What kind of god indeed?

Over at Slate, David Plotz is Blogging the Bible. He's a believing Jew, reading the Bible for the first time. He's not always happy with what he reads, either. Try this:

Jephthah is heroic for honoring his commitment to God. He's practically the only man in Judges who does what he promises to do, who doesn't complain or doubt. His holy rigidity is glorious.

But this leaves us with a dreadful question: What kind of God is so inflexible that he demands child sacrifice rather than cancel a foolish oath? When Abraham brought Isaac to the mountain, God sent the ram and stopped the murder. This time, He sends no ram. He condemns the child to the pyre instead. God tested Abraham's fidelity, and then spared the innocent boy. In Judges, God tests Jephthah's fidelity, but lets the innocent girl die. Why? What's changed, my Lord? Remember, in Deuteronomy and Numbers, the greatest crime of the Israelites' enemies—and the key reason they must be driven from the Promised Land—is that they sacrifice their own children to their gods. Yet here God's greatest warrior does the same, and the Lord seems pleased.

That's a very good question, isn't it?

I guess it comes down to what pleases God at the moment. Situational ethics and all that...

Now, I know some Christians (like JP Holding over at Tekton Apologetics) claim that Jephthah didn't kill his daughter - he just sent her to the Temple for life - they've got convoluted reasoning to show that "burnt offering" doesn't mean, you know, burnt offering, and that "lament" means "rejoice", and so on. But Dr William Hendricks, Director of the Baptist Studies Program and Lecturer in Theology at the Brite Divinity School of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, quite bluntly admits that Jephthah killed his daughter, though he says she is "a type of Christ" and to be emulated, and that Jephthah was the product of a horrible upbringing, and anyway it wasn't God's idea...

So - the arguments in favor of Jephthah's burning his daughter seem to fall, broadly, into three types. I haven't actually found anyone who says that 'Jephthah should have burnt up his daughter because he promised to'. But we get these:

(a) he didn't
(b) he did, but it wasn't God's fault, God never asked for it
(c) okay, he did and God was pleased, but God didn't want him to

(a) is, frankly, just silly. It depends on pretending that "make his daughter into a burnt offering" means "send her to serve at the Temple" (or whatever they decide happened). With that argument, you can excuse any damned thing you want - oh, no: Herod didn't kill the babies, he sent them off for adoption; oh, it wasn't forty years, just a longish time; it wasn't six days, it was six thousand years - or six billion. Honestly, this explanation is worthless because you can explain anything at all as anything at all. And it's also a bit unworthy of the omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent Ruler of the Universe, isn't it? It's like that bit in "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" where they make anagrams out of names by changing some of the letters into other ones... It's a cheat.

(b) and (c) are essentially the same argument: God didn't ask Jephthah to do it, so you can't blame him when Jephthah did. But Plotz's point about the ram in the thicket holds - God's idea or not, he could have stopped Jephthah once it was clear that the man needed stopping - once it was clear that Jephthah intended to honor his vow. And God didn't. In fact, he was pleased.

This is fairly typical of God - the most horrible things (slaughtering everyone and everything in a city; driving a nail through your sleeping guest's head; handing four hundred women over to a bunch of murderers to be their wives) delight him; doing horrible things (drowning every living thing on Earth; deliberately "hardening pharoah's heart" so as to have the excuse to kill innocent Egyptian children to make foreigners afraid of him) is his m.o.

Yes, I know about the "we can't judge God, his ways are not as our ways" argument. But I don't buy it. Good is good - and God doesn't do good. Think about it: has there ever been a book or story or film where the guy who says "Do what I say or I'll kill your children" has been the good guy? Or "Love me or I'll kill you"?

David Plotz asks, "What kind of God is so inflexible that he demands child sacrifice rather than cancel a foolish oath?"

Your God, David. Your god.