The Torah

  Henry H. Lindner

Note: I have copied this paper because I think Mr. Lindner has had some of his work removed from the net by dissenters and I didn't want this one to get lost.

  The author argues that the Torah, which forms the basis of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, presents a perverse theory of God and of mankind.  Instead of a loving God who cherishes his created humans as a human mother cherishes her children, the Torah presents a God that wants nothing from mankind except obedience, worship, and burnt animal sacrifice.  He gives one tribe of humans a license to live by conquest, slaughter, theft, and slavery.  The Torah teaches that humans are innately prone to disobey God, and are therefore innately flawed, innately evil.  It teaches that sex is dirty, that women are inferior to men, and that life consists of following rigid rules whose violation is punishable by death.  The Torah is, in fact, a blueprint for a militaristic, totalitarian society based on the conquest and exploitation of outsiders.  It advocates tribal supremacism and condones mass murder and enslavement.  It advocates a moral double standard even for aliens living among the Israelites and following their basic laws.  It is patriarchal and profoundly misogynous.

  Let’s talk about the idea of God and of his relationship to man as presented in the Torah, the basis of Judaism and the first five books of the Christian Old Testament.  Let us suppose that there does exist a single Supreme Being in some other dimension or place—a being that is not only extraterrestrial but extra-Cosmic.  This Supreme Being decides to create a Cosmos—the one we live in.  He either creates it so that life can evolve within it under appropriate circumstances, or he chooses the planet Earth out of all the billion billion planets as the place in which he will create life.  Either way, let us say that he creates thinking human beings who are bewildered by their situation and driven to try to explain how they came to exist.

  Now why would this supremely intelligent, powerful being create a Cosmos that includes thinking, language-using creatures?  Was he lonely?  Did he want some creatures that he could communicate with?  Was he curious to see what knowledge our puny minds would achieve?  We are told that God created man “in his image”.  We can’t know what that means but it probably refers to our mental capacity more than our physical appearance.  We find that God created man and woman in a state of innocence and that he wanted to test his creatures.  He wanted to see whether we would obey a couple simple commands:  not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil nor of the Tree of Life.[1]  Now the story gets more complicated because we are told that there exists another intelligent God-like being called Satan.  He is a sort of alter-ego of God—a troublemaker whom God allows to exist for some reason—perhaps because God wants to see whether the humans will obey him or instead obey Satan.  Now if God is omniscient and already knows what Satan will do, and what the humans will do, and what will happen from that day to today, then we are really stuck wondering why God decided to create this Cosmos in the first place—unless he just wanted to watch the entire spectacle unfold instead of just imagining what would happen.

  So the humans are “tempted” by Satan to do something God forbids them to do—to obtain knowledge by eating of the Tree of Knowledge.  Message:  Humans should obey God and not seek knowledge.  What a strange creator that doesn’t want his humans to learn anything!  Doesn’t every loving mother want her children to grow and learn and develop their potential?  Adam and Eve choose knowledge, for which they are banished from the Garden of Eden and forced to learn how to survive and to bear all the difficulties of life.  We should have chosen, I guess, to remain comfortable and stupid in the Garden.  After the expulsion, we find that humans constantly chose to do exactly what God tells them not to do—to the point that God decides to kill almost all human beings in a worldwide flood, sparing only one man, Noah, and his family.  One man and his family?  The only humans on Earth worth salvaging?

  Now you have to admit that this story is getting very strange.  Why did God create mankind if he knew that man’s ability to think and chose would cause him to disobey God’s commandments?  Why did he create most humans to be so “bad” that he would have to kill them all except Noah’s family?  What is “good” for mankind after all?  To live in accordance with the nature God gave him or only to obey God’s arbitrary commandments—that run completely contrary to his nature?  It appears, in the case of the Tree of Knowledge, to be the latter!  What does God want from these humans?  Why didn’t he just leave them alone?  Why did he create Satan and tolerate his existence and his meddling with the human race?

  Well, it all gets much, much worse.  The Torah is racist!  The descendants of Ham, a son of Noah, are condemned to be slaves, all because Ham happened to see Noah naked when Noah was drunk.[2]  (Europeans later assuaged their guilt over their enslavement of Indians and Africans by rationalizing that they were descendents of Ham!)  All Semites are descendents of Noah’s son Shem.  The descendants of Ham (Caanan) are supposed to serve the descendents of Shem, and the descendents of Japheth (Europeans and Asians?) are to be enlarged and dwell in the tents of Shem.  Choosing from the descendents of Shem, God decides to enter into a special relationship with one man, Abraham, and his descendants to whom he promises a certain region of the Earth—a place already filled with people.  God specifies the descendents of Jacob, Abraham’s grandson who stole his brother’s birthright, to be his “chosen people” and promises them that they will rule not only Canaan but eventually the entire world! 

  Jehovah makes his chosen tribe suffer slavery in Egypt before bringing them to the “promised land”.  As they travel there, he is their constant companion—protecting them, feeding them; appearing as a cloud in the day and a column of fire at night.  Today we would say that they had an encounter with an extra-terrestrial.  He gives them ten major commandments to follow in their relationships to one another, and innumerable lesser commandments about how they are to “worship” him.  He tells them to kill animals and burn them whenever they break his rules.  He tells them that they must worship him according to very strict guidelines and gives them plans for building the Ark of the Covenant and the tabernacle for his worship—where he will dwell among them.  He gives the Israelites a long list of unclean foods that they are not to eat including rabbits, pigs, lobster, octopus, clams, snails, frogs, etc.[3]  All animals must be killed and butchered according to certain rules.  These food laws are obviously intended to make the Israelites feel special, to look upon people who do not follow such rules as unclean and inferior, and to practically prevent any social interaction of Israelites with non-Israelites.  (It is well known that these books were written during or after the Jews’ Babylonian captivity, centuries after the events of the Torah took place, so it is no great stretch to conclude that the Levitical priests who wrote these books added all these rules specifically to prevent the assimilation of their fellow Jews and to enable them to rule and exploit their fellow Jews.)

  Now we have to wonder, why does the Supreme Being who created this magnificent Cosmos and all life on this Earth want to play this crazy commandment/sin/sacrifice game with one group of  human beings?  Is he playing with a few humans we might play with and try to train our own pets?  Why does the creator of everything want to obeyed and worshipped?  Does he have an ego problem?  Why choose to experiment with just one man’s descendants?  Why should he purposefully put this one group of humans into conflict with the rest?  Why not reveal himself to and give his commandments to the entire human species?  Does he want to leave the rest of the species as a control group—to see what theories and religions they develop without his special intervention?

  Now let us look at the moral/social/political regime that God invents for his pet people.  Is it a wonderful celebration of nature and of human life?  Does it bring out the best in man in accordance with his nature?  Does it promote love and the pursuit of truth?  Does it promote peace and brotherhood among all human beings?  Does God love and cherish his people as much as we love and cherish our own children?  Well, we already know that God’s not interested in humans knowing anything beyond what he tells them, and he wants complete obedience and ritualistic worship, so he fails the human parent test as far as I’m concerned.  Let’s look a close look at the moral and social aspects of this “covenant” he makes with the Israelites.

  The first thing we notice is that this regime is based on rules and punishment, with almost all infractions punishable by death.  That’s right—death for breaking the rules.  Let’s start with the most reasonable part, the “ten commandments” from Exodus 20.  It is clear from their context that these commandments apply only to Israelite-Israelite relationships.  Some of these rules seem quite appropriate for any human society, since people can hardly live together if they kill, steal, and lie.  Children will naturally honor their parents—if their parents have given them love and support.  In addition, however, are four commandments requiring that humans recognize and worship him only and show special respect to him—all infractions of which are punishable by death.  Why?  Why must they be commanded to worship him in certain ways and punished by death if they don’t?

  However, these are not the last of the commandments.  In fact, the Torah includes hundreds of commandments (613 according to orthodox Jews), most of them punishable by death.  This God rules by fear.  He tells them that he will kill anyone who touches Mount Sinai[4] and the ark of the covenant.  Any man who has sex with another man should be killed.[5]  Any human who has sex with an animal should be killed.[6]  Why all this killing?  Why is God so obsessed with human sexual conduct?  Not only is sexual intercourse outside male-female marriage punishable by death, even permissible sex is unclean!  After having sex, both the man and woman must wash immediately and are still considered unclean for the rest of the day.[7]

  The Torah is profoundly anti-female.  The fact that it was Eve who succumbed to temptation in the garden of Eden and caused Adam to sin is well-known and abused.  In a similar instance, when Aaron and Miriam complained about Moses, it was Miriam who was punished with leprosy, not Aaron![8]  The Israelites were a patriarchal society that viewed women as lesser human beings, somewhere between men and livestock.  Though there were many instances where leading Israelite men slept with prostitutes, there is no commandment against this nor any condemnation of it, as long as the prostitute is not an Israelite.  Virginity is required of wives but not of husbands.  Any girl who willingly has sex with a man outside of marriage should be killed.  If a man accuses his wife of adultery, she has to undergo a bizarre test reminiscent of, and probably productive of the Salem witchcraft tests.[9]  No similar test is mentioned for a man accused of adultery by his wife!  The punishment for a man who rapes a virgin is not death, he simply has to pay the father a fine and then marry her![10]  However, if a man marries a woman and then can prove that she was not a virgin as she claimed (no blood on the sheets), then the wife should be killed![11]  Talk about a sexual double standard!  Not only are women unclean when menstruating, there are many rules that make them subservient to and less valuable than men.  A father may nullify any vows made by a daughter (young woman) living in his house or by his wife.[12]  A woman is not to be touched for an entire week after her menstrual bleeding begins.[13]  A woman is unclean for seven days after delivering a son, but for 14 days after delivering a daughter.[14]  The value of a male compared to a female is set at a ratio of 5:3.[15]

  Talk about totalitarianism!  A persistently disobedient child should be killed.[16]  Any witch, sorceress, or medium, or anyone who worships or sacrifices to any other God should be killed.[17]  Anyone who doesn’t perform a sacrifice just right should be killed.  Anyone who does work on the Sabbath should be killed.  Anyone who shows contempt for a priest or judge should be killed.[18]  Anyone who challenges the authority of the leaders or disobeys the leaders should be killed, indeed God himself kills Korah when he denounces the dictatorship of Moses and Aaron and demands that the 250 council members have a greater say.[19]  Imagine it—killed for demanding greater democracy!

  What about non-Israelites?  How are they to be treated?  Interesting, even before the captivity in Egypt, Jacob’s sons deceived the Hivites by promising to become their allies.  They told the Hivite men that they must be circumcised.  When the Hivite men were recovering from circumcision, Jacob’s sons killed all the men and took their women, children, and possessions as booty.  They claimed to be justified in committing this heinous crime because one Hivite man raped one of their daughters.[20]  However, the Hivite man had offered to both pay the fine and marry the girl, just as later Levitical law commanded!  Thus was established a principal of disproportionate retaliation—but it gets worse.  After leaving Egypt and coming to Canaan, God commands the Israelites to kill all non-Israelites in the Promised Land and steal their land, houses, and livestock.  God tells them to make no covenants with them.[21]  Why do all these different people in Canaan deserve extermination?  Once, God claims it is because of their “wickedness”, but we have to wonder.  Were they really so wicked or were they just living in the wrong place?  Were they going around slaughtering entire tribes and stealing everything in sight?  I doubt it.  Notice that the Israelites’ genocidal policies are not even limited to the Promised Land!  God also tells them that they have the right to kill or enslave any people living outside the Promised Land![22]  God tells them that when they conquer a people, they may keep the attractive women, or sometimes just the virgins, as their wives.[23]  Furthermore, God institutes a moral double standard for the Israelites in their relationship with the non-Israelites who live among them and observe their laws.  Gentiles can be sold as slaves but not Israelites.[24]  Gentiles should be charged interest on loans, but not fellow Israelites.[25]  God tells the Israelites to love their neighbor as themselves, but by “neighbor” he clearly means only other Israelites.[26]  In one passage only, Israelites are told to not mistreat the aliens living among them, indeed that they should love them as they love themselves.[27]  However, what force does this lone admonition of love towards a small subset of aliens have when all other aliens who do not follow their rules and don’t live among them are free game for theft, killing, and enslavement?  It’s still “us” against “them”, and “they” are to be treated well only if “they” serve “our” purposes!

  This is a tribal cult designed for conquest and plunder.  The tribe is to exist by killing other people and stealing their land, houses, and livestock.  Those outsiders that it doesn’t kill, it enslaves.  Those it doesn’t enslave, it exploits with a moral double standard.  The Torah thereby negates the natural brotherhood of man and places the “chosen people” in a society based on war and coercion instead of love and cooperation.  The Torah commands tribalism, genocide, war, slavery, and racial discrimination.  It is the negation of all human values.  Now why did God want that?  Why did he want some human beings to kill and enslave others?  Why does he want these humans to live a life of perpetual fear and war? 

  Obviously, we should rethink our culture’s generally high assessment of these ancient Levitical writings—and we should think long and hard about the deleterious effects the Torah must have on every mind infected by its ideas.

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