Old Testament War Quotes

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

We can always be sure of one thing—that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments.

Women are also property in our bible; adultery is a property crime in the Old Testament, not a sex crime.

Mother says that people like me just become intellectual old maids,' I told him. 'I don't see why,' he protested. 'Oh, well, it's probably true!' I said, rather sharply, for misery had as usual made me irritable. 'After the War there'll be no one for me to marry.' 'Not even me?' he asked very softly. 'How do I know I shall want to marry you when that time comes?' 'You know you wouldn't be happy unless you married an odd sort of person.' 'That rather narrows the field of choice, doesn't it?' 'Well--do you need it to be so very wide?

Some Christian lawyers—some eminent and stupid judges—have said and still say, that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of all law. Nothing could be more absurd. Long before these commandments were given there were codes of laws in India and Egypt—laws against murder, perjury, larceny, adultery and fraud. Such laws are as old as human society; as old as the love of life; as old as industry; as the idea of prosperity; as old as human love. All of the Ten Commandments that are good were old; all that were new are foolish. If Jehovah had been civilized he would have left out the commandment about keeping the Sabbath, and in its place would have said: 'Thou shalt not enslave thy fellow-men.' He would have omitted the one about swearing, and said: 'The man shall have but one wife, and the woman but one husband.' He would have left out the one about graven images, and in its stead would have said: 'Thou shalt not wage wars of extermination, and thou shalt not unsheathe the sword except in self-defence.' If Jehovah had been civilized, how much grander the Ten Commandments would have been. All that we call progress—the enfranchisement of man, of labor, the substitution of imprisonment for death, of fine for imprisonment, the destruction of polygamy, the establishing of free speech, of the rights of conscience; in short, all that has tended to the development and civilization of man; all the results of investigation, observation, experience and free thought; all that man has accomplished for the benefit of man since the close of the Dark Ages—has been done in spite of the Old Testament.

I'm in no rush to patch up these questions. God save me from the day when stories of violence, rape, and ethnic cleansing inspire within me anything other than revulsion. I don't want to become a person who is unbothered by these texts, and if Jesus is who he says he is, then I don't think he wants me to either. There are parts of the Bible that inspire, parts that perplex, and parts that leave you with an open wound. I'm still wrestling, and like Jacob, I will wrestle until I am blessed. God hasn't let go of me yet.

What if I told you Jesus came to abolish religion? What if I told you getting you to vote Republican really wasn’t his mission? What if I told you religious right doesn’t automatically mean Christian? And just because you call some people blind, doesn’t automatically give you vision. I mean, if religion is so great, why has it started so many wars? Why does it build huge churches, but fail to feed the poor? Tell single moms God doesn’t love them, if they’ve ever had a divorce? Yet God in the Old Testament actually calls the religious people whores.

New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn't make it a smart country. A couple of weeks ago, I was asked on CNN if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn't put anything past this stupid country. Well, the station was flooded with emails, and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad, because they wrote entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS!!! Worst of all, Bill O'Reilly refuted my contention that this is a stupid country by calling me a pinhead, which (a) proves my point, and (b) is really funny coming from a doody-face like him. Now, before I go about demonstration how, sadly, easy it is to prove the dumbness that's dragging us down, let me just say that ignorance has life-and-death consequences. On the eve of the Iraq War, seventy percent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Six years later, thirty-four percent still do. Or look at the health-care debate: At a recent town hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which is kind of like driving cross-country to protest highways. This country is like a college chick after two Long Island iced teas: We can be talked into anything, like wars, and we can be talked out of anything, like health care. We should forget the town halls, and replace them with study halls. Listen to some of these stats: A majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. Twenty-four percent could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don't know what's in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don't know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket. Not here. Nearly half of Americans don't know that states have two senators, and more than half can't name their congressman. And among Republican governors, only three got their wife's name right on the first try. People bitch and moan about taxes and spending, but they have no idea what their government spends money on. The average voter thinks foreign aid consumes more twenty-four percent of our budget. It's actually less than one percent. A third of Republicans believe Obama is not a citizen ad a third of Democrats believe that George Bush had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, which is an absurd sentence, because it contains the words "Bush" and "knowledge." Sarah Palin says she would never apologize for America. Even though a Gallup poll say eighteen percent of us think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they're not stupid. They're interplanetary mavericks. And I haven't even brought up religion. But here's one fun fact I'll leave you with: Did you know only about half of Americans are aware that Judaism is an older religion than Christianity? That's right, half of America looks at books called the Old Testament and the New Testament and cannot figure out which came first. I rest my case.

Sunday morning came – next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams – visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation

George Lucas had a very Old Testament view of not forgiving,' Gary Kurtz said. 'Once he was wronged, he would always remember it.

The call to “take the land” ...is not a call to a new political, cultural or geographical dominance. It is Kingdom of God territory. It is the will of the Eternal God being done on earth, as it is in heaven.

Men speak of God’s love for man… but if providence does not come in this hour, where is He then? My conclusion is simple. The Semitic texts from Bronze Age Palestine of which Christianity is comprised still fit uncomfortably well with contemporary life. The Old Testament depicts a God capricious and cruel; blood sacrifice, vengeance, genocide; death and destruction et al. Would He not approve of Herr Hitler and the brutal, tribalistic crusade against Hebrews and non-Christian ‘untermensch?’ One thing is inarguable. His church on Earth has produced some of the most vigorous and violent contribution to the European fascist cause. It is synergy. Man Created God, even if God Created Man; it all exists in the hubris and apotheosis of the narcissistic soul, and alas, all too many of the human herd are willing to follow the beastly trait of leadership. The idea of self-emancipation and advancement, with Europe under the jackboot of fascism, would be Quixotic to the point of mirthless lunacy.

Exoneration of Jesus Christ If Christ was in fact God, he knew all the future. Before Him like a panorama moved the history yet to be. He knew how his words would be interpreted. He knew what crimes, what horrors, what infamies, would be committed in his name. He knew that the hungry flames of persecution would climb around the limbs of countless martyrs. He knew that thousands and thousands of brave men and women would languish in dungeons in darkness, filled with pain. He knew that his church would invent and use instruments of torture; that his followers would appeal to whip and fagot, to chain and rack. He saw the horizon of the future lurid with the flames of the auto da fe. He knew what creeds would spring like poisonous fungi from every text. He saw the ignorant sects waging war against each other. He saw thousands of men, under the orders of priests, building prisons for their fellow-men. He saw thousands of scaffolds dripping with the best and bravest blood. He saw his followers using the instruments of pain. He heard the groans—saw the faces white with agony. He heard the shrieks and sobs and cries of all the moaning, martyred multitudes. He knew that commentaries would be written on his words with swords, to be read by the light of fagots. He knew that the Inquisition would be born of the teachings attributed to him. He saw the interpolations and falsehoods that hypocrisy would write and tell. He saw all wars that would be waged, and-he knew that above these fields of death, these dungeons, these rackings, these burnings, these executions, for a thousand years would float the dripping banner of the cross. He knew that hypocrisy would be robed and crowned—that cruelty and credulity would rule the world; knew that liberty would perish from the earth; knew that popes and kings in his name would enslave the souls and bodies of men; knew that they would persecute and destroy the discoverers, thinkers and inventors; knew that his church would extinguish reason’s holy light and leave the world without a star. He saw his disciples extinguishing the eyes of men, flaying them alive, cutting out their tongues, searching for all the nerves of pain. He knew that in his name his followers would trade in human flesh; that cradles would be robbed and women’s breasts unbabed for gold. And yet he died with voiceless lips. Why did he fail to speak? Why did he not tell his disciples, and through them the world: “You shall not burn, imprison and torture in my name. You shall not persecute your fellow-men.” Why did he not plainly say: “I am the Son of God,” or, “I am God”? Why did he not explain the Trinity? Why did he not tell the mode of baptism that was pleasing to him? Why did he not write a creed? Why did he not break the chains of slaves? Why did he not say that the Old Testament was or was not the inspired word of God? Why did he not write the New Testament himself? Why did he leave his words to ignorance, hypocrisy and chance? Why did he not say something positive, definite and satisfactory about another world? Why did he not turn the tear-stained hope of heaven into the glad knowledge of another life? Why did he not tell us something of the rights of man, of the liberty of hand and brain? Why did he go dumbly to his death, leaving the world to misery and to doubt? I will tell you why. He was a man, and did not know.

Q (Quiller-Couch) was all by himself my college education. I went down to the public library one day when I was seventeen looking for books on the art of writing, and found five books of lectures which Q had delivered to his students of writing at Cambridge. "Just what I need!" I congratulated myself. I hurried home with the first volume and started reading and got to page 3 and hit a snag: Q was lecturing to young men educated at Eton and Harrow. He therefore assumed his students − including me − had read Paradise Lost as a matter of course and would understand his analysis of the "Invocation to Light" in Book 9. So I said, "Wait here," and went down to the library and got Paradise Lost and took it home and started reading it and got to page 3, when I hit a snag: Milton assumed I'd read the Christian version of Isaiah and the New Testament and had learned all about Lucifer and the War in Heaven, and since I'd been reared in Judaism I hadn't. So I said, "Wait here," and borrowed a Christian Bible and read about Lucifer and so forth, and then went back to Milton and read Paradise Lost, and then finally got back to Q, page 3. On page 4 or 5, I discovered that the point of the sentence at the top of the page was in Latin and the long quotation at the bottom of the page was in Greek. So I advertised in the Saturday Review for somebody to teach me Latin and Greek, and went back to Q meanwhile, and discovered he assumed I not only knew all the plays by Shakespeare, and Boswell's Johnson, but also the Second books of Esdras, which is not in the Old Testament and not in the New Testament, it's in the Apocrypha, which is a set of books nobody had ever thought to tell me existed. So what with one thing and another and an average of three "Wait here's" a week, it took me eleven years to get through Q's five books of lectures.

30 to 40 percent of the world's Jews were killed during World War II, but not that 80 to 90 percent of the Orthodox community perished, among them many who had kept alive an ancient tradition of mysticism and meditation reaching back to the Old Testament world of the prophets.

Most people know that 30 to 40 percent of the world's Jews were killed during World War II, but not that 80 to 90 percent of the Orthodox community perished, among them many who had kept alive an ancient tradition of mysticism and meditation reaching back to the Old Testament world of the prophets.

I had seen the poor, the meek and the modest, the young, the brave and the idealistic - all those, in fact, who always are too easily enchanted by high-sounding phrases - giving their lives and their futures in order that the powerful might have more power, the rich grow richer, the old remain in comparative security.

LewRockwell.com, is overbrimming with pro-Confederacy, anti-American material (mostly in the context of polemics against the U.S. war efforts in Iraq), as well as writings by people who (in other venues) are unacceptably racist or so traditionally Christian they call for stoning of sinners according to Old Testament rules.

Those who abandon the law praise the wicked man, but those who keep the law war against him. Evil men understand nothing of justice, but those who seek the Lord understand all. Proverbs: 28:4-5

For Hindus, banyan trees are sacred. For Buddhists, bodhi trees; for the Arabs, certain date palms. To be stalwart in a ‘tree-like’ way was to approach goodness, according to Confucius. The Normans built chapels in the trunks of yew trees. Many other cultures attached religious significance to particular trees and groves and forests. Adonis was born of a tree. Daphne turned into one. George Washington confessed to cutting one down and the United States, as a result, was all but immaculately conceived. The tree is the symbol of the male organ and of the female body. The Hebrew kabbalah depicts Creation in the form of a tree. In Genesis, a tree holds the key to immortal life, and it is to the branches and fruit of an olive tree that God’s people are likened in both the Old and New Testaments. To celebrate the birth of Christ his followers place trees in their sitting rooms and palm fronds, a symbol of victory, commemorate his entering Jerusalem. A child noted by Freud had fantasies of wounding a tree that represented his mother. The immortal swagman of Australia sat beneath a coolabah tree. In hundreds of Australian towns the war dead are honoured by avenues of trees.

America had, I believe, a divine founding. Call it American exceptionalism if you like. But that makes America all the more vulnerable to God's judgment if we become accustomed to glamorizing war, excusing lies, and parading our might and dominance.

I live in a time of fear and the fear is not of war or weather or death or poverty or terror. The fear is of life itself. The fear is of tomorrow, a time when things do not get better but become worse. This is the belief of my time. I do not share it. The numbers of people will rise, the pain of migration will grow, the seas will bark forth storms, the bombs will explode in the markets, and mouths fighting for a place at the table will grow, as will the shouting and shoving. That is a given. Once the given is accepted, fear is pointless. The fear comes from not accepting it, from turning aside one's head, from dreaming in the fort of one's home that such things cannot be. The fear comes from turning inward and seeking personal salvation. The bones must be properly buried, amends must be made. Also, the beasts must be acknowledged. And the weather faced, the winds and rains lashing the face, still, they must be faced. So too, the dry ground screaming for relief. There is an industry peddling solutions, and these solutions insist no one must really change, except perhaps a little, and without pain. This is the source of the fear, this refusal to accept the future that is already here. In the Old Testament, the laws insist we must not drink blood, that the flesh must be properly drained or we will be outcasts from the Lord. They say these rules were necessary for clean living in some earlier time. I swallow the blood, all the bloods. I am that outlaw, the one crossing borders. The earlier time is over.

Most people know that 30 to 40 percent of the world's Jews were killed during World War II, but not that 80 to 90 percent of the Orthodox community perished, among them many who had kept alive an ancient tradition of mysticism and meditation reaching back to the Old Testament world of the prophets. "In my youth, growing up in a Jewish milieu," Heschel wrote of his childhood in Warsaw, "there was one thing we did not have to look for and that was exaltation. Every moment is great, we were taught, every moment is unique.

He looked like the wrathful Old Testament God getting ready to throw down some well-deserved punishment on the earth. “This might be hard to understand, lady. But in war, you do the right thing, whatever it takes, and if you come out alive, you know how easy you could have screwed up, so bragging on it is dead-solid wrong. Only assholes do that. I don’t Facebook. Don’t tweet. Don’t Instagram. I don’t talk about the past, and it pisses me off that you remembered that old DDT thing and were able to find that newspaper photo.

Most people know that 30 to 40 percent of the world's Jews were killed during World War II, but not that 80 to 90 percent of the Orthodox community perished, among them many who had kept alive an ancient tradition of mysticism and meditation reaching back to the Old Testament world of the prophets. "In my youth, growing up in a Jewish milieu," Heschel wrote of his childhood in Warsaw, "there was one thing we did not have to look for and that was exaltation. Every moment is great, we were taught, every moment is unique." The

At the end of the fifteenth century, the poet Thomas Hoccleve declared in The Regiment of Princes, “Allas, wher ys this worldes stabylnesse?”—a lament that appears equally in Homer or in Jeremiah in the Old Testament. Through most of human history, people have accepted the fact that their lives will shift suddenly due to wars, famines, or other disasters, and that they will have to improvise in order to survive. Our parents and grandparents were filled with anxiety in 1940, having endured the wreckage of the Great Depression and facing the looming prospect of a world war.

Take a community of Dutchmen of the type of those who defended themselves for fifty years against all the power of Spain at a time when Spain was the greatest power in the World. Intermix with them a strain of those inflexible French Huguenots who gave up home and fortune and left their Country forever at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The product must obviously be one of the most rugged, virile, unconquerable races ever seen upon Earth. Take this formidable people and train them for seven generations in constant warfare against savage men and ferocious beasts, in circumstances under which no weakling could survive, place them so that they acquire exceptional skills with weapons and in horsemanship, give them a Country which is eminently suited to the tactics of the huntsman, the marksman and the rider. Then, finally, put a fine temper upon their military qualities by a dour fatalistic Old Testament religion and an ardent and consuming patriotism. Combine all of these qualities and all these impulses in one individual, and you have the modern Boer. The most formidable antagonist who ever crossed the path of Imperial Britain.

I have a deep thought for you. Science fiction is just beginning to catch up with the Old Testament. See artificial nitrates run off into the rivers and oceans. See carbon dioxide melt the polar ice caps. See the world's mineral reserves dwindle. See war, famine and plague. See barbaric hordes defile the temple of virgins. See wild stallions mount the prairie dogs. I said science fiction but I guess I meant science. Anyway there's some kind of mythical and/or historic circle-thing being completed here. But I keep smiling. I keep telling myself there's nothing to worry about as long as the youth of America knows what's going on. Brains, brawn, good teeth. tallness.

Jesus is a little problematic for Christian nationalists, and Matthew 10: 34 is one of the mechanisms they use to blunt his impact where it is not welcome. He was something of a nonjudgmental, socialistic peacenik, which is inconvenient to a movement characterized by judgment, unfettered capitalism, and war. So Christian nationalists gave Jesus a makeover, combining the unflinching, violent judgment and punishments of the Old Testament with a Jesus who provides eternal life through his death and resurrection for our sins. I often wonder how Jesus would feel in a modern, evangelical megachurch, as he would have precious little ideology in common with his followers there.

For the first time I understood the dogma of eternal pain -- appreciated "the glad tidings of great joy." For the first time my imagination grasped the height and depth of the Christian horror. Then I said: "It is a lie, and I hate your religion. If it is true, I hate your God." From that day I have had no fear, no doubt. For me, on that day, the flames of hell were quenched. From that day I have passionately hated every orthodox creed. That Sermon did some good. In the Old Testament, they said. God is the judge -- but in the New, Christ is the merciful. As a matter of fact, the New Testament is infinitely worse than the Old. In the Old there is no threat of eternal pain. Jehovah had no eternal prison -- no everlasting fire. His hatred ended at the grave. His revenge was satisfied when his enemy was dead. In the New Testament, death is not the end, but the beginning of punishment that has no end. In the New Testament the malice of God is infinite and the hunger of his revenge eternal. The orthodox God, when clothed in human flesh, told his disciples not to resist evil, to love their enemies, and when smitten on one cheek to turn the other, and yet we are told that this same God, with the same loving lips, uttered these heartless, these fiendish words; "Depart ye cursed into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels." These are the words of "eternal love." No human being has imagination enough to conceive of this infinite horror. All that the human race has suffered in war and want, in pestilence and famine, in fire and flood, -- all the pangs and pains of every disease and every death -- all this is as nothing compared with the agonies to be endured by one lost soul. This is the consolation of the Christian religion. This is the justice of God -- the mercy of Christ. This frightful dogma, this infinite lie, made me the implacable enemy of Christianity. The truth is that this belief in eternal pain has been the real persecutor. It founded the Inquisition, forged the chains, and furnished the fagots. It has darkened the lives of many millions. It made the cradle as terrible as the coffin. It enslaved nations and shed the blood of countless thousands. It sacrificed the wisest, the bravest and the best. It subverted the idea of justice, drove mercy from the heart, changed men to fiends and banished reason from the brain. Like a venomous serpent it crawls and coils and hisses in every orthodox creed. It makes man an eternal victim and God an eternal fiend. It is the one infinite horror. Every church in which it is taught is a public curse. Every preacher who teaches it is an enemy of mankind. Below this Christian dogma, savagery cannot go. It is the infinite of malice, hatred, and revenge. Nothing could add to the horror of hell, except the presence of its creator, God. While I have life, as long as I draw breath, I shall deny with all my strength, and hate with every drop of my blood, this infinite lie.

Isaiah was not only the most remarkable of the prophets, he was by far the greatest writer in the Old Testament. He was evidently a magnificent preacher, but it is likely he set his words down in writing. They certainly achieved written form very early and remained among the most popular of all the holy writings: among the texts found at Qumran after the Second World War was a leather scroll, 23 feet long, giving the whole of Isaiah in fifty columns of Hebrew, the best preserved and longest ancient manuscript of the Bible we possess.216 The early Jews loved his sparkling prose with its brilliant images, many of which have since passed into the literature of all civilized nations. But more important than the language was the thought: Isaiah was pushing humanity towards new moral discoveries.

I know that these things will never come back. I may see the rocks again, and smell the flowers, and watch the dawn sunshine chase the shadows from the old sulphuric-colored walls, but the light that sprang from the heightened consciousness of wartime, the glory seen by the enraptured ingenious eyes of twenty-two, will be upon them no more. I am a girl no longer, and the world, for all its excitements of chosen work and individualistic play, has grown tame in comparison with Malta during those years of our anguish. It is, I think, this glamour, this magic, this incomparable keying up of the spirit in a time of mortal conflict, which constitute the pacifist’s real problem — a problem still incompletely imagined, and still quite unresolved. The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour is dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any later time. The glamour may be the mere delirium of fever, which as soon as war is over dies out and shows itself for the will-o’-the-wisp that it is, but while it lasts no emotion known to man seems as yet to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged vitality.

Roughly 25 percent of humanity is Muslim. For every Jew, there are roughly one hundred twenty-five Muslims. Judaism is about 2500 years older than Islam, and yet it has not been able to attract nearly as many followers. If we construe religions as memeplexes (a collection of interconnected memes), to borrow Richard Dawkin's term, the Islamic memeplex has been extraordinarily more successful than its Jewish counterpart (from an epidemiological perspective, that is). Why is that? To answer this important question, we must look at the contents of the two respective memeplexes to examine why one is more "infectious" than the other. Let us explore the rules for converting into the two religions and apostatizing out of them. In Judaism, the religious process for conversion is onerous, requiring several years of commitment and an absence of ulterior motive. (For example, converting to Judaism because you are marrying a Jewish person is considered an ulterior motive). Not surprisingly, given the barriers to entry, relatively few people convert to Judaism. On the other hand, to convert to Islam simply requires that one proclaim openly the sentence, the shahada (the testimony): "There is no true god but Allah, and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah." It does not require a sophisticated epidemiological model to predict which memeplex will spread more rapidly. Let us now suppose that one wishes to leave the religion. While the Old Testament does mention the death penalty for apostasy, it has seldom been applied throughout Jewish history, whereas to this day apostasy from Islam does lead to the death penalty in several Islamic countries. But perhaps the most important difference is that Judaism does not promote or encourage proselytizing, whereas it is a central religious obligation in Islam. According to Islam, the world is divided into dar al-hard (the house of war) and dar al-Islam (the house of Islam). Peace will arrive when the entire world is united under the flag of Allah. Hence, it is imperative to Islamize the nations within dar al-harb. There is only one Jewish country in the world, Israel, and it has a sizeable non-Jewish minority. But there are fifty-seven member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

It is due to the spirit realm being suppressed by the natural realm. Human beings are the gatekeepers! If we were to cooperate with the realm of the spirit, not just as an individual but corporately, we would see tremendous results—Old Testament-type miracles would manifest on the scene! Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever! The issue is bad teaching, a lack of revelation, and a lot of cerebral processing with the kingdom of God rather than a united faith-filled Body giving tremendous permission for the Spirit of God to release what has already been done in the spirit into the natural realm. Human

Religious intolerance is an idea that found its earliest expression in the Old Testament, where the Hebrew tribe depicts itself waging a campaign of genocide on the Palestinian peoples to steal their land. They justified this heinous behavior on the grounds that people not chosen by their god were wicked and therefore did not deserve to live or keep their land. In effect, the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian peoples, eradicating their race with the Jew's own Final Solution, was the direct result of a policy of religious superiority and divine right. Joshua 6-11 tells the sad tale, and one needs only read it and consider the point of view of the Palestinians who were simply defending their wives and children and the homes they had built and the fields they had labored for. The actions of the Hebrews can easily be compared with the American genocide of its native peoples - or even, ironically, the Nazi Holocaust. With the radical advent of Christianity, this self-righteous intolerance was borrowed from the Jews, and a new twist was added. The conversion of infidels by any means possible became the newfound calling card of religious fervor, and this new experiment in human culture spread like wildfire. By its very nature, how could it not have? Islam followed suit, conquering half the world in brutal warfare and, much like its Christian counterpart, it developed a new and convenient survival characteristic: the destruction of all images and practices attributed to other religions. Muslims destroyed millions of statues and paintings in India and Africa, and forced conversion under pain of death (or by more subtle tricks: like taxing only non-Muslims), while the Catholic Church busily burned books along with pagans, shattering statues and defacing or destroying pagan art - or converting it to Christian use. Laws against pagan practices and heretics were in full force throughrout Europe by the sixth century, and as long as those laws were in place it was impossible for anyone to refuse the tenets of Christianity and expect to keep their property or their life. Similar persecution and harassment continues in Islamic countries even to this day, officially and unofficially.

Great speech to the German Reichstag Berlin, January 30, 1939 Once again I will be a prophet: should the international Jewry of finance (Finanzjudentum) succeed, both within and beyond Europe, in plunging mankind into yet another world war, then the result will not be a Bolshevization of the earth and the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe. Thus, the days of propagandist impotence of the non-Jewish peoples are over. National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy possess institutions which, if necessary, permit opening the eyes of the world to the true nature of this problem. Many a people is instinctively aware of this, albeit not scientifically versed in it. At this moment, the Jews are still propagating their campaign of hatred in certain states under the cover of press, film, radio, theater, and literature, which are all in their hands. Should indeed this one Volk attain its goal of prodding masses of millions from other peoples to enter into a war devoid of all sense for them, and serving the interests of the Jews exclusively, then the effectiveness of an enlightenment will once more display its might. Within Germany, this enlightenment conquered Jewry utterly in the span of a few years. Peoples desire not to perish on the battlefield just so that this rootless, internationalist race can profit financially from this war and thereby gratify its lust for vengeance derived from the Old Testament. The Jewish watchword “Proletarians of the world, unite!” will be conquered by a far more lofty realization, namely: “Creative men of all nations, recognize your common foe!

The other approach, probably more widely appealing in contemporary Western culture, is so to fix on the painful circumstances of life that one gives up on faith. The harsh realities of life show that Christian (or other) faith in God is no longer tenable. It might have been once, when one was a child, perhaps in Sunday school. But when one grows up and acquires scientific understanding of how the world works, together with an awareness of increasingly uncertain general prospects—global warming, continuing wars, terrorism, famines, growing disparities between rich and poor, transience of romantic relationships, familial instabilities, social anomie, disillusionment with grand claims about the world, or just existential moments of “Why?” when confronted by needless and innocent suffering—then it becomes clear that “Our God reigns” is empty language that trivializes the realities of the world.

Wellhausen, who is at the foundation of so many contemporary issues of biblical scholarship, expressed his understanding of the religious nature of warfare in ancient Israel. War was worship for Israel. But even further he noted the warlike nature of Israel’s religion. Israel was in conflict with her neighbors, particularly in the area of religion, and this frequently led to armed conflict.

Though our holy religion teaches us to be for peace, yet it does not forbid us to provide for war.

Genesis 1 sits in stark contrast to that dark mythological polytheism. The biblical account has as its chief purpose to glorify the one Creator God who is the sole God of all reality. The water at creation (1:2) is certainly no deity, and it is not God’s foe that needs to be vanquished. It is mere putty in the hands of the Creator. There is no war between Yahweh and the gods of chaos in order to bring about creation. Yahweh is sovereign, and all the elements of creation are at his beck and call. Again, Genesis 1–2 is ardently zealous for monotheism. Not only does this literature not allow the inclusion of other gods; it stridently argues against them with clear polemics.

*———. The Mystery of Israel’s Origins: An Introduction and Proposals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. *Stager, Lawrence E. “Forging and Identity: The Emergence of Ancient Israel,” in The Oxford History of the Biblical World, ed. Michael D. Coogan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Stark, Thomas. The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It). Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010. *Thomas, Heath A., Jeremy Evans, and Paul Copan, eds. Holy War in the Bible: Christian Morality and an Old Testament Problem. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013. Williamson, H. G. M. 1 and 2 Chronicles. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982. Wright, N. T. How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2012. *———. Jesus and the Victory of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997. ———. Paul in Fresh Perspective. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. ———. Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why It Matters. San Francisco: HarperOne,

Over time, however, the Christendom shift involved150: • The adoption of Christianity as the official religion of city, state, or empire. • Movement of the church from the margins to the center of society. • The creation and progressive development of a Christian culture or civilization. • The assumption that all citizens (except Jews) were Christian by birth. • The development of a “sacral society,” corpus Christianum, where there was no freedom of religion and political power was divinely authenticated. • The definition of “orthodoxy” as the belief all shared, determined by powerful church leaders with state support. • Imposition, by legislation and custom, of a supposedly Christian morality on the entire society (though normally Old Testament morality was applied). • Infant baptism as the symbol of obligatory incorporation into Christian society. • The defense of Christianity by legal sanctions to restrain heresy, immorality, and schism. • A hierarchical ecclesiastical system, based on a diocesan and parish arrangement, analogous to the state hierarchy and buttressed by state support. • A generic distinction between clergy and laity, and relegation of laity to a largely passive role. • Two-tier ethics, with higher standards of discipleship (“ evangelical counsels”) expected of clergy and those in religious orders. • Sunday as an official holiday and obligatory church attendance, with penalties for noncompliance. • The requirement of oaths of allegiance and oaths in law courts to encourage truth-telling. • The construction of massive and ornate church buildings and the formation of huge congregations. • Increased wealth for the church and obligatory tithes to fund the system. • Division of the globe into “Christendom” and “heathendom” and wars waged in the name of Christ and the church. • Use of political and military force to impose Christianity, regardless of personal conviction. • Reliance on the Old Testament, rather than the New, to justify these changes.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was no Old Testament warrior bent on illustrating God’s wrath through the indiscriminate slaughter of those opposed to him. Nor was he a backwoodsman run amuck in a civilized world, not understanding the rules of warfare or the strictures of human society. He was, both in the simplest and most complex ways, a soldier trying to win an engagement and willing to use nonlethal, as well as lethal, means to do so. His threat of “no quarter” was a device to win a given battle, and when Forrest found that it could achieve, or at least help to achieve, this goal at Murfreesboro, he clearly decided to use it again wherever he considered the method promising.

That is the lesson we learn from the Old Testament, Israel’s story. God meets the ancient Israelites as they are able to understand him—as a warrior who slays his enemies, human and divine; a deity who is appeased by the blood of animals; a God who commands that eating lobster and bodily discharges make one “unclean,” and considers virgin daughters spoils of war and the property of their fathers. And just when it seems this is all there is to say, God also meets the Israelites in unexpected ways, in crisis, in exile, and he is on the move, challenging his people not to limit his actions by their perceptions. On the pages of the Old Testament we see the ancient sages and storytellers pondering a God who won’t sit still long enough to have the cement of people’s perceptions dry around him.

pay for Douglas paper.” In a remarkable letter to his eldest son, John Jr., in 1853, Brown expressed “pain and sorrow” at the young man’s loss of faith. Then John Sr. drew upon passages from the first five books of the Old Testament to warn his erring son with the words of Moses, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and Samuel not to fall into the “same disposition in Israel to backslide.” Brown’s sons were devoted abolitionists; they followed their father for their own reasons, perhaps least of all because he had used Joshua to instruct them. John Jr. later experienced a mental breakdown in Kansas in 1856, captured, beaten, and imprisoned after fighting as a guerrilla warrior at his father’s side. Another son, Frederick, was killed in the Kansas war. John Brown’s personal holy war on slavery became an extended family disaster.10

The old biblical legend believes that man is in possession of knowledge; that the expulsion from paradise is only the result of God now being afraid of man and is now driving him away from the place where the tree of life, immortality, stands; if he now also ate from the tree of life, it would be a matter of his power: Apart from that, the whole culture is symbolized by a growing fearfulness of man, in the tower of Babel, with its "sky-storming" purpose. God divides people: he splits them up; the multitude of languages is an emergency measure of God; he can cope better with the individual peoples insofar as they now make war among themselves and destroy them. At the beginning of the Old Testament is the famous story of God's fear. Man is portrayed as God's mistake; the animal likewise; the man who recognizes as rival of God; as the highest of God; Work, hardship, death as God's defense in order to hold down his rival: The fear of God. man as a mistake of God; the animal as well. Moral: God forbids knowledge because it leads to power, to equality with God. He would in himself grant man immortality, provided that he always remains immortally stupid. He creates animals for him, then the woman, so that he has company — so that he has entertainment (so that he does not get bad thoughts, thinking, knowing But the demon (snake) reveals to man what knowledge is about. The danger of God is enormous: now he must drive people away from the tree of life and hold them down through hardship, death and work. Real life is represented as a defensive defense of God, as an unnatural condition ... Culture, that is, the work of knowledge, nevertheless strives for equality with God: it towers upwards, storming into the heavens. Now war is found necessary (language as the cause of the "people") people are supposed to destroy themselves. The downfall is finally decided. One believed in such a God! ...

I want to name the obvious here for a moment. This is not good military strategy (nor is it an endearing geographical name). I can just imagine Joshua addressing his officers: “Gentlemen, tomorrow at dawn we cross the Jordan. And when the enemy least expects it, we’ll attack! . . . ourselves . . . with swords, to prepare for war!

My espionage travels took me once around the world, to all of the continents except Australia, over most of the great mountain ranges and across most of the great rivers. At various times I followed the routes of Captain Cook, Sinbad the Sailor, T.E. Lawrence, Magellan, Vasco da Gama, Marshal Lyautey, and Admiral Livy. In telling some of the stories of those years, I plead the precedent of the Author of the Old Testament in being security minded, and I hope to be excused for leaving a number of things untold and a number unexplained. Rome, March 1953.

The Old Testament is characterized by the affirmation of God’s sovereign kingship. God is sovereign as Creator and Sustainer of the earth and all that dwell therein; as Judge; as Redeemer of Israel; and in relation to all nations and peoples. Yet the created turned against their Creator. The earth reels under the consequences of human rebellion. Human life is characterized by violence, injustice, unrighteousness and misery. Israel itself was shattered by cataclysmic wars, most notably the war with Babylon that destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, displaced the royal family and ended in the exile of her leading citizens, forcing Israel into a seemingly endless period of occupation at the hands of pagan armies—in Jesus’ time, the Roman legions. Thus the later Prophets are redolent with a deep yearning for salvation, in the deepest and most holistic sense of that word. In Isaiah, it is based on God’s forgiveness, and it is eternal. It includes deliverance from oppression and injustice, from guilt and death, from war and slavery and imprisonment and exile. It includes peace and justice and forgiveness. The promise is that salvation is coming—for Israel and ultimately for the world, for societies, for families and for individuals. This is where the hope of a Messiah is located in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Old Testament hope of salvation is not merely for an eternal salvation in which our disembodied souls are snatched from this vale of tears. Nor is it merely for physical justice while fellowship with the presence of God’s Holy Spirit is ignored. To the extent that Christians adopt any kind of body/soul, earth/heaven dualism we simply do not understand the message of Scripture—or of Jesus. God’s salvation is the kingdom of God, and it means that—at last—God has acted to deliver humanity and now reigns over all of life, and is present to and with us, and will be in the future. The New Testament will bring a greater emphasis on eternal life, but it will not negate the holistic message of deliverance. The only possible response to this good news is great joy!

The Old Testament itself makes clear it is using hyperbole. Such drastic language is very rare; it only shows up a few times, and every time it does, we only have to go a little farther in the story to find the same enemies (that were supposedly wiped out) are still very much alive, still very powerful, and still causing problems.

This development—moving away from the view that God causes evil (rape, famine, sickness, war), towards a view that such evil is demonic—can be seen much earlier within Judaism in the intertestamental book of Jubilees (ca. 100 BCE) which revises the biblical narratives found in Genesis and the beginning of Exodus. The book of Jubilees takes many passages, which in the Old Testament books are attributed to God, and instead states that these were in fact the work of “Mastema,” the prince of demons. For example, while Exodus says that God killed the firstborn children in Egypt (Exod 11:4), the later book of Jubilees instead attributes this to “the powers of Mastema” which literally means in Hebrew “the powers of Hate” (Jubilees 49:2). This illustrates the shift in thinking that was occurring within Judaism at the time which recognized the obvious moral difficulty in attributing acts of evil to God. We can see a similar revisionism as well in the canonical books of the Old Testament itself. 2 Samuel describes God telling David to take a census, and then punishing him for it: “Again the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, ‘Go and take a census of Israel and Judah’” (2 Sam 24:1). David then subsequently recognizes that this was a sin: “David was conscience-stricken after he had counted the fighting men, and he said to the Lord, ‘I have sinned greatly in what I have done’” (v. 10). God then punishes David for this: “So the Lord sent a plague on Israel from that morning until the end of the time designated, and seventy thousand of the people from Dan to Beersheba died” (v. 15). This obviously paints a morally problematic picture of God, which is revised in the parallel account in the later book of 1 Chronicles, which instead states, “Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel” (1 Chron 21:1). Instead of God deceiving David and inciting him to sin, this is now presented as the work of Satan.

Smith, for example, claimed that if Americans defended slavery on the basis of the Old Testament, they should also defend practices like polygamy and the complete annihilation of defeated armies that are also prescribed in the Old Testament

Gregory is waging war on England. He is our enemy.” Morgan gets the faraway look that means he's about to quote scripture. “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle.” “This is the same Lord who says we shouldn't kill?” Tristan asks. “No, it's the Old Testament God,” I say. “The grumpy one.” “You have two Gods?” Zhuri asks. “Just one,” Tristan says. “But he had a troubled childhood.

This was not God’s plan. God planned to transcend the timeless and deadly dichotomy of “us” and “them,” to tear down the dividing wall that separated Jew and Gentile. He planned to “gather together in one the children of God who were scattered abroad” (John 11:52), to create a new people who shared a new nature. He planned a Kingdom which had no borders, needed no armies, and would need to fight no bloody wars to defend its sovereignty. This Kingdom would have no oppressive taxation, for its King was supported by the power of God alone, not by any human resources. It would have no foreign policy, no immigration restrictions, for all foreigners could instantly become citizens of this Kingdom through faith and baptism, without change of place or earthly nationality. In Christ, God was transforming the very nature of kingship and power, of salvation and defeat, of peace and war. Everything was redefined and transfigured. In Him, “old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2 Cor. 5:17). In this Kingdom, God made all things new (see Rev. 21:5), for it was only through this transformation that His salvation could extend to all the world, and all men could find their way home.

they called themselves the Deutsche Christens, “German Christians.” The contortions required to pull together their idea of Germanness with their idea of Christianity can be painful to contemplate. 172 In her book, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich, Doris Bergen wrote that “the ‘German Christians’ preached Christianity as the polar opposite of Judaism, Jesus as the arch anti-semite, and the cross as the symbol of war against Jews.” Fusing the German Volk (people) with the German Kirche (church) meant stretching and twisting the definitions of both. Step one was to define Germanness as inherently in opposition to Jewishness. To make Christianity one with Germanness meant purging it of everything Jewish. It was an absurd project. For starters, they decided the Old Testament must go. It was obviously too Jewish. At one German Christians’ gathering in Bavaria, the speaker ridiculed the Old Testament as a saga of racial defilement. His remark that “Moses in his old age had married a Negro woman” drew boisterous laughter and enthusiastic applause.

Perhaps few Old Testament passages have seen so many attempts to interpret them in the light of current events as Ezekiel 38–39. This is hardly a new phenomenon. The church father Ambrose, writing in the late fourth century, confidently identified Gog as the Goths.14 In the seventh century, Gog and Magog were the Arab armies that threatened the Holy Land.15 By the thirteenth century, Gog had become a cipher for the Mongol hordes from the East.16 William Greenhill, writing in the seventeenth century, records the opinion of some contemporaries who identified Gog as the Roman emperor, the Pope, or the Turks.17 In the nineteenth century, against the background of the tensions in Asia Minor that culminated in the Crimean War, Wilhelm Gesenius identified Rosh as Russia.18 This view was subsequently popularized by the Scofield Reference Bible, along with the idea taken from other sources that “Meshech” and “Tubal” are the Russian cities of Moscow and Tobolsk.19 During the First World War, Arno Gaebelein argued that Gomer was Germany.20 More recently, in response to the rise of Communism, these ideas have become the staples of popular dispensational end-times literature, to which has in some cases been added the contemporary threat of the Red Chinese, usually identified as “the kings from the East” in Revelation 16:12.

As the tension between the Protestants and the Church of Rome intensified, so did the desire for a third way among dissenting groups. Soon a new group emerged, though in some senses it was also an old group—one that felt it could trace its origins all the way back to the New Testament. Known collectively as the Radical Reformation, these persecuted groups often advocated a nonviolent ethic, the separation of church and state, and a desire for both personal and corporate holiness. The ideas of these radicals spread through Europe, and over the years the Amish, Mennonites and Anabaptists, and to a lesser degree the Covenanters and Quakers, emerged or were influenced by this movement.

The idea of a crusade owes something to the Old Testament, something to the Muslim example of a jihad, or holy war. It owes something, too, to the inflammatory preaching of illuminate monks, and a great deal to the beginning of the Christian reconquest of Spain from the Moors; this combined the triumph of the faith with the acquisition of rich properties.

In Rome, before the time of Christ, a festival was observed on the 25th of December, under the name of 'Natalis Solis Invicti' (Birthday of Sol the Invincible). It was a day of universal rejoicings, illustrated by illuminations and public games." [365:2] "All public business was suspended, declarations of war and criminal executions were postponed, friends made presents to one another, and the slaves were indulged with great liberties." [365:3]

Joan's claim that God had France in HIs care because France was sacred to him may not be merely a medieval trope, embarrassingly old-fashioned language that today we must expunge from our vocabularies. To claim that France is sacred does not imply that only France is sacred. Throughout history, men and women have arisen everywhere who testify to the sacredness of nations. Perhaps today more than ever, we are aware that the identity and integrity of nations are supremely significant for the human race - that the facile invasion of a sovereign state and genocide are abbhorent. In this regard, the entire Jewish-Chrisian faith tradition is based on the belief that God once summoned ordinary people and through them worked extraordinary eeds for HIs own purpose, which is to bring all peoples to Himself. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and the prophets were but a few of thsoe called to establish and save the nation of Israel. But Israel was brought into existence and alter triumphed over its enimies not only for its own sake. This is made clear throughout the Hebrew scriptures: God saved the nation so that all nations might be emraced. Israel was to be "a light to the gentiles," as both Old and New Testaments reiterate. God chose the ISraelites not to dominate or control but rather to serve others. The Christian Scriptures make the point more specific: the gentiles are not excluded from God's embrace, for the light of ISrael shines on the gentiles and shows the way into that embrace. All the peoples of the world are to be brought into the capacious light of the knowledge of God's friendship.Nowhere is it implied that Israel, or any other nation, should cease to exist. Because no single person or roup represents what it means to be human, its the variety of people within a nation that gives it an irreplaceable character - its national personality. As with individuals, so with nations: it is the diversity of peoples that furthers the process of the world. Although many nations have tried, none may set itself up as the only or the predominant nation, forcing its culture, ideology, religion or political agenda on any other nation. For Joan of Arc, this was precisely what England was trying to do through its nobels, armies and war machinery. France deserved its identity and, as a symbol of its people, the king.

the Bible nowhere prohibits war: in the Old Testament we find war and even conquest positively commanded, and although war was raging in the world in the time of Christ and his apostles, still they said not a word of its unlawfulness and immorality.

For the first three centuries, every Christian writer who discussed killing said that all killing was prohibited--whether in war, capital punishment, or abortion. Whether or not the early church was correct in thinking that is what Jesus intended, it is perfectly clear that in the one case where Jesus was explicitly called upon to affirm the Old Testament's call for capital punishment, he refused.

The bedrock source of ancient condemnations of usury is Deuteronomy in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. Bracketing here translation disputes, Deuteronomy holds: “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of anything that is lent upon usury”. Yet, it continues, “Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not”. This so-called “Deuteronomic double standard” became a contentious point in the feudal era. It was used to justify lending practices of particular ethnic and social groups such as the Jews and Lombards. A second point of dispute also arose. This was the differentiation between usury and interest.50 For Christian purists, of course, humanity is all one. To justify charging interest to Christians or others amounts to turning the world’s population into “strangers” which is tantamount to endorsing Thomas Hobbes “war of all against all” as the human condition. Similarly, usura in its formative incantation is simply paying for the use of money. There is thus no difference between usury and interest.

Washington's last will and testament included the following: "To General de la Fayette I give a pair of finely wrought steel pistols, taken from the enemy in the Revolutionary war."32 Washington died in 1799, and the inventory of his estate lists seven swords and seven guns in the study, "1 pr Steel Pistols" and "3 pr Pistols" in an iron chest, "1 Old Gun" in the storehouse, and one gun at the River Farm.33 Patrick Henry died a few months earlier, also in 1799, and the inventory of his estate includes "1 large Gun" and "1 pr. pistols.

Turn in the Old Testament to the book of Ezekiel, chapters 38 and 39.” Birjandi then proceeded to walk them through a series of prophecies he said was widely known as the War of Gog and Magog. They revealed an apocalyptic showdown against Israel and the Jewish people that would be led by a nation called Magog. “There are quite a few clues that make it clear the nation referred to as Magog is modern-day Russia,” Birjandi said, “including the writings of Flavius Josephus, a Roman historian. But what’s critical for us to understand is Ezekiel 38:5. What is the first country mentioned that will form an alliance against Israel?” “Persia,” Ibrahim said. “Exactly,” Birjandi confirmed. “The ancient prophecies speak of a Russian-Iranian alliance sometime in the future. To many scholars, this has seemed very odd, given that for most of the last several thousand years, the Russians and we Iranians have never had such an alliance. Indeed, the leaders of these countries have hated each other. Until 1943, the Russians occupied parts of northern Iran. Under Khomeini, we prayed for Allah to bring judgment upon the heathen, godless, atheist Communists in the Kremlin. But then what happened? We suffered through eight years of the war with Iraq. We had lots of oil money but desperately needed new weapons. The Soviet Union imploded,

I don’t think this charmingly literal Feminist myth will catch on, because of Abendsen’s point two (the homosexual rituals of the Priory) which will annoy Gay men — and I use the word “annoy” as ironic understatement. The Rad/Fem crowd have an alliance with Gay Lib and will not endorse a book that makes it sound as if all wars and serial killings derive from a homo-conspiratorial early Old Testament cult. Now, if Abendsen had said a hetero-conspiratorial Old Testament cult, the book could easily become the Bible of Radical Feminism . . .

The biblical King David was also a sacred shepherd. His sensual and ecstatic songs of earthly love, so untypical of the Bible, derive from the ancient love rites of the shepherd king and the Goddess—her Canaanite names were Asherah, Astarte, Ashtoreth. The settled people of the Old Testament, like everyone else in the Near East, practiced Goddess worship. The Old Testament is the record of the conquest and massacre of these Neolithic people by the nomadic Hebrews, followers of a Sky God, who then set up their biblical God in the place of the ancient Goddess. The biblical Hebrews were a nomadic pastoral and patriarchal people, tribes of sheepherders and warriors who invaded land belonging to the matriarchal Canaanites. Both Hebrews and Canaanites were Semitic people. The Canaanites lived in agricultural communities and worshiped the orgiastic-ecstatic Moon Mother Astarte. As Old Testament stories relate, the Hebrews sacked, burned, and destroyed village after village belonging to the Canaanites, massacring or enslaving the people—a series of brutal invasions and slaughters described typically by theologians and preachers as “a spiritual victory.” In this way the Hebrews established themselves on the land, along with the worship of their Sky-and-Thunder God Yahweh (Jehovah), calling themselves his “chosen people.” Yahweh’s male prophets and priests, however, despite their political victory over the Canaanites, had to carry on a continuous struggle and fulmination against their own people, who kept “backsliding” into worship of the Great Mother, the Goddess of all their Near Eastern neighbors. For she had originally been the Goddess of the Hebrews themselves. This constant fight against matriarchal religion and custom is the primary theme of the Old Testament. It begins in Genesis, with the takeover of the Goddess’s Garden of Immortality by a male God, and the inversion of all her sacred symbols—tree, serpent, moon-fruit, woman—into icons of evil. Of the two sons of Eve and Adam, Cain was made the “evil brother” because he chose settled agriculture (matriarchal)—the “good brother” Abel was a nomadic pastoralist (patriarchal). The war against the Goddess is carried on by the prophets’ rantings against the “golden calf,” the “brazen serpents,” the “great harlot” and “Whore of Babylon” (the Babylonian Goddess Ishtar), against enchantresses, pythonic diviners, and those who practice witchcraft. It is in the prophets’ war against the Canaanite worship of “stone idols”—the Triple Moon Goddess worshiped as three horned pillars, or menhirs. One of her shrines was on Mount Sinai, which means “Mountain of the Moon.” Moses was commanded by “the Lord” to go forth and destroy these “idols”—who all had breasts. We are told monotheism began with the Jews, that it was the great “spiritual invention” of the religious leader Moses. This is not so. The worship of one God, like everything else in religion, began with the worship of the Goddess. Her universality has been duly noted by everyone who has ever studied the matter. “Monotheism, once thought to have been the invention of Moses or Akhnaton, was worldwide in the prehistoric and early historic world,” i.e., throughout the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages. As E. O. James wrote in The Cult of the Mother Goddess, “It seems that Evans was correct when he affirmed that it was a ‘monotheism in which the female form of divinity was supreme.” The original monotheism of the Goddess is perhaps most clearly shown by the fact that, in Elizabeth Gould Davis’s words, “Almighty Yahweh, the god of Moses and the later Hebrews, was originally a goddess.” His name, Iahu ’anat, derives from that of the Sumerian Goddess Inanna.

Jesus taught her to turn the other cheek but the Nazis had come in slapping both cheeks at once and it was hard to forgive an offence when ten more were already coming at you. At times like this she felt herself more of an Old Testament Christian – yearning for fire and fury – than a New Testament one,

George Lucas had a very Old Testament view of not forgiving,” Gary Kurtz said. “Once he was wronged, he would always remember it.

The New Testament is anti-Semitic, not incidentally, not implicitly, but fundamentally and thematically. Anti-Semitism is its purpose. From its very origins, the New Testament is quite literally “anti-Semitism.” The “New Testament” is a rebuttal to the “Old Testament” written at a time of holy war between the Jews and Romans.

America is both North and South, White and Black, Republican and Democrat. We are laughter and loss, Saturday night and Sunday morning, Old Testament and New. Liberty and equality are not opposites in inevitable conflict, but act in concert under the practical balance of the Union. In the end, even war and peace are intimately entwined.

I came across one company called NuManna, named in reference to manna, the foodstuff the god of the Old Testament had provided for the Israelites during the time of their wandering after the Exodus. The company marketed gigantic buckets of freeze-dried powdered foodstuffs with a shelf life of a quarter of a century, whose varieties included, but were by no means limited to, oatmeal, hearty beans and beef, cheddar broccoli soup, and pasta primavera mix with freeze-dried chicken chunks. In the Testimonials section of NuManna’s website, I read a brief blurb from a customer named Reagan B., which seemed to me an unwitting encapsulation of the absurdity of the entire apocalypse preparedness project. “This stuff is awesome,” wrote Reagan. “My wife has been away for a while so I ate NuManna while she was gone. It was simple and everything I had was really good. I wish NuManna was around when I bought a bunch of bulk food in the past from the Mormons. I don’t want to have all these ingredients and put them together. NuManna was simple and great tasting. I gave away all my other bulk food.” At first this comment seemed purely and unimprovably comic in its conjuring of a character who, for all his determination to be adequately prepared for the collapse of civilization due to nuclear war or the impact of a massive asteroid, was also the type of man for whom not having his wife around to cook dinner—which seemed to me to be at worst a Domino’s Pizza situation—forced him to crack open his apocalyptic food stash. (Equally bewildering, equally wonderful, was his purchasing food in bulk only to conclude that he lacked the stomach for the labor of assembling all these ingredients into meals.)

There is much in Judeo-Christian doctrine and history that can be used to support a peace system, but it is so far a minor current. The main stream has adopted the violent, dominator mode of late Palestinian Judaism with its foundation in Old Testament holy war. It is a somber fact of history that in the name of Christ men have murdered and condoned murder, tortured women and children, slaughtered in war, and executed each other without remorse. The Crusaders saw Jesus in terms of their own society, that is, as their feudal lord.

Massacring men, women, and children does not raise an eyebrow, but keeping a little war booty is “evil.” Notice that throughout the Old Testament, “evil” and “wicked” are not moral judgments. Saul is called “evil” because he disobeyed orders.

The texts that will become the Old Testament typically speak of salvation as an event that occurs in history, as in being saved from war, hunger, disease, plague, and oppression.

Therefore, to the extent Israel’s wars have something to say about the ethics of violence, killing, and war, they send a clear antiviolence message. Do not trust in violence. Do not rely on it for your safety or prosperity. Do not put your hope in it. It cannot save you. It only leads to pain, suffering, death, and destruction. The irony is that people today cite the OT holy wars for the precise opposite purpose: to justify their use of and trust in violence, killing, and war, instead of God.

And I really didn’t want to see Callie kill Eae if he acted like an Old Testament pillar of dick. Salt, whatever. Something large and phallic.

the creational monotheism of the Bible and of the church seems to logically require something like a prehistoric fall, regardless of how we interpret the Chaoskampf material of the Old Testament. Assuming that there is one eternal Creator God who is all-good and all-powerful, it is illogical to posit a foundational structural evil within the cosmos (which

A war initiated by human hands is not holy, so we shouldn’t presume to fight in the many unholy wars of our world.

the conquest battles were much more about God fighting for Israel than Israel fighting for God. They involved Israel waiting for God to work on its behalf instead of taking matters into its own hands on God’s behalf. That alone should caution us against attempting to wage “just” wars on God’s behalf today. The real irony is not only that many American Christians cite OT Israel’s God-run wars to support America’s non-God-run wars but that we cite God’s OT efforts to destroy militarism to advance our own militarism. We reference God’s OT violence to justify what it was trying to combat. We cite Israel’s actions against Canaan to justify acting like Canaan. That’s ironic. And tragic. Simply put, nothing about Israel’s conquest of Canaan, not its means or its ends, justifies our use of militaristic violence against our national enemies today.

Baillie's Operis Historica et Chronologici presented a sustained defence of Scripture's self-sufficiency based on the belief that the Hebrew Old Testament was the inspired and infallible Word of God.

In a review entitled ‘When Religion Makes It Worse,’ Yael Sela and colleagues (Sela et al., 2015) observed that various parts of both the Old Testament, to which Muslims in part adhere or which have influenced Islam, and the Islamic scriptures, therefore, unsurprisingly render it God’s will that you can rape the daughter of your enemy if you invade their land. It would surely elevate the damaged self-esteem of Muslim refugee males to believe that they are part of an invading force. It is indeed a common belief among fundamentalist Muslims that they must colonise the West under Islam (Armstrong, 2001). Leviticus 20: 13 tells believers that in a situation of war, you should kill every male in the opposing tribe and take all the females for yourself. Zechariah 14 is explicit that the enemies of Jerusalem are to be vanquished while their womenfolk are to be raped and enslaved. Judges 21 tells those who fear the Lord to invade the place of their enemies and kill every male as well as every female who is not a virgin. Virgins, however, are to be forcibly married to the soldiers who have slaughtered their families. The Koran 4:3 is quite clear that a man should take multiple wives: ‘Marry of the women, who seem good to you, two or three or four; and if you fear that you cannot do justice (to so many) then one (only) or (the captives) that your right hands possess.’ In other words, you can do what you like with female infidels, with the womenfolk in the country which you have invaded.

Historical criticism is reflective of a certain set of epistemological assumptions that go under the general terms objective, scientific, and positivistic, assumptions that sought to overcome the temptations of fideism. These epistemological assumptions no longer command the field uncritically in any serious intellectual endeavor, and Scripture interpretation cannot naively persist in such a notion of knowledge.112 Insofar as historical criticism reflects the assumptions and interest of modernity and the Enlightenment’s declaration of war on church tradition, historical criticism served to fend off any objectionable supernaturalism in the text and to explain away whatever was considered, by the norms of modernity, to be odd in the text.

In 2 Macc. 2:14-15 it is stated that, after the devastating war waged against the Jews by Antiochus IV (called Epiphanes) of Syria, Judas Maccabaeus, who led a Jewish revolt against the Syrians, collected together all the books scattered in the war. This activity, about 164 B.C., probably had a decisive role in the canonization of the Hebrew Bible, including an official listing of its canonical books.

Bohemia makes love, war, and even diplomacy, and in its old days, weary of adventures, it turns the Old and New Testament into poetry, figures on the list of benefices, and well nourished with fat prebendaryships, seats itself on an episcopal throne, or a chair of the Academy, founded by one of its children.