The Story of the Torah: First volume of ‘Is the Bible a Dangerous Book?’

By Beryl Lavender

Who authored the most ancient segments of the Bible? What is their age, and how have they endured through the ages? This book delves into the reasons why dictators, tyrants, and powerful factions have harboured such fear and loathing towards these texts, leading to relentless suppression and censorship. Even now, possession of these writings can result in dire consequences. These pivotal questions are explored in The Story of the Torah, the inaugural volume of the ‘Is the Bible a Dangerous Book?’ series of commentaries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9781035835669

Beryl Lavender

Beryl Lavender was born and educated in South Africa, at Rocklands Girls’ High School and the University of Natal, where she read English and History. She worked as a journalist (full-time reporter on The Eastern Province Herald) and later as a teacher of English and Divinity at Michaelhouse, a top South African public school. Beryl married Paul Lavender, South African artist and head of the art department at Michaelhouse, and they have three children and four grandchildren. Widowed, she currently lives in Buckinghamshire, UK. She has been a member of the Church of England all her life and has been studying the Bible since childhood. When she discovered that she was contributing to Bible study groups more than she was receiving from them, she decided the time had come to record all her knowledge, hence these Biblical commentaries: Already completed are The Story of the Torah, The Broken Contract, Problems, Praises and Proverbs and A Warning for Our Times—so the whole of the Old Testament. She selfpublished the first three with Xulon Press, USA. All are in everyday English and are designed for non-academics who wish to understand the Bible.

Book preview

About the Author

Beryl Lavender was born and educated in South Africa, at Rocklands Girls’ High School and the University of Natal, where she read English and History. She worked as a journalist (full-time reporter on The Eastern Province Herald) and later as a teacher of English and Divinity at Michaelhouse, a top South African public school.

Beryl married Paul Lavender, South African artist and head of the art department at Michaelhouse, and they have three children and four grandchildren. Widowed, she currently lives in Buckinghamshire, UK. She has been a member of the Church of England all her life and has been studying the Bible since childhood.

When she discovered that she was contributing to Bible study groups more than she was receiving from them, she decided the time had come to record all her knowledge, hence these Biblical commentaries: Already completed are The Story of the Torah, The Broken Contract, Problems, Praises and Proverbs and A Warning for Our Times—so the whole of the Old Testament. She self-published the first three with Xulon Press, USA. All are in everyday English and are designed for non-academics who wish to understand the Bible.

Dedication

For God, whose help I sought, and for Cathy and Vaughan, Guy and Karen, Penny and Craig, and Michael, Matthew, Amy and James.

Copyright Information ©

Beryl Lavender 2024

The right of Beryl Lavender to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The story, experiences, and words are the author’s alone.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781035835652 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781035835669 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2024

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Preface

In November 2013, security police in North Korea publicly executed eighty people, some of them merely for possessing Bibles.¹ In Uzbekistan, owners of religious material including Bibles can be imprisoned ‘for keeping and storing extremist materials.’² In fifty countries, including China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Somalia, one can be arrested for holding or carrying a Bible.³

This is not something new. The first attempts to suppress the Bible are recorded in the Bible itself. Jehoiakim, king of Judah, cut up and burnt a scroll that prophesied dire consequences for disobeying the law.⁴ After a decree by Antiochus Epiphanes, king of the Seleucid Empire, one reads in the Apocrypha that: ‘All scrolls of the law which were found were torn up and burnt.’⁵

The first attack on the Bible in Christian times was by the Roman emperor, Claudius, who a mere twenty years after Christ’s execution in a far-flung corner of his empire, expelled Jews and Christians from Rome and banned their writings ‘because Jews were continually creating disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus’⁶ For the next three hundred years persecutions and book-burnings continued on and off until the infamous persecution under Diocletian who in 303 A.D. ordered that Christians, their churches and their books be burnt.

After a struggle for the Roman throne, Constantine became emperor in 306 and finally stopped the persecutions in 313. The Christian church of Rome thereupon grew into a vast institution dominating Western Europe, and in the way of all institutions, became corrupt. The popes of the late Middle Ages, Innocent III, Leo X, Clement VII and Paul III, ordered that vernacular copies of the Bible be burnt because modern European languages were too ‘vulgar’ for writing about God⁷.

The real reason was that most people could not understand the Latin Bible, and the Roman Church was determined to keep things that way. Translations and translators were burnt, among them some of Britain’s finest thinkers who had defiantly produced English Bibles.

The question is, why? Why do tyrants, despots and corrupt institutions hate the Bible? Part of the answer lies in something the Uzbekistan authorities realised. The Bible is ‘extremist material.’ It inaugurated and insists on the Rule of Law, a concept that makes its first-ever appearance on earth in the Bronze Age section of the Bible.

Stephen Langton, 13th Century Archbishop of Canterbury and one of the compilers of Magna Carta read in the Biblical book of Deuteronomy that nobody was above the law and that even kings (which today would mean any rulers or governments) had to study and obey it.⁸ We know that Langton was familiar with Deuteronomy and was determined to include its ideas in Magna Carta because before he became Archbishop of Canterbury, he preached a series of sermons in Paris showing how Christian European monarchs were falling far short of how Deuteronomy decreed they should govern. Langton made sure that the Deuteronomic stipulations were included in Magna Carta.

It is one of the reasons the charter is so revered by those who fight for human rights. King John, understandably, tore up the first draft claiming he had signed it under duress, but Langton bided his time and in the end persuaded John’s successor, Henry III, to sign a final version, ensuring that the Rule of Law would underpin the British and subsequently the American and Commonwealth, political, judicial and legal systems forever. And it was not any old law either. It is a manifestation of the Moral Law.

It demands social justice for widows, orphans, servants, the poor, the weak, foreigners, the land and animals. One does not pretend that Christian monarchs and governments have always upheld the laws of Deuteronomy or the relevant chapters of Magna Carta, but the basic principles in both these documents have ceaselessly been the means by which citizens have pulled their leaders back to what is just and right.

In the later books of the Bible Christ insisted that his followers care for the entire world and especially for children, the poor, the disabled and those whom they regarded as their enemies. So it’s easy to see why dictators, one-party states and those who thrive on hate regard the Bible as extremist material.

However, it does not explain why there is currently so much opposition to the Bible in the west where governments practise a reasonably high degree of justice and socialism and mostly adhere to the concept that everybody is equal in the eyes of the law.

What anti-Bible campaigners in the west abhor is, I think, that the Bible is a book about God, and attributes the moral law and the need to practise social justice to God. Secularists, materialists, naturalists, humanists and atheists do not accept that God exists and they denigrate the Bible, especially its Bronze Age Torah section, as a hotchpotch of myths and fables, many of which they claim were plagiarised from earlier faiths.

Mostly based on out-of-context reading, they claim that the Torah promotes misogyny, racism, homophobia and genocide, and they find it incomprehensible that millions of people, worldwide, still believe in God and that thousands are being persecuted, tortured and killed rather than reject either God or the Bible.

So the last question is why the Bible continues to have a hold on public consciousness and why after decades of decline of faith in the west, people are once more wending their way back to churches and opening their Bibles. Partly it is because there is a growing uneasiness about the religion-free society in which everybody was supposed to love everybody else and do their own thing provided it did not impinge on the rights of others.

Instead of this achieving the longed for Utopia, it has somehow contributed to secular Britain’s turning into a nightmare. Communities are disintegrating; families are breaking up; neighbourhoods are unsafe; violence is increasing; children are rudderless and confused; the elderly are neglected and disparaged; depression and mental illness are on the rise; hospitals and prisons are overflowing; rudeness, unkindness, addictions and suicides are increasing; globalisation and robotics have made the rich mega-wealthy, exhausted and impoverished the middle classes and made the poor destitute; non-Biblical religions that proselytise with violence and do not accept the right of other religions to exist have increasingly filled the vacuum left by receding Judaism and Christianity. The future that was supposed to be so bright when the west got rid of Judaeo-Christianity now appears bleak and fearful.

Applied science which many believed would solve all problems, now seems to be adding to them. Artificial intelligence, clones and drones are raising fearful spectres. Unbridled scientific applications and products are contributing to pollution, global warming, droughts, destructive storms, floods, melting polar caps and contaminated and rising oceans. Nuclear weapons hang like a sword of Damocles over the entire world. The miracle antibiotics of the second half of the twentieth century are proving true to their name and spawning drug-resistant microbes that threaten all multi-cellular life.

In spite of all the above, and of being attacked by new diseases, infestations, famine and disaster, humanity is growing too fast in Africa and Asia for the planet to sustain either it or any other form of life. In Europe, population numbers are declining but immigration from overpopulated countries is creating tensions, and the gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening. Millions are feeling betrayed, ignored and abused and are rejecting politically correct media and establishment-politicians in favour of social media, mavericks and alternative solutions.

There’s more than a murmur of civic unrest and rebellion in the air. At this dangerous moment, some, particularly among the young, have stopped and thought and wondered. Could answers be found in that much-maligned book that tyrants, dictators, the rich and the powerful don’t want us to read? Should one reach for a dust-covered Bible?

The trouble is that as soon as one takes one from the shelf, blows off the dust and opens the cover, one discovers that it is a very difficult collection of writings. With endless lists of begats, battles, repetitions, contradictions, myths, fables, prophecies, poetry and parables, parts of the Bible are boring and parts of it incomprehensible. How does one get to grips with its sixty-six books, some of them three thousand five hundred years old and how does one discover whether they contain anything relevant for the twenty-first century?

Is the Bible a Dangerous Book is a series of commentaries that I’m writing in everyday English in an attempt to answer some of these questions and to try to make more accessible this extraordinary, life-changing book. The first in the series, The Story of the Torah, begins with a history of the Bible showing how it began, how it survived, how it was translated and how archaeology has either supported or challenged it.

It goes on to identify problems in and to give explanations where possible of the first five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, collectively called the Torah by the Jews, who wrote them. Finally, it draws attention to those verses that show that life is a quest on which anyone can embark with confidence and hope.

Revised

This is a revised edition of The Story of the Torah, which I originally published in 2017.

Beryl Lavender NIV Study Bible and the King James Bible

All Biblical quotations in these commentaries are from the NIV Study Bible,10th Anniversary Edition, Zondervan Publishing House, 1995, and the King James Bible. Where alternative versions are cited, I identify them and explain why I am using them.

---

¹JoongAng Ilbo (The Central Times) Seoul 3 November 2013.↩︎

²www.state.gov/documents/organization/256535 2016.↩︎

³The 2017 World Watch List by Open Doors U S A; it lists 50 countries in which Christians are being persecuted and where those found in possession of a Bible are punished.↩︎

⁴Jeremiah 36:23 NIV.↩︎

⁵The Apocrypha, 1 Maccabees 1: 56-57 The New English Bible, Oxford and Cambridge University Press, 1970.↩︎

⁶Suetonius (2007) The Twelve Caesars, Translated by Graves R, Revised Edition, London: Penguin Books.↩︎

⁷Schaff P (1960) History of the Christian Church 3rd Edition, Vol VI, Hendrickson, Massachusetts.↩︎

⁸Griffith-Jones, R. and Hill, M. (2015) Magna Carta, Religion and the Rule of Law, Cambridge University Press; Introduction: ‘Archbishop Stephen Langton hoped with Magna Carta to realise an Old Testament Covenantal kingship in England’ and ‘how important to Langton were the story and covenant of Deuteronomy.’↩︎

Introduction

No commentary on the Bible can be unbiased. To be human is to have a worldview and a worldview means bias. Although I am a Christian who worships God through the sacraments, liturgy, music and aesthetics of the Church of England, I am aware that, like all Christian churches, the Church of England makes mistakes, sometimes dreadful ones. What I like about the Anglican Church is that it has rightly been called a broad-church. It allows me to be inspired by its High-Church liturgy, aesthetics and incomparable music, much of it derived from the Catholic Church, and yet to be a Protestant evangelical, by which I mean that the core of my faith is my personal relationship with Christ, whom I couldn’t know but for the Bible.

It is the Bible too that shows me that there, ‘Is no new thing under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 1:9). The denial of God in the west today and our putting on the back-burner the discipline of the righteous life, while we prioritise wealth, entitlement and sex, are reaping the same devastating consequences that the Bible shows were experienced by God-deniers who did the same thing in the past.

However, it also shows that God is merciful, loving and forgiving, and that he has a special love for Jews, for people of all faiths and none, for repentant sinners, for outcasts, for the deprived, for the poor, for the homeless, for the disabled and for the marginalised, and that he prefers the questions of an honest atheist, whom he is prepared to go out of his way to encounter, to the pious platitudes of hypocrites.

Above all, even though the Bible is the product of human minds and hands and these sometimes get in the way of its mysterious revelations about God and his love for the world, those revelations come from the pages like a ‘still, small voice,’ the Bible’s own description of the voice of God (1 Kings 19:12)⁹ and it shows that the Holy Spirit opens our ears and enables us to hear that voice.

The purpose of this commentary, as I said in the preface, is to try to make the Bible more accessible and to show that it is possible to read it with an honest and questioning mind and to arrive at its essential truth without having to dump one’s intelligence. I hope that it will help a reader to discover why powerful and unscrupulous governments and tyrants hate the Bible and why those who think they can design a better society than the God-ordained one, dislike it.

I hope too that a reader will discover how much the Bible inspires and enables self-discipline, courage, empathy, patience, commitment, selflessness and generosity. And finally, I hope that a reader will discover why, from the moment Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1453 and produced the first ever mechanically printed book, the Bible, it has remained, in spite of all attempts to suppress it, not only the world’s all-time number-one bestseller but also its most challenging, provocative and dangerous read.

---

⁹King James Version, The Holy Bible, Cambridge University Press, slim, soft-cover, leather-bound edition, no date given, copy bought in UK in October 1949, given to me by my godmother, Gwendolen Milling. All KJV quotations in this commentary are from this copy.↩︎

Part One

A Brief History

Who Wrote It and How It Got to Us

Catastrophic Beginnings

Although there is no consensus about exactly when it was written, most authorities agree that the Torah is the work of a group of Bronze Age migrants called the Hebrews who some 3,500 years ago, plodded along the river valleys and desert wastes of the Middle East. Their endless, weary and fraught migration, which was often dogged by thirst and hunger, came at the beginning of a desperate time in human history, the collapse of the Bronze Age civilisations of the Middle East, humanity’s first urban cultures.

Historians refer to the collapse as the Catastrophe and many of them regard it as worse than the fall of the Roman Empire. Just as modern Europe ultimately rose from the debris of fallen Rome, so did Ancient Greece arise from the ashes of the Bronze Age. Something else survived both disasters, something intangible, mysterious, spiritual and indefinably resilient.

It began its existence in revelations and insights that the leader of the Hebrew migrants claimed had come from God. As they huddled around the campfires in the desert night, they discussed the revelations and wondered about the nature of God. Either the leader himself or literate members of his tribe (the Hebrew migrants came from the country where writing was invented) began to write down the revelations, first on ephemeral tablets of clay and later on transient rolls of papyrus, adjuring their brethren to keep on re-telling and transcribing them, generation by generation. Humble and insignificant, this was the beginning of the Torah, an extraordinary piece of writing, produced by man but claiming to be the Word of God.

Some authorities deny that the Hebrews could write this early in their history and are of the opinion that it is to the oral tradition only that we owe the Torah. However, as these notes will show, the latest archaeological discoveries reveal that the Hebrews could write much earlier in their history than was formerly thought.

The countries through which those ancient migrants travelled and in which they sometimes set up camp or for periods of time erected more substantial dwellings, were Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Israel, countries across which the first ever humans are said to have traipsed when they migrated from their supposed birthplace in Africa to trek across the Middle East to every continent on earth.

It has rightly been called the Middle East, that bit of earth. Middle is the operative word. Those desert wastes, mountains and fertile river valleys link three continents. All the great trade routes of antiquity passed through the Middle East: The Silk Road, The Spice Road and The Incense Road. The inevitable clash of disparate customs, ideas and beliefs is probably why the area was and still is, being brutalised by war, genocide and enforced migrations.

It has given birth to both the worst and best in human thinking and behaviour. Some of the finest Greek thinkers including Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes came from the Mediterranean coast of the Ancient Levant and from its hinterland came some of the greatest heroes of antiquity, Noah, Abraham, Hector, Moses, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, David and Jesus. The Bible, its great literary masterpiece, shows that good and evil are entwined in the make-up of every human psyche and that for any individual, no matter how lost or fallen, there is a way out.

Echoes of many of the Middle Eastern cultures that either disappeared or underwent a destructive change during the Bronze Age Collapse can be detected in the pages of the Torah, proving what the Torah itself claims, that the Ancient Hebrews spent varying amounts of time inter-mixing with and absorbing much from other Bronze Age cultures.

These Hebrews or Ancient Israelites are increasingly being identified with the Habiru or Abiru, one of the tribes of Semitic nomads mentioned in ancient texts as infiltrators of the Bronze Age cultures of the Levant and, in some instances, contributing to their downfall. Among them were the Canaanite Hyksos, who invaded Egypt and ruled it for more than a century.

Parallels with Our Own Time

When one studies this ancient period in human history, one cannot help noticing the extent to which the world of the Torah was beset by conditions similar to those of the twenty-first century. There was war in the Middle East, migration, new diseases and climate change. Of course, there were differences. The people of those days did not possess the advanced scientific applications that both benefit and bedevil today’s world. And over-population was not an issue. But there was much that was similar.

History and archaeology are agreed that it was a change in climate that if it did not precipitate, then it certainly contributed to the sudden collapse of the Middle Eastern Bronze Age civilisations. At some point in the second millennium B.C., the weather began to change and it had a devastating effect on the Fertile Crescent, that arc of productivity that stretched from the Persian Gulf along the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers through parts of Syria and Turkey and then down to the Mediterranean coast and the Nile Valley.

It is generally agreed that this is where civilisation began, first at the two ends of the crescent, near the river mouths of Egypt and Mesopotamia and then along the entire arc. It is difficult to determine why just as what we call civilisation got really going, the weather suddenly changed and together with some other factors caused those first urban attempts to implode in a chaos of mayhem and disaster.¹⁰ Current thinking is that the climate change was probably caused by at least two mega volcanoes, several high-Richter-scale earthquakes and what is increasingly looking like a comet or asteroid plunging through the atmosphere and bursting immediately above the Dead Sea.

The first and worst of the volcanic eruptions was the one that almost annihilated the Eastern Mediterranean Island of Thera or Santorini and probably gave rise to the Atlantis myth. It caused cataclysmic tsunamis and tephra (volcanic ash) that wreaked havoc in the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean. Carried around the earth by prevailing winds, the tephra caused a global dip in weather with incessant fog, longer, colder winters, heavier frosts, un-melted ice and snow and short ineffective summers.

Current thinking is that Thera ejected four times more matter into the atmosphere than Krakatoa did in 1883. The effect on Thera’s immediate surroundings, which included the lands of the Bible, was catastrophic, tsunamis and floods in the short term and droughts and plagues in the long. Throughout the period the entire area experienced increasing desertification and rivers became polluted and began to dry up, the Nile at the time of the first Biblical writings.

Almost unbelievably, archaeologists working on a dig in Jordan have exposed what they believe are signs that shortly before Thera blew up, a comet or asteroid exploded in the air above the northern section of the Dead Sea causing the apocalyptic destruction of a group of powerful Bronze Age cities on the kikkar (circular plain) of Jordan. They have tentatively identified the largest of the cities destroyed in the blast as Sodom.¹¹ In other areas, cities and towns seem to have been destroyed by earthquakes.

But if nature was partly responsible for the destruction of the first human civilisations, it was ably assisted by humans themselves. There was the systematic deforestation of the great cedar forests cladding Cyprus, Lebanon and the mountainsides of modern-day Turkey. Trees were chopped down with ruthless efficiency for ships, houses, floors, roofs, furniture and, most of all, as fuel for bronze-producing smelters.

As the trees disappeared, leaving unprotected top soils, winter storms caused devastating floods and silted up river mouths. Estuary trading ports like Troy, Priene, Patara and Ephesus found themselves increasingly distanced from the sea, which was their lifeblood. Exposed to new diseases carried by insects, particularly mosquitoes breeding in the newly created swamps, the last inhabitants packed their belongings and fled.

Then too, there was the fact that Semitic tribes were not the only ones making things difficult for Bronze Age civilisations. Far greater damage was caused by the ‘sea people’ (probably from southern Europe and including the Greeks) who invaded the Middle East. It was the Greeks who united to attack and destroy Troy, the Bronze Age city that guarded the Dardanelles and effectively barred others, unless they paid huge taxes, from the coast of the Black Sea (the Euxine) with its rich deposits of tin, one of the metals from which bronze was alloyed. The Greeks who besieged Troy almost certainly wanted the tin more than they wanted Helen, or so our delightful Turkish guide told us when my daughter, Cathy, and I visited the ruins of Troy.

Another cause of the Bronze Age Catastrophe was the technological revolution in which iron began to supplant bronze. Bronze is a better metal but iron was much more freely available and easier to work. It led to bigger armies better armed. The sword made its appearance and armour. Light-weight chariots drawn by a single horse and fitted with iron axles, wheels and scythes increasingly entered the fray. Because the Bronze Age cultures were sophisticated and specialised, supporting too many bureaucrats and aristocrats who lacked initiative, were overly dependent on others and were no longer able to survive on their own, their enemies, often more primitive, all but wiped them out.

Cities were totally destroyed (Knossos, Troy, Miletus, Ebla, Ugarit, Hattusas, Mycenae, Ramesess and Bethel, among others) some never again to be occupied, some to remain uninhabited for a thousand years. Communities were uprooted, enslaved or escaped into exile. Trade routes collapsed. The new skill of writing (as important for the dissemination of knowledge in the late Bronze Age as the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century and the internet in our own time) went into sharp decline.

Among the few Bronze Age revelations, songs and histories that did manage to survive were those that the Hebrew migrants were creating and protecting. These were the sources of the first five books of the Bible, the heritage of a people caught up in the collapse of towns and countries, sometimes as oppressors, mostly as oppressed, always on the margins, a people who found themselves asking the same questions that people ask today: How and why did it all begin? Why do people exist? What is the meaning of it all?

Why the Jews?

One has to wonder why it was the Ancient Israelites rather than any other Bronze Age people who not only asked these questions but also claim to have found answers which they fanatically protected during their