The Ten Commandments Redux

Old Testament

Book Five:  Deuteronomy

Primary Charge of Moses to the People (cont’d)

Chapter 5:  A review of the covenant at Sinai

Chapter 5 (cont’d):  Exhortations and warnings

Chapter 6:  Fidelity to the one Lord

It’s interesting.  God made a mistake in his covenant with Israel.  He promised salvation, but it wasn’t conditional on anything.  So throughout these books he has had to breach the contract over and over by adding new conditions—“I know I promised you, but first you have to . . .”  It is really pathetic and dishonest.  This one detail is enough to make this God simply not worthy of following, and it is THE Jewish God.

In this one way, Christianity is much smarter than Judaism. God made an entirely different promise.  In Christianity, he makes an individual covenant with each follower.  So each individual follower can uphold his end of the bargain or not.  If one Christian fails, he goes to hell without effecting the rest of the flock.  (There’s one small problem with this, which is that, for example, maybe my heaven wouldn’t be heaven without my wife or Elvis, but if they both sinned, then they have to go to hell and heaven can’t be heaven for me.  I think a real Christian would easily dismiss this argument.  When people say “Elvis must be with John Lennon in heaven right now” or whatever, they are misunderstanding heaven.  Heaven is about being with God, that is the thing that is going to be so awesome about heaven.  It’s not about reuniting with your loved ones.  If Christians let a follower believe they will be reunited, it destroys the advantage of one-on-one covenants.  This is a really subtle problem.  We humans don’t want one-on-one covenants, we all want to go to heaven together.  Hm.  God could just not be a dick and let us all go together.  (This reuniting issue is a fundamental problem with Mormonism, I think.)

Anyway, I noticed something else.  There are subtle indications throughout the Bible that this God isn’t the only god.  He says he’s the only god, but he means that he’s the only one for you; he doesn’t actually mean he’s the only god.  He says “I am a jealous god.”  What does that MEAN?  It means that there are many possible gods, but the one you have is a jealous god.  Just one more among the infinite contradictions in the bible.

A little interesting.  The question is why tell these rules again.  It is explained in 5.22–31.  In Exodus when Moses went to the mountain, they were all afraid.  They were afraid that if they encountered God personally and heard him speak they would die, so they had to have Moses go talk to God for them.  (This is where the “Horned Moses” comes from—after speaking to God his face shone, almost like it was bright and glowing and smoking after his encounter with God in the fire.)  So, at that time God gave them some of the rules, the ones they needed.  Now he’s going to give them more rules, the ones they will need for after they occupy Canaan.

Chapter 6, The Shema.  Notes say this is the “Jewish Creed,” the statement is the standard preface to private and public prayer in the Jewish tradition.  Then verses 10 to 15 say again that you must follow Him, no other god from the nations around you.  Man, I don’t see how you can read that except as acknowledging the legitimacy of the other gods.  This is a real Derrida moment.  Saying there is only one god admits that there are more than one god.  Why would you even need to say that otherwise?  I know what religious people would say, he’s saying the other gods are false gods, so you have to follow the real one.  But that really is not the way it sounds here.  He says explicitly, “You shall fear the Lord your God, serve him alone and take your oaths in his name.”  How else can you read that?  If it’s possible to “serve” another god, a god that isn’t real, then what is the point?  What difference does it make?  Doesn’t this acknowledge that the whole religious enterprise is fake, right here in the bible?

Verses 4 and 5 say, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength.”  The notes say that Mark describes those verses as “the greatest commandment.”  (Mk. 12.28–34.)  We need to keep an eye on these kind of comments, because of course this book has one of the most bizarre twists in the history of literature, right, that it turns out everything everyone believed for the first 5000 years was wrong, until Jeezy-Creezy comes along and explains the opposite?  It’s amazingly stupid, isn’t it?  But what is fascinating is that Jesus and his disciples were all Jewish!  I mean really Jewish, not just “my mom is Jewish,” but the whole point of Jesus is to explain the proper way to be Jewish.

I have to say that so far, six chapters in, this book is not as painfully boring to read as the last couple.  Moses is going to go through the rules again, but so far it seems to be written differently, more rhetorically and less mechanically.  Not so bad.

--bibletoenail