There are many troubling portions of the Bible, but the one that occurs to me first is the first story of Phineas (AKA Phinehas and some other variant spellings) found in Numbers 25:1-13. Philip Jenkins uses this as a his prime example in Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses.

While Israel dwelt in Shittim the people began to play the harlot with the daughters of Moab. These invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate, and bowed down to their gods. So Israel yoked himself to Ba’al of Pe’or. And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel; and the LORD said to Moses, “Take all the chiefs of the people, and hang them in the sun before the LORD, that the fierce anger of the LORD may turn away from Israel.” And Moses said to the judges of Israel, “Every one of you slay his men who have yoked themselves to Ba’al of Pe’or.”

And behold, one of the people of Israel came and brought a Mid’ianite woman to his family, in the sight of Moses and in the sight of the whole congregation of the people of Israel, while they were weeping at the door of the tent of meeting.

When Phin’ehas the son of Elea’zar, son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose and left the congregation, and took a spear in his hand and went after the man of Israel into the inner room, and pierced both of them, the man of Israel and the woman, through her body. Thus the plague was stayed from the people of Israel.

Nevertheless those that died by the plague were twenty-four thousand.

And the LORD said to Moses, “Phin’ehas the son of Elea’zar, son of Aaron the priest, has turned back my wrath from the people of Israel, in that he was jealous with my jealousy among them, so that I did not consume the people of Israel in my jealousy. Therefore say, `Behold, I give to him my covenant of peace; and it shall be to him, and to his descendants after him, the covenant of a perpetual priesthood, because he was jealous for his God, and made atonement for the people of Israel.’”

So Phineas kills a man and his wife for the sin of miscegenation. This was obviously written during one of the xenophobic periods of Jewish history.

There are some ridiculous elements to it. The supposed “crime” was marrying a Midianite, and the text makes a big deal out of the fact that this was brazenly done in front of Moses. But Moses himself likely had a Midianite wife, from the period after he fled Egypt. Moses’ Midianite father-in-law, Jethro, seems to be a fairly important character in Exodus.

Also notice that God stays his hand and grants a covenant of peace, “only” killing 24,000 people. This is what people mean when they complain about the God of the Old Testament. Also note that Phineas’ zealotry earns him and his descendants the plum position in the priesthood.

To me, this passage represents the troubling undercurrent of ethnic purity that runs through some of the Hebrew Testament. All of these sections, found particularly in books like Ezra and Nehemiah, are ignored by most mainstream Christians. Thankfully. But there are a few groups, like the Christian Identity group the Phineas Priesthood, who use this passage as a justification for their racism.

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To treat the Exodus story as literal, factual history, one would have to believe that at some point God devastated the agriculture, economy, and military of Egypt, and yet somehow not only no king but no other person saw fit to mention these events in a letter.

Which is the greater miracle? Believing that God sent plagues and drowned soldiers? Or believing that God ensured that no one in Egypt made any mention of these occurrences and that no shred of tangible archaeological evidence would be left?

McGrath mentions the lack of “correspondence, fiscal transaction records, and other textual as well as archaeological evidence,” which warms my archivist heart (acid-free and buffered). That’s exactly the sort of evidence that we would hope to see. Historians acknowledge that Egyptian scribes generally did not report the bad news, but there still should have been some physical evidence of a mass migration of people out of Egypt.

If nothing else there should have been spin. While we don’t get the bad news directly, there will frequently be back-handed acknowledgements of a crisis. For example, an inscription might read, “Praise to the Pharaoh for guiding us through a time of famine.” So we know that there was a famine, even if no official at the time wrote about it.

Egyptologist Bob Brier quipped that you know that the Egyptians were losing a war when the glorious victories kept getting closer to Egypt. Still, we do tend to find out about the battles and we can piece together the actual results.

The usual response to this is to draw back from the popular depiction of the Exodus. Perhaps it wasn’t as large as the scriptures indicated. Perhaps there are errors in the translation, or things got exaggerated. Perhaps there was no dramatic confrontation.

Which leads us to a tricky question of identity: how large did the migration from Egypt have to have been in order for it to be the Exodus? If a small family escaped during the Fall of the Bronze Age, ditching the slave masters in a swampy “reed sea,” does that mean that Exodus occurred?

The poster inspired by the book of Judges also has a certain charm:

Rachael Held Evans has a brief interview with LePage.

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For a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a nonhuman source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself

Lee seems most interested in tackling the first point: it’s meaningless, because we have no “nonhuman source.” To that end, his response is much like Deacon Duncan’s Undeniable Fact: God does not show up in the real world, so everything we say about God must come from humans.

That’s a solid point, but I think it’s also redundant because Hitchens’ second point fails as well: there very little in the world of religion and culture that is beyond the human ability to change.

That means that even if we were to grant Hitchens his first point, it would still do his argument little good. Even if we had the perfect book, we are still not perfect readers. Every word in that book must be translated, transmitted and interpreted. Even if you could perfect those first two processes, that last one would prove insurmountable.

What does “Thou shalt not kill” mean? A quick survey of biblical religions will return different interpretations of those four simple words. Does it apply to killing in self defense? To killing during war? To killing during an unjust war? To killing animals? To criminals, and if not, what types of criminals?

You’ll find Christians, Jews and Muslims on all sides of each questions. So what, exactly, is the advantage of having this “nonhuman source”?

I disagree with Lee that religion makes moral ideas harder to change. From my read of history, religious morality shifts at the same rate as other forms of culturally-embedded morality. Certainly the history of Christianity has shown massive shifts in its consensus over how to live a moral life, and no doubt this will continue. “Biblical morality” no longer means living a celibate life with few possessions, but perhaps it will return to that as the centuries roll on.

Part of this is because humans are champions rationalizers; we can find all sorts of reasons to do those things that we want or that make sense to us. Convincing someone to not do something that doesn’t make sense to them is tremendously difficult, as witnessed by the Catholic Church’s failure to prevent contraception use among American Catholics. But what makes sense to us comes from our preconceptions, which are shaped by our experiences and our society, and not just by what we hear from the pulpit.

For Hitchens to act as if having a “nonhuman source” grants us an unchanging moral code is to ignore most of what we learned from the past fifty years of philosophy and everything we’ve learned from history. There is only one law that continues to govern all human morality: This too shall pass.

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