God in the Bible will make a covenant with his people, and you think that since he’s made the sale, the book will end. But then the Bible stories keep coming. In part 1, we saw how God made covenants with Noah and then Abraham. After each one, you’re ready to read The End or “And they lived happily ever after” or some other wrapup. Perhaps after the covenant with Abraham we’re finally finished?

Nope—God wants to reboot this story yet again.

The Bible, take three (Moses)

Abraham begets Isaac, who begets Jacob, who then begets twelve sons, one of whom is Joseph. Joseph is annoying, and his brothers sell him into slavery. Joseph winds up in Egypt, but you can’t keep God’s man down, and God makes Joseph the Pharaoh’s right-hand man. That’s a nice bit of luck, because famine forces Jacob and sons to Egypt.

Generations go by, with Jacob’s descendants happily living in Egypt, still divided into twelve tribes according to the lineage of Jacob’s sons. But somehow the Israelites go from being guests to slaves.

And then Moses is born. He goes from the child of slaves to member of the royal household when he’s found floating in a basket (as coincidentally happened to Sargon, the founder of the Akkadian Empire, centuries before).

Moses first hears from God through a burning bush. Now on a mission from God, Moses and his brother Aaron haggle with Pharaoh for the freedom of the Israelites. The ten plagues helped. Weighed down with gold and silver taken from the Egyptians, they’re off for a quick trip across the Sinai to Canaan that takes forty years.

At Mount Sinai, God tells the Israelites (Exodus 19), “If you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession,” and the people agree. One chapter later, God gives what’s popularly known as the Ten Commandments. The covenant is confirmed with sacrifices and blood sprinkled on the people (Exodus 24).

So we’re good?

Nope—we need lots more laws and rules. Moses is finally ready to return from Mount Sinai, but by this time the impatient and fearful Israelites (with Aaron’s help) have made a golden calf to comfort them. God wants to press the Big Reset Button in the Sky again, but Moses talks him out of it by referring to the perpetual Abrahamic covenant. (It must not have been that great a plan if God let himself be talked out of it.)

Moses smashes the stone tablets of the Law on the golden idol. The people are punished, and Moses goes back up for a duplicate set of Ten Commandments (which isn’t even close to being the same set), and that set is stored in the Ark of the Covenant.

There’s plenty more about the Mosaic covenant being a perpetual contract. The priesthood of Aaron’s descendants is “permanent” (Numbers 25:13, also Exodus 40:15), the Day of Atonement is a “lasting ordinance” (Leviticus 16:34), God says about the laws, “Do not add to what I command you and do not subtract from it, but keep the commands of Yahweh your God that I give you” (Deuteronomy 4:2), and so on.

Finally. Now we’re done, right?

The Bible, take four (Jesus)

You’d think that if Jesus were the point of God’s story, if he were the person necessary for people to avoid hell, Jesus would be in Genesis 1, and it wouldn’t take a bunch of reboots and irrelevant covenants to get here. As it is, the Old Testament becomes just long-winded throat clearing, and much of the New Testament must rationalize away the incompatibility.

We read in the Law, “All your words are true; all your righteous laws are eternal” (Psalm 119:160). But God’s words aren’t particularly eternal according to the author of Hebrews, which weaves a legal case that Jesus was a priest “in the order of Melchizedek.” Since Abraham honored Melchizedek long before Moses, Jesus trumps the Levitical priesthood that was created from the Mosaic covenant. Or something.

This New Testament reboot upsets a lot of assumptions from before. What does it say about God that Jesus had to come down to straighten out his story? You’d think that an omniscient creator of the universe could convey things clearly. Here are a few things Jesus had to clarify.

• The afterlife is no longer a vague existence in Sheol but is either bliss or torment, depending on your beliefs (or works).
• God isn’t just a monotheistic Yahweh but has become a Trinity (in Christianity though not in the New Testament).
• In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes a number of corrections of the “You have heard it said . . . , but I tell you” form. Jesus redefines murder, adultery, divorce, the correct response to injustice, prayer, and so on, making one wonder why God needed to be corrected.
• The “death” of Jesus is said to be the sacrifice to (literally) end all sacrifices. (Let’s ignore the fact that no provision in the Law is ever given to permit the sacrifice of a human; Jesus wasn’t burned, which was required for any sacrifice; Jesus wasn’t part of any tribe and so couldn’t hold the office of Levitical priest to offer a sacrifice; and Jesus wasn’t physically unblemished, as was required for any sacrifice.)
• And that whole Chosen People thing for the Jews? No—Yahweh is now everyone’s god.

But surely this is the last reboot, right?

Nope—Islam was another reboot, and Mormonism was another. Christians can’t criticize reboots when their own religion is built on them.

What explains this?

There are at least three possible explanations for why we see these reboots in God’s instruction manual.

First, God kept changing his mind. This doesn’t put omniscient God in a good light if he kept forgetting the point or changing his mind.

Second, the fault is with the human scribes and keepers of the Bible, and if it had just been written and copied correctly, it would make sense. One wonders, then, why God would allow his message to become so muddled.

Third, God doesn’t exist, and the Bible is just the blog of a desert tribe from long ago. It’s no more accurate than the pre-scientific musings of hundreds of other religions.

I think this last interpretation paints the most dignified picture of God. Instead of a forgetful dolt or an inept manager, God was just the best explanation that one tribe could put together in a frightening and insecure time.

See also: 

• Simplicity: the Trait Missing from Christianity
• Contradictions in the Bible? No, It’s Progressive Revelation!

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Image via Gabriel White, CC license

A reboot is a new release of a story in comic, film, television series, or other form that discards continuity with previous versions to start afresh, unburdened by plot decisions in any previous release.

The Bible is a book whose storyline spans over a thousand years, so perhaps it’s not surprising that it also has reboots.

The Bible, take one (the Noah story)

God creates the world (twice), and then Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. Their son Cain kills his brother Abel, then there’s a long genealogy ending in Noah. God’s annoyed with how humanity turned out, so he hits the Reset button, and everyone drowns. But don’t be sad—Noah and his ark full of animals weather the storm.

Everyone in the world (by which I mean “eight people”) are once again safe on land. God as Elohim blesses Noah’s family with authority over all living things. He lays down a few rules, and in return he promises, “I establish my covenant with you: never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood” (Genesis 9:11). The rainbow (think: the kind of bow that shoots arrows) will appear in the clouds and remind everyone (God included) of this “everlasting covenant.”

So there you have it, God’s covenant with humanity.

The Bible, take two (Abraham)

But there’s more, as the story trundles along. Noah’s descendants populate the earth, there’s that whole Tower of Babel thing, and then we’re introduced to Abraham. For some unexplained reason, Abraham (né Abram) isn’t already in Israel but lives in Ur, an ancient city on the coast of the Persian Gulf, now in southern Iraq. God (now Yahweh) guides him to Canaan.

God must be forgetful, because he keeps making the same promise to Abraham. The promise is (1) you will have many descendants, (2) you get land, and (3) this covenant is perpetual.

• In Genesis 12, Yahweh says, “I will make you into a great nation. . . . To your offspring I will give this land” (that is, Canaan).
• Other stories intervene, and then in Genesis 13, God does it again: “All the land that you see [Canaan] I will give to you and your offspring forever. I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth.”
• In Genesis 15, guess what God does. He gives Canaan to Abraham. Actually, he gives a lot more than that, listing ten tribes whose land will be the property of Abraham’s descendants. He gives as boundaries the Euphrates River to the east and Egypt to the west.
• In Genesis 17, God was feeling generous, so he gave Canaan to Abraham. “I will make you very fruitful. . . . I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you.” This is the first time we see Abraham’s contribution to the covenant: he and his male descendants must now be circumcised. (If you’re familiar with the documentary hypothesis, this came from the P source. The previous three were from the J source.)
• Elohim from the E source is feeling generous, too, so in Genesis 22, he rewards Abraham for (almost) sacrificing Isaac with another gift of Canaan. “I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies.”

God (in his several forms) has stuttered out many bequests of Canaan and promises of many descendants. It was a bit clumsy and contradictory, but we kind of get the message.

The End.

Just kidding. There’s more. This is concluded in part 2.

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Image via Randy Jenkins, CC license

In part 1, we looked at Bible verses both for and against human sacrifice in the Old Testament. Now let’s turn to the New.

Things surely improve in the New Testament . . . right?

Sacrifice remains important in the New Testament. Everyone knows that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (Hebrews 9:22). The most popular verse in the Bible for many Christians acknowledges that: John 3:16 begins, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.” And by “gave,” of course, they mean that Jesus was a human sacrifice to God.

Christians will reject human sacrifice to the Canaanite gods Moloch and Chemosh as barbaric and pointless, but apparently the human sacrifice to their Bronze Age god actually worked.

James Dobson celebrated one Father’s Day by likening the crucifixion to, not a barbaric act of cruelty, but “God’s greatest example of true fatherhood.” He said, “Look to the cross of Jesus Christ and be reminded of what fatherhood is all about” (that page has since been changed).

Yeah, that makes sense—have a pretend sacrifice of yourself to satisfy your justified rage. Human sacrifice is always a good Father’s Day message.

But does the sacrifice of Jesus work, even within a biblical context? Jewish sacrifices must be burned. How can the mojo of the dead animal or person get to heaven (in rising smoke) without the offering fire? Ephesians even says, “[Jesus] gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma” (Ephesians 5:2). Sure, Jesus may have eliminated the need for further sacrifices, but if his sacrifice was necessary, then it must have been carried out the old-fashioned way, through burning. And if it wasn’t . . . well, then that sacrifice apparently didn’t work.

Further, Jewish sacrifices must be perfect. God demands the best, and Jesus after his beating was hardly an unblemished sacrifice. But, I suppose God makes his own rules. Or it’s a mystery. Or something.

In response to the statement, “Jesus died for you,” I’m tempted to note that the 9/11 hijackers died for me, too. Maybe we should look to something besides human sacrifices to solve our problems.

But is a sacrifice even necessary?

The Bible both demands human sacrifice and prohibits it, and God demanded the sacrifice of Jesus just like any other Bronze Age god. But the craziest part is that all this isn’t even necessary. Apologists assure us that God must have a sacrifice, and yet the Bible itself shows that God can forgive just like you and I do.

When God makes a new covenant with his people in Jeremiah 31, he says,

I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more (Jer. 31:33–4).

In a sunny frame of mind on another day, God says something similar:

I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more (Isaiah 43:25).

And we see the line from Jeremiah repeated in the New Testament in Hebrews 8:12. What’s all this about how God’s infinite justice would be infinitely offended if even a little sin wasn’t atoned for with blood?

God seems to be a decent guy—he just forgives. The Christian story looks a bit better now, and we can forget the idea of the sacrifice of Jesus and its house-of-cards justification.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/30/14.)

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