GING Old Testament

Chapter 7: "The Nightmare of the "Old" Testament."



Much like he does with his examples of apparently "flawed" design, Hitchens presumes to know how God really would have inspired the Bible if he in fact truly existed. It's interesting that an atheist as passionate as Hitchens seems to know so much about how a God should do things. I'm referring to his indictment of the ten commandments, which are too authoritarian, patronizing and misogynistic for his tastes.

I don't want to give the impression that I have never struggled with certain old testament passages-- in particular instances like the destruction of Jericho in which every single person, "man and woman, young and old," was killed per God's command. But I stop short of expressing how I could have done things better. Hitchens trots into the realm of fallacy by claiming how he could do things better than one who does not exist.

Hitchens also makes much of whether Moses was the exclusive author of Genesis and the books in which Moses appears. I don't think I've ever met one scholar who was willing to die on the Hill of Moses' exclusive authorship (in fact, many lean away from that idea). The point is not whether Moses wrote all, or any, of the first five books of the Bible. The point is that God accomplished what he set out to accomplish when he inspired the author or authors of the first five books of the Bible. God effectively communicated to Balaam through the latter's donkey; I'm quite confident He could give us the pentateuch the way He wanted it written via one, twenty, or twenty million different "authors."

Lastly, Hitchens flatly claims that the 400 years of Egyptian captivity, the Exodus, the wandering in the wilderness, and final settlement in Canaan never happened. He trots out an expert or two with impressive sounding credentials who claim that there is no archeological evidence whatsoever for the Biblical account of the 440(ish) years under scrutiny. (Interestingly enough, Hitchens does seem to lend credence to the notion of a mass-extinction flood event.) My response is: I haven't bothered to look into the evidence. But beyond the obvious fact that it would not follow, in the event that there was there no evidence, that the events themselves did not occur: Hitchens is revealed here by Pastor Mark Roberts to be either woefully misinformed at best, or at worst a blatant liar, on at least 15 significant points concerning the New Testatment. Why should I believe a word this man Hitchens has to say regarding the Old Testament?