One final point on this commandment: Yahweh differentiates Israelites from other “alien residents,” listing non-Israelites after livestock: “you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.”24 He makes a point of saying that, although non-Israelites are lesser and treated as such in most of his laws, even they should not be made to work on the sabbath. As we’ll see, differential treatment for Israelites and non-Israelites plays a crucial role in interpreting commandments six through ten.
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On Family Honor: The Fifth Commandment
V. “Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.”
— Exodus 20:12
“All three monotheisms, just to take the most salient example, praise Abraham for being willing to hear voices and then to take his son Isaac for a long and rather mad and gloomy walk. And then the caprice by which his murderous hand is finally stayed is written down as divine mercy.”
— Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great, 20071
There is little serious argument that this particular commandment influenced the American founding. Culture, yes. But few assert with any real conviction that parental reverence built this nation. Since we’ll touch on Christian family values later, there are only a few points to note here.
Interestingly, this is the “only commandment that comes with an inducement instead of an implied threat,” as Christopher Hitchens observed.2 The reward is not only long life, but long life on the land you were given—the Promised Land. The rule has “the slight suggestion of being respectful to Father and Mother in order to come into an inheritance.”3 Whether Hitchens is correct that this is an inducement for inheritance or whether it is a veiled threat that this god may take away the Promised Land, the rule is tainted. Remember, “the land that the LORD your God is giving you” is given with the promise of genocide, according to the second set of Ten Commandments (see pages 164–165). That gruesome promise is kept in subsequent books of the bible, such as Joshua.
The fifth commandment requires respect simply because of a family connection. Intellectual honesty requires that only those worthy of respect receive it. The “biological fact of fatherhood or motherhood does not in and of itself warrant honor,” observed Freedom From Religion Foundation cofounder Anne Gaylor.4 Not all parents are worthy of honor or respect. Recall that Noah cursed his own grandson because he, Noah, passed out drunk and naked. We already met Lot of Sodom, the person the Judeo-Christian god considered the sole bastion of morality in that doomed town, who offered up his daughters to be raped by a mob.5
This horror is indefensible, and one ought to think twice before accepting moral advice from anyone who defends these actions. But things got worse for Lot’s unnamed daughters. Both “became pregnant by their father.”6 The bible blames this on the young, nameless girls, claiming that they plotted together and, to preserve the family line, got their dad drunk and raped him without his knowledge. Yes, really. Which is more likely: that a male author of a book of the bible blames women for a crime committed by a male assailant, or that two young girls who had been offered up for gang-rape by their father and who had lost their mother seduced their drunken, unconscious father? The latter is too absurd to be believed. But there is plenty of biblical precedent for the former—Eve, to name one. God clearly believes Lot worthy of honor; he sent his angels to save him. But must his victims honor him? Must these girls really honor the man who would give them to a gang of rapists and later rape them himself—the more plausible explanation for their paternal impregnation?
Because not every parent is worthy of respect, this commandment is, to use a legal term, overinclusive: it’s a law that protects people it should not. But curiously, it is also underinclusive, failing to protect people it should. Since the code already mandates blind respect, it could easily be improved by extending the requirement to honor to all one’s family, or better yet, one’s fellow human beings. However, if blind respect is to be mandatory, perhaps the best formulation would require that every human deserves the chance to earn respect. One might justifiably end a moral code there and have done better than the Judeo-Christian god.
If the true purpose of this commandment is not to spread familial bliss, as seems evident by its shortcomings, what might it be? There are three possibilities: (1) ensuring obedience, (2) supporting priests, and (3) supporting the clan. All three purposes work to perpetuate the religion that issued the mandate. This commandment is not about honor and respect; it is about obedience and power. Gaylor labeled it “an extension of the authoritarian rationale behind the first four” commandments.7 The idea is simple: honor your god-fearing parents if you want a reward. And since parents will worship the biblical god with no other gods before him, this commandment helps ensure the worship of the “correct” deity. “Take to heart all the words [and] give them as a command to your children, so that they may diligently observe all the words of this law,” preached Moses.8 Paul echoes this in the New Testament, commanding all fathers to bring their children “up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”9 This commandment teaches obedience at an early age and comingles household obedience with obedience to god.
The blurring of the familial and religious duties also supports the priestly caste. Protestant reformer Martin Luther applied this commandment to priests, whom he labels “spiritual fathers.” He writes, “Since they [the priests] are fathers they are entitled to their honor, even above all others…. Those who would be Christians are under obligation in the sight of God to esteem them worthy of double honor who minister to their souls, that they deal well with them and provide for them.”10 He goes on to say that Christians should bankroll priests, even if they are starving, for they will be rewarded in heaven for doing so. Televangelists preaching the “prosperity gospel”—essentially a divine lottery with a healthy dose of guilt and coercion in which followers donate or “vow” money, pray, and are supposedly rewarded with wealth—echo this. Said one televangelist: “Vowing is one of the best ways to stretch your faith—but only when your vow goes beyond your natural resources or abilities. I don’t need much faith to vow $100 if I have $2,000 in a savings account. But, if I don’t even have a savings account and can barely pay my bills, then a $100 vow will stretch my faith indeed. For I will have to seek God and focus on Him to supply the seed to pay that vow.”11 Better you go hungry than your priestly, telegenic “father.”
The command also has a clannish element. The Jewish religion is built on patriarchs—Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon—the fathers of their people. They in turn ensured that their people worshipped the father, Yahweh.12 Jesus took worship of the father to new heights,13 even instructing his followers to “call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven.”14 This pipeline to the gods, controlled by a single patriarch, eventually led to the divine right of kings. Even the most woeful student of United States history knows that America’s founding generation spurned kings.
Gaylor was correct to describe this commandment as the authoritarian culmination of the previous orders. That authoritarianism—the veneration of authority—may have helped elect Donald Trump. With his immodesty, lack of liturgical and scriptural knowledge, and “unchristian behavior,” Trump seemed like an improbable choice for American evangelicals. Yet 81 percent of white evangelicals supported him, more than supported Mitt Romney, John McCain, or George W. Bush.15 Trump promised these voters plenty, but previous candidates had promised more and fared worse among them. They have demonstrated a strong distaste for female leaders.16 While that might account for evangelicals not voting for Hillary Clinton, it does not fully account for them flocking to Trump in greater numbers than they did for past candidates.
Trump’s dictatorial tendencies and mendacity, negative attributes for many voters, poised him perfectly to manipulate the evangelical mind. Like the biblical god evangelicals worship, Trump is a thin-sk
inned authoritarian with totalitarian tendencies. He craves love and punishes any disloyalty or slight. Evangelicals have been taught to worship and adore that type of being above all others. This strain of religion cultivates a veneration for extreme authority. Studies bear this out: religious fundamentalism and a tendency to submit to authoritarianism are highly correlated.17 Trump acted like the character evangelicals worship and benefited from their ingrained adulation. Evangelicals were simply seeing in Trump a character they’d been taught to revere. As if to prove the point, Ann Coulter called Trump her “Emperor God.”18
Coulter’s failed attempt at humor, which came before she turned on Trump in early 2018 for signing a $1.3 trillion spending bill, contains an uncomfortable grain of truth. With the evangelicals’ ready heart comes an overly receptive mind, a blind faith in the righteousness of the strongman authority. If he says something, it is true. It becomes an article of faith, not an issue of fact or evidence or reality. “You shouldn’t be in the totalitarianism business if you can’t exploit a ready-made reservoir of credulity and servility,” observed Christopher Hitchens.19 Hitchens was speaking about Stalin and the highly religious, and therefore credulous, population on whom Stalin imposed his will, but the analogy is apt. Evangelicals believe in virgins giving birth, talking snakes, and all manner of obvious falsehoods. The religious mind is primed to accept lies. Presented with an extraordinary claim, it does not demand extraordinary evidence, but instead engages faith to overcome skepticism. Their religion has taught evangelicals to accept, rather than to question. Trump’s constant waterfall of outright lies landed on amenable minds. His support was greater among regular churchgoers than among lukewarm believers.20 The greater the faith, the more subordinate healthy skepticism becomes. So the biblical fetish for totalitarians may have helped America elect its first.
The US Constitution honors individual rights over naked authority. The fifth commandment is about perpetuating religion, ensuring obedience, and venerating authority. It had no influence on America’s founding.
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Unoriginal and Tribal: The Sixth, Eighth, and Ninth Commandments
VI. “You shall not murder.” [or “Thou shalt not kill.” (KJV)]
VIII. “You shall not steal.”
IX. “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”
— Deuteronomy 5:17, Exodus 20:13, 15, 16
“Just think about Irish history, the Middle East, the Crusades, the Inquisition, our own abortion-doctor killings and, yes, the World Trade Center to see how seriously religious people take Thou Shalt Not Kill. Apparently, to religious folks—especially the truly devout—murder is negotiable. It just depends on who’s doing the killing and who’s getting killed.”
— George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, 20041
Virtually all that can be said of commandments six, eight, and nine can be said of commandment seven, the adultery commandment. All four are similar in structure, language, concision, and application. According to scholars, several of the oldest and “most significant”2 manuscripts of the Decalogue actually list the adultery commandment before the murder commandment.3 This ordering is echoed in the King James Version of the New Testament in several places, including in Jesus’s own words to his apostles: “Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal…”4 However, the adultery ban’s influence on America’s founding requires additional discussion, so it will be treated separately in the next chapter.
It is not until halfway through god’s most moral precepts that we begin to see, if not influence, at least some resemblance to American law and government. That these few commandments resemble some of our laws does not necessarily mean that they influenced those laws or the founding of this country. Prohibitions on theft, perjury, and murder are vital—so much so that every successful society agrees with them.5 These biblical commands fail to prove America’s Judeo-Christian foundations because they are not uniquely or originally Judeo-Christian and, as formulated in these commandments, they are not as moral as people suppose.
First, these principles are not exclusive or original to Judeo-Christianity. They are universal principles that all humans understand and arrive at regardless of their participation in the Judeo-Christian religion.6 This includes cultures and religions that predate Judaism and even holds true within Judaism itself, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out:
My mother’s Jewish ancestors are told that until they got to Sinai, they’d been dragging themselves around the desert under the impression that adultery, murder, theft, and perjury were all fine, and they get to Mount Sinai only to be told it’s not kosher after all.7
Interestingly, the biblical god does not base his rules on their universal moral qualities. Instead, the Ten Commandments “unmistakably rest even the universally accepted prohibitions (as against murder, theft, etc.) on the sanction of the divinity proclaimed at the beginning of the text,” as the Supreme Court noted in a ruling against governmental displays of the Ten Commandments.8 This puts the commandments on shaky ground, as we’ve seen it is, at best, only Moses’s word that vouches for the divine origins of the tablets. Formulations of these rules in other cultures are actually based on morality, not on the tenuous authority of a divine character. Which are better: rules that exist because they are valuable precepts for humanity, or rules that exist because a dictator decreed them?
Other, earlier legal codes in the region of the Levant contained similar prohibitions, as did other religions.9 Although Christians often talk of Jesus’s humility and their desire to emulate him, it is monstrously arrogant to claim that a universal human principle belongs to one religion, especially a relatively young religion. This belief marries that arrogance to ignorance—ignorance of other cultures, countries, religions, and ideas.
Second, America’s statutory versions of these universal principles apply to everyone; the biblical god’s commandments do not. Judeo-Christianity limits the application of these principles to other believers, destroying their universality. George Carlin’s quip on page 208, “It just depends on who’s doing the killing and who’s getting killed,” is accurate. The god of the bible allows murder if the victim believes in a different god. The biblical commandments protect only other believers. You may not murder, steal from, or bear false witness against other members of our group. This is why the first five commandments deal with god’s supremacy and how he should be worshipped, so that believers can recognize each other, the people to whom the final commandments apply. The in-group application of the final commands is why rather obvious rules against murder, stealing, and lying are not listed first.
The commandments in their original Hebrew support this in-group interpretation. They were set down when the art of writing was in its infancy, and were later translated from Hebrew texts that do not have commas, periods, capital letters, or breaks for paragraphs.10 Translators and editors made the grammatical and punctuation decisions we see today long after the originals were written.
This may seem trivial, but punctuation, capitals, and breaks clarify writing. Unpunctuated or poorly punctuated writing, like the original commandments, can easily confuse the writer’s message. Examples abound, including this popular one:
A woman without her man is nothing
Add some varying punctuation to this and you can get two contradictory meanings:
A woman, without her man, is nothing.
A woman: without her, man is nothing.
Had this been a biblical sentence in need of punctuation, it’s not difficult to guess which punctuation early bible scribes, men writing the laws of a patriarchal religion, would have chosen. Punctuation can even save lives:
Let’s eat, Grandpa!
Let’s eat Grandpa!11
Had the voice Moses heard in the wilderness—a voice he heard after starving for weeks during a forced desert march—bothered to invent punctuation for the Hebrews, thousands of lives might have been saved over the millennia. Here�
�s how commandments six through nine read, without the added punctuation:
you shall not murder you shall not commit adultery you shall not steal you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor
The preferred modern interpretation breaks this into four separate sentences, with the neighbor clause (“your neighbor”) modifying only the lying prohibition. Another viable interpretation, one that makes more sense given the surrounding books of the bible, is:
You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness against, your neighbor.
The alteration is subtle, but it completely changes the meaning. In the former interpretation, all the prohibitions except lying are absolute—one can lie, just not to his neighbor. In the latter interpretation, “neighbor” limits all the prohibited acts: You can kill, steal, cheat, or lie, so long as the victim is not your neighbor.
Here’s a parallel example, something a first-grade teacher might tell a student. Again, punctuation changes the meaning:
The Founding Myth Page 24