lot has taken in as guests. The angels save Lot and his daughters, who went to live in a cave in the hills. The daughters made him drunk and laid with him, unbeknownst to Lot. They fathered the progenitors of the Moabites and the Ammonites. (That’s the kind of people the Moabites and Ammonites, neighbors of the Israelis, are.) (Genesis 19)
God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, which Abraham begins to do. At the last moment God stops him and reiterates his covenant with Abraham. (Genesis 22)
Jacob deceives his father Isaac to receive Isaac’s blessing. God promises prosperity and increase to Jacob. Jacob wrestles God and receives the name Israel. The whole long narrative of Jacob/Israel seems to indicate that whomever God supports, prospers.
Exodus picks up the story. The Jews are enslaved to Pharaoh, and Moses is a powerful Jewish steward of his. And Moses said to the people, “Do not fear; for God has come to prove you, and that the fear of him may be before your eyes, that you may not sin.”
The ten commandments arrive at Exodus chapter 20, p. 57 in my Bible. Following are two+ pages of additional commands regulating worship, the institution of slavery, and various torts, which are handled in ways similar to the way we handle torts under our English common law (Exodus 21-23). The consequences of ox gorings are covered in detail. (Exodus 20:20)
The remainder of Exodus is occupied with the story of the meeting tent (which eventually becomes the Jerusalem temple), with detailed instructions for the tent material, frame, and fittings, as well as the altar and all its equipment, as well as the outfits of Aaron the high priest and his sons. It continues through the construction of all these things and their initial use.
Leviticus contains instructions for each of the types of sacrifices which were to be made to God, including peace, guilt, sin, burnt, and wave offerings; the treatment of leprosy; restoring cleanness after a discharge or emission; transferring iniquities to a scapegoat; injunctions about nakedness, eating blood, following the norms of other peoples; sabbath years and jubilee years.
The book of Numbers includes a census of the Israelites; responsibilities of the priestly families; trial by ordeal of a wife accused of infidelity; vows to separate to (sic) the Lord; blessing the Israelites; dedication of the altar and of the Levites (hereditary priests); moving and staying; the Israelites ask for meat and receive quails; Miriam and Aaron speak against Moses and anger the Lord; when the Israelite scouts carry back an evil report of the promised land, the Lord vows that none shall enter it before the present generation has died.
Such is the plot of these five books. The theme is the incorrigible stubbornness of the Israelis. They object to the simplest instructions. They continually complain and criticize Moses. While Moses is up on the mountain talking to God, they’re back in camp gathering up jewelry to pound out a golden calf. And when the people disobey, people die at God’s hand. Israel was for most of its ancient existence a theocracy.
Next: The Early Church
More information:
(Skitka 2002) “Dispositions, Scripts, or Motivated Correction? Understanding Ideological Differences in Explanations for Social Problems,” Skitka, L. J., Mullen, E., Griffin, T., Hutchinson, S., and Chamberlin, B., “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,” Vol. 83, No. 2, 2002.
Wikipedia: Just-world hypothesis
© 2021, Ross A. Hangartner