A Bible Study by the only people truly qualified to study the bible — those who don't believe.

Exodus

As many of you can probably tell, the story of Moses isn’t among my favorites. Squalid and cruel, I have a hard time grasping anything truly human within it, a tale with no mercy or even basic human compassion. Because of this Moses also ranks low on my list of biblical people I’d like to hang with. Not that it’s a long list, and I freely admit Joseph, Jacob, Isaac and the rest in Genesis had many faults, but they never pissed me off the same way Moses does. False piety and vicious righteousness ooze through those original patriarchs, along with the seemingly required brutal sexism but never such a willing complicity in infanticide, never such an arrogant affront to any kind of decency. Hell, human as they were, the other old bastards would likely be fun to party with. Sit down with a few beers and chat a bit about the good old days. Except Noah of course, everyone knows that bitch is always getting naked when drunk.

Seriously though, Moses reeks with such a manufactured humility with his seeming reluctance to join in God’s plan to make God himself seem great, but underneath his whole persona lies a joy in the destruction of Egypt, a pleasure in their pain. Abraham at least had the balls to argue for Sodom. Where did Moses do anything close? Where is the recognition of the unfairness of demanding that someone change their ways but never letting them actually do so. The other patriarchs who, though vicious and petty, were still thoroughly human. Moses is a jackass, a sadist, a chickenshit who flees when he’s in trouble and only returns when he becomes lickspittle to omnipotence. This is not courage; it’s cowardice! Courage is doing what is right in the face of danger, not torturing admittedly sinful people when they can do nothing about it. I’d call that sadism, and a rather cowardly sadism at that. Rather than the air of the righteous man, the reek of the Nazi death-camp guard hovers over Moses, happy to torment simply because he can.

Hardly the most admirable of characteristics? If I am to admire someone, I have need to admire better people, far better people.

But alas, we must go on. The story needs to be told. We’ve arrived at the Exodus itself, the great departure of the Hebrews from the land of Egypt. The tenth plague, the murder of Egyptian children, was enough for the Pharaoh. After his son was slain by the infanticide, God finally allowed him to set the Israelites free. If even at this point, you at all doubt that God kept Pharaoh from acting please read the preceding posts or even better, the original Exodus 5 -12 to see how much God interfered with the decision-making ability of Egyptian leadership to get to this point. He aimed his guns at the Egyptian children, not because he didn’t have a choice, but because he wanted to. Omnipotent beings have, by nature, unlimited options. He simply wanted to make the Egyptians cower and quail for all time, so he struck them in the soft underbelly every culture on earth has: it’s love for its babies.

So the Israelites leave Egypt with all their livestock, women and children. They flee, but God is unwilling to allow this to happen without a little more pain. God can’t just let the Egyptians mourn their dead and the Hebrews escape. This is contrary to his interests and desires, so he milks the Exodus for every ounce of suffering he can, and let me tell you, that is a lot. Egypt lying in ruins and a huge chunk of its children dead is not enough for Yahweh to show that he’s the man… err… the God. He gets into Pharaoh’s head and twice more admits openly that he makes the Pharaoh obstinate, so obstinate that he is forced to pursue the Hebrews into what is yet another elaborate trap that God has set for the Egyptian people. God has interfered with their free will. They act exactly how he wants them to act. They do just what he demands they do. They pursue and are destroyed. Ah, how God loves it when his sinister plans come together.

Mistranslated as the Red Sea, Moses actually leads his people across the Reed Sea, a large marshy area no where near as grand. Never-the-less, the literal interpretation that most fundamentalist claim is that Moses, led by a pillar of smoke by day and of fire by night, pursued by the vengeful Egyptians, arrives at the Red Sea raises his arms and parts the waters. Then when the Egyptians, forced by God to pursue, tried to cross Moses raised his arms once more and the waters collapse back into the sea drowning the Egyptians.

Goddamn! Don’t you just love the happy ending. This book makes me feel so warm and cuddly inside.

Problems, inconsistencies and sheer improbabilities arise on the strictly literal interpretation of this event. As if anyone here is surprised.

First, lets revisit the sheer number of people who fled Egypt. I know we’ve been here before, but it’s far too absurd not to recap a bit. 600,000 men left Egypt not including women and children. Adding an equal number of women and just two and a half children per couple, a small family by biblical standards, the totals stand at 2.8 million people who fled Egypt. Now that’s a lot of people. To put this in perspective, this is the entire population of North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana combined or as a further example it’s a million more people than live in the entire metropolitan area of Las Vegas. It’s also equal to the number of people living in the Chicago city limits. I could go on, but the reality a literalist must face is that it’s a massive number of people to migrate from any area. To make matters even more imposing, the Bible indicates that they all left in a single day exactly 430 years after their ancestors arrived. Holy shit, Batman! Even with modern transportation and technology and bullwhips, we could never evacuate all of Chicago in a day.

Let’s go and play with these numbers, and see if we can grasp how big a group this size really is. To get an idea how much space such a group would take up let’s look at the marching horde. For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume they travel in rows spreading across the land. Each person takes up five feet in the row and a row passes by a set point every 5 seconds. This is actually pretty tight spacing for families on a forced march, but lets use it. Let’s also assume they walk for 12 hours a day and leave the rest for cooking, eating, pissing and the like. With these assumptions, there would be 8640 rows of people each 1620 feet long and containing 324 people. At 2 miles per hour, this vast column of humanity would be 24 miles long and a third of a mile wide. That’s 8 square miles of marching humanity packed tight as sardines! This would make the vast herds of bison that formerly roamed the Great Plains of North America seem insignificant. Even in a rich land, they would, like locusts, consume everything in their path.

Perhaps you think I’ve cooked the numbers to support my preconceptions. Think again. The fact is I’ve really been very generous. These are people taking young children and elderly on a migration through the desert. How fast could you walk in Egypt throughput the day? Now carry a young child and herd another at your side. Even young men at the very pinnacle of health simply could not do this and move faster. Take our military in any war through our history and tell them they have to move 2.8 million men past a single point in a day and they’d call you insane, even shit-assed crazy. But maybe you think that they weren’t burdened and traveled light. You’d be wrong. Vast herds of livestock went with them, and if you remember, they carried away the wealth of Egypt given to them by the people whose children had just been murdered. Truly, the number of 2.8 million is very likely an underestimate because the number of children would likely be higher and Exodus 12/37-38 states:

The Israelites set out from Rameses for Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, not counting the children. A crowd of mixed ancestry also went up with them, besides their livestock, very numerous flocks and herds.

This people of mixed ancestry is not included in the 600,000 men, and please notice again how they fail to mention the women. Typical, but we have to assume that they left too. No matter how you jack the numbers around, you end up with totals higher than what I have given. No matter how you look at it, their camps would stretch for miles in all directions. If every person took up 100 square feet, far too little area allowing for space between families, cooking and latrine areas, spaces for livestock and other required items, the camps alone would cover at least ten square miles and I am certain that’s a vast underestimate. Does any literalist realize what a group this size would need? Can you imagine just the food and water requirements? In a desert?? WTF? To add to your perspective, think of just how much human shit would litter the trail. At just a single pound of fecal material per person per day, 42,000 tons per month of fertilizer would lie drying in the desert. After 40 years of wandering, these “deposits” should be so common people today would be rounding them up and selling them as holy relics. “Moses’ semi-petrified shit here. Cures cancer, hemorrhoids and locusts!”

On the other hand, a march of this intensity would be very hard on the very old and very young, fatally hard on many. Can you imagine how many corpses of the elderly and babies would be left to rot in the Egyptian sun?

The numbers are absurd. Period. A head would have to be placed quite far up an ass not to notice the logical inconsistency here. Like any other ancient source, the numbers can only be vastly exaggerated, if not entirely fictional.

Oh, I am also quite aware of the argument that these people were supported by divine intervention. I call bullshit! The fundies argue their way out of every logical dilemma by bringing up divine intervention. By the unsacred shit of Darwin, can we please get through a discussion of the Bible without having to dredge up some squalid miracle to get it all to make sense! For Frak’s sake people, did your God really design a world so poorly that he has to constantly keep pushing buttons, turning knobs, and hammering on all the internal workings of the universe to get the results he needs? Intelligent design, my ass. Slapped together rubbish would be more accurate.

Sigh!

Among the other ridiculous concepts here is the requirement that the firstborn of every Hebrew creature, whether human or beast, be dedicated to the Lord, sacrificed if beast, redeemed, whatever the hell that means, if man. I say man because female children seem to be excluded. I guess there is one small benefit for a female living in a brutally patriarchal society, you’re not even good enough to be sacrificed. Now there’s a privilege my feminist wife won’t likely be demanding soon.

And then there’s the idea that we take the infanticide of the Egyptian children and make a ritualistic celebration out of it, Passover. Not exactly what I would try to remember about this whole event. Were I Yahweh, I’d be trying to bury that little youthful indiscretion under the rug. What? I slaughtered whose children? What Devil’s shit was I smoking?

OK. Even after reading this a dozen times, I shudder under the implications of worshiping such a being. I perpetually find it ironic when the fundamentalists claim that the Koran is a terribly violent book and the root of all Middle Eastern evil. Have they actually read the blood soaked pages of the Old Testament? Do they just skip over the tough parts, close their eyes to any part that violently contradicts an idea of the later Prince of Peace? Or do they just use that old head and ass symbiosis they have perfected so well. In reading the Bible, most fundamentalists seem to follow a hear no evil, see no evil, do whatever evil gets us ahead kind of mentality. Again, hardly admirable!

That’s one thing I have to give the Westboro Baptists, you know those pricks who protest the military funerals because they think God is punishing America for allowing gays to survive. Think about this. The Westboro Baptists do have a purity to their faith which is in the very least not hypocritical. I assure you, I do not mean this as a compliment. The world abounds in sincere evil, and true faith like they exhibit is a malignancy, a poison, a horror. But not a hypocrisy, for these Baptists know their Yahweh. They, better than most, truly understand the spirit of the Old Testament, for they are quite correct that Yahweh is a nasty old shit who gets his rocks off demanding complete obedience to arbitrary commands and flexes his powers in ways that maim the most innocent people. All this is in the name of justice of course. They understand the undiluted atrocity of the prick they worship and do their best to emulate him. Their problem is not that they are misinterpreting the Old testament or the mind of Yahweh. I think they have nailed the old bastard pretty well. In all their ravings and preaching of death and eternal torture, they’re just trying to gain favor with their imaginary hero. They are truly following the teachings of their God. They have simply picked a bad god, a terrible one, in fact. They have thrown their admiration and worship into the mud and shit and slime likely never to pick it up again.

They could do so much better. Like many fundamentalists, this would be a far better world, and they would be far better people if they would just hold dogshit as sacred.

Come to think of it, the smell would be roughly the same.

And would likely wash off easier.