4
The initial testing of the Old Testament in chapter 2 led us to fear the worst. Chapter 3 then provided further diagnostic tools drawn from the linguistic side of the analogy that I am employing here. Armed with these tools, we can return to the Old Testament proper, broadening our view to realms of discourse and arenas (in some cases, quite literally) that are larger and consequently more public, to see if these, too, manifest telltale signs of the Old Testament’s morbidity. This chapter and the next two, which together comprise part 2, focus on three areas that, sadly, confirm the existence of our patient’s disease and, what is still more worrisome, demonstrate just how far along it really is.
The three areas on display in part 2 are not unrelated, though they are by no means identical. There is a good bit of overlap between the first two particularly, but, in a strange way, so also with the third. When seen through the lens of chapter 3, the interrelationship among all three comes as no real surprise: the first two reflect the process of (re)pidginization, while the third manifests creolization. Pidgins and creoles are closely related in the language life cycle, after all, and both are—each in their own way—on the road to language death, at least when it comes to the original language(s) that now lies in their distant past. So, seen in this linguistic light, the overlap of the three areas I take up below comes as no significant surprise.
These three areas of discourse are the New Atheism (chap. 4), Marcionites Old and New (chap. 5), and the New Plastic Gospels of the “Happiologists” (chap. 6). Each of the three shows telltale signs of the disease, manifesting a very curious (and in truth, pathological) understanding of the Old Testament (and the Bible as a whole). My argument throughout part 2 is that the understandings of the Old Testament found in these three cases are in fact profound misunderstandings—nothing less than proof of (re)pidginization and creolization, each in its own way a sign of morbidity, and thus proof that the Old Testament is dying in very large, very public ways. Along with my analysis of these three morbid signs, I hope to demonstrate that the full language of Scripture not only reveals the nature of the pathologies present but also points the way toward their remedy—a topic that will be discussed more extensively in chapters 7–9.
Dawkins and the New Atheists on the Old Testament
Early in his best-selling book, The God Delusion, the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins throws down the gauntlet:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.1
If, after reading this characterization, one is still uncertain how Dawkins really feels (!), further clarity can be gained by observing how he calls God “the Old Testament’s psychotic delinquent” and “the cruel ogre of the Old Testament,” and so, ultimately, “an easy target” for his criticisms.2 And let us not forget “God’s maniacal jealousy”!3 Dawkins finds the Lord “an appalling role model” and is flabbergasted at those who would “try to force the same evil monster (whether fact or fiction) on the rest of us.”4 He goes so far as to boast that the problem of evil is “childishly easy to overcome” by “simply postulat[ing] a nasty god—such as the one who stalks every page of the Old Testament.”5 He summarizes the Old Testament as an “ethical disaster area.”6
I could go on, but Dawkins’s position is already more than clear. Why does he take this view? On what does he base this vicious disdain for the Deity—all theistic notions thereof, let it be remembered, not just Christianity, since Dawkins is an equal-opportunity offender against any and all theists—but especially for Yahweh, whom he calls the “most unlovely instantiation” of the “God Hypothesis”?7 The answer to these questions is, of course, the Old Testament itself. It is because of the Old Testament, on the basis of it, that Dawkins promotes his vitriol. In his own words:
To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and “improved” by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries.8
This comment is “fair” in the same way any backhanded compliment is fair, but it is nevertheless quite instructive to note the implicit valorization of consistency in Dawkins’s remark and to observe that the facts of the Bible’s historical development mixed with a smidgeon of knowledge (always a dangerous situation) about the Bible’s composition history stoke the flames of his disaffection with Scripture.
But it isn’t just the Bible’s redaction or its nature as an anthology that bothers Dawkins; it’s the content. As telling examples illustrating why the Bible should not—indeed cannot—be used as a source for morals or rules for living, Dawkins zeroes in on the classic “texts of terror”:9 the flood story, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the incest between Lot and his daughters, the story of the rape of the Levite’s concubine, the endangering of Sarah by Abraham, the near sacrifice of Isaac,10 the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter, God’s jealousy over idolatry, the holy war practice of ḥērem (“the ban,” or utter destruction), and pentateuchal legislation regarding capital punishment.11
This is not the place to attempt a refutation of all the criticisms of theism, let alone Christian theism, that Dawkins and others have leveled. In fact, that is the first thing to acknowledge: Dawkins is not alone; a number of other writers—Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, to name a few—have written similar books and made similar points.12 Not all of these books are composed in the same full-throttle, polemical, antagonistic style of Dawkins, and yet, for that very reason, they may be even more compelling since several are written by journalists with religious backgrounds and excellent senses of humor, who are often writing directly or exclusively about religion, the Bible, even the Old Testament itself, and their experience of reading it.13 Again, this is not the place to review all of that work, let alone engage it in dialogue, especially because there has been no shortage of competent responses to the New Atheism (as the movement has come to be called) exemplified by Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris.14
I do, however, feel the need to address what the New Atheists say about the Bible, especially the Old Testament, because that hasn’t received as much attention in the literature responding to the New Atheism.15 Why that is the case, I cannot say—perhaps because the respondents thus far have not been biblical scholars. Perhaps a respondent or two even worries that the New Atheists have scored a victory here and there, maybe even several, against the Bible—especially against the Old Testament—so there’s nothing much that can be said in reply. Maybe it’s a sign that the Old Testament is already dead, not worth defending any longer. Whatever the case, a response of some sort is necessary because it has become almost pro forma for every New Atheist book to include a section, if not a full chapter or two, debunking the Bible as a whole and the Old Testament in particular.16 A response is also in order because the New Atheists’ take on the Bible—and, again, the Old Testament specifically—is seen in a very different light when one views it through the lens of the linguistic analogy I am employing here. While any of the New Atheists would serve as a suitable example of my points, in what follows I focus on Dawkins, partly because I would like to pick up the gauntlet he has so forcefully thrown down, and partly because his critique serves as suitably representative of others.17
We might begin with the fact that Dawkins, expert biologist that he is, is no Bible scholar. Upon reading his remarks, one is immediately struck by obvious deficiencies in his understanding of the field of biblical studies, the methods and tools of biblical criticism, and so on and so forth. To cite a few examples: he seems completely unaware of form criticism as well as specialized treatments of intertextuality, allusion, or inner-biblical exegesis, which, among other things, biblical scholars frequently employ when dealing with closely similar texts like those concerning the endangered ancestress or Sodom and Gomorrah and Judg. 19.18 As another example, Dawkins betrays a lack of rudimentary knowledge regarding ancient Israel when he states that it is not surprising that Jephthah’s daughter is the first to come out of the house after his rash vow in Judg. 11:30–31.19 The standard architecture of the Israelite four-room house, with one entrance used by both humans and animals,20 is precisely what makes Jephthah’s vow understandable (he was expecting an animal, not his daughter, to emerge), as well as what makes that vow potentially so stupid and tragic—as confirmed by the subsequent narrative (Judg. 11:34–40).
To be fair (to borrow Dawkins’s phrase), on these and other points Dawkins is (to borrow again from his terminology) “an easy target” precisely because he isn’t an expert in the biblical material nor the methods of biblical criticism. And yet these points are nevertheless quite significant, not just persnickety, because I am quite confident that, if I were to weigh in on evolutionary and biological matters with a similar level of (in)expertise in Dawkins’s own discipline—say, having read only bits and pieces of Darwin’s Origin of Species a time or two but little else, and then weighing in on, for example, the silliness of this or that aspect of the latest in evolutionary theory—Dawkins would be quick to point out my lack of credentials as well as my massive ignorance on the details, on which so much depends and wherein the devil (if you believe in one) resides. Simply put, I’m not expert in Dawkins’s disciplinary language. But the opposite is equally true. Much of Dawkins’s critique falls wide of the mark and fails miserably due to simple lack of expertise.21
The biggest problems do not emerge from the niceties of the guild of biblical studies, however, so much as from Dawkins’s general manner of reading the Bible. I do not call this reading style a “method,” as I doubt that it is self-reflective enough to be categorized as such. In any event, and in a word, Dawkins reads the Bible flatly. Very flatly. Almost always “literally”—whatever that means22—in a way not unlike and indeed altogether similar to those with whom he most disagrees.23 That is to say, Dawkins doesn’t read the Bible any differently or more sophisticatedly than his opponents; he simply delights in pointing out the Bible’s contradictions, or its immoral or submoral aspects, which, presumably, his interlocutors—flatfooted, literal types to a fault—are unable to account for.
Consider, for example, Dawkins’s comment on Gen. 19 and Lot’s offering of his daughters: “Whatever else this strange story might mean, it surely tells us something about the respect accorded to women in this intensely religious culture.”24 Well, no, not exactly. Or at least not nearly as straightforwardly as Dawkins implies. Lot is hardly a laudable character in this narrative, and the citizens of Sodom are portrayed negatively. In Gen. 18:20, God says, “The cries of injustice from Sodom and Gomorrah are countless, and their sin is very serious!” (CEB). Later in the same chapter we discover that God is willing to spare Sodom if even only ten (!) righteous people could be found therein (Gen. 18:22–33). One is hard pressed, then, to say that the conduct of either Lot or the Sodomites is something the narrator wishes to commend. And, if that conduct is not commendable with regard to their treatment of women, is it impossible to think that a different ethic, one more positive toward women, might be commended, at least implicitly, by this “intensely religious culture,” if not even this disturbing story itself? Of anyone in the story, it is the divine visitors who are the most likely “role models”—the good guys, as it were—and they strike the Sodomites with blindness before anything can be done to Lot or his daughters (Gen. 19:11). True, the story implies that in ancient Israel, women were denigrated and mistreated—at least by some, though not necessarily good, people and certainly not by all people (see Ruth 2:8–17)—and this is a significant and sad point, confirmed many times over by ancient texts and data but also by our own present-day circumstances. Dawkins is not the first modern commentator to highlight such facts; indeed, feminist interpretation drew attention to such items long ago. Even before feminism, however, the narrative qualities of stories like Gen. 19 showcased such details. By “narrative qualities” I mean to say, once more, that in no way does the narrative present the behavior of Lot or the citizens of Sodom as exemplary; nor is their behavior ever tied in the narrative (that is, by the narrator) to these characters being “intensely religious.” Quite the contrary, as Gen. 18:16–33 makes clear! This is a city full of injustice and sin; you’d be lucky to find ten righteous people in it. (And the fact that the city is destroyed in Gen. 19 indicates there were less than that number.)25 Still further, neither Lot nor the Sodomites mention God once in this story: they are hardly portrayed, then, as “intensely religious.” The only characters who mention God are God’s messengers, who announce the destruction of the city precisely because “the LORD has found the cries of injustice so serious” (Gen. 19:13 CEB). Even a dull reader will probably eventually understand the scene, deducing that the way the Sodomites wished to treat these guests, Lot, and/or his daughters is exactly such an example of unrighteous behavior, what the Hebrew text (Gen. 18:20) calls “outcry” (צעקה/זעקה, ṣəʿāqâ/zəʿāqâ).26 To sum up: Dawkins’s moral outrage at Gen. 19 is not entirely wrongheaded in theory, just wrongheaded about Gen. 19. His fatal faux pas is that he presents his outrage as being about this specific text; as such, his critique fails rather miserably due to poor reading.
Two other examples from Dawkins deserve mention. First, here is Dawkins’s take on Gen. 22, the near sacrifice of Isaac: “By the standards of modern morality, this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power relationships, and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defence: ‘I was only obeying orders.’”27 To be sure, Gen. 22 is a very difficult text, and exactly on the moral points that Dawkins invokes. But here too Dawkins seems out of his depth in reckoning with the story’s complexity or demonstrating the kind of interpretive dexterity that such a complex story demands of would-be interpreters. For starters, competent readers of Gen. 22 must wrestle with the significance of the narrative introduction to this story: “After these events, God tested Abraham” (Gen. 22:1 CEB).28 Now, Abraham might not know this is a divine test, but the reader does. That doesn’t “fix” the story by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a crucial detail at a crucial moment of the story—the very introduction to all that follows—that must be taken into consideration.29 But Dawkins is happy to ignore it altogether.
We might next consider how Dawkins’s critique of “this appalling story” rests almost entirely on it being “a literal fact” and how, according to him, many real people read the story as “literal fact” and thus live their lives accordingly.30 I myself am highly dubious of this assertion without some empirical studies of such real people (e.g., how many are there?) and their lives that are modeled (in what way?) on Gen. 22. Does that imitation include also God’s miraculous deliverance of their loved ones, I wonder? In any event, at this point in his “interpretation,” Dawkins is as simpleminded as it gets. It is certainly possible for someone to read the Gen. 22 story and go out and kill their child, saying that God told them to do so. That has in fact happened.31 But such an actualization is by no stretch of the imagination a logical or appropriate interpretation of the biblical narrative where, in fact, no child dies at all. Such an actualization is not good reading at all but a manifestation of psychosis, in the same way that it would be psychotic for someone to kill the elderly or infirm after reading a book on the survival of the fittest. “But Darwin told me to,” such a person might plead to the authorities at trial, but who would believe that person, and who would blame The Origin of Species for such violent actions?
Dawkins anticipates a response like this to some degree, but deems it proof of a larger anti-Bible point. The only way we guard against the worst parts of the Bible, Dawkins asserts, is by a random strategy of picking the nice bits from the nasty. But, he quickly asserts, we can only do that by “some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself.”32 But this simply isn’t true; neither is it a logical necessity. Once again, it is more than obvious from the very start of Gen. 22 itself that God does not want Abraham to kill Isaac. It is, after all, a test (22:1), and, lest any doubt remain, the child is rescued (22:13–14). I repeat that these details do not fix all of the difficult and troubling aspects of the story,33 but one thing is absolutely certain, contra Dawkins: they do not in this case come ab extra, from outside the narrative. They are, instead, a matter of simply reading the story, of reading it closely and carefully, and—perhaps most important—the habit of continued reading. There is, after all, far more to God and Abraham and Isaac and child sacrifice than simply, merely, or only Gen. 22.34 If one simply keeps reading, one learns a lot more about all of that (and more), and what to do about all of that (and more), in the same way that one learns more as one continues to read a science textbook—for example, that survival of the fittest in its most brutal form doesn’t apply to Savannah, Georgia, like it does to the savannah of Africa. One needs, in sum, a comprehensive knowledge of the book that one is reading. That may not suffice in every instance, but it may suffice in a large number of them, and it is entirely system-intrinsic such that Dawkins’s “outside the Bible hence anti-Bible” point is neither a logical nor a necessary sequitur. Let us return to the linguistic analogy: to adequately understand and use a language, one needs fluency. Knowing little bits here and there simply won’t do. Snippets definitely don’t count as the full language. They also can’t count as serious criticism.
As my second example, Dawkins is similarly out of his depth in the New Testament when, in continuing his extra-Bible–anti-Bible argument, he asserts, “Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them. . . . Since a principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.”35 Dawkins is thus proud to be an “Atheist for Jesus” and to have a T-shirt bearing that motto. But any New Testament scholar worth their salt would say that Dawkins’s statement seriously underestimates Jesus’s indebtedness to and embeddedness within the Judaism of his day, not to mention how deeply the New Testament writers—every one of them, evidently—are indebted to and embedded within the symbolic world of the Old Testament.36 And this is not even to mention how deeply the New Testament writers root Jesus himself in the Old Testament.37 If Dawkins means by Jesus’s departure from the Old Testament to refer to the so-called antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount, we might note that the departure there is hardly “antithetical” at all: Jesus makes the Ten Commandments harder than ever. The Decalogue is no longer just about murder but about being angry, not just about committing adultery but about lusting. Furthermore, insofar as the book of Deuteronomy itself expands on the significance of the Decalogue, clarifying its brief, almost poetically spare injunctions with fuller case law,38 one could make the case that Jesus not only derived his morals from Scripture but also, evidently, his exegetical method. But of course Dawkins is in the dark about all such matters.
The examples outlined above demonstrate Dawkins’s penchant for flat reading and signal other problems as well—the biggest of which is how poorly he understands hermeneutics writ large, especially in his repeated insistence that readings of Scripture that are not as flat as his are arbitrary:
We pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as symbols or allegories. Such picking and choosing is a matter of personal decision, just as much, or as little, as the atheist’s decision to follow this moral precept or that was a personal decision, without an absolute foundation. If one of these is “morality flying by the seat of its pants”, so is the other.39
In light of what I’ve already said above, it comes as no surprise to hear that I deem this to be far from accurate, and here I invoke the massive juggernaut of the history of biblical interpretation as proof of the point. To be sure, there is no small amount of willy-nilly interpretation contained therein, but there is just as much, if not far more, that is marked by careful rules—whether explicit or implicit—regarding how best to interpret the Bible, even and especially its most difficult and problematic parts, that is about as far from “flying by the seat of its pants” as is Dawkins’s own careful research in evolutionary biology. But, since Dawkins is largely ignorant of that history of interpretation (if not of interpretation, generally), he continues to insist that our picking of good bits and rejection of bad is completely arbitrary, completely unjustified by the biblical text itself, and only warranted by external, nonbiblical, and nonreligious criteria.40 (By the way, the contested nature of biblical interpretation—that not everyone agrees—is no different at precisely that point than the contested nature of scientific discovery: in the latter realm, too, there is often widely divergent opinion on this or that matter, but that does not mean that scientists are randomly or arbitrarily picking and choosing.)
A further and more specific word should be said about Dawkins’s tirade against writing parts of the Bible off as symbols or allegories. Here again Dawkins seriously misjudges and underestimates (or simply under-knows) the rules of figural interpretation, a hermeneutical approach that has a long and venerable history and is already manifest within the Bible itself.41 Because Dawkins appears to know nothing about any of that, he is content to caricature it as “that favourite trick of interpreting selected scriptures as ‘symbolic’ rather than literal. By what criterion do you decide which passages are symbolic, which literal?”42 The answer to that question is “By several criteria, certainly never just one criterion,” though there is not space to do justice to all that here.43 It must suffice to gesture toward one possible strategy of “picking and choosing” with reference to the particularly disturbing (to many people) issue of “holy war” (ḥērem).44 When one reads slowly (which is to say, carefully) and widely (which is to say, one continues to read)—even, let it be stressed, only within the Old Testament itself—one finds that the Old Testament largely contains and constrains the holy war tradition to the period of conquest and settlement (Deuteronomy–Judges). The motif is not found extensively elsewhere, which means that it is not enjoined as a dominant metaphor for the religious life or, more to the point, for religious practice(s).45 That situation could and should be immediately contrasted with the way the Old Testament everywhere and repeatedly evokes the exodus tradition as a root metaphor of its life with God.46 So, as problematic as the holy war tradition is—and it is very problematic, to be sure—there is nevertheless within the Bible itself a kind of textual “containment strategy” that limits the damage from being even worse than it is. Noticing that textual logic, then building out from it toward an ethic that is peaceable and ultimately nonviolent,47 is hardly an arbitrary picking and choosing on the basis of an external non- or irreligious criterion of morality. It is rather, and quite simply, a close and careful reading of the whole Bible, or, put differently, it is a case of knowing the full language, perhaps including its diachronic development (see chap. 3), not just little bits and pieces of it here and there. It seems that it is Dawkins, in the end, who is the one picking and choosing.
Now I seriously doubt that any of this would satisfy Dawkins. In his estimation it is too little, too late. The damage has already been done to the “poor slandered, slaughtered Midianites” and company.48 Of course, one needn’t be an atheist to be upset about the conquest tradition; a lot of Christians are upset by it too, and although many of these may not know the Bible very well (and so are just bothered in general, perhaps in the same way Dawkins is), many do know the text well.49 But the point is that the Bible itself may be upset with the conquest tradition. Better: the Bible itself is “upset” with the conquest tradition—insofar as it contains and constrains it—but only a careful and sophisticated understanding of the entirety of the Bible knows that. Dawkins doesn’t have such an understanding, and therefore what Dawkins knows of the Bible—the biblical “language” that he speaks—is neither full nor fluent, but, in the end, little more than a pidgin. There is no doubt that Dawkins gets some of the lexemes right—divine war, violence, killing, moral outrage, and the like—but he lacks the full vocabulary or a syntax that can appropriately relate the different words to one another. Put slightly differently, every language has “bad” words in it, but no language is comprised solely of the “bad” words.50 Critiquing a language’s “bad” words as if it had no “good” words in it is pure silliness, the epitome of linguistic ignorance. That this is not special pleading (no doubt what Dawkins would say it is) can be demonstrated by one final example drawn from his work.
Dawkins is quite taken with a paper written by a physician and evolutionary anthropologist, John Hartung, which argues that the famous injunction to “love your neighbor” in Lev. 19:18 applies only to one’s fellow Israelites.51 Dawkins takes great delight in the fact that this ethical “highpoint” in the Bible is, in his (Hartung’s) view, originally and therefore evidently only (though this last part is assumed rather than argued) exclusivist, which is to say that it refers only to one’s own in-group. In Dawkins’s words: “‘Love thy neighbour’ didn’t mean what we now think it means. It meant only ‘Love another Jew.’”52
A reply: this observation is hardly as “devastating” as Dawkins would make it seem because it is, in fact, nothing new. Any decent commentary on Leviticus, whether written by a Christian or Jewish scholar, will dutifully report that Hebrew רע/rē(a)ʿ refers to a nearby neighbor and thus not a citizen of a far distant country.53 The same holds true for much of the kin language found in the Bible. Thus far, then, Dawkins and Hartung are quite right, though again, this is hardly a novel insight, and religious people, not just atheists, have made the point—indeed long before Hartung wrote his paper or Dawkins read it!54 That is to say that one doesn’t need a PhD in Bible to make this observation about “neighbor” language (hence Hartung), but people with PhDs in Bible (and without them) have made the same observation, in contrast to how Dawkins would make it seem.55
But the biggest problem in all this is that Dawkins seems completely ignorant of the fact that there is more than just this one “exclusivist” text in the Bible concerning the love of others (or rather, nonothers: in-group members). Only a few verses later in the very same chapter (Lev. 19:34), one finds the very same injunction as Lev. 19:18:ואהבת . . . כמוך/wǝʾāhabtā . . . kāmôkā, “and you must love . . . as yourself,” only this time the object of love is not the in-group “neighbor” (רע/rē[a]ʿ) but the גר/gēr, a sojourner or “immigrant” (CEB)—a designation that without doubt refers to an out-group.56 If Lev. 19:18 is “exclusively exclusivist,” then Lev. 19:34 must be considered every bit as “inclusively inclusivist.” Alas, Dawkins seems blissfully unaware not only of Lev. 19:34 (if only he had kept reading for sixteen more verses!) but also of the many other texts that offer a strong counterperspective to the exclusivist strain that he delights in uncovering and that, admittedly, do cause problems for some people and some perspectives.57 To put things directly: there is far, far more in the Old Testament than just holy war or only intratribal loyalty (“love”) when it comes to the foreign nations. There’s the story of the Moabitess Ruth and her incorporation into Israel; or the streaming of the nations to Zion in Isa. 2:2–4//Mic. 4:1–3 (the repetition of the oracle itself is noteworthy); or God’s equal care for Egypt and Assyria, whom God calls by pet names typically reserved only for Israel (Isa. 19:19–22); or God’s concern to liberate other people groups (Cush, Israel, Philistia, Aram—perhaps a merism for “all people”) via exoduses, just like God did in bringing Israel out of Egypt (Amos 9:7);58 or Deuteronomy—the theological home of the holy war tradition!—which speaks of Israel’s nearest neighbors, often deep political enemies, as “relatives” (אחים/ʾāḥîm, “brothers”) who should not be bothered or engaged in battle in part because God performed conquest-like and land-giving activities on their behalf just as God did for Israel (Deut. 2:4–5, 9–12, 19–23).59 This listing is just the tip of the iceberg in the Old Testament proper and doesn’t yet invoke the New Testament and Jesus’s careful definition of “who is my neighbor” in the good Samaritan story—a definition that is anything but exclusivist and, seen in the light of the Old Testament texts I’ve cited, hardly a redefinition of “neighbor” either.60
Now perhaps this is unfair to Dawkins. After all, he is an easy target since he is no biblical scholar—nor is Hartung—so how can he be expected to know all that? But this is precisely the larger (linguistic) point: Dawkins doesn’t know “all that,” and so what he is critiquing is not the full story at all but a massive reduction of “all that”—taking just a part, just a bit, and the worst bit at that. Linguistically, what this means is that Dawkins only knows and only speaks an “Old Testament pidgin,” and therefore what he is critiquing is only an Old Testament pidgin, not the full Old Testament itself. His pidgin critique of a pidgin Old Testament is quite effective as far as it goes (we would have to agree with much of it), but it doesn’t go very far simply because the full language includes all of Dawkins’s “bad” parts but also many other “good” ones that he doesn’t treat at all, and which he certainly doesn’t treat together.61 But the coexistence of both kinds of discourse in the full language means that critiquing the “bad” bits alone simply won’t do. Dawkins scores points, surely, but only vis-à-vis the pidgin language, not against the real, full language. To quote Eagleton, “Critics of the most enduring form of popular culture in human history [i.e., Christianity] have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook.”62
Still further on this point, the coexistence of both “good” and “bad” parts—the binary presentation doesn’t begin to do justice to the linguistic complexity (see further below)—doesn’t mean that one is permitted to pick one part, whether “good” or “bad,” willy-nilly. Dawkins is spot on here, even though he is wrong in characterizing all such picking as willy-nilly. Instead, the coexistence of both parts (and yet still others) means one must be fluent in and attempt to understand the whole linguistic complex, which, like any language, can be exceedingly complex. That is difficult work indeed, involving language facility and dexterity won over long stretches of time—a sense of the whole system and the functionality of its constituent parts—all of which Dawkins doesn’t have or is unwilling to give. In its place, he himself is guilty of picking and choosing, which is a cardinal error in his book! Moreover, analogically speaking, Dawkins is content to critique a sentence like “Dick and Jane ran”—or, in biblical terms, “God is love” (1 John 4:16)—as “utterly simplistic.” Who beyond five years of age wouldn’t agree?
Unfortunately, Dawkins’s own sentences are equally simplistic when considered via the linguistic analogy. Consider the following, for example: “We . . . (and this includes most religious people) as a matter of fact don’t get our morals from scripture. If we did, we would strictly observe the sabbath and think it just and proper to execute anybody who chose not to.”63 Such a remark is tired and tiring; it hardly warrants a response. Suffice it to say that such a sentiment could only be voiced by someone who doesn’t know the full language of Scripture, is horribly simplistic about hermeneutics, is rigidly literalistic in the worst sense of the term, and is evidently completely unaware that (speaking within our analogy) languages change (see, e.g., Matt. 12:1–14; Mark 2:23–28; 3:1–6; Luke 6:1–11; 13:10–17; 14:1–6; John 5:1–18; 7:14–24; 9:1–34; cf. 1 Sam 21:6; Acts 15:22–29). Surely Dawkins would scoff at anyone who told him we should give up our smartphones and use Oldowan stone tools from the Lower Paleolithic period because, well, that’s the way humans used to do it, and for heaven’s sake (or some other entity’s sake), we must be consistent!
Let me reiterate that Dawkins isn’t all wrong: he gets several things exactly right. But that is what we would expect with a pidgin: greatly reduced, lacking significant vocabulary, largely devoid of nuance and sophistication, but not entirely distinct from the original languages (whether superstrate or substrate) that went into its production.64 To go even further, I believe Dawkins is completely correct when he asserts that many religious people do not get their morals (solely) from the Bible, for whatever reason (and some of those reasons should be thoughtfully considered—not all of Christianity or Christian theology is coterminous with what is found in Scripture). At one point Dawkins paints the situation starkly: “Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?”65 His implied answer is “No, they don’t,” and here I find myself in general agreement with Dawkins—though I agree for different reasons than his and with far different outcomes.
In my judgment, most people don’t have the slightest idea of what is actually written in the Old Testament because they, like Dawkins himself, cannot speak the language. The Old Testament is dying. If it isn’t already dead, it is at least reverting to a pidginized form, and those who do know anything of it, whether friend or foe, typically know only snippets: a phrase or two here, a word or three there. Dawkins himself is one of these second-, third-, or fourth-generation speakers who lack fluency; he just happens to be an unreligious one. Dawkins’s preferred interlocutors apparently are similarly impaired, however, which is further proof of my point that his pidgin critique is, in turn, only of (and therefore only valid for) another pidgin. Dawkins is fond of citing the most extreme examples of religious rhetoric: everything from “rapture” websites to the television evangelist Pat Robertson.66 With respect to the latter, Dawkins cites the following statement Robertson made after the citizens of Dover, Pennsylvania, removed members of their public school board who were trying to enforce the teaching of intelligent design in science classes:
I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover, if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God. You just rejected him from your city, and don’t wonder why he hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin, and I’m not saying they will. But if they do, just remember you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, then don’t ask for his help, because he might not be there.67
Perhaps Dawkins is correct when he writes that Robertson is “typical of those who today hold power and influence in the United States,”68 though I find that an incredible and unsubstantiated claim. Regardless, his is a critique of Robertson, not the Bible. And Robertson is speaking a pidgin here, no less than Dawkins himself. Since when, per Robertson’s syntax, is “intelligent design” equivalent to “God”? Or when is voting down the teaching of intelligent design equivalent to “voting” or “rejecting” God “out of a city”? Nowhere in the Old Testament, that’s for sure. Or the New Testament, for that matter. So while Dawkins may have scored one against Robertson, it is at best a case of pidgin versus pidgin. Neither is satisfying if we care about the full language. If anything, both are equally troubling because they manifest repidginization—the language on its way to death—because when a language reverts to pidgin form, it means that it is seriously threatened, imminently in danger of becoming extinct. To make matters still worse, lack of fluency among the faithful leaves them completely incapacitated to answer the likes of either Dawkins or Robertson. Without knowing more, the pidgin in question sounds sufficient if not altogether compelling, whether the result is that one is somehow bowled over by Dawkins’s intellect and walks away from faith forever, or one is overcome by Robertson’s piety and sends in a large contribution to the web address or 1-800 number on the screen.
This incapacity is exactly the kind of failure in problem solving that accompanies the death of a language (see chap. 3). One might also observe that church leaders have warned about such situations long before the twenty-first century. Already in “An Address to the Clergy” (1756), John Wesley makes the same argument I have, though he bases his plea on knowing the Bible in Greek and Hebrew:
Do I understand Greek and Hebrew? Otherwise, how can I undertake . . . not only to explain books which are written therein, but to defend them against all opponents? Am I not at the mercy of every one who does understand, or even pretends to understand, the original? For which way can I confute his pretence? Do I understand the language of the Old Testament? critically? at all?69
Let me reiterate that Dawkins is not alone in mounting his considered and cantankerous critique of the Old Testament. The work of other incisive minds (and pens!) could easily be cited on his behalf. Here again one thinks of such brilliant minds and sharp pens as Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett, to name a few.70 In my judgment, however, these other works offer little in terms of substantive critique beyond the ringing rhetoric that Dawkins has already offered. These other works are, in the main, variations on the same theme, each writer, of course, bringing a particular area of expertise to bear. But the substance of the atheistic critique is rather similar, and so I think the responses offered to Dawkins above can largely stand in for these others as well.71 In each case, some crucial piece or fairly large swath of the language that is the Old Testament (or Christian Scripture) seems to be woefully lacking, perhaps ignored but more likely completely, maybe even willfully, unknown. Nevertheless, this particular “company of scholars” is not solely of recent vintage (despite the “new” in the New Atheism) but is truly ancient insofar as the virulent anti–Old Testament polemic of the New Atheists has a heritage that long antedates the relatively recent coinage of the word atheism.72 As chapter 5 on the next sign of morbidity makes abundantly clear, there is a good bit of family resemblance between recent characterizations of the Old Testament by New Atheists and the famous second-century arch-heretic Marcion and the legacy he bequeathed to (Christian!) posterity.73