Today, from the Huffington Post: “The Bible is a Book of Inclusion and Love.”, by Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson.

He writes:

The Bible starts with two profound stories: The first story we are given is of a God who cannot bear to be alone. A God who is driven by love to create a world of flowering and cascading diversity in which nothing is precisely like what came before it; in which each new creature is delightfully fresh and novel; in which God, thrilled by each new creation, says: This is good. And then God creates a creature with the capacity, also, to look at diversity, and to look at novelty, and to say: This is good! And we are told in this story that we are made in that God’s image.

What is the characteristic of the God of Genesis? Unearned love that can only be made real when it is given away. And so without obligation, God creates a diverse and flowering universe, because God cannot be God if God cannot love. We are, my friends, in God’s image. And we also, though, shrivel up and die if we do not have the ability to pour out our love; to celebrate difference; to rejoice in novelty; to see in each other’s divine sparks; and to be delighted and thrilled by what we see. That is, says the Bible, our most God-like attribute.

The second book of the Bible, the Book of Exodus, tells the second foundational story of Western civilization. It is the shocker! The story tells of an obscure small group of people who are described by the Hebrew term to’evah — abomination. Those people are so abominable that the Egyptians will not even sit at a table with them; they will not eat with them; they force them to live in a different neighborhood so they do not have to deal with them. And they oppress them, ruthlessly and harshly. And the Torah announces that the force that created the cosmos, the force that is known in the giving away of unearned love, that force cannot abide pharaohs. That force will rise up on behalf of the oppressed, on behalf of the abominable and that force will set them free. We Jews know that as our core story. Every year we recall that we, each of us, were slaves in a land that viewed us as outsiders, and that we were visited by the very forces that make the universe what it is: forces of liberation and freedom and wholeness. And that we were brought out of that narrow land into a place where we were free to be ourselves.

I’m pretty sure Rabbi Artson and I aren’t reading the same book.

The God of Genesis is loving and inclusive? The same God who:

• Drowned nearly every living being on Earth in a senseless fit of violence?
• Recognized the curse of eternal servitude Noah laid upon the descendants of Ham?
• Cursed Pharaoh’s house for believing a lie told by Abraham?
• Destroyed Soddom and Gammorah and murdered all who dwelt within?
• Who turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt for daring to look back?
• Who orders Abraham to kill his own son in a sick test of faith?
• Who slew Er for no apparent reason?
• Who slew Onan for having recreational sex?
• Who brought seven years of famine on the world for no other reason than to line Joseph’s coffers?

The God of Genesis is loving and inclusive? The same God who:

• Decides to smite Egypt?
• Tries to kill Moses because his son hadn’t been circumcised?
• Who hardens Pharaoh’s heart, so he will not let the Hebrews go?
• Who curses Egypt with seven plagues because the Pharaoh didn’t let the Hebrews go?
• Who murders the firstborn children of Egypt?
• Who orders the Hebrews to slaughter the Amalekites?
• Who mandates disobedient children be killed?
• Who says it is A-OK to beat your slaves?
• Who mandates disobedient oxen be put to death?
• Who threatens to destroy anyone who worships another God?
• Who mandates those who break the Sabbath be killed?

We could go on like this for days. I think it safe to say the Rabbi’s professional agenda calls into the question the objectivity with which he is presenting his holy text. It should be abundantly clear to anyone who has read even a few chapters of Genesis or Exodus that Rabbi Artson is taking an extremely liberal interpretation of the Biblical narrative, to the point where I question whether or not he’s read the thing at all. Genesis and Exodus are not about establishing an inclusive, loving religion, but about establishing the Hebrews as God’s favorite mammals, ultimately to give divine authority to a claim laid upon a rather unspectacular strip of arid real estate some fifteen hundred years before the supposed birth of Christ.

Shall we ask the Canaanites how loved and included they feel?