The Hebrew bible is the most revered document of the Christian religion and also highly regarded in the other Judo-Christian faiths. However, a review and scrutiny which has been on-going since the 17th century and now popularized in the advent of the internet have raised serious questions regarding the claims made in the document and the knowledge and competence of its authors. What is more worrying is the fact that the document is presented as the literal spoken word of the Living God. If that is true then we would expect the Bible to present accurate information, and be more knowledgeable than any other field of inquiry known in the world today. However it is becoming increasingly clear that the Bible is abundant in scientifically wrong statements, unsupported claims, as well as the condoning of what many consider unethical behavior.
The problem is, if God’s work is full of errors, mistakes, contradictions, and illiteracy, then God is not omniscient or omnipotent. And if he is not omnipotent then he is not God, and from there one can make the case that then in fact there is no god. In previous posts, commentators have asked this author to find God by seeking him out, reading the Bible, and talking to him. The purpose of this article is to review some quotations and put them in perspective, and see if they make any sense at all or if believers can come to our aid and provide the necessary explanations.
Is the Bible a document for all ages of human reality, or is it based on the culture of primitive desert nomads, and needs to be upgraded to meet modern levels and standards of knowledge and education. Read on, and as always readers are encouraged to comment and question the contents of this essay.
NU 22:21-30 A donkey sees an angel, recognizes it as such, and then speaks in human language (presumably Hebrew) to his master.
Comment: After talking snakes in genesis we now have talking donkeys
DT 1:1 Moses speaks to "all" of Israel, perhaps 2,000,000 people (see EX 12:37 above).
DT 2:14 All of the "men of war"--some 600,000--who left Egypt in the Exodus were dead just thirty-eight years later. (See EX 12:37 above.)
Comment: Ancient Israel had a standing army of 600,000 men? How? Even today the US army is now reaching that figure and that is if you include reserves, selective service, and school students on military scholarships.
DT 7:15 Moses promises his people that the Lord will take away all sickness.
Comment: Did that include SARS, Bird Flu and AIDS? These diseases have become prominent in the last few years. Small pox has been eradicated but it was by the efforts and over 10 billion dollars of the UN and WHO, not any specific deity
DT 25:5-9 A man has an obligation to produce a child with his brother's widow. If he refuses, his sister-in-law is to spit in his face in front of the elders.
Comment: So you mean God requires that if you do not marry your dead brothers wife you should be spat on in public? And by the way, what if the woman is not interested in that person? Does she have to shut up and receive her husband’s brother’s penis?
JS 10:12-14 God obliges Joshua by making the sun and moon stand still (so that he can finish his battle by daylight).
Comment: A big fat lie. The author of the Bible did not learn about gravity. It is the earth that is moving around the sun and not vice versa. If the earth stops moving right now, it will be pulled towards the sun at an unimaginably high speed and will crash into it and be completely destroyed without a trace. The author of the bible is an ignoramus and fool to say such a thing. Shame on him.
JG 3:21-22 (KJV) "Ehud ... took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly. And the haft also went in after the blade; and the fat closed upon the blade, so that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly; and the dirt came out."
Comment: Barbarism and more unnecessary killing condoned by an omnipotent being.
JG 7:12 The camels were without number as the sand of the sea.
Comment: There may have been many camels but not as many as the sand on the sea. How? Very false.
JG 15:15 Samson slays 1000 men with the jawbone of an ass.
JG 16:17-22 Samson loses his strength as a result of having his head shaved. (Note: This is not psychosomatic since he began to lose his strength while he was still asleep.)
JG 20:16 There were seven hundred men who were left handed and could sling a stone at a hair and not miss.
1SA 5:8-9 God causes "emerods" (hemorrhoids or tumors) amongst the Philistines (who have captured the Ark of the Covenant, where God was thought to reside).
1SA 13:5 The Philistines had "... troops like the sand on the seashore in multitude."
Comment: As of today the world population is around 6 billion. Mathematicians at the University of Hawaii tried to guess how many
grains of sand are on the world's beaches. They came up with
7,500,000,000,000,000,000, or seven quintillion five quadrillion
grains of sand." Over a billion times more than the human population. Yet this is the statement of an omnipotent being.
1SA 16:14-23 Evil spirits can come from God (and be exorcised with God's help).
1KI 3:12, 16-28 Solomon, the wisest man that ever lived, can think of no better way to determine the natural mother of a child in dispute than to threaten to divide the child in half. (Note: This does not take into account the possibility of mental derangement on the part of the natural mother.)
1KI 4:29 God gave Solomon wisdom as measureless as the sand on the seashore.
Comment: More sand on the seashore nonsense.
1KI 6:2, 2CH 3:3 Solomon's temple was only about ninety feet long by thirty feet wide, yet:
1KI 5:15-16 153,300 persons were employed to build it.
1KI 6:38 It took seven years to build.
1CH 22:14 ~7,500,000 lbs. of gold and ~75,000,000 lbs. of silver were used.
1CH 23:4 24,000 supervisors and 6,000 officials and judges were employed to manage it. (Note: Inasmuch as there seems to be uncertainty as to the exact weight of the biblical talent, some estimates place the weight of gold at more than 13,000,000 lbs. and the weight of silver at more than 116,000,000 lbs.)
Comment: All lies. The size of the temple mentioned here is about the size of a five bedroom house. Does it take 153, 000 people to build that? And spend 7 years doing so?
1KI 10:24 The whole world sought an audience with Solomon to hear his wisdom.
Comment: The whole world? Really? So ancient Ghanaian ancestors also went to Israel to listen to Solomon speak? How about Native Americans and Australian Aborigines
1KI 17:2-6 The Lord commands ravens to bring bread and meat to Elijah.
Comment: yeah right. These animals did not talk but provide food to a human. I see.
1KI 18:33-38 Fire consumes wet wood, stones, and dust, and "licks up" water.
2KI 6:5-7 An iron axe head "swims" (or floats).
Comment: But in reality an iron axe head cannot float.
2CH 9:23 All the kings on earth sought the presence of Solomon to hear his wisdom.
Comment: And this ALL includes the chiefs of ancient Ghana as well? What about the ancestors of Queen Elizabeth who had not yet migrated from Normandy (France) to become the monarchy of the British?
2KI 13:21 A man who is being buried comes alive after touching the bones of Elisha.
2KI 16:2, 20, 18:1-2 Ahaz was thirty-six years old when he died. His twenty-five year old son Hezekiah succeeded him. Thus Ahaz was a ten or eleven year old father.
Comment: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I thought Indians alone use to practice child marriage through their families, but even then they had to wait until they were sexually matured and doing some job before the woman moved in with the man and started doing bedmatics. But in this case a 10 year old boy fathered a child. 10 years? No, not true, the juices would not be flowing by that time, it is a lie. If it happened today I would believe it because now due to the manufactured foods we eat etc, yes we are now having sexual maturity occur earlier in both men and women. But back then it was delayed mostly due to malnutrition.
2KI 19:35 (KJV) "...the angel of the Lord...smote...an hundred four score and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning ... they were all dead...."
Comment: More killing.
2KI 20:11 The shadow on a sun dial moves backwards.
Comment: But the shadow of a sundial does not move backwards. Ha ha ha ha ha. You see, more falsehood, why?
2CH 7:5, 8-9 Solomon sacrificed 22,000 oxen and 120,000 sheep in one week. This is 845+ animals per hour, 14+ animals per minute, for seven days straight.
2CH 21:20, 22:1-2 Ahaziah was forty-two when he became king; he succeeded his father, who died at the age of forty. Thus, Ahaziah was two years older than his father.
Comment: Some translations use "twenty-two" here in an attempt to rectify this discrepancy. The Hebrew is clear, however, that 2CH 22:2 is 42. The Hebrew words involved are Strong's H705 and H8147, "forty" and "two," respectively. Does Yahweh know maths? Oh no.
2CH 13:3 Abijah sent 400,000 men into battle against Jeroboam's 800,000 men. This is a total of 1,200,000 men, all of them Jews.
Comment: Assuming one additional woman per man of fighting age, plus two persons per man [either older persons or children] would put the Jewish population of the surrounding area at a minimum of 4,800,000 persons. This is hardly feasible.. In fact not true at all. Even today with all the advances of healthcare, Israel population is 3 point something million and includes thousands of immigrants who were brought there to help develop the modern Israel as well as migrant workers from other countries who do not have papers. Even with compulsory military service they do not have 1 million standing army, so how could they in ancient times?
2CH 13:17 500,000 Israelites are slain in a single battle.
Comment: : This is more than were lost in any single battle of World War II, and even exceeds the number of deaths that resulted from the dropping of the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
ES 6:6, JB 19:27, PS 7:9, 16:7, 73:21, PR 23:7, 16, IS 10:7, JE 11:20, 17:10, 20:12, MT 9:4, LK 2:19, 9:47, AC 8:22, RO 10:9-10, HE 4:12, RE 2:23 (See KJV especially.) Thought occurs in the heart. The kidneys ("reins") are the seat of conscience.
Comment: Note: This is not merely a poetic use of these terms, as is now claimed. In early times, it was actually believed that various body organs other than the brain were responsible for our thoughts, feelings, actions and the like. The heart was believed to be the seat of thought processes and beliefs, while the kidneys were thought to be the seat of conscience.
JB 9:6 (KJV) God shakes the earth out of its place and makes its pillars tremble.
Comment: Fail, big fail. The earth hangs in the emptiness of space by gravity alone. There is no pillars or foundation supporting the earth to stand where it is. Yahweh needs to learn physics and stop promoting nonsense in his book.
JB 9:7 God can make the sun not rise and seal up the stars.
JB 28:28, PS 111:10, PR 1:7, 9:10, 15:33, IS 33:6 Fear of the Lord is equated with obtaining wisdom.
Comment: Job was a very wise man. In fact many of his statements about stars and science are correct.But here he is wrong. The stars cannot be sealed up, they are many billions and trillions of miles away, how do you seal them up? And no the sun does not move relative to us so how can it be stopped? This is like the Joshua claim that he prayed and the Lord made the sun stand still. It cannot , the earth would fly into the sun and be destroyed in seconds if the earth stopped orbiting the sun. Sorry.
PS 58:8 Slugs and/or snails melt as they move.
Comment: No they don’t. Read biology textbook and stop your nonsense.
PR 20:30 Blows that wound cleanse away evil.
Comment: What? Receiving blows and punches will cleanse one of evil? Whaaaaaaaaaat?
IS 30:26 The moon will someday be as bright as the sun now is. (Note: Until relatively recent times, the moon and the planets were thought to give off their own light.)
IS 38:8 The shadow of the Sun is made to move backwards.
IS 40:22 The earth is a circle. (Note: The earth is really a sphere, not a circle, and this verse does not imply a sphere as some believers like to infer.)
Comment Isaiah is wrong on all three statements. None is true. They are all false. The earth is not flat, the moon will never become as bright as the sun, and no, shadows dont move backwards because light travels in a straight line so when blocked by an object it forms the shadow on the other side, not backwards. You failed. Even 5th graders know this.
JE 20:7, EZ 14:9 Jeremiah says that the Lord deceived his own prophet. God himself says that he deceives his own prophets in order to get rid of them.
EZ 37:1-10 Dry bones come alive.
AM 8:9 The Sun will be made to set at noon in "clear day."
Comments: More gibberish from an illiterate claiming knowledge. Is god a tinkerer? If the sun sets at noon, it means the earth speed would have been changed to produce a shorter day, then go back up for a normal 24 hour day. Again, read the laws of Universal Gravitation published by Isaac Newton in 17th century. The biblical claim does not follow any proven scientific truth, it is false. I thought Yahweh was omniscient. OK maybe he preferred Einstein theory of relativity than Newton. OK, so why was it not stated in that context then? Instead more cock and bull stories.
So even with these few examples, we can see that the Bible is indeed in trouble. However all is not lost. If we can be honest with ourselves, we will realize is it time to update and upgrade the Bible to make it more consistent with new knowledge and established facts that have flourished since the Bible was written. For example we can apply some of the advances in DNA to explain the causes of some strange illnesses the Bible says are caused by God being angry of some evil spirit. We can also use the lessons learned from space travel, cosmology, and astrophysics etc to explain the behavior of the stars and planets, and replace statements like Job and in Genesis that the stars are set in the firmament by God, to direct humans, even though humans had not been created at the time of the statement. We can also use big bang cosmology to update the Bible so believers will understand the universe was not spoken into existence by a Hebrew speaking God but as a result of quantum mechanical processes associated with black holes and multiverses that caused an expansion of space-time and the birth of our universe, and that this expansion continues to this day. We can include the Theory of evolution so that we can rewrite the story of the rise of Man. Currently the biblical claim is that Adam and then Eve were created in a garden called Eden, and spoke Hebrew. Then they were deceived by a Hebrew speaking snake. Tis is not true. Studying DNA and human evolution, we know that the first humans were black Africans whose descendants diversified and scattered all over the world. We also need to add that these first humans evolved from a pre-human ancestor that also shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees, gorilla, and other apes. Yes we need to include all these in the bible so the Bible will become an authoritative reference for all things human. In the next installment we shall look at the New Testament.
kwaku ba; February, 2011
Copyright © 1994 - 2024 GhanaWeb. All rights reserved.
