This Bible quiz (with a theme) is the second guest post from long-time commenter avalon. I learned more than I expected—see if you do, too.

Bible illiteracy is a major problem in America. Whether you’re a Christian who believes in the Bible or a skeptic who doubts the Bible, knowledge about what’s in the Bible should be a prerequisite for any discussion or debate. The following quiz is an attempt to spark your interest in learning more about the Bible. This quiz focuses on the word “spirit.”

Questions

1) What are the four types of baptism referred to in the New Testament?

2) In Hebrew, Greek, and Latin the word for spirit can have two other meanings (besides literally “spirit”). What are they?

3) Why didn’t Abram cut up the birds when preparing for the meeting with God? This is from Genesis 15:9–10: “So the Lord said to him, ‘Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon.’ Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other; the birds, however, he did not cut in half.” (Hint: remember the theme.)

4) What descended on Jesus when he was baptized?

5) What was the first sign that the apostles were being visited by the Holy Spirit when they gathered at a house for Pentecost?

Continue for the answers:

God has no problem breaking Commandment #9 against lying (see my previous post). He also likes the occasional human sacrifice, which puts him in conflict with Commandment #6 prohibiting murder. Can’t this guy follow his own rules?

God presumably isn’t obliged to follow the first four—no other gods, no graven images, no blasphemy, keep the Sabbath—but can’t he be expected to understand basic morality?

Commandment #6: no murder

In addition to the human sacrifice,

• God orders the death of the tribe of the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15:2–3).
• Ditto the guy who picked up sticks on the Sabbath (Numbers 15:35).
• He kills the guy who touched the Ark of the Covenant so it wouldn’t fall (1 Chronicles 13:10).
• Ditto the guy who refused to impregnate his sister-in-law (Genesis 38:8)
• and the men, women, and children in Sodom and Gomorrah.
• And then there’s the whole Flood thing where presumably millions were drowned.

Maybe God doesn’t have to follow his rules

Here’s how world-famous apologist William Lane Craig tap dances around this issue:

I have no right to take an innocent life. For me to do so would be murder. But God has no such prohibition. He can give and take life as He chooses. . . . God is under no obligation whatsoever to extend my life for another second. If He wanted to strike me dead right now, that’s His prerogative.

The parallel often given is that of a sand sculpture. If I built it, I can squash it. Perhaps I’m splitting hairs here, but I think things are different when the thing being squashed is living. We have no respect for the sadist who pulls the wings off a fly, and we have laws against animal cruelty. But Craig thinks that God’s rules don’t apply to God? How many moralities are there? And if God needn’t follow the rules, how can they be objective (which Craig argues)?

Craig’s own holy book disagrees with him. What does Man made “in the image of God” (Gen. 1:27) mean if morality applies to Man but not God? Matthew also makes clear that the standards are the same: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48).

We see the same single standard of morality when Abraham challenges God about his plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.

Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right? (Gen. 18:25)

(I’ve written more about God and morality here and here)

A few other commandments

God doesn’t personally commit adultery (Commandment #7), though the Bible’s concerns about adultery are often not reciprocal but just about the man’s rights. In many cases, if a man’s rights aren’t violated, it’s not adultery. Adultery can be wrong in our own day, but we define it differently.

Commandment #8 prohibits stealing, but God helped the Israelites take Canaan from the tribes that were already there (Deuteronomy 7:1–2).

Commandment #10 prohibits coveting, but God comes pretty close: “I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God, responding to the transgression of fathers by dealing with children to the third and fourth generations of those who reject me” (Exodus 20:5).

Let’s apply the Ray Comfort test (Comfort is a street evangelist who likes to ask people if they’ve ever broken a commandment, even once). Okay, God, by the admission in your own holy book, you’re a lying, stealing, covetous murderer. What sort of punishment do you think you deserve? Keep in mind that most of the penalties for breaking any of the Ten Commandments are death.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/18/14.)

Photo credit: Bob Seidensticker

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.)

Wikimedia / Image public domain

World famous Christian apologist William Lane Craig is known for his hilariously inept defense of the savage excesses of his God, who apparently isn’t able to present a defense himself.

For the Canaanite genocide, Craig’s punch line is that every Canaanite adult deserved death because they sacrificed children to their god, all the children hacked to pieces were actually getting a ticket to heaven, and we must reserve our sympathy for the Israelite soldiers forced to perform this butchery. (Craig’s insulting argument is eviscerated here.)

Let’s move from genocide to another area of biblical violence, human sacrifice.

Abraham and Isaac

The Abraham and Isaac story in Genesis 22 is often given to show God’s rejection of human sacrifice and, as it is in the Bible today, that may well have been the purpose. But, like a cheerful fairy tale that comes from a darker original, the Isaac story may not initially have had its happy ending.

The documentary hypothesis (discussed more here) argues that the first five books of the Bible are a patchwork of four ancient sources with differing agendas. Read the Abraham and Isaac chapter closely to see how it might have originally read (my source: The Bible with Sources Revealed by Richard Elliott Friedman, p. 65).

• Verses 11–15 have an angel stop Abraham and declare the whole thing a test, but where did the angel come from? God had no problem talking directly to Abraham to demand this inhuman sacrifice, and then an angel pops up from nowhere? That section looks like an addition.
• Verses 16–17 say, “Because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you.” Done what? If Isaac was not withheld, apparently he did get sacrificed.
• Abraham and Isaac set out together in verse 6, but verse 19 concludes the story with, “Then Abraham returned to his servants.” Alone.

There’s very little condemnation of child sacrifice in a story that rewards a man for his willingness to perform it.

But doesn’t the Bible reject human sacrifice?

Just in case anyone was unclear that the Old Testament comes from a post-Bronze Age Mesopotamian culture, it tells us 37 times that God loves the pleasing aroma of burning flesh. And God has a big appetite: “The first offspring of every womb belongs to me, including all the firstborn males of your livestock.” (Exodus 34:19). But God is reasonable. One verse later, he clarifies: “Redeem all your firstborn sons”—that is, sacrifice an animal instead.

We find a similar demand in Deuteronomy 18:10, “Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or daughter in the fire.”

Human sacrifice in the Bible

The Bible acknowledges that sacrificing humans is powerful mojo, because that’s how the Moabite god Chemosh beat Israel’s god Yahweh (2 Kings 3:27). The combined forces of Israel, Judah, and Edom were about to defeat Moab when the Moabite king sacrificed his son to Chemosh. The result: “There was an outburst of divine anger against Israel, so they broke off the attack and returned to their homeland.” (More here.)

Though the Bible talks a good story as it rejects human sacrifice, it’s a sock puppet, and you can make the Bible say just about whatever you want. If you think God can’t say precisely the opposite of what he commanded before, then you underestimate an omnipotent god! Take a look:

Consecrate to me every firstborn male. The first offspring of every womb among the Israelites belongs to me, whether human or animal. (Exodus 13:2)

But nothing that a person owns and devotes to the Lord—whether a human being or an animal or family land—may be sold or redeemed; everything so devoted is most holy to the Lord. No person devoted to destruction may be ransomed; they are to be put to death. (Leviticus 27:28–9)

As if bragging to his drinking buddies, God laughs about it afterwards. To teach the stiff-necked Israelites who’s boss, God said,

So I gave them other statutes that were not good and laws through which they could not live; I defiled them through their gifts—the sacrifice of every firstborn—that I might fill them with horror so they would know that I am Jehovah (Ezekiel 20:25–6).

Now what was William Lane Craig saying about sacrificing children to gods? Looks like there was a lot of that going around, and not just among the bad guys.

Concluded with examples in the New Testament in part 2.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/29/14.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia