A nother way in which religion betrays itself, and attempts to escape mere reliance on faith

and instead offer “evidence” in the sense normally understood, is by the argument from

revelation. On certain very special occasions, it is asserted, the divine will was made known by

direct contact with randomly selected human beings, who were supposedly vouchsafed

unalterable laws that could then be passed on to those less favored.

There are some very obvious objections to be made to this. In the first place, several such

disclosures have been claimed to occur, at different times and places, to hugely discrepant

prophets or mediums. In some cases—most notably the Christian—one revelation is apparently

not sufficient, and needs to be reinforced by successive apparitions, with the promise of a

further but ultimate one to come. In other cases, the opposite difficulty occurs and the divine

instruction is delivered, only once, and for the final time, to an obscure personage whose

lightest word then becomes law. Since all of these revelations, many of them hopelessly

inconsistent, cannot by definition be simultaneously true, it must follow that some of them are

false and illusory. It could also follow that only one of them is authentic, but in the first place this

seems dubious and in the second place it appears to necessitate religious war in order to decide

whose revelation is the true one. A further difficulty is the apparent tendency of the Almighty to

reveal himself only to unlettered and quasi-historical individuals, in regions of Middle Eastern

wasteland that were long the home of idol worship and superstition, and in many instances

already littered with existing prophecies.

The syncretic tendencies of monotheism, and the common ancestry of the tales, mean in

effect that a rebuttal to one is a rebuttal to all. Horribly and hatefully though they may have

fought with one another, the three monotheisms claim to share a descent at least from the

Pentateuch of Moses, and the Koran certifies Jews as “people of the book,” Jesus as a prophet,

and a virgin as his mother. (Interestingly, the Koran does not blame the Jews for the murder of

Jesus, as one book of the Christian New Testament does, but this is only because it makes the

bizarre claim that someone else was crucified by the Jews in his place.)

The foundation story of all three faiths concerns the purported meeting between Moses and

god, at the summit of Mount Sinai. This in turn led to the handing down of the Decalogue, or Ten

Commandments. The tale is told in the second book of Moses, known as the book of Exodus, in

chapters 20–40. Most attention has been concentrated on chapter 20 itself, where the actual

commandments are given. It should not perhaps be necessary to summarize and expose these,

but the effort is actually worthwhile.

In the first place (I am using the King James or “Authorized” Version: one among many rival

texts laboriously translated by mortals either from Hebrew or Greek or Latin), the so-called

commandments do not appear as a neat list of ten orders and prohibitions. The first three are

all variations of the same one, in which god insists on his own primacy and exclusivity, forbids

the making of graven images, and prohibits the taking of his own name in vain. This prolongedthroat-clearing is accompanied by some very serious admonitions, including a dire warning that

the sins of the fathers will be visited on their children “even unto the third and fourth

generation.” This negates the moral and reasonable idea that children are innocent of their

parents’ offenses. The fourth commandment insists on the observance of a holy Sabbath day,

and forbids all believers—and their slaves and domestic servants—to perform any work in the

course of it. It is added that, as was said in the book of Genesis, god made all the world in six

days and rested on the seventh (leaving room for speculation as to what he did on the eighth

day). The dictation then becomes more terse. “Honor thy father and thy mother” (this not for its

own sake but in order “that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth

thee”). Only then come the four famous “shalt nots,” which flatly prohibit killing, adultery, theft,

and false witness. Finally, there is a ban on covetousness, forbidding the desire for “thy

neighbor’s” house, manservant, maidservant, ox, ass, wife, and other chattel.

It would be hard to find an easier proof that religion is man-made. There is, first, the

monarchical growling about respect and fear, accompanied by a stern reminder of

omnipotence and limitless revenge, of the sort with which a Babylonian or Assyrian emperor

might have ordered the scribes to begin a proclamation. There is then a sharp reminder to keep

working and only to relax when the absolutist says so. A few crisp legalistic reminders follow,

one of which is commonly misrendered because the original Hebrew actually says “thou shalt do

no murder.” But however little one thinks of the Jewish tradition, it is surely insulting to the

people of Moses to imagine that they had come this far under the impression that murder,

adultery, theft, and perjury were permissible. (The same unanswerable point can be made in a

different way about the alleged later preachings of Jesus: when he tells the story of the Good

Samaritan on that Jericho road he is speaking of a man who acted in a humane and generous

manner without, obviously, ever having heard of Christianity, let alone having followed the

pitiless teachings of the god of Moses, who never mentions human solidarity and compassion at

all.) No society ever discovered has failed to protect itself from self-evident crimes like those

supposedly stipulated at Mount Sinai. Finally, instead of the condemnation of evil actions, there

is an oddly phrased condemnation of impure thoughts. One can tell that this, too, is a man

made product of the alleged time and place, because it throws in “wife” along with the other

property, animal, human, and material, of the neighbor. More important, it demands the

impossible: a recurrent problem with all religious edicts. One may be forcibly restrained from

wicked actions, or barred from committing them, but to forbid people from contemplating them

is too much. In particular, it is absurd to hope to banish envy of other people’s possessions or

fortunes, if only because the spirit of envy can lead to emulation and ambition and have

positive consequences. (It seems improbable that the American fundamentalists, who desire to

see the Ten Commandments emblazoned in every schoolroom and courtroom—almost like a

graven image—are so hostile to the spirit of capitalism.) If god really wanted people to be free

of such thoughts, he should have taken more care to invent a different species.

Then there is the very salient question of what the commandments do not say. Is it too

modern to notice that there is nothing about the protection of children from cruelty, nothing

about rape, nothing about slavery, and nothing about genocide? Or is it too exactingly “in

context” to notice that some of these very offenses are about to be positively recommended? In

verse 2 of the immediately following chapter, god tells Moses to instruct his followers about the

conditions under which they may buy or sell slaves (or bore their ears through with an awl) and

the rules governing the sale of their daughters. This is succeeded by the insanely detailed

regulations governing oxen that gore and are gored, and including the notorious verses

forfeiting “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” Micromanagement of agricultural disputes

breaks off for a moment, with the abrupt verse (22:18)

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” This was, for centuries, the warrant for the Christiantorture and burning of women who did not conform. Occasionally, there are injunctions that are

moral, and also (at least in the lovely King James version) memorably phrased: “Thou shalt not

follow a multitude to do evil” was taught to Bertrand Russell by his grandmother, and stayed

with the old heretic all his life. However, one mutters a few sympathetic words for the forgotten

and obliterated Hivites, Canaanites, and Hittites, also presumably part of the Lord’s original

creation, who are to be pitilessly driven out of their homes to make room for the ungrateful and

mutinous children of Israel. (This supposed “covenant” is the basis for a nineteenth-century

irredentist claim to Palestine that has brought us endless trouble up to the present day.)

Seventy-four of the elders, including Moses and Aaron, then meet god face-to-face. Several

whole chapters are given over to the minutest stipulations about the lavish, immense

ceremonies of sacrifice and propitiation that the Lord expects of his newly adopted people, but

this all ends in tears and with collapsing scenery to boot: Moses returns from his private session

on the mountaintop to discover that the effect of a close encounter with god has worn off, at

least on Aaron, and that the children of Israel have made an idol out of their jewelry and

trinkets. At this, he impetuously smashes the two Sinai tablets (which appear therefore to have

been man-made and not god-made, and which have to be redone hastily in a later chapter) and

orders the following:

“Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the

camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his

neighbor.”

And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses, and there fell of the people

that day about three thousand men.

A small number when compared to the Egyptian infants already massacred by god in order

for things to have proceeded even this far, but it helps to make the case for “antitheism.” By this

I mean the view that we ought to be glad that none of the religious myths has any truth to it, or

in it. The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic

cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by

any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.

It goes without saying that none of the gruesome, disordered events described in Exodus

ever took place. Israeli archaeologists are among the most professional in the world, even if

their scholarship has sometimes been inflected with a wish to prove that the “covenant”

between god and Moses was founded on some basis in fact. No group of diggers and scholars

has ever worked harder, or with greater expectations, than the Israelis who sifted through the

sands of Sinai and Canaan. The first of them was Yigael Yadin, whose best-known work was at

Masada and who had been charged by David Ben-Gurion to dig up “the title deeds” that would

prove the Israeli claim to the Holy Land. Until a short time ago, his evidently politicized efforts

were allowed a certain superficial plausibility. But then much more extensive and objective work

was undertaken, presented most notably by Israel Finkelstein of the Institute of Archaeology at

Tel Aviv University, and his colleague Neil Asher Silberman. These men regard the “Hebrew Bible”

or Pentateuch as beautiful, and the story of modern Israel as an all-around inspiration, in which

respects I humbly beg to differ. But their conclusion is final, and the more creditable for

asserting evidence over self-interest. There was no flight from Egypt, no wandering in the desert

(let alone for the incredible four-decade length of time mentioned in the Pentateuch), and no

dramatic conquest of the Promised Land. It was all, quite simply and very ineptly, made up at a

much later date. No Egyptian chronicle mentions this episode either, even in passing, and Egypt

was the garrison power in Canaan as well as the Nilotic region at all the material times. Indeed,

much of the evidence is the other way. Archaeology does confirm the presence of Jewish

communities in Palestine from many thousands of years ago (this can be deduced, among other

things, from the absence of those pig bones in the middens and dumps), and it does show thatthere was a “kingdom of David,” albeit rather a modest one, but all the Mosaic myths can be

safely and easily discarded. I do not think that this is what the sour critics of faith sometimes call

a “reductionist” conclusion. There is great pleasure to be had from the study of archaeology and

of ancient texts, and great instruction, too. And it brings us ever nearer to some approximation

of the truth. On the other hand, it also raises the question of antitheism once more. In The

Future of an Illusion, Freud made the obvious point that religion suffered from one incurable

deficiency: it was too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death. This

critique of wish-thinking is strong and unanswerable, but it does not really deal with the horrors

and cruelties and madnesses of the Old Testament. Who—except for an ancient priest seeking

to exert power by the tried and tested means of fear—could possibly wish that this hopelessly

knotted skein of fable had any veracity?

Well, the Christians had been at work on the same wishful attempt at “proof” long before the

Zionist school of archaeology began to turn a spade. Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians had

transmitted god’s promise to the Jewish patriarchs, as an unbroken patrimony, to the Christians,

and in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries you could hardly throw away an orange peel

in the Holy Land without hitting a fervent excavator. General Gordon, the biblical fanatic later

slain by the Mahdi at Khartoum, was very much to the fore. William Albright of Baltimore was

continually vindicating Joshua’s Jericho and other myths. Some of these diggers, even given the

primitive techniques of the period, counted as serious rather than merely opportunistic. Morally

serious too: the French Dominican archaeologist Roland de Vaux gave a hostage to fortune by

saying that “if the historical faith of Israel is not founded in history, such faith is erroneous, and

therefore, our faith is also.” A most admirable and honest point, on which the good father may

now be taken up.

Long before modern inquiry and painstaking translation and excavation had helped

enlighten us, it was well within the compass of a thinking person to see that the “revelation” at

Sinai and the rest of the Pentateuch was an ill-carpentered fiction, bolted into place well after

the nonevents that it fails to describe convincingly or even plausibly. Intelligent schoolchildren

have been upsetting their teachers with innocent but unanswerable questions ever since Bible

study was instituted. The self-taught Thomas Paine has never been refuted since he wrote, while

suffering dire persecution by French Jacobin antireligionists, to show

that these books are spurious, and that Moses is not the author of them; and still further,

that they were not written in the time of Moses, nor till several hundred years afterwards,

that they are an attempted history of the life of Moses, and of the times in which he is said

to have lived; and also of the times prior thereto, written by some very ignorant and stupid

pretenders several hundred years after the death of Moses; as men now write histories of

things that happened, or are supposed to have happened, several hundred or several

thousand years ago.

In the first place, the middle books of the Pentateuch (Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers:

Genesis contains no mention of him) allude to Moses in the third person, as in “the Lord spake

unto Moses.” It could be argued that he preferred to speak of himself in the third person, though

this habit is now well associated with megalomania, but this would make laughable such

citations as Numbers 12:3 in which we read, “Now the man Moses was very meek above all the

men which were on the face of the earth.” Apart from the absurdity of claiming to be meek in

such a way as to assert superiority in meekness over all others, we have to remember the

commandingly authoritarian and bloody manner in which Moses is described, in almost every

other chapter, as having behaved. This gives us a choice between raving solipsism and the

falsest of modesty.

But perhaps Moses himself can be acquitted on these two charges, since he could hardly

have managed the contortions of Deuteronomy. In this book there is an introduction of thesubject, then an introduction of Moses himself in mid-speech, then a resumption of narrative by

whoever is writing, then another speech by Moses, and then an account of the death, burial, and

magnificence of Moses himself. (It is to be presumed that the account of the funeral was not

written by the man whose funeral it was, though this problem does not seem to have occurred

to whoever fabricated the text.)

That whoever wrote the account was writing many years later seems to be very clear. We

are told that Moses reached the age of one hundred and twenty, with “his eye not dim nor his

natural force abated,” and then ascended to the summit of Mount Nebo, from which he could

obtain a clear view of the Promised Land that he would never actually enter. The prophet, his

natural force all of a sudden abated, then dies in the land of Moab and is interred there. No one

knows, says the author, “unto this day,” where the sepulcher of Moses lies. It is added that there

has since been no comparable prophet in Israel. These two expressions have no effect if they do

not denote the passage of a considerable time. We are then expected to believe that an

unspecified “he” buried Moses: if this was Moses himself in the third person again it seems

distinctly implausible, and if it was god himself who performed the obsequy then there is no way

for the writer of Deuteronomy to have known it. Indeed, the author seems very unclear about all

the details of this event, as would be expected if he was reconstructing something half

forgotten. The same is self-evidently true of innumerable other anachronisms, where Moses

speaks of events (the consumption of “manna” in Canaan; the capture of the huge bedstead of

the “giant” Og, king of Bashan) which may never have occurred at all but which are not even

claimed to have occurred until well after his death.

The strong likelihood that this interpretation is the correct one is reinforced in Deuteronomy’s

fourth and fifth chapters, where Moses assembles his followers and gives them the Lord’s

commandments all over again. (This is not such a surprise: the Pentateuch contains two

discrepant accounts of the Creation, two different genealogies of the seed of Adam, and two

narratives of the Flood.) One of these chapters has Moses talking about himself at great length,

and the other has him in reported speech. In the fourth chapter, the commandment against

making graven images is extended to prohibiting any “similitude” or “likeness” of any figure,

whether human or animal, for any purpose. In the fifth chapter, the contents of the two stone

tablets are repeated roughly in the same form as in Exodus, but with a significant difference.

This time, the writer forgets that the Sabbath day is holy because god made heaven and earth

in six days and then rested on the seventh. Suddenly, the Sabbath is holy because god brought

his people out of the land of Egypt.

Then we must come to those things which probably did not happen and which we must be

glad did not. In Deuteronomy Moses gives orders for parents to have their children stoned to

death for indiscipline (which seems to violate at least one of the commandments) and

continually makes demented pronouncements (“He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his

privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord”). In Numbers, he

addresses his generals after a battle and rages at them for sparing so many civilians:

Now, therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath

known a man by lying with him. But all the women-children that hath not known a man by

lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.

This is certainly not the worst of the genocidal incitements that occur in the Old Testament

(Israeli rabbis solemnly debate to this very day whether the demand to exterminate the

Amalekites is a coded commandment to do away with the Palestinians), but it has an element of

lasciviousness that makes it slightly too obvious what the rewards of a freebooting soldier could

be. At least so I think and so thought Thomas Paine, who wrote not to disprove religion but

rather to vindicate deism against what he considered to be foul accretions in the holy books. He

said that this was “an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers, and debauch thedaughters,” which drew him a hurt reply from one of the celebrated divines of the day, the

bishop of Llandaff. The stout Welsh bishop indignantly claimed that it was not at all clear from

the context that the young females were being preserved for immoral purposes rather than for

unpaid labor. Against dumb innocence like this it might be heartless to object, if it were not for

the venerable clergyman’s sublime indifference to the fate of the boy-children and indeed their

mothers.

One could go through the Old Testament book by book, here pausing to notice a lapidary

phrase (“Man is born to trouble,” as the book of Job says, “as the sparks fly upward”) and there

a fine verse, but always encountering the same difficulties. People attain impossible ages and

yet conceive children. Mediocre individuals engage in single combat or one-on-one argument

with god or his emissaries, raising afresh the whole question of divine omnipotence or even

divine common sense, and the ground is forever soaked with the blood of the innocent.

Moreover, the context is oppressively confined and local. None of these provincials, or their

deity, seems to have any idea of a world beyond the desert, the flocks and herds, and the

imperatives of nomadic subsistence. This is forgivable on the part of the provincial yokels,

obviously, but then what of their supreme guide and wrathful tyrant? Perhaps he was made in

their image, even if not graven?