The Bible UnveiledMangasarian, M. M. (Mangasar Mugurditch)
Religion
The Bible Unveiled
Mangasarian, M. M. (Mangasar Mugurditch)
Bible -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Could intolerance go further than that! Other peoples are not to have
any gods at all. Even as their lands will be taken away from them, so
shall their gods. And since their Jehovah never intended to be the god
of anybody else but a Hebrew, it followed that the Jews were the only
people privileged to own a god.
Why should "all the high places," where the other nations served their
gods, be destroyed? Did not Moses go to Mount Sinai, a high place, to
worship Jehovah? Why may not a Gentile have his own high place, as well
as a Jew? Surely, the heathen gods on their mountains could not possibly
have given a more unmerciful set of commandments than those which
Jehovah dictated to Moses. There was no breadth in the God of the Jews.
_Live and let live, or Think and let think_, is the conquest of
modern thought for which we are indebted to Rationalism. We say it,
reluctantly, but say it we must, Jehovah was a bigot. How long will the
Jews continue to profess a religion which requires of them to live in
Europe and America, and in the twentieth century, according to the
ways of the desert? If Gentiles, in every country, are in great numbers
forsaking Christianity, let the exodus of the Jews from the synagogue be
equally earnest and pronounced.
_Cruelty_ was to be the accompaniment of religious persecution.
The descriptions of acts of cruelty against the stranger seem to have
given positive pleasure to the writers of the bible, for they enter into
the most repulsive details in narrating them:
_For the Lord shall sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.... Howbeit
Sisera fled away on his feet to the tent of Jael the wife of Heber the
Kenite: for there was peace between Jabin the king of Hazor and the
house of Heber the Kenite.
And Tael went out to meet Sisera, and said unto him, Turn in, my lord,
turn in to me; fear not. And when he had turned in unto her into the
tent, she covered him with a mantle... Then Jael Heber's wife took a
nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto
him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the
ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died.... Behold, Sisera
lay dead, and the nail was in his temples._ *
* Judges iv, 9, 17-23.
For this act of treacherous cruelty Jael was sainted:
_Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, blessed
shall she be above women in the tent.... She put her hand to the nail,
and her right hand to the workmen's hammer; and with the hammer she
smote Sisera, she smote off his head, when she had pierced and stricken
through his temples.... So let all thine enemies perish, O Lord._ *
_Superstitions_ of the most degrading type are recommended and their
daily practice sanctioned. Though they claimed to be on talking terms
with the deity, they had, nevertheless, to cast lots, and resort to
sorcery and divination, to find out the mind of the Lord.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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