6. The Old Testament as morality: what kind of god is God? What morality does the Old Testament teach? And is it ‘right’?

A close look at the Old Testament shows that morally it is a very mixed bag. Stick in your thumb and you may get a plum – or you may lose a limb! Consider the ten statements below. Nine are from the Old Testament; one is not.

  1. ‘Therefore thus saith the Lord God … because of all thine abominations … the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers’;
  2. ‘Because thou servedst not the Lord thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart … he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he hath destroyed thee … The tender and delicate woman among you … her eye shall be evil toward the husband of her bosom, and toward her son, and toward her daughter, And toward her young one that cometh out from between her feet [the New Oxford Annotated Bible has ‘afterbirth’], and toward the children which she shall bear: for she shall eat them for want of all things secretly in the siege’;
  3. ‘Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bond-men [slaves] for ever’;
  4. ‘If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother … Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out to the elders of his city, and to the gate of his place … And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die’;
  5. ‘For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts … as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast: for all is vanity’;
  6. ‘Happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that dasheth thy little ones against the stones’;
  7. ‘A gift in secret [a bribe] pacifieth anger: and a reward [bribe] in the bosom, strong wrath’;
  8. ‘And he took it, and the king thereof, and all the cities thereof; and they smote them with the edge of the sword, and utterly destroyed all the souls that were therein; he left none remaining … but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded’;
  9. ‘And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered’;
  10. ‘In the name of God, the lord of mercy, the giver of mercy. When God’s help comes and He opens up your way, when you see people embracing God’s faith in crowds, celebrate the praise of your Lord and ask His forgiveness: He is always ready to accept repentance’.

The odd one out, of course, is number 10, which is from the Qur’an.6

How can we make sense of these? If the Old Testament is a unity, which of these views represents that unified moral view? And if it is a multiplicity, which of its voices should we attend to?

Let us go back for a moment to Shakespeare, our other Desert Island companion. Shakespeare is a historical character who died in Stratford in April 1616; we have his will, we have the testimony of people who saw his plays and read his poems, and his works were published both during and shortly after his death. Yet the exact texts of Shakespeare’s plays are a matter of constant dispute. There is disagreement about the wording as between the First Folio and the First Quarto. There are phrases that editors usually emend because the original doesn’t make sense. There are passages that are notoriously difficult (does Gertrude really mean it when she describes her son as ‘fat and scant of breath’? Hamlet? Fat?). There are lines that no one can make sense of (what does Hamlet mean when he says, ‘The dram of eale/Doth all the noble substance of a doubt/To his own scandal’?). There are disagreements between critics as to which is the original version of some of the texts, there are disagreements about the order in which the plays were written, and there are plays (for example Two Noble Kinsmen, Henry VII, King John) where it is not clear how much if any Shakespeare actually wrote.

And all this says nothing about questions of interpretation: of how, once we have an ‘agreed’ text, we should actually make sense of it; of what it was, what it meant – or was supposed to mean – in its own time, and what it means now.

If this is true of Shakespeare, who died 400 years ago, how much more true will it be of the Bible, whose earliest elements date back 3,000 years?

The Bible is traditionally held – by Jews and Christians alike – to be the word of God, with every line divinely inspired and packed with meaning and guidance. On closer inspection, this is a difficult claim to maintain.

Some of the problems in the Old Testament are matters of sheer textual inaccuracy: cases where the text ‘is carefully preserved even where it does not make sense’.7 Misprints and omissions creep into typeset Bibles – see the two-page list of errors printed at the end of the first King James Bible, or the 1576 Version which contrived to omit a vital word in the seventh commandment, making Moses solemnly command his people to commit adultery. And if these occur in English versions, where they can be traced, we shall never know what errors, inaccuracies, transpositions, repetitions, omissions, and reworkings found their way into the texts in ancient times through the long process of copying by hand that brought them into recorded history.

Then there is the matter of moral inconsistencies: of passages where teaching seems frankly contradictory.

  1. The men of Sodom ask Lot to hand over his (male) guests so that they can have sex with them. Lot declines – but offers them instead his two (virgin) daughters (Genesis 19:8). Result: though the offer is not taken up, the Genesis writer seems in this particular case to approve of this behaviour.
  2. Lot’s daughters, thinking that they will not be able to find husbands, get their widowed father drunk and have intercourse with him, thus contravening Leviticus 18:6 and 9 but begetting children that will continue his line (Genesis 19:30–38). Result: approved again …
  3. The patriarch and prophet Abram (later to be renamed Abraham) enters Egypt as a pauper and encourages his attractive wife Sarah to enter Pharaoh’s harem, describing her as his sister. Pharaoh gives him ‘sheep, and oxen, and he asses, and menservants, and maid-servants, and she asses, and camels’ (Genesis 12:16). When the ruse is discovered, Abram takes Sarah back, despite her adultery, and returns with her to Israel a wealthy man (Genesis 13:2). Result: approved, at least for Abram (indeed he pulls off the trick again in Genesis 20).
  4. Judah (founder of one of the twelve tribes of Israel and the person after whom the southern kingdom is named) has three sons. His eldest son marries a woman called Tamar. The young man dies, as does Judah’s second son. Judah, as is customary, promises that he will give Tamar his third son in marriage – but delays. Tamar becomes impatient and decides to take the law into her own hands. Disguised as a roadside prostitute, she seduces her father-in-law Judah. Found to be pregnant and accused of harlotry, she shows in public the tokens Judah has given her, and successfully forces him to find her a husband (Genesis 38). Result: approved for Tamar, despite Leviticus 20:12, which orders that intercourse between father-in-law and daughter-in-law is punishable by death.
  5. Judah’s second son Onan is asked to ‘go in’ to his dead brother’s wife and ‘raise up seed to your brother’ – the so-called ‘levirate marriage’. Reluctant to beget children who will not count as his, he ‘spilled [his seed] on the ground’ (Genesis 38:9). Result: he is struck dead by God, and on the basis of this text, taken to reveal a general law, Christian sects and faiths around the world (including of course Roman Catholicism) condemn masturbation (‘the sin of Onan’), coitus interruptus, and birth control.

Now there are two ways in which we can look at inconsistencies and contradictions. One way is to assume that there is a single meaning and purpose behind all these texts, a recoverable ‘right answer’ to these puzzles: a single message, but a breakdown in transmission.

But what if there are different messages?