Leviticus and Numbers: Let's Get Mad at God

Here's where the Bible starts getting really horrible for the majority of people.

Image courtesy of Ivan Radic on Flickr

So, to catch us up since I didn’t post last week:

The world is on its path, Israel is free from Egypt, and now they ask themselves: how do we worship God? And boy, does God have some answers for us in Leviticus. God has a lot of answers, and they’re all very meticulous and precise.

Being raised in conservative evangelicalism, the intense laws of Leviticus were totally ignored, except, of course, the verses about sexuality immorality and the one about homosexuality being an abomination. Sexual “misconduct” remains the biggest sin and temptation in all of conservative Christianity, despite greed and wealth (which are mentioned far more in both parts of the Christian Bible, and by Jesus personally) openly wreaking more definite havoc on our world. I guess churches find it hard to condemn what they’re openly participating in and supporting?

It’s a little horrifying to read Leviticus. Animal sacrifice makes me feel queasy despite being an omnivore, but this, of course, was one of the most common ways of worship throughout the Middle East at the time. The rules were deliberate for this group of people just forming an identity, a community, and looking for their own place, their own nation, their own home. And not only that, the laws were often formed deliberately to differentiate themselves from other tribes that engaged in practices like child sacrifice, incest, and consumption of foods that might have caused sickness at the time. And of course, the development of monotheism: God evolving as a singular figure to be worshiped above and instead of other gods.

I try to see it from that perspective, but it’s still really fucking difficult. I hate thinking about women constantly being referred to as “unclean” which feels nearly triggering to me. The worst line, for me, was that a woman who gives birth to a daughter is unclean for 60 days, while one who gives birth to a son is “only” unclean for 30 days. The sexism of the words are plain as day, and you can’t explain it away with some overly kind progressive interpretation. It was how women were viewed then, and in some manner, continue to be viewed as such. Israelites were not alone in these views.

If you read the Bible with a literal eye — which, as all of Leviticus proves, literally nobody does, even if they try to claim that Pauline “Jesus fulfilled the law and now we don’t have to do it” bullshit — if you imagine God saying all these things out loud to some old guy in the desert and killing Aaron’s two sons immediately because their animal sacrifice wasn’t good enough — it seems, well, pretty fucked up.

In Numbers, we see the immediate results of the Israelites’ failure to abide by the laws that God just mandated. Man, does he get pissed.

I think we, as progressive Christians who defiantly stand by our religion in spite of its incredulous, world-changing, terrible flaws, have to sit with this and let it make us uncomfortable.

What I want to point out, however, is that here — and throughout the rest of the Old Testament, in fact — people argue with God. They get God to make concessions. They get God to change his mind. For some reason, Christian theology has evolved to say that God is never-changing, that he’s some stagnant force of ultimate power and authority and we have to bow down before him. Just like in American politics, evangelicals want totalitarianism so fucking bad! They want some evil God to come down and punish their siblings for whatever “sins” they’re engaging in, while of course ignoring or minimizing their own “sins.” Absolute, black and white morality, because “the Bible says so.” What a shitty excuse to mistreat kind and good people in 2022.

In between the enforcement of the laws in Leviticus and Numbers, we see God growing more vengeful as the Israelites complain more and suffer crises of faith. They are subjected, famously, to 40 years of wandering the desert and the out-of-Egypt generation, including Miriam, Moses, and Aaron, are told they will never personally reach the land of milk and honey (Canaan) because of all the whining and lack of belief in the Lord. As a child when I heard sermons and Sunday school lessons about Moses, I always thought, “Wow, I can’t believe they had all this direct interaction with God and still don’t believe.” As an adult, I can just imagine wandering from place to place with my family and being scared that I wouldn’t have enough food or water, not knowing what’s going on, watching culture shift and change around me, trying to follow meticulous laws, and not knowing if the surrounding tribes were my enemies or my neighbors. It seems exhausting to be an Israelite, and God has little mercy for them, though they are still his chosen people.

I’m mad at the God of Leviticus and Numbers. I’m mad that God wants to kill people in other tribes that he has ordered the Israelites to conquer. Men, women, male children. Whoever. I always, always, always will struggle with this. And I think more of us should.

The little glimmers of hope are when people talk back. When people argue with God. When people disagree with God. Most famously, of course, is Jesus, God himself, famously defying God’s commandments here — in Numbers and Leviticus, stoning is mandated as a punishment for adulterers, but Jesus of course puts a stop to it when addressed with it in the Gospel — and challenge the teachings. Modern American Christians are incapable of doing this, despite ignoring so much of the Bible themselves while claiming to be literalists, and it infuriates me. I’m not saying human morality is infallible, or that my beliefs and philosophies and actions are always accurate. Humans have been capable of great evil throughout history, regardless of (or because of) religion. We do not live in a good, just, or moral Earth and many humans are complacent or cruel in matters dealing with their fellow mankind. But if you think morality hasn’t evolved since Leviticus and Numbers, you’re just fucking wrong.

Is this an evil God? By historical standards of other tribes at the time, Israelites aren’t evil; in fact, they were even egalitarian. Or maybe they are evil, and we can’t excuse past behavior like this regardless, and we can only see that by the light of modern context. To be fair, I don’t know how much — if any — of these stories have any historical accuracy whatsoever. It’s true that the Israelites began to develop as a large tribe during the Iron Age in the land of Canaan. And scholars aren’t sure where “Yahweh” specifically came from, either.

I’m not sure if I’m more of a biblical maximalist or a biblical minimalist (maybe a biblical moderate?) when it comes to sussing out how much the biblical Hebrew history matches up with the historical Hebrew history. Since I am a Gentile, American Christian, of Anglo-Saxon heritage, of Pentecostal upbringing, how can I safely discuss my identity in this? It’s not my identity. My own ancestors were pagan deists living in bogs at this time in history, still in a bronze age, still figuring out agriculture, with plenty of immorality of their own and much, much more to come. Everyone has growing pains, right?

“Nice” evangelicals used to say things like “You can get mad at God when your life is bad! He can handle it!” But it was always about coming to the conclusion that God was still right, and if their theology was even worse, that he had predetermined and arranged whatever suffering you were going through. Hey, thanks God! And then you’re supposed to turn to the same God who chose to hurt you over for COMFORT now? No way. I despise that theology. I refuse it. I’m mad at God AND I’m going to say it’s wrong to kill innocent people so you can conquer their lands even if he commanded it in Numbers.

But if I take it a little less personally, and if I read it a little more neutrally, it’s better. There’s hope. There’s beauty. Even in the worst parts of the Bible, you can find a blessing. Numbers 6:24-26 says this:

The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.

And then I’m stuck back on God yet again.