Unmasking the God of Israel: The Devil’s Trick, part 2

by Laurent Guyénot

The belief in a cruel god makes a cruel man. (Thomas Paine. The Age of Reason, 1794).

COUNTLESS BIBLICAL STORIES demonstrate that Yahweh is the spirit of murder and theft. We read in Samson’s legend in Judges 14:19, that when “the spirit of Yahweh seized on him,” he went on killing and robbing thirty men, “then burning with rage returned to his father’s house.”

Yahweh is the cruelest of gods, but he would have us believe that all other gods are abominations. Biblical history portrays all nations but Israel as repulsive idolaters. But they were not. The Egyptians had built the first great civilization; their goddess Isis had taught them how to grow wheat and bake bread, and the Greeks learned it from them — as everything else, according to Herodotus. They were a spiritual and peaceful people. The Assyrians were conquerors, and their god Assur was no angel, yet even the Bible recognizes that they did not slaughter the defeated Israelites, but deported and resettled them. The Babylonians dealt with the Judeans the same way, even allowing them to keep their tradition and their cohesion, and to prosper on the riverbanks of the Euphrates.

Reversed accusation of genocidal intention is typical of Israel, a country with nuclear warheads pointed at Iran, whose leaders have always denied having any nuclear arsenal at all — but who hysterically urges the world to stop Iran’s alleged military nuclear program and determination to erase Israel from the map. It would be laughable if Israel were just paranoid. But Israel is the psychopath among nations, and that means a tremendous capacity to manipulate, intimidate, corrupt morally, and get what they want.

The psychopath projects his own cruelty and lust for power on others. And so he thinks that those who resist his domination are out to get him. Therefore he must destroy them first. From the biblical point of view, nations must either recognize Israel’s sovereignty, and their kings “fall prostrate before [Israel], faces to the ground” (Isaiah 49:23), or be destroyed. Yahweh told Israel that he has identified “seven nations greater and stronger than yourself,” that “you must put under the curse of destruction,” and not “show them any pity.” As for their kings, “you will blot out their names under heaven” (Deuteronomy 7:1-2, 24). And we recall that, even according to Wesley Clark, son of Benjamin Jacob Kanne, the neocons had plans for destroying precisely seven nations — another proof that they are possessed by Yahweh.

Yahweh offers only two possible paths to Israel: domination, if Israel keeps Yahweh’s Covenant of separateness, or annihilation, if Israel breaks the Covenant:

[I}f you make friends with the remnant of these nations still living beside you, if you intermarry with them, if you mix with them and they with you, then know for certain that Yahweh your god will stop dispossessing these nations before you, and for you they will be a snare, a pitfall, thorns in your sides and thistles in your eyes, until you vanish from this fine country given you by Yahweh your god. (Joshua 23:12-14)

Dispossess others or be dispossessed, dominate or be exterminated: Israel cannot think beyond that binary paradigm. A good illustration is David Ben-Gurion’s paradoxical thinking in the early 1960s. Discussing Kennedy’s determination to stop Dimona, Avner Cohen writes in Israel and the Bomb (1998): “Imbued with lessons of the Holocaust, Ben-Gurion was consumed by fears of security. […] Anxiety about the Holocaust reached beyond Ben-Gurion to infuse Israel’s military thinking.”[11] Yet in the very same period, Ben-Gurion seriously considered that, within 25 years, Israel will dominate the world, and Jerusalem “will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.”[12]

The Prohibition of Moral Conscience

Accusatory inversion is the birth process of Yahwism, which presents a murderous demon as the supreme God while demonizing the supreme God worshipped by other peoples. This can clearly be seen in the Genesis story of the Garden of Eden, with a very simple historical critical analysis.

In the Garden of Eden allegory, Yahweh forbids man access to “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). The Hebrew word for “knowledge,” daat, translates in Greek as gnosis, meaning inner awareness or insight rather than intellectual knowledge, so that “knowledge of good and evil” can be accurately translated as “moral conscience,” which is man’s capacity to distinguish good from evil, right from wrong, in any particular situation. So Yahweh’s prohibition of the knowledge of good and evil simply means the prohibition of moral conscience.

To contextualize that Genesis story, we must recall that Egyptian and Persian religions taught that immortality is the reward for a blameless life. Since immortality was synonymous with divinity, being immortal could be expressed as “being among the gods,” or “being like the gods.” But in the Hebrew Bible it is the serpent, a liar and deceiver, who tempts Adam and Eve into eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil with the guarantee that, “the day you eat it you will not die,” but “your eyes will open and you will be like gods, who know good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). The serpent’s words sound much like the religious wisdom of great religions. The Hebrew scribes can present him as a liar because, for them, immortality (“not dying”) only makes sense physically: Yahweh, they claim, intended Adam and Eve to be physically immortal on Earth, and provided no otherworld for their afterlife. From this materialistic standpoint, the scribes denounce the promise of immortality through knowledge of good and evil as deceptive, and implicitly portray the Babylonian, Persian, and Egyptian gods as liars.

We have been “educated” for so many generations by this story, and are so used to assuming that the serpent of Genesis is a satanic deceiver, that it is hard to see the Torah’s message for what it really was: a direct attack against the higher religions and their moral teaching that the knowledge and practice of good and evil is the way to a blessed afterlife. But, I ask, if trying to become like gods is a Luciferian impulse, why did the [non-Jewish] Greek Christians much later stress man’s potential for deification (theosis) under the logic that “God became man so that man might become God”?[13]

Lucifer, by the way, is the Latin translation of the Greek Phosphoros (light-bearer), traditionally applied to the Morning Star, the planet Venus. In Isaiah 14:12-17, the prophet blames the Babylonian king Nabuchodonosor II (605-562) for having tried to “rival the Most High,” and sarcastically asks: “How did you come to fall from the heavens, Daystar, son of Dawn [Lucifer in the Latin Vulgate]?” Discarding the reference to the Babylonian king, Christian exegetes conflated “Lucifer” with the serpent of Genesis, and declared him the chief of the fallen angels, “cast away from heaven because of his rebellious pride.” Yet, if we look at Yahwism from the revisionist perspective I am advocating, Yahweh, the tribal god who usurped the majesty of the Supreme God, fits the Luciferian archetype. Yahweh is the infernal demon that wanted to be God instead of God.

Yahweh Molech

To understand Yahwism — and thereby Jewishness and Zionism — it is important to know the background of its infancy, which has nothing to do with the birth of universal monotheism.

There is a mounting scholarly assumption that Yahweh was originally the volcano god of a tribal people specialized in metallurgy (read here).[14] Hence his volcanic character. Any portrait of Yahweh would have to be based on Psalms 18:8: “Smoke rose from his nostrils, from his mouth devouring fire.” According to the “Kenite hypothesis”, the cult originated with the Kenites, who believed that, as a result of a curse upon their fratricidal ancestor Cain, they must live as restless wanderers, but inspire fear to the people among whom they dwell by their Yahweh-given law of sevenfold vengeance — revised as seventy-sevenfold by Cain’s descendant Lamek (Genesis 4:15-24).

We are often told that Yahweh is the god who abolished human sacrifice, when, after ordering Abraham to tie down his son Isaac to be sacrificed, he held back his hand and contented himself with a ram (Genesis 22). Yet long after Abraham, some Israelite leaders seemed unaware of that great progress, and sacrificed their own children as burnt offerings to Yahweh: Jephthah in Judges 11:29-40, Hiel in 1Kings 16:34, King Azaz in 2Kings 16:3, and King Manasseh in 2Kings 21:6. Not to mention the 32 holocausted Midianite virgins in Numbers 31 (read my article “A Holocaust of Biblical Proportions”).

For his alleged abolition of human sacrifice, Yahweh has been compared favorably with the Canaanite god Molech or Moloch, to whom firstborn infants were ritually sacrificed. But biblical scholars like Thomas Römer speculate that Molech was in fact none other than Yahweh himself. One of his arguments is that the noun mlk, vocalized as Molek in the Masoretic text (the ninth-century Tanakh that introduced vowels into the Hebrew script), but Melek in the Greek Septuagint, is identical to the Hebrew word for “king”, melek or melech (malik in Arabic), applied more than fifty times to Yahweh. The expression Yahweh melech, “Yahweh is king,” is found in Psalms 10 and still in use in Jewish religious songs.

The second argument for Molech’s ancient identity with Yahweh comes from the Leviticus prohibition of infant sacrifices: the prohibition proves the practice, and in this case, it proves that sacrifices were made in Yahweh’s name and in Yahweh’s sanctuary: “You will not allow any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech, thus profaning the name of your God” (18:21); “Anyone […] who gives any of his children to Molech, will be put to death, [for] he has defiled my sanctuary and profaned my holy name” (20:2-5). Jeremiah 7:30-31 confirms that “the people of Judah” continued “to burn their sons and daughters […] in the Temple that bears my name, to defile it.” Although Yahweh declares it to be “a thing I never ordered, that had never entered my thoughts,” the very fact that a scribe wrote this indicates that the people who sacrificed their children did claim that it was required by Yahweh. In fact, Yahweh is caught lying, since he admits to Ezekiel, around the same period:

“And for this reason I gave them laws that were not good and judgements by which they could never live; and I polluted them with their own offerings, making them sacrifice every first-born son in order to fill them with revulsion, so that they would know that I am Yahweh” (Ezekiel 20:25-26).

In Exodus we learn that every first-born male, human or animal, was originally sacrificed on the eighth day after birth:

“You will give me the first-born of your children; you will do the same with your flocks and herds. For the first seven days the first-born will stay with its mother; on the eighth day you will give it to me” (Exodus 22:28-29).

Since animals were offered to Yahweh as holocausts from time immemorial, the implication is that the first-born son of every Jewish family had once been sacrificed as a holocaust too.

According to biblical record, it is King Josiah (640-609 BC) who abolished the sacrifices of children, “so that no one could pass his son or daughter through the fire of sacrifice to Molech” (2Kings 23:10). But according to Römer, it is only in the Persian era that human sacrifices became taboo.[15] They were substituted by animal offerings, as we learn from Exodus and Leviticus:

“All that first issues from the womb belongs to me: every male, every first-born of flock or herd. But the first-born donkey you will redeem with an animal from the flock; if you do not redeem it, you must break its neck. All the first-born of your sons you will redeem, and no one will appear before me empty-handed” (Exodus 34:19-20; reproduced almost verbatim in 13:11-13 and in Leviticus 27:26).[16]

As in a palimpsest, we read here two things: in ancient Yahwism, the first-born male of humans and beasts were sacrificed to Yahweh, while in the reformed Judaism elaborated during the Exile, the first-born male of humans was “redeemed” by an animal offering.

The Lord of the Foreskins

It was also in Babylon that the Levites introduced the Abrahamic covenant of circumcision: “As soon as he is eight days old, every one of your males, generation after generation, must be circumcised” (Genesis 17:12).

In religious reforms, innovations are presented as the restoration of ancient and lost practices. And so the Levites introduced their new rite as a pre-Mosaic commandment. For that purpose they used or invented Abraham: As a figure born in Mesopotamia and given the Promised Land in inheritance, he is the personification of the program of the priestly caste exiled in Babylon.

In pre-exilic Yahwism, every first-born male was to be offered to Yahweh on the eighth day of his life (Exodus 22:28-29), and in post-exilic Judaism, every newborn male was to be circumcised on the eighth day. That parallel is a strong clue that circumcision was introduced as another substitute for sacrifice.

Circumcision was not a novelty. It was unknown in Mesopotamia, but was practiced in ancient Egypt on fourteen-year-old boys. Circumcision of prepubescent or adolescent males was also practiced in Syria, but not uniformly: the Philistines, an Indo-European people from the Aegean world (they gave their name to Palestine), are called “the uncircumcised” in the Bible: David offered two hundred foreskins of slaughtered Philistines to Saul as bride token for his daughter (1Samuel 18).

Circumcision rites practiced in ancient Judea before the Babylonian Exile were probably consistent with the practices of neighboring peoples, which would explain why it is not even mentioned in the Mosaic covenant. According to the Book of Joshua, it is only when the Hebrews had settled in the Promised Land of Canaan that “Joshua made flint knives and circumcised the Israelites on the Hill of Foreskins” (5:3).

The Yahwist priestly caste who legislated over the Judean community in Mesopotamia may have valued circumcision as a marker of ethnic identity in a land where nobody else practiced it. But why would they introduce the radical novelty of circumcision on newborn babies? Continuity with the ancient rite of sacrificing the first-born on the eighth day is one explanation. But I suggest a more sinister one: By eighth-day circumcision, Yahweh’s covenant is not only “marked in [every Jew’s] flesh as a covenant in perpetuity” (Genesis 17:13), it is impressed into the deepest and unreachable layers of their subconscious, through symbolic castration and traumatic pain. Unlike the child or teenager, the newborn baby is incapable of elaborating any positive meaning to the violence done to him, and to integrate it consciously as part of his identity. Eight days after emerging from his mother’s womb — a trauma in itself, but a natural one — what he needs is to build an unshakable trust in the benevolence of those who welcomed him into this world. The trauma of circumcision alters his relationship to the world in a deep and permanent way.

Because infants cannot speak, rabbis who defend the tradition speak in their place to minimize their physical pain. But according to Professor Ronald Goldman, author of Circumcision, the Hidden Trauma, scientific studies prove the neurological impact of infant circumcision, for which no anesthesia is used. Behavioral changes observed after the operation, including sleep disorders and inhibition in mother-child bonding, are signs of a post-traumatic stress syndrome.[17] During the ceremony of brit milah, the mother is normally kept away from the scene, and the baby’s shrieks of agony are partly covered by the cheers of the men — a message in itself. But when mothers happen to hear them, they suffer enduring trauma themselves, as can be read on the Circumcision Resource Center web page “Mothers Who Observed Circumcision”: “The screams of my baby remain embedded in my bones and haunt my mind,” says Miriam Pollack. “His cry sounded like he was being butchered. I lost my milk.” Nancy Wainer Cohen: “I will go to my grave hearing that horrible wail, and feeling somewhat responsible.”

It is reasonable to assume, at least as a working hypothesis, that the trauma of circumcision at the age of eight days leaves a deep psychological scar. Abuse by adults is known to trigger in very young children’s minds a mechanism known as dissociation. The pain, the terror, the rage, and the memory of the experience, will be pushed out of ordinary consciousness, and form, so to speak, a separate personality, with a life of its own and a tendency to ooze into the normal personality. The idea of the wickedness of parental figures is so devastating that the repressed anger will be deviated away from them — in this case, away from the Jewish community as a collective parent. Is it farfetched to suppose a causal link between the trauma of eighth-day circumcision and the fact that Jews tend to be incapable of seeing the abuse perpetrated on them by their own community, and instead see the rest of the world as a constant threat?

Could it be that the trauma of eighth-day circumcision has created a special predisposition, a pre-programmed paranoia that impairs the Jews’ capacity to relate and react rationally to certain situations? Was brit milah (“covenant by circumcision”) invented some twenty-three centuries ago as a kind of ritual trauma designed to mentally enslave millions of people, an unbreakable “covenant” carved into their hearts in the form of an incurable subconscious terror that can at any time be triggered by code-words such as “Holocaust” or “anti-Semitism”?

It has been suggested that traumas can be transmitted “epigenetically.” According to a study conducted under the direction of Rachel Yehuda at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, “the trauma of the Holocaust is transmitted genetically” by “epigenetic heredity”;[18] May I suggest to Professor Yehuda that she now conduct a study on the epigenetics of eighth-day circumcision?

Baruch Spinoza said that, “circumcision alone will preserve the Jewish nation for ever.”[19] That explains the fierce resistance of Jewish authorities against every attempt to ban it, from Roman Emperor Hadrian (117-138) to the recent Icelandic bill, condemned by European Jewish organizations as “anti-Semitic.” It must be said that opposition to infant circumcision has often come from enlightened Jews. Abraham Geiger (1810-1874), one of the founders of Reformed Judaism in Germany, advocated giving up this “barbarian and bloody rite.” But, on this issue as on all others, it is always “the more ethnocentric elements — one might term them the radicals — who have determined the direction of the Jewish community and eventually won the day” (Kevin MacDonald).[20] To protect their bloody rite from criticism, Jewish activists managed to normalize it in England and North America from the 1840s to the 1960s, under fraudulent medical reasons — an amazing demonstration of their power over Christian civilization.

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Notes

[1] Herbert George Wells, The Fate of Homo Sapiens (1939), p. 128, on archive.org.

[2] Read in Félix Niesche, Voltaire antisémite, KontreKulture, 2019.

[3] Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values and the Jewish State, Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 18.

[4] “Document: Shamir on Terrorism (1943),” Middle East Report 152 (May/June 1988), on https://merip.org/1988/05/shamir-on-terrorism-1943/

[5] Norman Habel, Yahweh Versus Baal: A Conflict of Religious Cultures, Bookman Associates, 1964, p. 41.

[6] Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism, University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, p. 47.

[7] Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 3.

[8] I have conflated the two almost identical accounts of the same episode in 2Samuel 12:31 and 1Chronicles 20:3.

[9] Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 122–125, 4.

[10] Jeffrey Goldberg, “Israel’s Fears, Amalek’s Arsenal,” New York Times, May 16, 2009.

[11] Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Random House, 1991, p. 141, quoted in Michael Collins Piper, Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy, American Free Press, 6^th ed., ebook 2005, p.[56] 117.

[12] David Ben-Gurion and Amram Duchovny, David Ben-Gurion, In His Own Words, Fleet Press Corp., 1969, p. 116

[13] John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes, Fordham University Press, 1974.

[14] Ariel David, “Jewish God Yahweh Originated in Canaanite Vulcan, Says New Theory,” Haaretz, April 11, 2018, on haaretz.com

[15] Thomas Römer, The Invention of God, Harvard UP, 2015, pp. 137-138.

[16] Numbers 18:15-17 declares redeemable the “first-born of an unclean animal” (unfit for consumption), but forbids to redeem “the first-born of cow, sheep and goat,” which are destined for the consumption of the Levites.

[17] Ronald Goldman, Circumcision, the Hidden Trauma: How an American Cultural Practice Affects Infants and Ultimately Us All, Vanguard, 1997.

[18] Tori Rodrigues, “Descendants of Holocaust Survivors Have Altered Stress Hormones,” Scientific American, March 1, 2015, on www.scientificamerican.com.

[19] Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-political treatise, chapter 3, §12, Cambridge UP, 2007, p. 55.

[20] Kevin MacDonald, Cultural Insurrections: Essays on Western Civilizations, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism, The Occidental Press, 2007, pp. 90-91.

Finis.

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Source: White Biocentrism

Laurent Guyénot, Ph.D., is the author of From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018, and JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State, Progressive Press, 2014.