The Evil of Yahweh: Guyénot is Right, Alexis Isn’t Even Wrong

He's just incoherent and obnoxious

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By Kevin Barrett, Veterans Today Editor

Jonas Alexis has published two articles in Culture Wars purporting to review Laurent Guyénot's From Yahweh to Zion, a book I translated and published. (They are now freely available on the internet: Part 1 Part 2.) While Alexis's "reviews" aren't quite as long as Guyénot's 500-page book, my fellow VT editor does write as though he's being paid by the word.

Alexis's "reviews" of From Yahweh to Zion are long-winded, rambling, incoherent diatribes that blather on about everything under the sun except the book they are supposedly reviewing. In the first installment, Alexis gives us the long version of Wilhelm Marr, Ludwig Feuerbach, Sigmund Freud, David Duke, and Kevin MacDonald—8,405 words long, to be precise—before he even gets around to Laurent Guyénot and From Yahweh to Zion. He then, in similarly tedious fashion, spends many more interminable pages lambasting Guyénot for entertaining the fairly common notion that Christianity and the cult of Osiris bear a "family resemblance," as does the story of Cain and Abel with that of Osiris. Even more bizarrely, he blames me—the translator—for the contents of the book faithfully translated:

While Kevin Barrett’s reputation as a scholar remains intact despite translating and editing From Yahweh to Zion, and while I have nothing but appreciation for his works, I am disappointed that he did not challenge Guyénot on the points I raised here.

If Alexis thinks "translators and editors" change the meaning of the texts they translate, I hope he is never hired to translate anything from Korean!

As if spending over 10,000 words (or was it 15,000? I've lost count) saying practically nothing about the subject at hand wasn't enough, Alexis returns for an encore performance in this month's Culture Wars. Believe it or not, the Master of Meander has somehow produced yet another highly discursive non-review of From Yahweh to Zion! While admittedly E. Michael Jones' brilliant review of The Brutalist is a hard act to follow, Alexis's piece is so bad that Jones' article ought to be to be embarrassed to be rubbing up against it.

Like Alexis's first "review," his second completely avoids grappling with Guyénot's thesis: That the extant Torah or Old Testament is largely a gospel of evil, as epitomized by its main character, Yahweh, and that Jews who have misbehaved in various times and places have done so under its influence. (Please note that I do not necessarily agree with that thesis! I am just the translator!*)

Rather than refuting Guyénot's claims about what the Torah/OT actually says, Alexis fulminates obscenely about the Prophet of Islam,** offers a characteristically verbose critique of the Talmud (hardly relevant to Guyénot's critique of the Torah) and finally wanders off on a many-thousand-word negative assessment of the early Christian dualist Marcion. And while it's true that Guyénot's general view that Yahweh is evil was most famously espoused by Marcion, the two critics of the Torah are separated by almost two millennia and an almost equally incommensurable gulf in worldviews. (Guyénot was trained in the secular-atheist tradition of French historical scholarship and is philosophically and spiritually something of a stoic, so nobody would ever mistake his writings for Marcion's!) Alexis's critique of Marcion, while perhaps adequate as a pedestrian rendering of Catholic dogma, has very little to do with Guyénot's book.

Since Guyénot's thesis is that Jewish misbehavior has been fueled by the problematic Torah, anyone who wishes to refute From Yahweh to Zion should focus on two tasks:

1. Address Guyénot's claim that the Torah/OT repeatedly depicts Yahweh as an unpleasantly jealous tyrant ordering his followers to do all sorts of evil things, up to and including genocide.

2. Address Guyénot's claims that various examples of Jewish misbehavior, ranging from usurious predation to Zionist genocide, are rooted in the Jews' (not obviously wrong) understanding of the (plain text of) the Torah.

In hopes of stimulating Alexis to once again pick up his profusive pen and start dipping it in his inexhaustible inkwell (and, if he is indeed being paid by the word, to cut me in on the profits) I hereby offer selections from Chapter Two of Laurent Guyénot's magisterial From Yahweh to Zion. If Alexis or anyone else wishes to do a New Critical style close reading of the plain text of the Torah/OT selections cited by Guyénot, using historical context when necessary to help us understand what these texts meant to their original authors and audience, and to their Jewish audience throughout the ages—and to claim that Guyénot's all-too-obvious interpretation is wrong—please be my guest.

-

*Actually, I agree with Guyénot that there is a lot of evil in the Torah/OT and its depiction of Yahweh, but argue that (1) there is also some good, and that (2) the explanation for this mixed picture is that the Jewish elite, AKA the Elders of Zion, took what was originally a divine revelation and distorted it, in an egotistical/self-interested/satanic manner, in the transmission. God's correction of the Torah/OT, and His admonishment to the Jewish elites who distorted it, is the Qur'an.

**Why does Alexis gratuitously attack the Prophet of Islam? His implicit argument seems to be: "Your dim view of the Old Testament offends me, so now I am going to offend you! Nyah-nyah!" Which, of course, is not an argument.

---

From Laurent Guyénot's From Yahweh to Zion, Chapter Two (reproduced with permission of the publisher)

Jealousy and Narcissistic Hubris

“Yahweh’s name is the Jealous One” (Exodus 34:14). The Torah emphasizes jealousy as his main personality trait, calling him “the Jealous One” repeatedly (Exodus 20:5, Deuteronomy 4:24, 5:9, and 6:15). What Yahweh demands from his people above anything else, is the exclusivity of worship. But that is not all: he also demands that all his neighbors’s shrines be utterly destroyed: “tear down their altars, smash their standing-stones, cut down their sacred poles and burn their idols” (Deuteronomy 7:5). Thus spoke Yahweh, otherwise known as El Shaddai, “the destroyer god” (Exodus 6:3).

After the destruction of the Northern kingdom of Israel by Assyria, Yahwist priests and prophets who had sought refuge in Jerusalem held the Israelites responsible for their country’s defeat: they “provoked Yahweh’s anger” by “sacrificing on all the high places like the nations which Yahweh had expelled for them,” and by “serving idols” (2Kings 17:11-12).Israel’s divine election had now passed to the smaller kingdom of Judah, whose survival now depends on respecting the exclusivity of Yahweh’s cult and of Jerusalem’s Temple, and on destroying any trace of rival cults and holy places.

The second Book of Kings judges David’s heirs on the unique criterion of obedience to that precept...

...To understand how this biblical monotheism came about, it is necessary to know that in the oldest strata of the Bible, Yahweh is a national, ethnic god, not the supreme God of the Universe. The Israelites revered Yahweh as the Assyrians worshiped their god Ashur and credited him with their military victories: “For all peoples go forward, each in the name of its god (elohim), while we go forward in the name of Yahweh our God for ever and ever” (Micah 4:5). “I am the god of your ancestors, the god of Abraham, the god of Isaac and the god of Jacob,” Yahweh says to Moses (Exodus 3:6). Then Yahweh mandates Moses to say to his people: “Yahweh, the god of your ancestors, has appeared to me,” and to urge them to talk to Pharaoh in the name of “Yahweh, the god of the Hebrews” (3:16-18)....

...Yahweh’s superiority over other gods presupposes the existence of these other gods. One story in particular deserves to be mentioned here: After the Philistines had captured the ark of the defeated Israelites, they “put it in the temple of Dagon, setting it down beside Dagon” (1Samuel 5:2). The next day, they found the broken statue of Dagon. Yahweh then afflicted the inhabitants of two Philistine cities, Ashdod and Gat, with a proliferation of rats and an epidemic of tumors...

...It was only during the Babylonian exile that Yahweh, deprived of the temple where he had previously sat between two cherubim, began to claim to have created the universe himself. After banning all trade with other gods and declaring Yahweh more powerful than they, the Yahwist priests and prophets would claim that these other gods simply did not exist. And if Yahweh was the only real god, then he must have been the creator and master of the universe. The exterminating fury of the deicide god thus reached its logical conclusion...

...Rather than reaching philosophically the notion of the unity of all gods under a universal Godhead, the Yahwists pursued the outright negation of other gods and the extermination of their priests. In this process, theology and anthropology are inseparable: it is insofar as the national god of the Jews managed to establish himself as the “one God” of humanity that the Jewish people would be able to style themselves as the “chosen people.”

It is the chronic jealousy of Yahweh, not just his misogyny, on which the xenophobia of biblical Israel is founded. We have seen that the ancient peoples always ensured that their gods were compatible or in good terms, making cultural and economic relations possible.

The authors of Deuteronomy were aware of the widespread idea that national gods were all under the authority of the Supreme Creator. But they altered it in typical fashion: “When the Most High (Elyown) gave the nations each their heritage, when he partitioned out the human race, he assigned the boundaries of nations according to the number of the children of God, but Yahweh's portion was his people, Jacob was to be the measure of his inheritance” (32:8-9). In other words, among all nations, the very Father of humankind has picked one for himself, leaving the others under the care of lesser gods (angelic powers, for such is here the accepted meaning of “children of God”). That is the ultimate source of Jewish pride: “Of all the peoples on earth, you have been chosen by Yahweh your God to be his own people” (7:6). And this people of his, Yahweh naturally wants to “raise higher than every other nation in the world” (28:1). Although he implicitly admits being the Father of all other national gods, he feels for them only a murderous hatred.

The essence of monotheistic Yahwism, which is a secondary development of tribalist Yahwism, is the exclusive alliance between the universal Creator and a peculiar people... Its specificity is less in the affirmation of a unique God as in the affirmation of a unique people. The one God is the side of the coin shown to the Goy to remind him his debt to the “inventors of monotheism”; but the other side, the concept of chosen people, is what binds the Jewish community together, so that one can give up God without abandoning the exceptionality of the Jewish people.

And so, even while claiming to be the Creator of the universe and humanity, Yahweh remains a national, chauvinist god; that is the basis for the dissonance between tribalism and universalism which has brought up the “Jewish question” throughout the ages. In fact, the Jewish conception of Yahweh parallels the historical process, for in the development of Yahwism, it is not the Creator of the Universe who became the god of Israel, but rather the god of Israel who became the Creator of the Universe. And so for the Jews, Yahweh is primarily the god of Jews, and secondarily the Creator of the Universe; whereas Christians, deceived by the biblical narrative, see things the other way round.

Having chosen for himself a single tribe among all the peoples, using unknown criteria, Yahweh plans on making of them not a guide, but a bane for the rest of humanity: “Today and henceforth, I shall fill the peoples under all heavens with fear and terror of you; whoever hears word of your approach will tremble and writhe in anguish because of you”(Deuteronomy 2:25). The biblical stories are there to dramatize the message. Let us mention a few, taken from the cycles of Jacob, Moses, and David, all carrying the same trademark.

Sheshem, the son of Hamor, king of the Canaanite town of Sheshem, “fell in love with [Jacob’s daughter Dinah] and tried to win her heart,” then “seized her and forced her to sleep with him.” Jacob’s sons “were outraged and infuriated that Shechem had insulted Israel by sleeping with Jacob’s daughter—a thing totally unacceptable. Hamor reasoned with them as follows, ‘My son Shechem’s heart is set on your daughter. Please allow her to marry him. Intermarry with us; give us your daughters and take our daughters for yourselves. We can live together, and the country will be open to you, for you to live in, and move about in, and acquire holdings.’ Then Shechem addressed the girl’s father and brothers, ‘Grant me this favour, and I will give you whatever you ask. Demand as high a bride-price from me as you please, and I will pay as much as you ask. Only let me marry the girl.’” Jacob’s sons then “gave Shechem and his father Hamor a crafty answer,” demanding that “you become like us by circumcising all your males. Then we will give you our daughters, taking yours for ourselves; and we will stay with you to make one nation.” Hamor, trusting the good intentions of Jacob’s tribe, convinced all his male subjects to be circumcised. “Now on the third day, when the men were still in pain, Jacob’s two sons Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, each took his sword and advanced unopposed against the town and slaughtered all the males. They killed Hamor and his son Shechem with the sword, removed Dinah from Shechem’s house and came away. When Jacob’s other sons came on the slain, they pillaged the town in reprisal for the dishonouring of their sister. They seized their flocks, cattle, donkeys, everything else in the town and in the countryside, and all their possessions. They took all their children and wives captive and looted everything to be found in the houses” (Genesis 34:1-29).

Second example: In Moses’ time, when the kings of Heshbon and Bashan wanted to prevent the Hebrews from entering their territory, the Hebrews “captured all his towns and laid all these towns under the curse of destruction: men, women and children, we left no survivors except the livestock which we took as our booty, and the spoils of the captured towns” (Deuteronomy 2:34-35).

It is nothing compared to what King David did to the people of Rabba, after having sacked their town and “carried off great quantities of booty”: “And he brought forth the people that were therein, and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brickkiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon. And David and all the people returned unto Jerusalem” (2Samuel 12:31). The episode is repeated in 1Chronicles 20:3: "And he brought forth the people that were therein, and cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes. Even so dealt David with all the cities of the children of Ammon.” I have quoted here from the King James Revised Version. Significantly, this episode has been fraudulently retranslated after 1946. We now read in the Revised Standard Version: “And he brought forth the people who were in it, and set them to labor with saws and iron picks and iron axes, and made them toil at the brickkilns.” And in the Catholic New Jerusalem Bible: “And he expelled its inhabitants, setting them to work with saws, iron picks and iron axes, employing them at brickmaking.” This new rendering makes the story politically correct, but highly improbable, since iron tools were never needed to make bricks—certainly not axes, picks and saws—but made deadly weapons that no victor in his right mind would distribute to the men he has just vanquished.

The war code established by Yahweh makes a distinction between the cities outside and those within the territory given to his people: in the first, “you will put the whole male population to the sword. But the women, children, livestock and whatever the town contains by way of spoil, you may take for yourselves as booty. You will feed on the spoils of the enemies whom Yahweh your God has handed over to you.” In the nearby towns, on the other hand, “you must not spare the life of any living thing,” men and women, young and old, children and babies, and even livestock, “so that they may not teach you to do all the detestable things which they do to honour their gods” (Deuteronomy 20:13-18). So, in Jericho, “They enforced the curse of destruction on everyone in the city: men and women, young and old, including the oxen, the sheep and the donkeys, slaughtering them all” (Joshua 6:21).

The city of Ai met the same fate: its inhabitants were all slaughtered, twelve thousand of them, “until not one was left alive and none to flee. […] When Israel had finished killing all the inhabitants of Ai in the open ground, and in the desert where they had pursued them, and when every single one had fallen to the sword, all Israel returned to Ai and slaughtered its remaining population” (8:22-25). Women were not spared, and “For booty, Israel took only the cattle and the spoils of this town” (8:27). In the whole land, Joshua “left not one survivor and put every living thing under the curse of destruction, as Yahweh, god of Israel, had commanded” (10:40).

Same program for the nomadic tribe of the Amalekites, the first enemy the Hebrews faced during the Exodus from Egypt and Canaan. In a cynically paradoxical formulation, Yahweh asked Moses: “Write this down in a book to commemorate it, and repeat it over to Joshua, for I shall blot out all memory of Amalek under heaven” (Exodus 17:14). The idea is repeated in Deuteronomy 25:19: “When Yahweh your God has granted you peace from all the enemies surrounding you, in the country given you by Yahweh your God to own as your heritage, you must blot out the memory of Amalek under heaven. Do not forget.” The mission fell to Saul in 1Samuel 15: “I intend to punish what Amalek did to Israel—laying a trap for him on the way as he was coming up from Egypt. Now, go and crush Amalek; put him under the curse of destruction with all that he possesses. Do not spare him, but kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” Thus spoke Yahweh Sabaot, the divinely spiteful, by way of the prophet Samuel. Since Saul spared King Agag “with the best of the sheep and cattle, the fatlings and lambs,” Yahweh repudiates him: “I regret having made Saul king, since he has broken his allegiance to me and not carried out my orders.” Yahweh withdrew Saul’s kingship and Samuel “butchered” Agag (“hewed Agag in pieces,” in the Revised Standared Version, faithfully translating the Hebrew verb shsf). Despite this theoretically perfect biblical genocide, the Jews never ceased to identify their enemies with Amalekites. Flavius Josephus, writing for the Romans, recognizes them in the Arabs of Idumea. Later, Amalek came to be associated, like his grandfather Esau, with Rome and therefore, from the fourth century onwards, with Christianity. The “bad guy” of the Book of Esther, Haman, is referred to repeatedly as an Agagite, that is, a descendant of the Amalekite king Agag. That is why the hanging of Haman and his ten sons and the massacre of 75,000 Persians are often conflated in Jewish tradition with the extermination of the Amalekites and brutal execution of their king. The Torah reading on the morning of Purim is taken from the account of the battle against the Amalekites, which ends by the conclusion that “Yahweh will be at war with Amalek generation after generation” (Exodus 17:16)[1].

When the people, under Moses’s guidance, settled temporarily in the country of Moab (or Midian) in Transjordania, some married Moabite (Midianite) women, who “invited them to the sacrifices of their gods” (Numbers 25:2). Such abomination required “the vengeance of Yahweh on Midian.” And so, instructed by Yahweh as always, Moses formed an army and ordered them to “put every [Midianite] male to death.” However, the soldiers were guilty of taking “the Midianite women and their little ones captive,” instead of slaughtering them. Moses “was enraged with the officers of the army” and rebuked them: “Why have you spared the life of all the women? They were the very ones who […] caused the Israelites to be unfaithful to Yahweh. […] So kill all the male children and kill all the women who have ever slept with a man; but spare the lives of the young girls who have never slept with a man, and keep them for yourselves.” At the end of the day, “The spoils, the remainder of the booty captured by the soldiers, came to six hundred and seventy-five thousand sheep and goats, seventy-two thousand head of cattle, sixty-one thousand donkeys, and in persons, women who had never slept with a man, thirty-two thousand in all,” not to mention “gold, silver, bronze, iron, tin and lead” (Numbers 31:3-31).

And we would be in error if we believed that the message of the prophets, most of whom were priests, softens the violence of the historical books: “For this is the Day of Lord Yahweh Sabaoth, a day of vengeance when he takes revenge on his foes: the sword will devour until gorged, until drunk with their blood,” forsees Jeremiah as reprisals against Babylon. For Yahweh promises through him “an end of all the nations where I have driven you,” which includes Egypt (Jeremiah 46:10-28). “Yahweh’s sword is gorged with blood, it is greasy with fat,” says Isaiah, on the occasion of “a great slaughter in the land of Edom” (Isaiah 34:6). Zechariah prophecies that Yahweh will fight “all the nations” allied against Israel. In a single day, the whole earth will become a desert, with the exception of Jerusalem, which will “stand high in her place.” Zechariah seems to have envisioned what God could do with nuclear weapons: “And this is the plague with which Yahweh will strike all the nations who have fought against Jerusalem; their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet; their eyes will rot in their sockets; their tongues will rot in their mouths.” It is only after the carnage that the world will finally find peace, providing they worship Yahweh; then “the wealth of all the surrounding nations will be heaped together: gold, silver, clothing, in vast quantity. […] After this, all the survivors of all the nations which have attacked Jerusalem will come up year after year to worship the King, Yahweh Sabaoth, and to keep the feast of Shelters. Should one of the races of the world fail to come up to Jerusalem to worship the King, Yahweh Sabaoth, there will be no rain for that one” (Zechariah 14). The prophetic dream of Israel—nightmare of the nations—is very clearly a supremacist and imperial project. There is indeed, in Isaiah, the hope of world peace, when the peoples of the earth “will hammer their swords into ploughshares and their spears into sickles. Nation will not lift sword against nation, no longer will they learn how to make war” (Isaiah 2:4). But that day will only come when all nations pay homage to Zion. In those glorious days, says Yahweh to his people in the Second Isaiah, kings “will fall prostrate before you, faces to the ground, and lick the dust at your feet,” whereas Israel’s oppressors will “eat their own flesh [and] will be as drunk on their own blood” (49:23-26); “For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish, and the nations will be utterly destroyed” (60:12); “Strangers will come forward to feed your flocks, foreigners be your ploughmen and vinedressers; but you will be called ‘priests of Yahweh’ and be addressed as ‘ministers of our God.’ You will feed on the wealth of nations, you will supplant them in their glory” (61:5-6); “You will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the wealth of kings” (60:16).

Certainly all these past and future genocides perpetrated in the name of Yahweh are imaginary, but the psychological effect produced by their accumulation ad nauseum on the chosen people is not, especially since some are commemorated ritually. It is to celebrate the massacre of seventy-five thousand Persians slaughtered by the Jews in one day that Mordecai, the secondary hero of the Book of Esther, “a man held in respect among the Jews, esteemed by thousands of his brothers, a man who sought the good of his people and cared for the welfare of his entire race” (10:3), establishes Purim, a month before Easter. Emmanuel Levinas would have us believe that “Jewish consciousness, formed precisely through contact with this moral hardness, has learned the absolute horror of blood.”[2] It’s a bit like claiming that the virtual violence of video games will eventually make our children less violent. Was it not on the day of Purim, February 25^th, 1994, that Baruch Goldstein massacred with a submachine gun twenty-nine pious Muslims at the tomb of Abraham? Has his grave not become a place of pilgrimage for Orthodox Jews?[3]

The Plunder of the Nations

“Feeding on the wealth of the nations” is the destiny of the Jewish nation, says the prophet (Isaiah 61:6). It is also the way it was first created, for plundering is the essence of the Conquest of Canaan, according to Deuteronomy 6:10-12: “When Yahweh has brought you into the country which he swore to your ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that he would give you, with great and prosperous cities you have not built, with houses full of good things you have not provided, with wells you have not dug, with vineyards and olive trees you have not planted, and then, when you have eaten as much as you want, be careful you do not forget Yahweh who has brought you out of Egypt, out of the place of slave-labour.”

Gentiles, Canaanites or other, are no different from their belongings in Yahweh’s eyes, and can therefore become the property of Hebrews. “The male and female slaves you have will come from the nations around you; from these you may purchase male and female slaves. As slaves, you may also purchase the children of aliens resident among you, and also members of their families living with you who have been born on your soil; and they will become your property, and you may leave them as a legacy to your sons after you as their perpetual possession. These you may have for slaves; but you will not oppress your brother-Israelites” (Leviticus 25:44-46). Note that, from the historian’s point of view, the prohibition proves the practice (there is no need to legislate on something that doesn’t exist), and the story of Joseph is here to illustrate that a Jew sold as slave by other Jews was not inconceivable.

While waiting for the fulfilment of their imperial destiny, the chosen people can, even more effectively, exercise their incomparable mastery of monetary mechanisms. One of the revolutionary contributions of biblical religion in the world is the transformation of money from a means of exchange to a means of power and even war. In every civilization that has reached the stage of monetary trade, lending at interest, which makes money a commodity in itself, was seen as a moral perversion and a social danger. Aristotle condemns usury in his Politics as the “most unnatural” activity because it gives money the ability to produce itself out of nothing, and thereby take on a quasi-spiritual, supernatural character. Around the same time, Deuteronomy prohibited the practice, but only between Jews: “You may demand interest on a loan to a foreigner, but you must not demand interest from your brother” (23:21).[4] During the Jubilee, every seven years, any creditor must remit his Jewish neighbor’s debt. But not the stranger’s: “A foreigner you may exploit, but you must remit whatever claim you have on your brother” (15:3). As far as we know, the Yahwist priests were the first to conceive of enslaving entire nations through debt: “If Yahweh your God blesses you as he has promised, you will be creditors to many nations but debtors to none; you will rule over many nations, and be ruled by none” (15:6).

[1] Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence, Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 122-125, 4.

[2] Emmanuel Levinas, Difficile Liberté, quoted in Hervé Ryssen, Les Espérances planétariennes, Éditions Baskerville, 2005, p. 308.

[3] Hervé Ryssen, Les Espérances planétariennes, op. cit., p. 301.

[4] Also Exodus 22:24 and Leviticus 25:35-37.