Welcome back to another installment of the Divine Origins series, in which we take a look at the arguments presented by Fred Pearce at thisisyourbible.com. He claims that these arguments prove the Bible was inspired directly by God – I, naturally, beg to differ.

Today, Fred moves away from the variations on a circular theme he’s been peddling so far, and has a go at using evidence from history.

Argument 6: The Phenomenon of Israel

The early history of Israel definitely points to divine intervention. After all, Exodus is chock-full of plagues, pillars of fire, parted seas, manifestations of God’s holy buttocks, commandments, tabernacles and what-not. God also spends most of the book in direct conversation with His main man Moses, when he isn’t busy smiting the Egyptians and/or disobedient Hebrews. The greater part of this discourse concerns the vast list of things the Hebrews can and can’t eat, enslave, screw, kill or set on fire, and Fred argues that no society in its right mind would have agreed to all these prescriptions and proscriptions without evidence that they came direct from the Big Guy In The Sky Himself. As he puts it:

“It is emphatically not a Law which any people would have chosen for themselves of their own free will… [but] if these great events actually occurred as the book of Exodus says they did, then we can better understand how it was that Israel came unanimously to accept this Law”

Now this is a pretty fundamental failure in historical understanding. The argument is postulated entirely on the idea that Bible lays out the history of Israel exactly as it happened. It does not. The Law to which Fred is referring is that of the Pentateuch, which was, as I’ve mentioned before, composed and redacted far, far later than the events it purports to record. This was first demonstrated by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, in 1651 (see Fred? I can reference old books too!), so there’s no excuse for anyone nowadays to claim that events occurred as written in Exodus, especially now that a wealth of archaeological evidence backs up the textual analysis on which Hobbes relied. The work of Prof. Israel Finkelstein pretty much puts the nail in the coffin of the Biblical histories, so the “great events” Fred refers to, which remain unsupported by any evidence outside the Book of Exodus, can be safely said to be the imaginings of later authors.

Why then, as the argument says, would Israel have submitted to such a harsh legal code? Well, in a society headed by the priestly caste, such a system of religious laws is a pretty surefire way to maintain the status quo. Bear in mind that these laws were developed relatively late in Israel’s history (around 650 BC), not whilst they were roaming around in the desert (which they probably never were). Recall also that the texts were “discovered” by Judah’s priests precisely when the nation was under severe external threat (from Egypt), and would have benefited substantially from a unifying shared mythology which established them as a “chosen people”. What sets the Israelites apart from their neighbours? Why, the special laws they follow to gain the favour of their god! It didn’t work (Egypt installed a puppet king in Judah in 608 BC, and the country’s inhabitants were back to Babylonian-sponsored polytheism within a couple of decades), but it was an inspired attempt at national unity.

Argument 7: A Disobedient People

This argument again relies wholly on the assumption that the Bible, as written, is an accurate portrayal of Israeli history. The argument here is that no nation would preserve historical records which cast it in such an unfavourable light, but given that the whole intent of the Histories was to scare people back into compliance with the Yahweh-worshipping ruling class, a tale which emphasises the horrible things which happen to apostates is pretty appropriate.

Argument 8: How did such Writings arise?

Now we reach another argument from incredulity. How could a morally reprobate people like the Israelites produce something as lovely as the Psalms or the Song of Songs. Obviously they couldn’t, so it must have been God.

This is both rather patronising to the ancient Hebrews and also vastly subjective. Fred Pearce claims that, “No other nation did this [i.e. produced “elevated moral teaching”]”, but right about the same time we see the rise of Confucianism in China, emphasising propriety and respect for one’s fellow man, Buddhism and Jainism in India, with their focus on doing no harm, Socratic philosophy in Greece, centred on forebearance and tolerance, the enlightened legal code of Hammurabi in Babylon… Lots of ancient peoples formulated profound ethical and spiritual ideas, but because Fred happens to subscribe to the Judaic code, that’s the one which seems profound to him. The Judaic system is the best, so it must be inspired by God, so it must be the best – I sense the re-emergence of our old friend Roundy McCircuitous in this.

Keep your Bible scholarship hat on, because in the next part of the series, we’ll be looking at prophecy, and why, once again, Fred’s knowledge of Bible history lets him down.

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