I read a piece on The Christian Post about three “controversial Bible takes” from Democratic Senate candidate from Kansas, Adam Hamilton – who is also a United Methodist pastor.
According to the article, Hamilton said regarding Joshua 6:21 and Yahweh’s order to kill every man, woman, and child within the lands they were conquering: “God commands priests to burn their daughters alive if they become prostitutes. I cannot imagine God calling me to burn one of my children alive, regardless of what they had done.”
It’s perspective. For someone who perceives mythology as an evolving body of work, as I do, then for Hamilton to say it’s inconceivable for God to demand a human offering makes sense. The Bible says Yahweh (and Jesus) is good and loving, and if that is one’s faith, then that’s the deity’s actions. Anything else is just the influence of the people who wrote the story.
However, if the stories are carved in stone, then the myths are the unfiltered facts of what happened, and one must take them at face value. As such, Yahweh is both cruel and caring, loving and despising, vengeful and forgiving. It is how we get Jonathan Edwards’ famous “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” because the Bible portrays a lake a fire into which the sinners are thrown – even if they children.
For another perspective: The Poetic Edda portrays Odin as a God who will lie, deceive, and betray people to accomplish His goals. However, the Prose Edda portrays Odin as the foundation upon which cosmic order and oaths reside, that He is a trustworthy deity. An Edda literalist must reconcile those opposing descriptions, just as a Biblical literalist must reconcile God’s call for genocide against His call for world peace.
In this highly-charged, highly-politicized world in which we live, each perspective has its adherents, and those devotees press their perspectives as not only religious but also political Truth.
This has been your Mythology Minute! To receive the Myth of the Month in your Inbox, subscribe to my newsletter at www.hdeanfisher.com