The ongoing genocide in Gaza at the hands of Apartheid Israel has brought the question of biblical interpretation from the margins to the center.
The impetus to do so has come from Benjamin Netanyahu. Think of his pronouncements about his Amalek strategy justifying his attacks in Gaza. Couple that with his IOF (Israel Occupation Force) song and dance celebrating the same. It has all raised the perennial question of the very nature of the God of the Jewish Testament.
And the question is simple. It was articulated by the ancient fathers of the Christian community - men like Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and the hereticated Marcion of Sinope. All of them wondered how anyone with a drop of humanity or possessed of the most elementary moral compass could believe in a God who commanded complete genocides directed specifically against women, children, infants, cattle, and sheep?
Of course, similar questions might be addressed today to Bibi Netanyahu or Genocide Joe Biden. Where's your humanity? Have you completely lost your moral compass? What kind of God would justify your crimes?
So, let's examine the question of Apartheid Israel's genocidal God. Let's think about divinity bereft of moral compass. Start with facing the fact that the Hebrew Bible might not be about God at all. Next look at the powerful beings who are presented there. And finally, consider Jesus' attitude towards the so-called God of Israel.
No God in the Hebrew Bible
On this first and second points, I'm following the direction of scholars like the Australian Paul Wallis and the Italian biblical scholar Mauro Biglino. They question entirely the traditional interpretations of the biblical God.
According to Biglino and Wallis, the Hebrew Bible's genocidal God is no God at all. In fact, the Hebrew Testament itself is not about God. Instead, close examination reveals that it is about "Elohim," i.e., "Powerful Ones."
These were Beings from Beyond who in the ancient world vied for control of our planet. Stories of such paleo-contacts with extraterrestrials (ETs) are found throughout revered texts across the planet from China to Egypt, and Babylon; from the Philippines to the Mayan Popol Vu. In fact, every ancient civilization holds that we came from above - from the sons of the stars.
Most often these foreign entities appear in reptilian forms or as fire-breathing dragons, Sometimes they possess wings. At others, the Powerful Ones appear in human form and are recognized as giants, witches, magicians, governors, lawgivers, as "Sons of God" or simply as kings whose specific names were forgotten, but who were remembered as divine. Still elsewhere the Powerful Ones take the form of "angels," (messengers from beyond) or demons. Invariably, they possess super-human powers.
In biblical texts these "Powerful Ones" had names such as El, El Shaddai, Elion, Baal, Ruach, Ashera, and Yahweh. Together they comprised a family that included 70 sons of El. Among them Yahweh was an inferior subordinate of his father who apportioned to his offspring control of various geographical regions. Yahweh's assignment was to protect the nation of Israel. (Note El's name in the term Yisra-El itself.)
Only at the beginning of the first millennium BCE was El replaced by Yahweh as the supreme and only God. That is, Jewish polytheism and henotheism morphed into monotheism for the first time around 530 BCE - after the Babylonian exile. It was then that Judah's elite in the persons of Ezra, Josiah (640-609 BCE), and Nehemiah reformulated the nation's longstanding traditions. Their patriarchal work removed, downplayed, and/or reinterpreted all references acknowledging the existence and power of Gods from above other than Yahweh, Judah's national deity.
Put otherwise, the Jewish biblical tradition was rewritten with the name Yahweh pasted over references to the Elohim as if Israel had always been monotheistic. This is how Yahweh became responsible for the genocides of El Shaddai and other "divinities" who lacked human feeling or moral compass.
The reformers took special pains to erase references to goddess worship. Against great resistance, Israel's beloved goddess Ashera was consigned to the biblical memory hole.
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