I still think Tracie Harris has the best take on this:
You either have a God who sends child rapists to rape children or you have a God who simply watches it and says, “When you’re done, I’m going to punish you.” If I could stop a person from raping a child, I would. That’s the difference between me and your God.
The topic of the ten commandments is much more interesting when adding in consideration of the Shapira Scroll, which has a compelling modern case for authenticity thanks to Idan Dershowitz.
That version of the ten commandments also contains:
Thou shalt not hate your brother in your heart.
Which is further expanded during the “blessed are” section:
Blessed be the man who avenges not nor bears any grudge against the soul of his brother. […]
Blessed be the man who oppresses not his neighbor. […]
Blessed be the man who loves his neighbor.
There are similar sentiments in Leviticus 19, which also apply to foreigners (as in Deuteronomy 10:19).
We tend to interpret the sayings as referring to literal physical neighbors within a society, as opposed to regarding neighboring societies, largely based on the considerable counter-example tales of conquering neighbors.
There’s a certain irony to Joshua carrying around the Ark saying “don’t covet and steal your neighbors” while he steals everything from the neighboring cities after murdering them all.
But this is one of the many places where the Bible is anachronistic. There’s zero evidence the early Israelites were conquering Philistines or Canaanites. In fact, the emerging archeological picture was that they were cohabitating in mixed cities with both.
So when we look at the apparent contrast between messages of “love your neighbors and strangers among you” and “don’t covet or steal their shit” with the anachronistic tales of coveting neighbors and killing and stealing from them, it may simply be that we’re receiving a heavily edited text within which many changes have occurred under regimes that came to power after disregarding such guidance which leads to conflicting messaging.
For an analysis of a similar development of contradiction regarding homosexuality prohibitions in Leviticus, check out this oped from Idan Dershowitz in the NYT.
Here’s a link that isn’t youtube: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=xfQwgyKtK5M - it’s 1:42, so you can choose if you want to hear him say, what apparently has been transcribed.
I said to my oldest child just today "There is a commandment that says you can’t say “goddamnit”, or “Jesus Christ!” but nothing, nothing about slavery. I’ll double back and mention war also tomorrow. So much suffering would have been prevented by an actual god if he’d been less narcissistic back on Mount Sinai. Seems to have wasted several on making sure his ass was the only one kissed and missed a bunch of other important stuff.
And just for fun, the Harper Collins Study Bible footnotes on the flood story, since the article quotes it:
The flood story is an amalgam of two texts, the J version and the P version, along with some editorial passages that harmonize the two texts…
The Biblical flood stories are related to the older Mesopotamian flood tradition (in Atrahasis and Gilgamesh tablet 11), in which the destroyer god (Enlil) and the savior god (Enki) are two different gods in conflict. In biblical monotheism, one God combines these two impulses, and the moral conflict is transposed from the divine realm to the relationship between God and humans and the problem of human immorality.
