Cherry Pie

I might not literally have sprayed my coffee over my keyboard, but my reaction was as near as doing so. The 2016 American presidential election campaign was still in full swing, and I was listening to a reporter on the BBC World Service gather public opinions on the candidates. A woman in Colorado Springs was quizzed about her reaction to Donald Trump’s now-notorious ‘locker room’ tape in which he allegedly bragged about his sexual groping activities. An ardent Trump supporter, she breezily admitted with a laugh that she “tended to quickly forget about such things”.

Now Colorado Springs, I know, is regarded as a bastion of good Christian values, but here was someone who in a moment was entirely prepared to betray both her own gender and what she presumably regarded as her God-given sense of moral worth. This woman simply turned a blind eye to what by any yardstick were gloatingly smutty and demeaning sexual remarks made by her favoured candidate. Since the woman already had declared both her political and her religious allegiance to the reporter, I was left scratching my head. How could she possibly reconcile her political stance with her religious one? Clearly she did not form her political opinion on what was morally right, but on what was expedient. And if this was so, then by extension this presumably also applied to her religious beliefs. And then the penny dropped.

‘Cherry picking’ is a term used, usually in the context of a debate, to describe the glossing-over or outright omission of facts which you know would weaken the case that you are presenting. It is a form of deliberate self-censorship designed to bolster your beliefs or world view, and its effect is one of self-deceit. [1]Cherry picking keeps you in your comfort zone, and although the practice can apply generally, it is often found in the sphere of religious beliefs. I would even suggest that a religious belief might not actually survive were it not subjected to cherry picking, however overtly or subtly the practice is deployed.

If we need to hear that God is love, then we prefer not to be reminded that this same God intends to force us to suffer terrible and agonizing torments without hope of reprieve forever merely for [2]blaspheming against Him. The two concepts are directly contradictory, for love – and certainly the magnanimity of deific love – can surely have nothing to do with the eternal torturing of the souls which are its own creation? Such an act, or even just the stipulation of it, would make God, not a god of love, but a god who would take all the prizes for sheer unbridled sadism: a god whom anyone with even a stroke of moral decency would reject out-of-hand.

We are rescued from this impasse by cherry picking. We might gloss over this darker side of God (and it is a very dark side indeed) to instead concentrate our thoughts upon the love and redemption aspects of our beliefs, and thus reassured, move swiftly on. We might even attempt to excuse it by claiming that this simply proves that God is a ‘just’ god, which is the apologist’s stance. But if this is justice, then it is the ruthless justice of the lynch mob, of the kangaroo court – or of the Inquisition. It is justice devoid of compassion. It is as if religion, by its very nature, contains paradoxes which overwhelm us. And perhaps they do.

The paradoxes in scripture are indeed overwhelming. I have read many passages which give every indication of positively reveling in the slaughter of ‘God’s enemies’, and demand the grimmest of [3]punishments, such as the stoning to death of your own son for mere wayward disobedience. How about making a human sacrifice of your daughter? Absolutely, if you have vowed to God to do just that. Since this is Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age tribalism, such rough justice need not surprise us. What should rightly appall us is that we still regard such writings as ‘holy scripture’ right here in our own 21st-century.

Ah, but that’s the problem with scripture: it’s all in, or all out. If you want love and redemption, you also have to have stoning to death, slavery, forcing a rape victim to marry her rapist, and other horrors sanctioned by its assorted texts. Redaction of these texts already has taken place, so if you want to change something to which you might object then you’re already too late. Which is what makes cherry picking a near-indispensable activity. If you cannot discretely edit out the less palatable passages, then just brush over them, because no man of the cloth is going to mount his pulpit to deliver an uplifting sermon on how Moses ordered the massacre of the women and children who already had surrendered to his soldiery.

And this, as I finally understood, is what presumably prompted my good Christian citizen of Colorado Springs to react as she did to [4]Donald Trump’s unsavory and uncouth remarks. Her religious beliefs already had put her in cherry picking mode. It must have been an easy switch to apply that same activity to her political affiliations. Moral or not, cherry picking is an entrenched and much-used practice, and when it comes to religious beliefs, cherries, apparently, are always in season.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] The term apparently derives from the idea that if someone sees a basket of freshly-picked and delicious-looking cherries, they might assume that all the cherries still on the tree are just as good, whereas the fruit that is left on the tree might actually be too inferior to harvest.

[2] This is specifically stated in Mark 3:29 – “But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation.” Good luck to anyone who has ever muttered “Jesus Christ!” as an expletive.

[3] It is usual for me to give chapter-and-verse citations in any post where they apply, but as the citations for the various scriptural incidents mentioned in this post already are given in full on previous posts, I’ll link to those posts here. For misdeeds by Moses, and ‘cruel and unusual’ punishments in scripture, please see my post Frontier Justice in the Promised Land. For the full story of the sacrifice of his daughter to God, please see my post Jephthar's Daughter: Darkness in Gilead. For the God of scripture’s own dubious morality, please see my post Profiling a Psychopath. For scriptural approval of the wholesale massacre of ‘God’s enemies’, please see my post The Butcher of Canaan.

[4] Making America great again? It is interesting that, in addition to his cavalier dismissal of the importance of climate change issues during his campaign (as witnessed by his ‘climate is just weather’ remark: apparently he does not even understand the vital difference between the two), Donald Trump chose for his campaign slogan the phrase: “Make America great again!” which itself is an example of presupposition. Presupposition, like cherry picking, is a debating ploy in which a statement ‘pre-supposes’ that something is true without providing further evidence to support that statement. To say ‘make America great again’ is to presuppose that America is not great now. You can agree or disagree that it might not be great anymore, but such sleight-of-hand word trickery can so easily go unnoticed and unchallenged.

What is neo-Fascism? The 'Make America great again' slogan expresses core neo-Fascist sentiments: that of a preoccupation with the perceived or actual regeneration of a nation, the running of a country as if it were a business venture, repression by bullying or intimidation in some form of any opposing voices, the encouragement of a personality cult towards the leader, and the promotion of go-it-alone xenophobic isolationism.

Attacking the person: A third debating ploy was self-evident during the campaign: that of ad hominem attacks. That is: you attack the person, rather than the issues or principles for which that person stands.

Pro-life? I will not sit on my hands on the issue supported by born-again Christian Mike Pence, soon to be the new vice president, when it comes to ‘pro-life’, or as it is less coyly and more realistically called: anti-abortion. Outlawing abortion does little to wholly prevent the practice (as we know from the example of Ireland). All it really does is drive women either over a border to a country with different legislation, or into back alleys where other women are waiting for them with one hand outstretched for cash and with a metal knitting needle clutched in the other. In practice, outlawing abortion at best makes having an abortion a medically unsupervised and traumatic experience, and at worst can endanger young women's lives. Taking this stance does not make me a rabid pro-abortion liberal; it just makes me a realist, and I for one would question whether faith-driven pro-life protesters who voice their righteous indignation have even seriously thought through such practical considerations.

A recent actual Russian billboard.

Are Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin really such strange bedfellows? I have written these notes in the time before Donald Trump is sworn in as president, and the following year inevitably will bring more clarity as to which way the wind is really blowing. 'Fascist' is a term that tends to be loosely slung around in a pejorative sense, which is why I tend to be careful about using it. But I do find that in considering whether Donald Trump's views really are 'Fascist' that it's possible to tick all the boxes. It's worth repeating here that one of the central tenets of Fascism is the perceived regeneration of a nation. The slogan 'Make America great again' fits this tenet like a glove.

A kindred spirit? The man himself, I am sure, does not see himself in this way, but calling a duck an eagle doesn't mean that it stops being a duck. Trump's views are essentially Fascist, and the ultra-right wing stance of Fascism (witness the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party, both of whom firmly endorsed Trump's candidacy) have previously in history made bedfellows of the ultra-left wing ideology of communism. Hence Trump's apparent perception of Vladimir Putin as a kindred spirit.

The chink in America's armour? My own view is that in reality Putin, the ex-KGB master of manipulation, is already playing Trump like a violin. Trump's Achilles' heel is his vast vanity, so that is what Putin plays on, and it's working. Trump's political world stage naivety and inexperience has him thinking that Putin is, after all, a pretty okay guy, but history might well record that Trump was the chink in America's armour through which Putin managed to wriggle, and America will be left anything but 'great again'.

Living in hope? As someone who can remember all the presidents (and their election campaigns) as far back as Eisenhower, I can never recall feeling so apprehensive about a coming presidency, both for my friends in America and on the global stage. All we can really do now is hope and trust that 'President Trump' will turn out to be a more civilized person than the uncouth, obnoxious, racist, misogynist, xenophobic, disability-mocking bully so shockingly visible on the campaign trail.
Hawkwood

Stop press: Make China great again! Today, 22 November 2016, carries the news that on his first day in office Donald Trump will pull America out of the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership). Since the partnership of Pacific nations allowed America to have an influence in the region at the expense of China, it doesn't take rocket science to predict that China will now rush in to fill the vacuum left by the U.S. and expand its influence in the region. My own comfortable prediction based on this one myopic decision is that the coming Trump presidency will see a considerable weakening and even a reduction in America's power as a player on the world stage.

Sources:

All photos have been adapted from uncredited sources. The vision of Hell is adapted from a painting by Hans Memling. The sacrifice of Jephthar’s daughter is adapted from a painting by Edwin Longsden Long.

The Prophet and the Goddess

I enjoy my own language, and when I come across a word which might not be so familiar to me, I like to check its meaning. So when in a written phrase I came across the word ‘tilth’, I reached for my [1]Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and discovered that tilth is “labour, work or effort, directed to useful or profitable ends.” It is derived from the term tillage, meaning soil that is tilled or ploughed before seed is sown, and comes (as you probably can guess) from farming methods of the Middle Ages.

A field is tilled, the seed is sown, and the crop can later be harvested. But if the field is instead used as a metaphor, can we be so certain that what we have sown is what we also shall reap?

The phrase which contains this term is: “Your women are a tilth for you, so go to your tilth as you will.” This is startling enough. It is not an implication, but a statement, and this statement plainly declares that women are to be viewed – and treated – by men as ploughed fields in which they can ‘sow their seed’ – a metaphor so obvious that it becomes literal –  ‘as you will’: as they want to, and whenever they feel like it. There is no arguing with this phrase, no ‘but it really means...’ type of protest possible. It says what it says, and what it says would seem to be a particularly crude example of arrogant male chauvinism.

Paul the apostle, as portrayed in the 17th-century by Rembrandt. Passages in Paul’s pastoral letters appearing in scripture give the impression that Paul was almost contemptuous of women, but these letters are now known to be anonymous later additions.

I wonder what you might now be thinking? Are you uncomfortably thinking that this phrase could come from some discreetly-overlooked verse of scripture? Such rampant chauvinism in scripture is, it has to be said, hardly unknown. My posts here already have dealt with the notorious verses in Paul’s [2]pastoral letters which, we now know, are not actually by Paul at all. These particular verses read like a rule book of women’s dos and don’ts as prescribed by the Church, even though they were written by an unknown hand several decades after Paul lived, presumably as an ecclesiastical way of keeping women in their place.

But this phrase does not appear in Christian scripture. It can in fact be read in [3]Surah 2:223, the second Surah of the Quran titled Al-Baqarah (The Cow), which is where I came across it. But perhaps this phrase is just an isolated exception among these Surahs? I read on for a few verses more. At the end of verse 2:228 comes this statement: “And women have rights similar to those of men in a just manner…” Well (I think) this is more reassuring. But then comes the twist at the end: “…and men are a degree above them.” This is again unequivocal. Men, according to the Quran, are a rather more superior class of creation than women.

Men, according to the Quran, are above women in status, and need to be obeyed. But how different would things be if such texts were not written by a male prophet claiming revelation from a male angel who in turn was the representative of a male deity?

Surah 4 of the Quran is titled An-Nisa’ (The Women) and prescribes various guidelines for family, relationship and inheritance issues not dissimilar to such Old Testament lawgiving passages. In verse 4:34 we read: [4]“Men are in charge of women, because God has made them excel the other, and because they spend their property (for the support of women). …As for those (women) from whom you fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them…”. If there were any doubts before about how women should be viewed and treated, this verse definitively dispels them. A woman who is kept by a man is at the behest of that man. Any woman who objects to her allotted status is to be scourged. My above dictionary defines this variously as being flogged, whipped or beaten.

The familiar star and crescent of Islam. It is a strange irony that a religion which brands even the idea of goddesses as a grave sin has chosen for its emblem two powerful goddess symbols: the lunar crescent is widely recognized as being associated with goddesses from Hecate to Selene, and because the planet Venus appears to trace out a five-pointed pathway in the heavens, the five-pointed star is sacred to the great goddess Ishtar. 

There are other such examples among the Surahs, but I shall briefly quote one from Surah 4:117-121. These verses are about the error and folly of following other beliefs, and having in the previous verses been assured that whomever [5]opposes the Messenger (Muhammad) shall be ‘exposed to Hell’, we read: “They invoke in His (God’s) stead only females (female deities); they pray to none else than Satan…” In short: other gods are bad enough, but goddesses are beyond the pale, and any respect due to them amounts to Satanism, with ‘they’ in this instance referring to virtually anyone not following Islam. But the goddess manifests through every young girl, every woman, and certainly through every mother, and every last Islamic terrorist owes the gift of his life, his very existence, to the mother who bore him and brought him into the world.

This photo complete with its caption I found on the Web. The caption is a grim nonsense, as perhaps whoever wrote it might have been aware. Why? Under Islamic law the penalty for apostasy – for leaving Islam – is death. The caption therefore ironically verifies what it sets out to deny.

I undertook the writing of this particular post, not as a specific protest against what would seem to be the Quran’s advocating of gender inequality (although that arises of itself out of the material quoted here), but to try and come to terms with, and even to attempt to find reasons for, a news item which I happened to read. The incident, I warn you, is disturbing, and involved a young recruit of [6]Islamic State who dragged his mother out into the street and executed her in public with a single shot. Her crime? She attempted to persuade her son to leave IS. This incident is so many different kinds of wrong that we might struggle to take them in. What is left of our own humanity when we are driven to such an act? What does it say about the beliefs which we profess, both religious and ideological?

Some of the two hundred Christian schoolgirls who have been abducted by the Nigerian Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram. Schoolgirls in particular are targeted because such terrorists oppose any form of education for women. In this sense such Islamic terrorist actions follow the classic pattern of a cult: cut your subjects off from their families, keep them ignorant and make them dependent upon you for their needs.

Barack Obama among others has protested that such inhuman atrocities have nothing to do with the religion which their members profess to follow. I disagree. Were that so, then the followers of IS would be a mere brigandage, bereft of religious adherence. But terrorism in these early years of our century means Islamic terrorism, and the mass rapings of women and young girls by IS are documented. The Nigerian Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram has forced the two hundred Christian schoolgirls it abducted two years ago to convert to Islam and take Islamic [7]’husbands’. In reality, girls kidnapped by this Islamic terrorist group and also by IS either are used for domestic labour, or are themselves forced to commit atrocities, or are used as [8]sex slaves.

Maybe Islamic terrorism is Islamic for a reason. And maybe Muslim [9]attitudes towards women exist for a reason, and the words from the Quran quoted here are as they are: men are superior to women, men have rights over women, and domestic violence towards women is both sanctioned and condoned. When the Prophet Muhammad consummated his marriage to his third wife [10]Aisha he was already into his fifties. She was nine.

Hawkwood      

The Prophet said that women totally dominate men of intellect and are possessors of hearts.
But ignorant men dominate women, for they are shackled by the ferocity of animals.

- Rumi

Notes:

[1] The term ‘Shorter’ in the title is perhaps ironic: the dictionary is necessarily split into two large format volumes totalling almost eight thousand pages.

[2] Please see my post "Behold This Woman".

[3] The chapters of the Quran are known as Surahs (or Suras), with 114 Surahs of various lengths. The verses of each Surah are known as ayahs.

[4] As I have abridged the verse in my post, I will give the verse here in full: “Men are in charge of women, because God has made them excel the other, and because they spend their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which God has guarded. As for those from whom you fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them. Lo! God is ever High Exalted, Great!"

[5] The Quran is openly anti-Semitic, claiming in Surah 4:46 that Jews are “…distorting with their tongues and slandering religion.” This verse concludes by adamantly affirming that “God has cursed them (the Jews) for their disbelief.” The imagined sufferings which await such ‘unbelievers’ are dwelt upon in Surah 4:56 with almost lip-smacking relish: “Lo! Those who disbelieve our Revelations, We shall expose them to the Fire. As often as their skins are consumed We shall exchange them for fresh skins that they may taste the torment.” In spite of its anti-Jewish stance, the Quran apparently was still not too proud to borrow the characters of Noah, Moses, Abraham and Lot from the Torah, written some eight to nine centuries earlier.

[6] The BBC has a policy of referring in its news items to Islamic State as ‘so-called Islamic State’ to accurately reflect the fact that the group is not actually a state at all. 

[7] Like Islamic State in the Middle East, Boko Haram in Nigeria wants to establish an Islamic caliphate in their region. To this end they oppose all forms of education which are not strictly Islamic, which is why they specifically target schools, with hundreds of students being killed or abducted. Boko Haram also opposes any form of education for women, as do the Taliban in Afghanistan, which is why schoolgirls are targeted, either to be killed or kidnapped and forcibly converted to Islam.

[8] Moses, who appears both in the Old Testament, the Torah and the Quran, allowed his forces to keep the young girls they captured ‘for themselves’ (please see the Old Testament's Book of Numbers 31:18 and my post Frontier Justice in the Promised Land). So even after all these centuries men are still using religion as a pretext for behaving like beasts towards womankind, and the whole premise that religion of itself makes someone inherently more morally decent and altruistic is a sham.

[9] The co-ordinated mass sexual assaults on women that occurred during the 2015-16 New Year celebrations in Cologne (below), allegedly by males of North African origin, are also relevant here. It would seem that any women who by Islamic cultural standards behave ‘provocatively’ are perceived as having loose morals and are therefore seen as fair game. There seems to have been little awareness among these men that what they did was actually a criminal offence.

[10] These are the ages of Aisha given in paragraph 66, Book 62, Volume 7 of the hadith (commentaries on the Prophet) Sahih al-Bukhari. There is some disagreement about the exact age of Aisha. She apparently was six or seven when she married Muhammed, with the marriage being consummated when she was either nine or ten years old. One commentary points out that it was normal for young girls to be married off at that time and in that culture. But what might be culturally acceptable is not by default morally right, and such an assertion directly contradicts the claim that the Quran is outside of time, and speaks to all ages and all cultures. Clearly it does not. What it reflects is a 7th-century Arabic culture, just as the Old Testament reflects a Late Bronze Age-Early Iron Age tribal culture and its attendant social values. 

DIFFERENCES IN TRANSLATIONS: It is worth noting that various online English translations of the Quran give slightly differing versions from the translation I have used for this post. Indeed, one supplies candidly specific instructions: “2:223. Your wives are a tilth for you, so go to your tilth (have sexual relations with your wives in any manner as long as it is in the vagina and not in the anus), when or how you will…” Or more agriculturally: “2:223.  Your women are cultivation for you; so approach your cultivation whenever you like...” In Surah 4 some coyly translate “scourge” as “beat (lightly)” or “chastise”. But as my dictionary defines ‘chastise’ as ‘to inflict corporal punishment’, it’s really the same difference. And beating is still laying a hand on a woman, however the term is moderated by adding ‘lightly’.

THE ARCHANGEL AND WOMEN: It is worth remembering that the Quran is purported to have been dictated to the Prophet Muhammed by the archangel Gabriel. As with any such claim by any belief, this claim clearly is unprovable, and so falls within the province of religious belief. It nevertheless is reasonable to question the validity of such a claim when this in turn means that the archangel, and therefore God, not only is okay with but actually advocates the treatment of women as quoted above in the Quran.

A MATTER OF PERSONAL HYGENE: What struck me in my reading of the Quran is that, unlike Christian scripture, it clearly addresses itself to a male readership: “your women”, "your wives" etc. To offer one final quote: Surah 4:43 concerns personal hygiene and cleanliness, and advises: “And if you be ill, or on a journey, or one of you comes from answering a call of nature, or you have touched women, and you find no water, then go to high clean soil and rub you faces and your hands (therewith). Lo! God is Benign, Forgiving.” We might trust that God also is benign enough to forgive those who compare touching women with washing your hands after going to the toilet. 

Sources:

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Oxford University Press, revised edition 1980.

The Quran Translated: Message for Humanity. Based on the English translation of M. Marmaduke Pickthall. Revised by: International Committee for the Support of the Final Prophet. Washington, D.C., 2005. I will restate the point made previously on this blog: irrespective of my own beliefs, I treat all books in my possession which are regarded by others as religious texts with due care and equal respect.

Islamic State militant 'executes own mother' in Raqqa. BBC News website, 8 January 2016. Retrieved on 19 March 2016.

Terrorists kidnap more than 200 Nigerian girls. USA Today, April 21 2014. Retrieved on 19 March 2016.

Photos from Reuters, AFP/Getty Images, Colourbox and uncredited sources.

Hawkeye, Moses and the Right Stuff

Glancing at my bookshelf a couple of evenings ago, my eye fell upon a great American literary classic: James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. It set me to thinking about the moral compass of such narratives. For all his ups and downs, Hawkeye, Fenimore Cooper’s existential frontiersman, strives to ‘do the right thing’ in the situations in which he finds himself. At certain moments in the narrative such striving lifts him to heroic stature, and his example lifts us up with him.

The moral compass of this work and other such titles as John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, or Ernest Hemmingway’s The Old man and the Sea, or even Mark Twain’s [1]The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is never in doubt. Their central characters, however embattled through circumstances, remain basically good and decent. Indeed, guided by his own moral compass, Hawkeye moves mountains in his attempts to affect a rescue of the story’s victims of kidnap. 

Now let’s take Fenimore Cooper’s protagonist and place him on a very different frontier. Could we imagine Hawkeye willing to kill a child, or handing over a young girl in his care to be raped, or overseeing a massacre of women and children? If the answer is ‘no’ – and it has to be – then what makes such possibilities, not merely unlikely, but in the minds of we the readers, completely out of the question? We take our lead from the narrative itself, which gives us every indication of Hawkeye, not just having decent moral standards, but of adhering to those standards. In short: he lives by his own innate code of moral values.

My eye travels to another title on my shelf. Four of its characters we already have encountered in [2]posts on this blog. Could we imagine these characters being prepared to kill their own children, or offering their own daughters up to be gang-raped by a mob, or directing a massacre of defenceless women and children? The answer has to be ‘yes’- because all these events actually take place within the narrative. The characters are respectively Abraham, Jephthar, Lot and Moses, and the book is of course my own copy of the King James Bible.

Now we are confronted with a paradox. On the one hand we have Hawkeye, the frontiersman with the moral right stuff. On the other, we have four names whose moral compass is clearly awry – at least when compared to those of our frontiersman. How is it then possible that these names are held up as examples of ‘doing the right thing’: in this case, of being obedient to God’s will? Abraham is prepared to kill his own son. Jephthar actually does kill his own daughter. Lot actually does offer his two virgin daughters to a street mob to be raped. Moses actually does command his men to kill many defenceless women and children whose lives had previously been spared.

The question has to be: why do we not condemn these four, whose actions are so clearly reprehensible, even inhuman? Why, against all reason, does an aura of virtue apparently cling to them? There is only one answer which presents itself: because they are in scripture. Hawkeye, on the other hand, has to make do with a secular context. And yet all our instincts tell us that, were there ever to come a hypothetical face-off between, say, Hawkeye and Lot, then the frontiersman would view the Sodomite as being worthy of nothing but his contempt, as flawed in his values as the treacherous Huron Magua from his own world, who, like Lot, was fully prepared to betray the trust which others had placed in him.

There might be someone, somewhere, who can clearly explain to me the reasons why the moral compass of such characters from scripture is worthy and exemplary – and indeed, why God’s also is, if these actions were in his name. There might be, but I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, I’m happy enough to take Hawkeye, the embattled frontiersman with the moral right stuff, as being more worthy of my emulation and more deserving of my respect than such flawed scriptural luminaries as Abraham, Jephthar, Lot and Moses.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] I seem to have chosen four American authors as my examples. You can probably think of as many British, European and other authors whose characters exemplify moral decency. Heck, I can even think of the characters in Bram Stoker’s classic gothic tale Dracula – Jonathan and Mina Harker, John Seward and Abraham Van Helsing – whose moral decency drives them to strive their utmost in their struggle against the notorious Count. Would Van Helsing have offered his own daughter up to be raped? Just saying.

[2] If you wish to independently check for yourself that the Bible really does say what I claim for it here, these posts together with their chapter-and-verse citations are:

For Abraham: Abraham, Isaac and a Stressed Out Ram, (Genesis 22:1-18).

For Lot: Lot and His Daughters: The Inside Story (Genesis 19:1-38).

For Moses and Jephthar: Frontier Justice in the Promised Land (Numbers 31:7-18, and Judges 11:29-40).

The two top images are adapted from paintings by Zdeněk Burian, the second two images are adapted from paintings by N.C. Wyeth.

Lot and his Daughters: The Inside Story

You perhaps know of the story. It can be found in the Old Testament’s [1]Book of Genesis, and the names of the protagonist and the places are familiar enough, even to those souls who never pick up a Bible. There is old Lot sitting at the gate of the city of Sodom, when up come two angels. Except these angels apparently are human-enough in appearance for Lot to assume them to be ordinary mortals – albeit strikingly good-looking ones. They tell Lot that they are newly-arrived to the city, and having nowhere to stay, plan to spend the night on the street.

Being familiar-enough with the fancies of his home city’s menfolk, our hero sees the dangers, and rather than have them become easy pickings on the moonlit streets of Sodom invites the two strangers to spend the night under the safety of his roof, to which the two assent. Ah, but no sooner do the trio make it to the safety of Lot’s front door when the house is surrounded by a generous number of the city’s male population who, having already caught a glimpse of the two handsome strangers, are only too eager to press their penchant for something more.

So far it’s not a bad story. It’s what happens next that sends things down a mind-spinning chute of deeply-dubious morality – and that morality has nothing to do with the sexual preferences of Sodom’s menfolk, whose city’s name has become a verb still current today. No, that morality has to do with Lot’s own decision making. Because what happens next is that Lot steps outside to calm the crowd, and his attempted means of doing so is to offer his own two virgin daughters to the rabble to have their way with as long as they agree to leave the two strangers alone.

And it’s not just a bluff. He actually means it. Lot actually seriously offers his own daughters to be gang-raped on the street, rather than (as he sees it) compromise the sanctity of his hospitality. Each time I read this story, this is the point at which I shake my head in numbed disbelief. Not just because of Lot’s offer to the mob, but because it is supposed to be Lot’s virtue that sways the angels to warn him, and him alone, of God’s coming destruction of the city, which is why he’d better leave town in a hurry. Virtue? What virtue? For pity’s sake, this is a man who is more than prepared to hand his own young daughters over to be gang-banged by a sex-hungry street mob. I’m not making this stuff up: it’s right there in Genesis 19:8 if you want to check.

Recovering our mental equilibrium enough to read further, we learn that the mob now rounds on Lot, which to me smacks of rough justice, but justice deserved nevertheless. He is, however, dragged inside to safety by his two guests, who for good measure use their supernatural powers to strike the seething throng collectively blind. This is the point in the story where we realise that sleeping on the street for these two would actually have been a viable and completely safe option anyway.

Dawn’s light sees Lot and family fleeing from the city and its coming destruction. God does his fire-and-brimstone thing, Lot’s [2]wife looks back at the ghastly destruction and, as we all know, is promptly turned into a pillar of salt. Not that old Lot shows any particular signs of remorse at being summarily widowed by the Almighty: he’s too busy negotiating with God about where he’s going to flee to. He drives a [3]bargain with God that he can flee to the nearby city of [4]Zoar, because, well… it’s only a small city after all, and hardly worthy of God’s destructive attention. So God wouldn’t mind sparing such a small city, would He? God agrees.

But even in Zoar Lot feels ill-at-ease (which to me smacks of mistrust in God’s word), and flees farther. He takes his two daughters to a cave in the wilderness beyond the city walls, and there occurs probably the most astonishing twist in the story. With their mother no longer a going concern, the daughters realise that their father has no possibility of siring male heirs to carry on his line. So they ply old Lot with wine, and that night the eldest daughter, in that grandly coy Biblical euphemism, ‘lay with him’. We are reassured that Lot sleeps through the whole process, apparently as a way of excusing the whole thing. The next night the younger daughter: ditto. So the two daughters lose their virginity to their own father, and the incestuous results are two sons who go on to found the Moabites and the Ammonites.

It’s a story with threatened rape, threatened sodomy, actual incest, and plenty of disaster movie-scale destruction. And the moral standards of its central character whom God chose to spare are plainly as dubious as those of the inhabitants of the city which God in his wrath destroyed. But it’s in scripture, so all this must be okay, right? And hands up anyone who believes that old Lot was only pretending to be asleep? I thought so… J

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] Genesis 19:1-38 contains the complete story related here. Aside from a necessary condensing of some details, all the events related in this post can be found in this passage of scripture.

[2] As with his two daughters, we are never told the name of Lot’s wife. This is certainly not the only instance in scripture when protagonists who play a key role in a story remain unnamed, apparently for no other reason than that, being female, their names were considered not worth recording. As if in support of this chauvinism, we straight away learn the names of the daughters’ sons: Moab and Ben-ammi. Please see also my previous post Frontier Justice in the Promised Land for another instance of a female lead character remaining anonymous, and a father’s callous behaviour towards his own daughter at least as heartless and despicable as Lot’s in this story. Jephthar, in case you’re not aware of the story, actually offered his own daughter up to God as a human sacrifice (Judges 11:29-40) to keep a bargain with God for his resounding victory over the Ammonites: the people of the line of Lot’s youngest daughter’s son. Oh, the irony.

[3] Lot was not the only one to drive a bargain with the Almighty. In a preamble to this story (Genesis 18:26-32) we learn that Abraham, disapproving of God’s ruling that fifty righteous men must be found in Sodom for him to spare the city from destruction, actually haggles God down until God agrees to spare the city if only ten righteous men of Sodom can be found, thus considerably reducing the odds for the coming omnipotent devastation. As we know, even these reduced odds prove to be of no avail, and Sodom was wiped from the map. And no other commentator on these events whom I have so far read has picked up on the supreme irony that Abraham, in pleading with God for his nephew Lot’s life to be spared, could have saved his descendants much misery had he not done so. For it was these very descendants of Abraham who were so harassed by the Moabites and the Ammonites – the two tribes who themselves were the descendants of Lot’s two daughters by their own father!

[4] This city is now the only one of the five original ‘cities of the plain’ whose location can be traced with reasonable certainty.

The Paintings:

Lot and his Daughters, by Francesco Furini, 17th-century. Furini’s intense interpretation is a scene which the artist depicts as a grand seduction, as one of Lot’s daughters offers their befuddled father a goblet of wine while the other tugs teasingly on the hem of his cloak. Here there are no tableaux of destruction as a backdrop, no suggestions of cave or wilderness. Instead Furini treats his background as a blank screen onto which we project our own imaginations, and in so doing thrusts all the focus onto the human drama of the moment. I discuss another work by Furini on my art blog here.

The Sodomites, by James Tissot, 19th-century. Tissot enjoyed a reputation as a painter of elegant society scenes until he turned his attention to Biblical subjects such as this one. We see Lot confront the agitated crowd as the two credibly-human angels shelter behind the shutters. Intriguingly, the artist has chosen to portray Lot as a younger man than is usually the case with this theme. And the two angels are also exceptional in that they suggest an altogether darker mood: fitting enough for these two who serve, after all, as the hit men of the angelic host. 

The Destruction of Sodom, by John Martin, 19th-century. Martin was the ‘master of disaster’ of his era, and painted many such Biblical scenes of destruction so dramatic, and on such a grand scale, that his canvases would collect audiences in the same way that disaster movies do today. Indeed, Cecil B. DeMille was inspired by his work to make the films which he did, and the artist’s visionary genius continues to influence film makers of our own time. Martin portrays the Almighty as an accusing finger of lightning stabbing down to transform Lot's wife into the famed portion of sodium nitrate. 

Lot and his Daughters, by Hendrick Goltzius, 17th-century. The artist’s treatment of the subject is typical of many: Sodom burns in the background as the two seductively nude daughters ply their father with the necessary alcoholic beverage. Goltzius was by no means the only artist to seize upon the subject as a veiled excuse to portray voluptuous female flesh, but what charms is his inclusion of whimsical details: the scene includes half a wheel of good Dutch cheese, the family’s pet dog (definitely not a part of the original story!), and even an inquisitive fox in the background. 

Frontier Justice in the Promised Land

I recall attending enough church services whose sermons related various Biblical miracles and uplifting messages of hope. But how many ministers mount their pulpit and deliver a sermon on Moses’ instructions to his forces to execute a My Lai-style massacre, or relate to the listening congregation the scriptures' heartless treatment of women as victims of rape and spoils of war? And yet these and other dark themes are as much a part of the Bible as those stories which get all the attention, and rough and ruthless frontier-style justice is not in some mysterious way made more morally acceptable simply because it appears in scripture. And I, who have in my career illustrated such dark gothic classics as Frankenstein, Dracula, The Phantom of the Opera and others, am still somewhere struggling to get my head around the realization that it is the Bible, of all books, which reaches into darker places even than these. You doubt me? Then please read on...

This post grew out of the notes which I made for my previous post to reference specific Biblical passages. The more I buried my nose in my [1]Bible to double-check the accuracy of my references, the more surreal everything seemed to become. Was I really still reading canonical scripture? Was I still reading the presumed word of God? Well, yes I was, as anyone reading these cited texts can check for themselves. These passages are mostly either God speaking in the first person, dictating the various laws or Commandments to Moses (yes, there are considerably more than ten), or Moses speaking to the Israelites, and are intended as instructions for social conduct in the Promised Land.

Slaughter: In the Old Testament see the Book of [2]Numbers 31:7-18 for a graphic account of how, having massacred the Midianite army, the victorious Israelite forces nevertheless had mercifully spared the lives of the captive women and children - much to Moses' wrath. He then commanded his forces to put all the married women and boys to the sword as well, but the young virgin girls they 'could keep alive for themselves'. He seems quickly enough to have brushed aside the 13th Commandment ('Thou Shalt Not Kill') which God had so recently given to him personally. And so these captive women and 'young ones' were slain also. But even this brutal episode was not a one-off incident: see also Judges 21:10-24 for a very similar account. This time it was the women and young boys of Jabesh-gilead who were slain. In this case it even specifies the number of young virgins who were taken back to the Israelite camp: there were four hundred of them. Apparently even this many weren't enough to go around - or as the narrator ruefully puts it: 'they sufficed them not'. See other instances throughout the Bible of murder and massacre too numerous to cite here.

Slavery: See Exodus 21:6 and Deuteronomy 15:17, both of which describe the practice of driving an awl through the ear of a slave to mark that slave forever, while bracing him or her (it applied to both sexes) against a door. Incredibly, in both Books this act is described as a reward for loyalty. See Leviticus 25:44-47 for an exposition of slaves as inheritable possessions, and elsewhere regarding the keeping of slaves, and also in the New Testament, such as in Ephesians 6:5 (on obedience to one's master) and Timothy 6:1 (on honoring one's master). Slavery is dealt with in scripture in expositions of the various rules governing the owning of slaves, while never actually being condemned as a practice. Exodus 21:20-21 states that if you beat your servant (whether male or female) to incapacity, if the servant survives for 'a day or two', then you're off the hook because, well... after all, servants cost money. Yes, this is the actual reason given, as anyone reading this can check for themselves.

Rape: In the Old Testament see Deuteronomy 21:10-14 for a description of the treatment of women as spoils of war, which concludes that if a captive woman does not please you, and you show her the door, it is unlawful to sell her for money if you have raped her because she is then regarded as spoiled goods. See also Deuteronomy 22:28-29, which earnestly assures us that the rape victim must marry and remain with her rapist 'all his days'. I would challenge anyone to read these several chapters in Deuteronomy and other books in the Old Testament dealing with Biblical law and not feel revolted by their inhumanity, as anyone with a sense of moral human decency should.

Stoning: See Deuteronomy 21:18-21 for instructions on stoning to death your disobedient son. This particular law is just one of many such Biblical laws which break the 13th Commandment. Homosexuality, loss of virginity before marriage, blasphemy, adultery, fortune telling and swearing at or striking a parent were also among the various Biblical offences punishable by a gruesome and prolonged death by stoning. An exception is Leviticus 20:14, which specifies that if a man 'take a wife and her mother', then all three are to be burned alive. Deuteronomy 13:6-10 also specifies death by stoning for apostasy - in this case, turning away from the Israelites' God - and urges the listener that 'thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death'.

Sacrifice: Judges 11:29-40 relates the grim tale of Jephthah, who makes a pact with God. If God will grant him victory in a coming battle, Jephthah will sacrifice to God whatever is the first thing to come out of his house upon his return home. God keeps his side of the bargain, Jephthah returns triumphant – and is greeted by his daughter, his only child, who rushes joyfully to meet him. Jephthah in despair tells his daughter what he has promised to God. His daughter (whose name we never learn) is reconciled, but asks for two months reprieve. The period passes, and Jephthah then ‘did with her according to his vow’, as the Bible coyly phrases what is in reality a human sacrifice. The body is then burned so that the smoke may waft heavenwards and please the Almighty. God, being all-knowing, would of course have known at the time the pact was made who the victim would be, and being all-powerful, could presumably have arranged for a chicken or some other animal to rush outside instead. But God, as much as Jephthah – and the rest of us – made his choices.

Hawkwood

[1] The Bible referred to is my own copy of the King James Version study edition, published by Zondervan. This is a copiously-annotated Apologist edition whose annotations at times make unintentionally chilling reading, such as excusing the Biblical condoning of slavery as 'situations that were divinely-given, practical ways of dealing with the morality of the day.' (annotation to Timothy 6:5). So in the actual words of this edition's editors, for one human being to own another is considered by them to be a 'divinely-given situation'.

[2] My chapter-and-verse citations throughout this post are for others to independently check these passages for themselves should they choose to do so. For those who do not have a Bible, the full text of the King James Version is available online from several websites, including: http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/

The images for this post are adapted from Gustave Doré's illustrations for the Bible.