I call this post, “A Buddhist reflects on the Bible: Part I” – the Buddhist being the wholly Trinity of Me, Myself, and I. “Part I” is merely a label of convenience – meaning that I do not intend to give (here and now) my detailed impressions of the entire Bible. At some future date, I might post a Part 2, 3, 4 etc, but at this point, I only have a yawning enthusiasm to do so.
To be fair, I’ve read precious little of the Bible’s texts. Oh, I’ve tried over the decades to fathom its mysteries but I just couldn’t penetrate the archaic, flowery, and (in my opinion) vague and stilted prose.
However, I feel I’ve been blessed with an open mind (which used to be called liberal, but not in polite society any more). So I want to give you an idea of what goes through my mind as I try to process certain “givens.” Toward that end, I’m going to touch on the Old Testament stories of Job, and of Abraham in the episode commonly called the Binding of Isaac.
QUOTES* followed by COMMENTS
In my usual style, I will QUOTE source material and follow with my COMMENTS. I purposely omit entire sections of narrative on which I don’t intend to comment.
From the Book of Job
QUOTE:
There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name [was] Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil.
COMMENT:
The word “perfect” hit me like a brick. Did the text mean “perfect” as in “[only] as perfect as a mere man can be?” “Perfect” covers a lot of territory – so much that the entire rest of the sentence could have been omitted after that word.
QUOTE:
His substance also was seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she asses, and a very great household; so that this man was the greatest of all the men of the east.
COMMENT:
“Five hundred she asses,” you say? What? No he asses?
“The greatest of all the men of the east,” you say? There were no kings who were greater? Not to mention, how should one define “greatest” in this context? Does the mere possession of wealth make one great?
Can you imagine the sheer number of acres which had to be at Job’s disposal to feed all this herd? And the number of herders under his employ? Job was very rich, to say the least. But whenever I hear of a man’s wealth, a couple of things are at work in the back of my mind. How did he obtain this wealth; or was it all just bestowed upon him as blessings from the Lord? How did he defend himself from pilferage or blatant thievery?
I never begrudge a man his fortune but it does give me pause. Especially since, as the old saying goes, “Victors write history books.” So if the Bible should be at least partly regarded as a history book, shouldn’t we be suspicious as to how much of that historical reporting is (shall we say) self-serving or self-vindicating?
QUOTE:
Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them.
COMMENT:
Why is Satan permitted to attend a gathering of the LORD and the sons of God? Unless he too should be considered a son of God?
QUOTE:
And the LORD said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.
COMMENT:
What a strange greeting is, “Whence comest thou?” More to my sensibility would be, “What brings you here?”
And what a strange answer. A good friend tells me that “in the earth” refers to exactly that – literally, “inside the earth,” which contains an underground world much embraced by devotees of the Hollow Earth narrative. As for “walking up and down in it,” could the “walking up” part refer to how he got from within the earth to its surface?
QUOTE:
[NOTE: This section follows the immediately preceding QUOTE(D) section.]
And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that [there is] none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?
COMMENT:
Of course, the rest of the story is well known – how Satan is permitted by the LORD to put Job through a variety of trials. Satan claimed Job would curse the LORD if he were to lose his divinely provided bounties and if his health or life were to be threatened.
However, suppose instead Satan did not challenge the LORD. Suppose instead he said something like this, “You say, ‘[there is] none like him,’ and that he is ‘a perfect…man.” If there are none like him and he is perfect, you’re saying he is the only man among the entire multitude alive at this moment who is perfect. He may well be perfect – I won’t challenge that. What I will challenge – How is it that he is the only perfect man? How poorly you have nurtured the human race that this must be so.”
Of course, if Satan had offered these alternate words, must we assume that God would never have tested Job? Remember: It was Satan who, only after being permitted to do so by the LORD after challenging the LORD, had savaged Job so terribly. So if God had it in His mind that Job was to be tested, and if Satan hadn’t been a willing tool in this test, would God have tested Job in another way? Maybe deciding to test Job directly Himself, without Satan’s assistance?
QUOTE:
So went Satan forth from the presence of the LORD, and smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown.
COMMENT:
Eww…Much of the rest of what follows contains speeches made by Job after seven days of silently suffering from these boils. He is in utter agony and yet – he manages to speak so eloquently. Why is that? How is that possible? [Again, I had trouble penetrating his meaning but I could sense how others could obtain at least the general drift of Job’s words.]
QUOTE:
Then said his wife unto him, Dost thou still retain thine integrity? Curse God, and die.
COMMENT:
Sounds like his wife is saying, “Since you’re in such awful physical pain, why not cut short your life by cursing God. For then He shall surely smite thee, removing you from this life and from any life hereafter. If your pain is so great, how could you be expected to endure it without [apparent] end?” [NOTE: It could not have been known to Job for how much longer he would suffer, nor by what means.]
QUOTE:
[This immediately follows “Curse God, and die” from the above QUOTE.]
But he said unto her…shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips.
COMMENT:
I will answer his question (“…and shall we not receive evil?”) with an emphatic, “No, we shall not – at least, we should not receive evil and still call God great.” The whole thrust of this story seems to be, “If we can only man up and suffer silently at the hands of our superiors, bounty shall surely be ours.” That ethic has been suggested to all of the lowly throughout all of the ages by all of our superiors. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it; and it surely doesn’t mean we have to call them “great” as they torture us.
QUOTE:
[After Job’s trials are over and he is no longer suffering.]
Then came there unto him all his brethren, and all his sisters, and all they that had been of his acquaintance before…every man also gave him a piece of money, and every one an earring of gold.
COMMENT:
Why did all of those people give Job money? He surely didn’t need it, for as the next QUOTE tells us:
QUOTE:
So the LORD blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning: for he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses.
COMMENT:
What, still no he asses? What’s with that?
After most of Job’s herders had been killed by Satan’s hand, where did Job find replacements to manage this even larger-than-before flock? Did he enslave them, which was not an uncommon practice of the time? How did he obtain extra land for their forage and roaming?
QUOTE:
He had also seven sons and three daughters.
COMMENT:
Ah, these would have been to replace those seven sons and three daughters which the LORD God had allowed Satan to kill earlier in this narrative. I don’t know how Job felt about losing his first ten children; I don’t even know if he mourned their loss. But here and now, I (in the twenty-first century) will say a prayer for them. For the narrative continues by saying, “And thus lived Job an hundred and forty years…So Job died, [being] old and full of days.” Sad this couldn’t have been said of his dead children.
The Binding of Isaac
Much of what I’ve heard about Abraham has forced this conclusion: Were I to see Abraham approaching me as I should walk down the sidewalk, I would cross the street to avoid him.
Since the story of the Binding of Isaac is so well-known, I will not summarize it here but I will furnish a link should you care to review its words, which are rather few in number:
More QUOTES and COMMENTS follow:
QUOTE:
And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here [am] I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where [is] the lamb for a burnt offering?
COMMENT:
In answer to that question, Abraham lies by saying:
“…My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.”
Since Issac was supposed to have been a rather profound individual in his own right, Abraham should have said, “You are to be that lamb. I will bind and cover thee with sticks which I shall set aflame, after I slit your throat so you feel no pain. For God has told me to make of you a burnt offering.”
To me, this is what makes an offering profound – that it is voluntarily given, not demanded as tribute is demanded by all-too-common tyrants.
QUOTE:
And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.
COMMENT:
There’s no hint in this telling that Isaac resisted in any way or said anything. This is part of the problem I have with Abraham – it’s always all about Abraham. You’d think this story would allow for some words or actions to be offered by the man who is about to die.
QUOTE:
And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind [him] a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.
COMMENT:
This was done after an angel of the LORD told Abraham not to sacrifice Isaac, and indeed had praised Abraham by saying, “Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearst God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only [son] from me.”
So there we have it:
1) God tells Abraham to kill his son and burn him up as an offering;
2) An angel of God, at the last moment, tells Abraham not to kill his son.
3) However, no mention is made of that angel (or God Himself) asking for a substitute burnt offering (that ram).
4) That substitute was Abraham’s inspiration of the moment upon seeing some poor, defenseless animal trapped.
5) The angel of God did not stop Abraham from killing the ram.
If I were any kind of a fiction writer, I might have added these considerations toward the end of this story:
Killing that ram was the real test which God had in mind for Abraham.
The binding of Isaac wasn’t much of a test since God told him to kill his son but withdrew that order. In other words, Abraham didn’t have to do any thinking, he simply followed the words of the Lord. However, killing that ram was a thought that came directly from Abraham, unsolicited by God. That ram, as a symbol, would have been Jesus Christ in disguise, of whom the world (or at least Abraham) was not yet ready.
The irony is that this ram was “attached” to a wooden framework (his horns caught in a bush) in a manner similar to how Jesus Christ was to be later crucified. So, in his own way, Abraham pre-crucified Christ so to speak. If that was the case – God was truly forgiving indeed.
QUOTE:
…I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which [is] on the sea shore…
COMMENT:
Hmm…as many as all that, eh? That’s way more than the known population of the earth.
QUOTE:
And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice.
COMMENT:
In my humble opinion, the descendants of Abraham (specifically, those of Isaac) haven’t done much to bless “all the nations of the earth.” When’s that supposed to happen?
As for “because thou hast obeyed my voice,” I would have much preferred “because thou hasn’t obeyed my righteous laws.” Harkens to an age old situation: Just because one hears the voice of one claiming to be God, doesn’t make it so. Even today, there are too many claiming they did some really awful things because “God told me to.” Well…something told them to but…
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
In closing
Please, don’t get the wrong idea. I’m just as questioning of Buddhist scripture as well, much to the discomfort of my fellow Buddhists. Which might explain why we no longer keep each other’s company.
Steven Searle, just another member of the Virtual Samgha of the Lotus
“Why is it that children can offer interesting questions, but they seem to lose that ability when they get older? Where’s Peter Pan when you need him?” - Steven Searle.
