Kerrigan - Dark history of the bible: the sins, the temptation, the betrayal, and the world

And he went unto his fathers house at Ophrah, and slew his brethren being threescore and ten persons, upon one stone (9, 5). The Book of Judges reports the crimes of Abimelech (depicted here by Gustav Dor) almost gleefully.

The Ten Commandments are all very well: murder, most of us would agree, is wrong, covetousness is a corrosive feeling and adultery undermines the happiness of whole families. But the Commandments emphasis on the need to avoid idolatry, understandable as this is in its biblical context, has seemed strange for centuries certainly for the whole of the Christian period. (Hence the rage to rationalize these decrees as injunctions against the worship of worldly things like sex or money.) And, if its wrong to kill, what of all that smiting? From the Book of Joshua onwards, the Bible is full of it. What of Samson (Judges 16, 28)? Should we see his death as justifying the suicide bombers of our own age?

THE THING WHICH HE DID

PERSPECTIVE IS ALL, and every generation recreates the Bible in its own image. However firm we think we are in our belief, were invariably selective in what we see. While modern readers have successfully turned a blind eye to scripturally-sanctioned incest, polygamy and genocide, theyve also tended to see sins that just arent there. Take the notorious case of Onan: that unfortunate son of Judah has been forever identified with the sin of masturbation.

That the Bible, while certainly condemning Onan, makes no such judgement against him is clear to anyone who reads his story (Genesis 38, 8):

And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brothers wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother. And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brothers wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother. And the thing which he did displeased the Lord.

What it was that displeased the Lord, it seems, had little or nothing to do with the sin of onanism. (Onans crime may even have been one of coitus interruptus, some scholars say.) It certainly doesnt seem to have been the act of masturbation per se that offended God but his deliberate and defiant withholding of his semen; his refusal to serve his sister-in-law as his father had directed.

As authoritative as it seems, as sonorously as its written, the Word of God is open to unnumerable interpretations.

Abimelechs slaughter of the 70 princes who apparently impede his path to the throne occasions no particular editorial comment in Judges 9. Davids affair with Bathsheba, and his murderous plot against her husband Uriah (2 Samuel 11), are condemned and divinely punished, although the king is held up as an example for all generations thereafter.

And what of the Bibles more implicit rulings those it doesnt assert outright yet appears to exemplify: its disapproval of Miriams defiance of her brother Moses (Numbers 12, 1), for example? Theres no doubt that Miriams waywardness offends the Lord (shes afflicted with leprosy in punishment), but is it as Gods appointed leader, or simply as a man, a brother a male that Moses should have been revered?

As authoritative as it seems, as sonorously as its written, the Word of God is open to innumerable interpretations. This really shouldnt come as a great surprise, of course. Any text is, pretty much by definition, susceptible to a range of different readings. When that text is actually, like the Bible, a collection of several different texts, the possibilities are multiplied many times. To the 24 books of the