So ... what's that about the 10 Commandments?

In a nutshell, this is what I discuss:

• God gives Moses two stone tablets
• Moses breaks the tablets when he sees the Israelites worshipping a Golden Calf.
• There is no mention what these first tablets say
• Moses gets a second copy of the first tablets
• The commandments on the tablets are NOT what we claim is "The 10 Commandments"
• Scroll to the bottom if you'd want to see what they say

I ofcourse encourage you to read the entire story.

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Exodus Chapter 24 opens up with a little bit of some good old-fashioned animal sacrifice! Moses burns some oxen, sprinkles the blood on his fellow Israelites, and MAN does God love it! Well, despite its context, I'd imagine it smelled like a decent little barbecue.

A bit later, Moses, Aaron, and two other guys go up the mountain and they see God, and I guess they thought He was pretty awesome because they noticed that Almighty Creator was wearing some sapphire rocks under His feet! Interesting shoes, no doubt, but still odd that these rough men would be so keen on divine footwear! To be honest, I would probably look at God's feet, too. I'd imagine they would look strange.

Well, Mr. YHWH tells Moses and his friends that He's going to write something on stone, and that Moses must show it to the Israelites. God creates a cloud on top of Mt. Sinai, and Moses joins Him in the cloud. Moses and God hang out in the cloud for 40 days and 40 nights.

During this time, the Israelites get restless. They apparently NEED to worship SOMETHING! I must admit I have no idea what that must feel like. Or at least, I don't remember having that need. So, someone (Aaron of all people!) has the bright idea of making a golden calf.

In a nutshell, the Israelites pool all their gold jewelry and melt it down, and then they create an idol of a golden calf. Then they go off the deep end and start dancing, drinking, and having a rather crazy orgy-ish time.

Chapters 25 to 31 is just a list of instructions on how to create the Ark of the Covenant, of which Moses will later put the stone tablets that He will give; and it also talks about how to make a myriad of other things: candles, curtains made of goat hair, holy garments, a special breastplate for Aaron, special pants for the priests (if they don't wear them, they'll die!).

What? A breastplate for Aaron? Yea, it's a special one, too. Apparently, Aaron's breastplate will bear the names of the children of Israel, and also attached to the breastplaste is this weird coin thing-a-ma-jig called the Urim and the Thummim. The Urim and the Thummim is basically a coin that one flips to make decisions. "Should I kill this guy? Let me consult the Urim and Thummim. Oh, sorry. Urim, you lose."

Anyways, a lot of this stuff is obscure, but I invite you to read it. It doesn't really come across as a spiritual message, though, so I just sort of browsed through them. Anyways, as we all should know, God gives Moses the two stone tablets and tells Moses, "You better go back down, 'cause your peeps are going crazy!"

Notice that at this point, there is no mention about what is on the stone tablets!!!

When Moses sees the orgy going on, he throws the stone tablets down, thus destroying the only thing that the Israelite God had ever written down in His own hand, up to that point.

There's a huge argument, and Moses and his followers kill at least 3,000 people who still wanted to worship the Golden Calf.

Finally, after all the hubbub, Moses goes BACK up Mt. Sinai and God hooks Moses up with a second copy of the stone tablets. During their conversation up on Mt. Sinai, God is a little shy to show His face, and instead shows him "His Backside". This is known in some circles as "The Divine Mooning".

God says the stone tablets have the exact same wording as the first tablets (Exodus 34:1), and these second tablets say:

1. Thou shalt worship no other god (For the Lord is a jealous god).
2. Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.
3. The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep in the month when the ear is on the corn.
4. All the first-born are mine.
5. Six days shalt thou work, but on the seventh thou shalt rest.
6. Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, even of the first fruits of the wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at the year's end.
7. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leavened bread.
8. The fat of my feast shall not remain all night until the morning.
9. The first of the first fruits of thy ground thou shalt bring unto the house of the Lord thy God.
10. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk.

THAT'S what's on the stone tablets, and that is what God Himself called the 10 Commandments!

The Exodus

All the plagues and wholesale slaughter was largely unnecessary. If God hardened the Pharoah's heart, couldn't the Almighty just as easily softened the Pharoah's heart? Oh yea. He definitely could have, but it wouldn't be nearly as good a story.

Well, after God did the equivalent of Nagasaki (He was just showing off) and the Pharoah witnessed the death of his firstborn son, the Pharoah decided to let the Israelites go.

"This Yahweh guy means business," he is reported to have said.

An interesting comment that God told Moses and Aaron, that I'm going to fictionalize: "Commemorate this day (the day that God killed Egypt's firstborn) with a special passover dinner ..."

Then God starts to walk away and stops, seemingly in thought, and turns around. "Oh yea, if there's any dudes that still have that extra penis skin, they can't partake of that meal. That's just disgusting."

And so God walked away into the sunset.

I'm not sure how to interpret the beginning of Exodus 13. God asks that before they cross the Red Sea, the Israelites have to 'sanctify' their own firstborn males - man and animal. Does this mean to sacrifice them? Without an apologist over my shoulder telling me what to think, I am starting to think that this is indeed what God wants. Pretty scary!

In Chapter 14, I guess God isn't finished with his wily ways. He AGAIN hardens the Pharoah's heart so that the Pharoah will follow the Israelites. If I were an Israelite and I knew that the Almighty was doing this, I'd be a little bit pissed off. "Let's just go already," I would yell at the sky.

"Stupid unpatient American," sayeth the Lord. "Don't you want to be part of an awesome story?"

The Pharoah, who was more likely pissed that his son had died (if this story is even true), mustered 600 chariots and took off after the Israelites.

When they the Egyptians closed in, God created a cool fog of darkness (sounds like a spell from World of Warcraft), and the Egyptians couldn't find the Israelites while inside the cloud.

Then Moses held his rod over the Red Sea and the waters parted, and the Israelites started their trek to the other side. Finally, after a healthy head start, God lifts the fog of darkness (which is cool) and the Egyptians chase after the Israelites, and the rest I think everyone knows.

You know what? Fuck the Egyptians. They deserved it. Anyone who is stupid enough to fight against people who have an all-powerful, psychotic, blood-crazed deity on their side deserves to die.

Wait. Doesn't EVERYONE think they have that deity on their side? That could be a problem.

Wow, I've been getting pretty busy lately so I'm going to limit my readings until everything smooths out again.

I think I'm going to focus more on some problems, especially with the last plague - the killing of the firstborn.

"The firstborn of the Pharoah to the firstborn of the slave woman at the mill, and the firstborn of all the livestock," to be exact.

Come on, man. Who the hell would kill off kids because one dude is an @$$hole? Most of the kids aren't even his kids. And the livestock??? A few plagues ago all the livestock were dead, and now this plague is acting like there's still a few firstborns out there.

But more interesting, God has the Israelites perform some sort of witchcraft ritual to make sure that THEIR kids are fine. The Creator of the Universe tells Moses that the Israelites must slaughter an animal without blemish at twilight; and it must be a one-year-old male goat or sheep.

Did you catch that? In the Bible, "Without blemish" equals "young male". It's kind of subliminal, but we see Yahweh's sexism. It's no secret that women are viewed as being, for a lack of a better word, filthy, in the Bible. For some reason, males are seen as clean.

And what does age have to do with animal's cleanliness? Animals are not moral agents. We don't hold them to the same standard as we do other humans, at least. Humans start doing bad things before they are 10, but animals will never be expected to uphold our laws. We give lions leeway when they kill another animal. Sharks, too. While we might kill animals that kill humans, we don't kill the animal because it's being immoral; we kill it because it is dangerous.

After each household slaughters a young goat or sheep, the Israelites have to paint its blood around the door of the house, and then roast and eat the entire thing - heads, bones, entrails, everything. Even the Rocky Mountain Oysters.

Oddly enough, God even has special instructions on "how" to eat the animal. They have to wear a special outfit. The Israelites must eat the animal wearing a belt around his waste, sandals on his feet, and a staff in his hand.

So, like a smart bomb God swoops down into Egypt and kills out a very select group of people. Except, rather than kill the leaders or a group of bad guys hunkered down in a bunker, God kills specifically the first-born, kids and otherwise innocent people. Even the criminal who was a first-born, but was in prison at the time died. Ironically, he was innocent!

I wonder what would've happened if God just killed the leaders of Egypt?

Anyways, the plan had its intended effect, to persuade the Pharoah into letting the Israelites go.

Most of us should know by now that the ancient Hebrews were pagans, and borrowed their concept of Yahweh from older gods like the Babylonian Marduk and the Sumerian El.

While the mythology of the Babylonians account for most of the worldview of the Hebrews, it is the Sumerian god El from which Yahweh (or YHWH) comes from. Briefly, El was Father of the Gods, Creator of Created Things, The Kindly, Kodesh. El wears bull horns on his helmet and resides at "the Source of Two Rivers" upon Mt. Lel.

El also had a wife named Asherah, who was considered the Queen of Heaven.

In the Bible, we see that Yahweh (the Hebrew's adaptation of El or Elohim) actually had a wife named Asherah. I'm pretty sure that much of the Hebrew's earlier history was lost or forbidden after the reforms of King Hezekiah and King Josiah.

But there are still parts of the Bible that allude to Asherah, especially in complaints from reformist "prophets" like the author of Jeremiah or in the historical accounts of 2 Kings. For instance, the "high places" or "groves" were places where Asherah was specifically worshipped, and she is referred to as the "Queen of Heaven".Check out these Bible verses: Jer. 7:17-18Jer. 44:17Deut. 16:212 Kings 18:4 .

It's strange to think of Yahweh being married. Isn't it?

We can also see how later reforms actually eliminated one earlier concept of god and replaced it with another. First it was the Sumerians and Babylonians, then it was the Hebrews, then it was the reforms of the kings Hezekiah and Josiah, later the various sects that formed out of Judaism, Christianity and its myriad of sects, and finally Islam.

People create and mold the concept of God to suit their needs, political or otherwise, and so religion is forever changing.