Bible Study, Commentary, Analysis: Old Testament Scriptures, Laws

The Pentateuch is the beginning of the Bible - the stories which introduce all the major themes, ideas, and characters which recur through the rest of the Bible. If you're going to study or understand the Bible, you'll need to start with the Pentateuch.

There are a lot of really awful things in the Old Testament. This seems like a simple and obvious statement, but there are two slight problems with it. First, although nonbelievers and skeptics will superficially agree with it, many are unaware of what some of the specific laws and events actually are. This is particularly true when it comes to the laws because, lets face it, reading those lists of ritual laws can be quite boring.

Let's turn our attention now to that group of any society which is perhaps its most defenseless: children. A society can often be judged by how it treats its children. Unfortunately, the laws supposedly handed down by this 'god' to the ancient Hebrews were not always very 'kid-friendly'.

God's focus upon obedience was certainly not limited to children following the commands of parents. This god handed down a lot of laws - some of which even today appear reasonable and others which, as we have seen, are beyond any modern merits. So what was this god's policy towards those who might question or even disobey his commands? What...

One of the issues worth looking at is how those from other tribes and nations were to be treated. It is unsurprising for people to wish to treat their extended kin relations better than outsiders, but would a god who created all humanity and who is supposed to be all-loving really try to reinforce and promote such an attitude?

If a god created humanity, then it created half of all that humanity as one gender (male) and half of another gender (female). And how was the latter half treated by the former half through history? Pretty badly, for the most part. It isn't surprising to find this trend continued among the ancient Hebrews, but should we expect an all-loving God...

The Documentary Hypothesis is the conclusion of biblical scholars about who wrote the Bible (specifically the Pentateuch) and when. Rather than simply accept the traditional stories about who wrote the texts, biblical scholars have traced what they believe to be multiple anonymous authors writing over the course of many centuries.

The Book of Joshua is a story of invasion, conquest, and genocide. According to the Book of Joshua, the Israelites were ordered to by Yahweh to kill all of the inhabitants of Canaan and take the land for themselves.

The Book of Judges follows up on events in the Book of Joshua. Although the Israelites were ordered to commit genocide, they must have failed because there are lots of non-Israelites living in Canaan. They keep coming into conflict with the Israelites who beg Yahweh for a savior or Judge to rescue them.

The Book of Ruth is about a Moabite woman named Ruth who marries into an Israelite family, adopts the worship of Yahweh for her own, and thereby become an example of a faithful, obedient follower of Yahweh. According to later biblical texts, her descendants include David and Jesus.

The Books of Samuel are, predictably enough, primarily about the prophet Samuel - even though he dies before the end of the First Book of Samuel. Before he dies, though, Samuel anoints Saul as the first king of Israel as the Israelites request, though Yahweh was reluctant to allow this.

The Books of Kings describe the reign of king Solomon, the reign of his son David, and the division of the United Kingdom into two: the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. The Books of Kings is fundamentally about kings: which kings are good, which kings are bad, and what differentiates the two.

The story of Exodus has inspired many modern liberation movements, but few of those movements have draw attention to the fact that the liberation of Exodus necessarily entails the oppression and genocide of Joshua. Liberation thus comes via the oppression of others, something that carries awful implications for events in the modern state of Israel.

The Book of Joshua is a Book of Genocide - the entire point of the story is that the Israelites come into Canaan to exterminate everyone who lives there. There isn't even an attempt to depict the Canaanites as having doing anything wrong to the Israelites. The Canaanites are simply living in land promised to the Israelites by Yahweh, so they...

How historically accurate or reliable is the Book of Joshua? Not very. If you compare the Book of Joshua to the archaeological record and other historical records we have of that region, very little (if anything) in Joshua can be verified at all. We simply cannot treat the Book of Joshua as accurate or reliable.

Deuteronomist theology is a theological version of blaming the victim for their suffering: whatever your problems in life, you must deserve them. The reverse is also used: if you're prosperous and doing well, it must be because you are doing something right.

A single person, group, or school known as the Deuteronomist Editor was probably responsible for several Old Testament books, now called the Deuteronomist History.