God Is. by Douglas Wilson

Author:Douglas Wilson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780915815869
Published: 2008-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

The Need for Human Sacrifice

I will treat the next two chapters of Hitchens’ book together. Chapter Seven of is on the nightmare we call the Old Testament, and Chapter Eight informs us why the evil of the New Testament surpasses that of the Old.

That which is good in the Old Testament is, according to Hitchens, not unique to it:

But however little one thinks of the Jewish tradition, it is surely insulting to the people of Moses to imagine that they had come this far under the impression that murder, adultery, theft, and perjury were permissible. (99)

Again he forgets the heart of man, both ancient and modem. And I do not mean the heart of man in some hyper-spiritualized sense, but rather the heart of man as indicated by what he actually does. In the world into which these commandments came, human sacrifice was not uncommon. Herodotus records how each Babylonian woman was required to do a “tour of duty” as a temple prostitute. As for theft, the distinctions between “me” and “you” were particularly blurry, especially when dealing with the members of another tribe. The codification of these standards represented a true advance in civilized liberty.

But what about now?

To take just one example, does Hitchens seriously want to maintain that the evil of adultery is self-evident in our day? In the circles he travels, is adultery such an evil that everyone recoils in horror from the news of yet another straying husband or wife? When a marriage cracks up because one of the partners was seeing someone on the side, what sort of comment might you hear from Hitchens at a Wash inton D.C. cocktail party? “What Smith did is reprehensible. Why this is something that Moses didn’t even need to tell his unwashed barbarian followers. Even they would know this was an evil and an outrage.” As one of our prophets has put it, don’t hold your breath.

Hitchens makes fun of the “insanely detailed regulations governing oxes that gore and are gored,” along with “micromanagement of agricultural disputes” (100). This is not the heart of his argument at all—he is just setting the stage by showing how irreverent he can be—but it is kind of funny. Think about it. He is laughing at these rubes for micromanaging agriculture. He pokes fun at the ancient Hebrew predilection for “insanely detailed regulations.” And where does Christopher Hitchens live? I believe I read somewhere that it is in the Washington D.C. area, that vast and inexhaustible supply of micromanaging and insanely detailed regulations. The ancient Hebrews had Ten Commandments, and one slim volume of commentary on those commandments. Go to the nearest law library and ask to see the regulations that you, enlightened modern man, live under. They will show you shelf after shelf of big fat books, and the incoming regulations will, on a daily basis, far surpass the Mosaic code in volume, and what they overdo in quantity they will make up for in pettiness, hubris, and incoherence.

But then we get to his real objection to the Old Testament, which is moral.

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