How It Came To Be
One man under the divine inspiration of God didn’t write the Pentateuch; it was the product of several different perspectives of a common legacy passed down by fallible oral tradition for hundreds of years. When we analyze the texts, we clearly observe the Pentateuch as a convolution of several works from different authors with interpolated segues to signal subject transitions. Considering these observations, we cannot possibly anticipate the Pentateuch to be 100% accurate in its detail.
Following the Assyrian invasion and Babylonian Exile, conditions were certainly indicative of a rising necessity for a cohesive religious society. Perhaps these tales arose from the necessity to instill fear into the hearts of Israel’s stronger enemies. Consequently, it would be very likely that these bits of propaganda were intended to be nothing more than methods of keeping superstitious enemies at bay so that such forces wouldn’t overrun the demonstrably inferior and ill-equipped Israelites.
Exaggerated oral traditions and urban legends during this highly superstitious era no doubt played a large role in forming the first draft of the Old Testament. The seemingly countless number of horrible acts carried out by God, recorded in the Old Testament, and discussed in the previous three chapters of this book weren’t the result of angry divine interactions. Instead, these tales of unfathomably enormous armies and insanely angry deities were undoubtedly the product of a vivid human imagination. Thus, we cannot reasonably attribute the earliest writings of the Bible to an omniscient deity, much less the “wonderful” and “loving” Christian god. In short, the historical account left by the Hebrews is a problematic report filled with wild, unsubstantiated, ridiculous, and extraordinary claims without a shred of evidence to back it up.
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Saturday, January 3rd 2015 at 6:09PM
You can also
click
here to view all posts by this author...
