In trying to defend the claim that men can use the bible as a justification to treat women badly, I was accused of ‘cherry-picking’ verses from the bible to suit my own theories. Mea culpa. To do otherwise is foolishness. The accusation was followed with the usual question: “What gives you the right to pick and choose what parts of the bible you want to believe?” I say the right of intellectual inquiry, and then add, the record of what Jesus did and said about God is the most accurate portrayal of him. Any text that contradicts this portrayal becomes suspect, clearly not inspired, and likely to misrepresent God. Much of the Old Testament does this. It portrays God as gods were always portrayed at that time. To be sure, it was one god, not one among many, but presented as a god-like figure nonetheless; needing to be kept pleased or bad things will happen. Hence the prevalence of the word ‘mercy’.
Keeping the gods from becoming angry required sacrifice. And, of course with the sacrifice idea there must be a priestly class to administer it, an intermediary between the worshippers and their object of worship. It appears that by the time Jesus arrived, the priestly class had so corrupted the sacrifice idea, they had lost sight of the beggars ‘at the gate’ going hungry while cart-loads of meat were available. He was not happy, and there isn’t any evidence his father was either. Nor is there much evidence the whole sacrifice order was God’s idea to begin with. Lots of scripture to suggest he took no pleasure in it, rather he accommodated it as the patient father of wayward children tends to do. Likely the idea of sacrifice originated from the God-as-Deity idea so prevalent in the OT and the model that Jesus changed with “Our Father…” All done away with under the new covenant of grace.
While the slaughter of animals was done away with, the priestly class needed something to help them maintain their intermediary role, and they found it in the bible. It gave them authority, if not from God, at least from what they claimed was ‘his word’. They had willing collaborators in the translators to ensure ‘the word’ was saying what they wanted it to say, and later introduced the notion of ‘inerrancy’, meaning it had no errors and thus could not be challenged.
But challenged it was. The Eastern Orthodox church, for example do not have the Western church’s high view of the ‘sacred’ texts. They view the Old Testament as a library of Hebrew writings; poetry, history, hymns, prophecies, all vital in their capacity to point to God’s work in the earth, but certainly not error-free. For the orthodox, difficult passages that so demean women or are overly triumphalist (slaughter of the enemies) are readily dismissed as the writings of a group of scribes attaching God’s name to their own ideas. Often these scribes have an ulterior motive, one that suits either themselves as individual men, or their nation to have it represented as one with God on their side.
In my view, groups of scribes could have wanted to copy their neighbours in this sacrifice idea (anything to make the gods happy) and wrote it as ‘law’. The people even dragged the god of Moloch through the wilderness for 40 years, suggesting some attachment to their neighbour’s gods.
Not convinced? Try examining the topic of rape in scripture. It puzzled me to read that in Jesus’ day, Jewish men were able to choose young women and have their way with them with impunity. Perhaps not surprising, given women had no more rights than infants, foreigners and handicapped people. The law on adultery gave women some protection, but the law on rape is inconclusive and confusing to say the least. I rely on perhaps the best scholar on gender and Hebrew law, Harold Washington who concludes: (on Deuteronomy 20-22) “The laws do not interdict sexual violence, rather they stipulate the terms under which a man may commit rape”. I ask you: “God-breathed?” Consistent with Jesus’ approach to women?
We Christians should not be defined as ‘people of the book’ such as Mormons, Muslims and Jews. For sure Jesus had high regard for the ancient texts, but it is interesting to note that his regard was for the words of the ‘living oracles’ not necessarily what is recorded. There must have been good reason for the Word to become a living person pitching his tent alongside ours. And good reason for the slaughter of animals as appeasement to cease forever after the ‘once and for all’ sacrifice.
Yes, we have to cherry-pick. To do otherwise is to assume all verses are of equal value, all ‘God-breathed’, sacred, and inerrant. Good luck with that idea. The euphemism ‘difficult passages’ doesn’t explain how out of character such actions are for a loving God. To reconcile much of the misogyny, the nationalistic triumphalism, the downright harshness on non-Jewish people with what we see in Jesus is not just difficult, it is impossible. Cherry-pickers know this and don’t even try. They are for higher ideals, not the low-hanging fruit of ‘but the bible says …’
Cherry-pickers become good fruit inspectors. They know, for example, that dreadful things have happened because the book said they could; war, crusades, inquisitions, slavery and more, in other words bad fruit. Rotten to the core, and fruit that must be discarded. They know what good fruit looks like, evidence of changed lives demonstrating the values of self-giving, other-centred love in their interaction with everyone, including people who don’t like them and are not like them. They live in a glorious freedom because they are not bound by a book; they have gone beyond that to another writer: the author and finisher of their faith.
Cherries anyone?
See video: Did God really say that?
