bringing God to book: the evidence mounts

I’m diverting myself again with ye old testament, using Testament as my starting point but ranging through many different versions – I’ve come across a concordance thingy which allows you to compare chapter and verse in 26 different versions. For example, were the ‘tumours’ that God visited upon the peoples of Ashdod (1Samuel 5:6) really hemorrhoids? Not surprisingly the skeptic’s annotated bible (truly a godsend) has great fun with this, especially with the five golden images of hemorrhoids God then demands to be made, as a ‘trespass offering’, whatever that is. The King James Bible uses the word ‘emerods’ where Testament and most modern versions has ‘tumours’. Interestingly, a later version of the King James, called The New King James Version, also uses ‘tumours’ and has a footnote about it referring to the bubonic plague. I was tempted to accept that maybe ‘tumours’ was more historically accurate (apart from the bit about God bringing them about), but then came upon another even more recent version of the King James, called the Twenty-first century King James Version (that should be it for the next century then), which boldly uses ‘hemorrhoids’. Bible study’s a fraught business, but it can be fun.

A rather more serious discrepancy occurs at 1 Samuel 6:19, where the skeptics understandably make much of the terrible slaughter and the pathetic pretext. Here’s the KJV:

And he smote the men of Bethshemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the LORD, even he smote of the people fifty thousand and threescore and ten men: and the people lamented, because the LORD had smitten many of the people with a great slaughter

My Testament reduces this number (50,070) to 70, without comment of course, and you can see here that, of eight versions, only two claim that seventy men were killed, while another goes for ‘seventy men – fifty chief men’, trying to argue presumably for fifty ‘thousand-men’ being chief men – probably on very shaky ground. The other five versions go with the vastly bigger number, sometimes with some ambiguity, separating the fifty thousand and the seventy as though that were somehow significant. But really, it looks bad for God. Not that murdering 70 is less heinous than murdering 50,070, and in any case the charge list is horrendously long quite apart from this crime. We’ve definitely got him on the big ones, ethnic cleansing, genocide, crimes against humanity. What astonishes me is that he has chosen to write his memoirs, detailing in chapter and verse the whole gamut of his crimes. A testament to the complete arrogance of the fellow. Personally though, I believe he has grossly exaggerated his involvement, in order to big-note himself and to scare his enemies. Like most alpha types he suffers from delusions of grandeur.
He’s been lying low for a while but he can’t evade capture forever. I hope they don’t make it a show trial, he really doesn’t deserve the publicity. The last thing you’d want to do is make a martyr of him.

Surprise surprise, someone's arrived here way before me.