If you take the course offered here at the College in Hebrew Bible, don’t expect to get anything much different from what is taught in most seminaries.  The professor who teaches the class will vouch for that himself.  He did so for my class.

But, given that the College is a public college, not a private religious one, it should offer a course in Hebrew Bible that is significantly different from what is taught in seminary schools, where such classes are designed to bring the evidence of the Bible in line with religious doctrines.  We need classes here where the Bible is treated as historians would treat any other text, using the critical, scientific approach of first examining the evidence, then coming up with a cogent theory to best explain the evidence.

Seminaries weren’t set up to investigate biblical text as an inquiry into any historical truth that might be revealed about their sacred text.  Rather, their faith requires that they go into the study of the Bible already accepting certain truths about it.  And those “truths” are the doctrines of their religion.

Now the problem for such schools is that the Bible is filled with details that fly in the face of their faith.  One example of this is the overwhelming evidence that rather than speaking with one harmonious, unified voice, as their faith maintains, the various writers of the text were often at great odds with one another. For instance, in Deuteronomy 18:10 the practice of child sacrifice is strictly forbidden.  Yet one law given to Moses on Mount Sinai in Exodus is the command that the Israelites offer up their first-born sons as a sacrifice to God.

Yes, there’s actually a Bible verse that commands child sacrifice.  Exodus 22:28 says, “...You shall give me the first-born among your sons.”

The verse that follows confirms that first-born sons were to be treated the same way as livestock.  It says, “You shall do the same with your cattle and flock: seven days it shall remain with its mother; on the eighth day you shall give it to me.”

Any question about what it means to “give” the first-born to God should be answered in Leviticus 22:27, which says, “When an ox or a sheep or a goat is born, it shall stay seven days with its mother, and from the eighth day on it shall be acceptable as an offering by fire to the LORD.”

Noting this law of Moses commanding child sacrifice is critical to understanding large parts of the Hebrew Bible.  One of the best known stories in the Old Testament, that of Moses destroying the tablets and then having to return to Mount Sinai to have God create a new set of tablets, is a veiled accounting for why such a brutal law was on the books, i.e., included in their sacred text.

When Moses returns from Mount Sinai the second time, the laws on one tablet are reiterated in the text.  All those laws are the same as before, except one: the law demanding the sacrifice of the first-born son.  That law has been changed to allow a sheep to be sacrificed in place of the first-born son (see Exodus 34:19-20).

Yet the writer was careful to insinuate that having that brutal law on the books was Moses’ fault, not God’s.  He says, after God had written down His commandments in stone that first time, “Moses then wrote down all the commands of the LORD,” according to Exodus 24:4.  Then, after Moses destroyed the tablet, he had God tell Moses He would “inscribe upon the tablets the words that were on the first tablet, which you shattered,” according to Exodus 34:1.  So, if God wrote on the second set of tablets exactly what He had written on the first set, then clearly Moses had written down one of the commandments wrong.

Later in the Hebrew text Ezekiel attempts to account for why the law of child sacrifice was on the books.  But rather than put the blame on Moses, he has God Himself admit He “gave them [The Israelites] laws that were not good and rules by which they could not live.  When they set aside every first issue of the womb, I defiled them by their very gifts,” according to Ezekiel 20:25-26.

Jeremiah, unwilling to concede God had given the Israelites such a law, had God say, “They have built the shrines... to burn their sons and daughters in fire -- which I never commanded, which never came to My mind,” according to Jeremiah 7:31.  One denial, though, wasn’t enough, so Jeremiah has God repeating this denial several more times in the text.

And that’s just a small sample of the huge role the law of the sacrifice of the first-born son plays in the Old Testament text.  Yet I dare say you’ll never hear any of this mentioned in any Hebrew Bible class here at the College.  Instead you’ll get a lot of generalized history that’s no more than a glossing over of small differences in the text and ignoring altogether the great differences -- those conflicts that reveal the real history embedded in the text.

Yet, given the prominent role the Bible has played in Western culture and history, isn’t it time the College offered its students something in biblical studies substantially different from just the Jewish and Christian apologetics they would get in seminary school?