My credentials as a biblical writer are not impressive. I have published nothing on biblical subjects. I have never taught bible study or criticism. Nor have I been connected with any university related to bible study. In fact I work in a flea market. Yet I wrote the most important, insightful interpretation of the Old Testament. In all fairness and without anyone to vouch for me as a scholar (which I am not) - I ask for a fair reading of my work which will show that Old Testament literature is the story of the cruel and sadistic ambition of David, whose evil knew no bounds, lasting to his very last breath and a scorching rebuke of the Canaanites, which includes the famous patriarchs and heroes of the Old Testament. We also learn that the religion of the Jews has no relation to the religion they practice today. What I have written is not science, but I do believe that what I have said is the closest to the truth ever written. I show the intentions of the authors of the Bible and what they are saying absent the misinterpretations that have filtered down to us. I am not claiming that what I say is absolute truth. I am only saying that reading the Bible fairly results in my conclusions. After all, how can I be so sure that what was written about David was true, notwithstanding my interpretations? If you look to the Bible for moral or religious guidance, you will receive hypocritical and contradictory instruction. What you will find is great literature, great stories as well as political and psychological insights. Do we need a bible to tell us not to steal, not to kill and not to commit adultery? I am not delving into what author wrote which section. I have analyzed the canonized books of the Bible as well as the ancient literature of the time. I give an overall picture of what the bible says. I believe you will find that I do not just come to conclusions without support. My difficulty is in distributing and having my work read. Because of my lack of credentials, I did not try to get a publisher. Hopefully I will now be read or a publisher will see the merit of my work.
The Bible extols the virtues of the tyrant. The ‘Winner Takes All’ philosophy dominates the writing. Morals and the Ten Commandments are secondary. It could be argued that like a bad movie that shows violence the Bible, by its mixed message , encourages and rewards evil and violence rather than the good it is purported to instill. Somehow the Old Testament became Western Civilization’s book of morality. And somehow it’s clear direction which was a stinging rebuke of the southern Jews of Judah and their Canaanite relatives was reinterpreted. The displaced Jews of Northern Israel are less assailed. It was David’s people and the biblical heroes who were scorched by the great writers of the Old Testament. Little good is said about Samuel, Jeremiah, Moses, David, Joseph, Solomon and the many kings of Judah. The ancient Jews morality is vigorously attacked. Idol worshippers throughout their history, perhaps the last people of Asia Minor to give up human sacrifice, and a people never comfortable with their ancestry, (which was in all likelihood Canaanite, the most rebuked people in ancient literature) reinterpretation of what was clearly written was necessary. The reinterpretations have replaced what is clearly written. The orthodox Jewish rule prohibiting the mixing of milk and meat, one of the most powerful edicts of the Jewish religious rules of Kosher, somehow finds its foundation in words emanating from the Old Testament, when the contrary is stated in the clearest language by one of the most knowledgeable Jewish scholars living in the first century B.C. The body of the ancient literature of the Middle East leaves little doubt that the major elements of the Jewish religion came from the many lands they were associated with: the Sabbath from the Babylonians, Yom Kippur from the Egyptians (which was taken almost verbatim from the Book of the Dead), Passover from the Egyptian observances of the Feast of Dionysius . Even circumcision came from elsewhere. The ancient god of the Jews, Yahweh, cannot be considered a moral god, when the behavior demonstrated in the old testament was so harsh and cruel. So much so that it could very well be the Biblical author’s attacks not only on the Ancient Jews, but on their god as well.
The Book of Genesis could very well be called The Book Of Insults to the Canaanites, who are depicted as immoral as well as their god and leaders. Moses kills thousands and God kills tens of thousands and without justification. The patriarchs are just as vile. Jacob is a dishonest and crafty opportunist . Abraham willing to kill his son. Isaac who is willing to let his wife sleep with another man, just as his father Abraham was so willing. There is even a question left as to whether Isaac was the Hittite Ahimelech’s son rather than Abraham’s. The Abraham, Sarah, and Ahimelech story is repeated with the Isaac, Rebekah and Ahimelech story which is virtually the same story . Again, questioning whether the wife of a Patriarch, this time Rebekah, like Sarah before her committed adultery with a Hittite king. Just another strike at the Canaanites morality, a recurring theme of slander of the Canaanites. The slanders continue. The Isaac and Rebekah union produced two sons, Jacob and Esau. Rebekah in another display of defective morality collaborated with Jacob to steal a kingdom from her other son Esau by committing a fraud on her ailing and dying husband Isaac. Jacob even stole from his father-in-law Laban, after marrying his two daughters Rachel and Leah, who also turned out to be disloyal to their father Laban, having fled from him with Jacob, taking some of his possessions without permission. Jacob stole an inheritance by stealth, his mother being no better encouraged his trickery. Abraham is willing to sacrifice his son , or give his wife for a night to a king who worries him to save himself. Can this be anything but insults to a people who were Canaanites? Why deny it then? Why deny it now? The Jew is a Canaanite from the land of Canaan, so was his language, his burial ground and everything about him, including his practice of human sacrifice. Joseph raped the land of Egypt of its wealth. His administration was not at the pleasure of the Egyptian people. His administration benefited the Pharoah and himself. The Canaanites were a successful people hated by the Arameans who gave us the Book Of Genesis. The Moabites and Ammonites were also Canaanites who were insulted. Lot was said to have slept with his two daughters to produce children who would be progenitors of the Moabites and Ammonites. Again, an insult to the Canaanite tribes so closely connected with to the Israelites. Further evidence that they were the same people is in the fact that the Canaanite Jerusalemites, from the earliest time under Melchizedek, believed in the same Yahweh. There was a common ancestry , common habits, common religion, common characteristics, and essentially a god and gods having the same basic style and existence. In fact, the story of Simon and Levi having killed the people of Shechem, who were said to be Hittites but were more likely Canaanites who wanted to share their lives with the Israelites, may have been a counter -story to refute the fact that at the time they actually did unite and become the same people. Ezekiel unequivocally stated what the Lord told him regarding the Hebrews, "thus said the Lord God to Jerusalem: By origin and birth you are from the land of the Canaanites - your father was an Amorite and you mother a Hittite" (Ez 16:3). It is not only the Israelites who were Canaanites, a distinction that warrants honor rather than opprobrium. Other people besides the Israelites , such as the Ammonites, Moabites, Midianites, and Edomites were in all likelihood segments of a Canaanitic assemblage of peoples, whose contributions to civilization include the alphabet. The Hebrew language was designated in the Bible as "the language of Canaan": the Israelites spoke and wrote in Hebrew. It was also the language of the Moabites and the Edomites and probably the Ammonites as well. The Amarna letters from Ugarit, found in the village of Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast, contain Canaanitic literature from the fifteenth century B.C, written in a language extraordinarily similar to biblical Hebrew. Like the Hebrews, the Canaanites also had trespass offerings and wave offerings to their main god El, the same name the Israelites often used for their God. Concerning sacrifice, human and animal, the similarities between the Hebrew sacrifices and Canaanite and Phoenician sacrificial practices were so marked that it is impossible to dispute Canaanite influence on the Hebrew sacrifice and vice versa. The art forms of the Canaanites were similar to the few we have of the Hebrews . Even two of the five great holidays of the Jews , Shavuot and Succoth, are believed by many modern-day scholars to have been agricultural festivals that the Israelites appropriated from the Canaanites and reshaped. The prevailing view, based on faulty and progandistic evidence, is that the Israelites were Aramaens- as were the Moabites and Edomites who founded their kingdoms in Palestine. To boost this theory is the Bible’s alternate description of the Israelite as a ‘wandering Aramaen’. (Dt 26:5).
The story of the extermination of the Shechemites was another story used to show that the Hebrews were not the same people as the people who lived among them, since they exterminated them. The Shechemites were tricked into circumcising themselves so that they could join the Israelites and while in pain were slaughtered by the Israelites. The reason for this slaughter was because Jacob’s daughter Dinah was consensually seduced by the King of Shechem’s son, leading Jacob’s sons Simeon and Levi to conduct their bloodthirsty murders. The Book Of Jubilees tried to justify the activities of Jacob’s sons by claiming Dinah was only 12 years old when she was abducted by Shechem. The story of the Shechemites having circumcised themselves in order to unite with the Hebrews is left out of Jubilees and also left out of Josephus’ writings as efforts were made to justify the vile slaughter of the Shechemites. Whether any of the Bible stories are true is not the issue. Their intent and direction is the concern. The slander stories used to disparage groups often are repeated with the same theme. In the story of Lot, from the Book of Exodus, the men of Sodom wanted to have sex with a man, not the man’s wife. In the Book of Judges, the Benjamanites are described as having acted similarly. Multiple stories abound in the Bible. Aaron the priest’s two sons are killed on the same day, just as Eli the priest loses his two sons on the same day. The ten plagues of the Egyptians is duplicated by the ten plagues of the Philistines and there are more. The Old Testament that has reached us has undergone a great deal of change. Josephus , the great first century historian, rabbi and general, who insisted like so many other scholars mistakenly have until this day, that the bible was unchanged and that he was retelling it word for word, retold it in a very different way even two thousand years ago. Instead of saying Moses fled to Midian after he killed an Egyptian, told an entirely different story of the Egyptians being conquered by the Ethiopians and the Egyptians asking Moses to lead his people in a counter-attack against the Ethiopians, in which Moses was successful , so successful that the Ethiopian Queen was so taken by him that after being defeated she married him. All our Bible says is that Moses married a Cushite woman, leaving out all of what Josephus restated as the "unchanged" words of the Bible. Josephus also did not mention the story of the Golden Calf. Josephus said it was Egyptian mid-wives who were to kill the Hebrew’s newborns. The Bible says it was the Hebrew’s midwives who had that task. Josephus said much that was at variance with the Bible of today. Josephus said Ur (Hur) was Miriam’s brother, a relationship not found in the Bible. Josephus omits the incident of the Plague mentioned in Number 16:41-50, wherein 14,700 persons are killed. The holy and sacred Bible was severely tampered with during Josephus’ time and afterwards, numerous stories have been altered, deleted or added to make the Bible of today a very different collection of words than its original ancient edition. This despite comment of Biblical scholar W.F Albright that ‘no comparable literary legacy has come down to us so faithfully recorded and so little modified by the course of time as the Bible’. The Bible includes anecdotal stories commemorating events that occurred at a later time, redacted to an earlier book. The Story of he Golden Calf describing the conflict between Moses and Aaron is really the story of the northern leader of Israel Jeroboam’s conflict with the southern rulers of Judah, Solomon and his son Rehoboam. So are concepts like Sabbath’s origin redacted to Moses’ time when it probably came from Babylon many generations later. The Israelites well into the 8th Century BC and at least into the time of King Hezekiah, if they did not consider it a god , gave substantial reverence to a brass snake. So important was this idol that it partially accounts for the many names the Israelites took , especially the Levites that were derivatives of the Egyptian name for snakes. Another god who competed with the Israelites’ god’s El or Yahweh (who were either separate names for the same god or two gods of the Israelites) was Baal, who was supposedly not a god of the Israelites, yet the name Baal was frequently found to form part of many an Israelite name. (El was the main God of the Canaanites with Baal a subordinate god.)
Moses was extremely cruel killing Midianite children, killing those who married a Midianite and saving only Midianite virgins, yet he himself had married a Midianite and had children with her and had great respect for his father-in-law who did so much for Moses. These contradictions are perplexing. The discussion of the prohibition of intermarriage with Moabites as well as explanations for how Moab territory fall into the Israelite’s hands are stories that related to events that occurred hundreds of years after Moses’ time and were simply backdated to show that there was a biblical prohibition for intermarriage with the Moabites and justification for taking their lands. In the Book of Judges it is clear that Jew and Canaanite cohabitated and shared in each others religions. They were one and the same people. In Jerusalem and all over Israel, the Canaanites were never driven out . The commands of the Bible that the Canaanites be destroyed was scarcely if ever attempted. The first true king of the Israelites, Abimelech was half Israelite and half Canaanite.
The Books of Samuel are the masterpieces of biblical literature, exposing David as a murderous philanderer and Samuel as a dangerous despot. Samuel’s sons were corrupt (and it is more than suggested Samuel was corrupt also) and the people wanted a king. Samuel reluctantly picked Saul. Saul was to make a sacrifice with Samuel present. Samuel did not arrive in time. So Saul did not wait for Samuel , who was after all late beyond five days to make a sacrifice before going to war leading Samuel, who was insulted to tell Saul that there will be another leader of Israel instead of him Samuel was distraught at having to give away some of his power to a king (Saul) and he protested too loudly that he never took a bribe. Samuel ordered Saul to kill all the Amalekites but Saul spared their king Agog leading Samuel to cruelly cut Agog to pieces. Josephus wrote that Saul saved Agog because of his beauty , which was simply a counter-attack to claims that David and Jonanthan were homosexual. When Samuel visited Bethlehem to find a new king the people were in such fear of him that they asked him, while trembling, ‘Do you come peacefully?’. Jonathan, on meeting David, was smitten with love for him and gave him his robe and his sword. At first sight, Jonathan was willing to give himself to David. Part of the writing aims to show David as an aggressor but David’s defenders argued that Saul was the aggressor, using his daughter as marriage bait to put David in harms way. But David was the real aggressor. He sexually won over not only Michal, Saul’s daughter , but Jonathan, his son and their mother Ahino-Ann as well, as David sexually conquered Saul’s family. Jonathan, on behalf of David, was disloyal to his father, who was in fear of David. Telling David of his father’s plans and even putting his father in peril. Michal helped David escape from her father. Covering an idol with clothes to make it appear David was under the cover and there to be killed, when he had escaped. Jonathan told David "Whatever you say, I will do for you". In one major conspiratorial conversation between David and Jonathan, the conversation was interrupted when Jonathan said, "Come let us go out into the field". So they both went out into the field. Their conversation resumed after the visit to the field, which is the author’s contemptuous description of their homosexual foray. Jonathan swore his loyalty to David and cared nothing about his father and would tell David if he heard anything plotted by his father. And when Saul wondered why David was not present at a meal and was told by Jonathan that David returned to Bethlehem for a sacrifice David’s family made (which was incidentally a religious observance not observed by Saul , but a religious observance peculiar to David’s people) Saul was angered again and he harshly said to Jonathan the most telling sentence in all of biblical literature, "You son of a straying woman deserving of punishment. Did I not know that you chose the son of Jesse.." Jonathan was the son of Ahino-Ann, Saul’s wife. David had mastered her as well. Saul again sought to kill David and Jonathan again told David of his father’s intentions: "…and they kissed one another and wept with one another…"
While David fled from Saul, he left his parents where he felt was the safest place - the land of Moab. There is reasonable evidence to suggest David was a Moabite. His distant ancestor Ruth was a Moabite who converted to Judaism. There is historical evidence that in the Elephantine region of Egypt, Jews respected Chemosh the god of the Moabites, just as relics of Yahweh are found in Moabite lands. On his father’s side David stemmed for Judah, who had impregnated the foreign prostitute Tamar. Uncharacteristically, nothing is said about the national origin of David’s mother. The story of Ruth (a Moabite) was a friendly reference to these people. Ruth became Boaz’ wife and their son’s name was Obed, who was the father of Jesse., the father of David. Moabites were a presence in Israel’s history. Solomon had a Moabite as one of his wives and when the Hebrews returned from Babylon, Moabites returned with them as an influential presence. In times past, Moabites and Israelites worshipped together at the shrine of Baal. Let us not also forget that when David had strife he sent his parents to Moab for protection and that David’s family had special religious observances.