The Meat of Gazelle or Buck

“You shall pull down their altars and break their sacred pillars, burn their sacred poles and hack down the idols of their gods and thus blot out the name of them from that place.”  —Deut. 12.3

Doesn’t that sound exactly like the attitude they always accuse Muslims of having?

Old Testament

Book Five:  Deuteronomy

God’s Laws Delivered by Moses

Chapter 12:  The one legitimate sanctuary

Okay, now start the actual rules, once again, another iteration of the same crap over and over.  These rules are specifically what to do once they take over Canaan.  The interesting thing here is that God tells them they have to have a centralized place of sanctuary in order to highlight that this religion is special—the Canaanites worship wherever they want, not the Israelites!  We have a special sanctuary.  There’s stuff about slaughter for sacrifice versus for food.  You can eat the flesh but not the blood, for “the blood is the life.”

God also says that He will “exterminate, as you advance, the nations whose country you are entering to occupy.”  It will be interesting to see (if it ever actually happens), whether this is true—whether God does it, or if in the end it’s just a regular old human-made war.

Finally he says, “you must not add anything to [these rules,] nor take anything away from it.”  Which is just funny, of course, because we continually add to it, over and over and over.  But it is always supposedly God doing it, so it’s okay.

—bibletoenail