What is the evilest thing you have ever seen?
For me, it is the below picture. A mother and child are about to get killed by a Nazi officer.
Here is another famous picture.
Children die in every war, but there is something viscerally terrible about rounding up children and killing them in cold blood. Young children with their still-developing minds are incapable of committing an act that warrants their murder. Imagine a justice system that approved and sanctioned rounding up children by the thousands and murdering them. Our blood would freeze in our veins in fury and anger.
Imagine this legal system claimed that all its commandments originated from a benevolent, all-powerful entity - and their law code is, in fact, the blueprint for all morality. Such a claim inherently mocks the very concept of mortality. Yet in the Bible, we find one of the most disturbing stories ever written:
After leaving Egypt, the Israelites advanced on the land of Cannan, intent on conquering the territory and banishing its inhabitants. The nations living there turned in fear to the sorcerer, billam, who advised them to send their women and seduce the Jewish men. This call was taken up by the Midianites, who hoped to cause the Jewish nation to sin and to turn the divine wrath upon the Jewish people. This strategy would hopefully create chaos amongst the Jews and foil their plans of pillaging the land of Canaan. But the Jews, led by the hero Pinchas, resisted the wily advances of the Midnites, and, under the directive of Moses, attacked the Midnites and slaughtered every male down to the newborn babies They burned all the towns of Midian and killed all their five kings. But the Jewish army spared the woman, children, and cattle - bringing them back to their camp as war booty.
But the story does not end there.
“upon seeing the army return with the Midnite woman, Moses spoke to them wrathfully.
Moses said to them, “You have spared every female!
Yet they are the very ones who, at the bidding of Balaam, induced the Israelites to trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor, so that the LORD’s community was struck by the plague.
Now, therefore, slay every male among the children, and also murder every woman who has known a man carnally;
but spare every young woman who has not had carnal relations with a man.”
The story continues that the Jews rounded up their captives, killed all the male children as well as all the adult women, sparing only the virgin girls. In case you believed that this was a small scale massacre, the Bible puts that notion to rest by stating that the number of virgin girls that survived numbered 32,000.
This story is horrifying on many levels, but the truth is that this insanity is only just beginning. The Talmud is bothered by a number of questions with this story, and using the tools of rabbinical exegesis, states that the massacre was not divided between virgins and non-virgins, but rather between those who were over the age of 3 and those younger than the age of 3. Let us understand the implications of what the rabbis were saying. The Jewish army was commanded to kill all the women and children and only spare the girls under the age of 3. after the slaughter was over, 32,000 little girls under the age of three remained. Remember, assuming an even population split between males and females, this implies that the Jews killed approximately 32,000 male children under the age of three. Ok. Pretty terrifying. But the story is not over.
The Talmud ( https://www.sefaria.org/Yevamot.60b.11?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=bi ) is bothered by a question. How would the Jewish people know which girls were over three years old and deserved to die, and which were under three years old and were allowed to be spared?
The Talmud answers that they were all lined up and passed before the Jewish high priest. Based on how the child reacted when viewing the breastplate of the high priest, it was determined if the child was to be killed or spared.
Let us examine this idea for a moment. For the sake of argument, let us assume that all children under the age of 2 were readily identifiable as being under three years old and were spared. Let us also assume that all the children over four years old were also immediately recognizable as being too old and were immediately executed. This leaves all the children between the ages of 2 and 4 to be passed before the high priest and judged if they should be spared of executed. The Bible tells us that the number of people spared was 32,000. If we divide that into three equal groups, one for those aged, 1, another for those aged 2, and another for those aged 3, this comes out to 10,666 children per age group. Assuming an equal distribution of age, this means that, according to the Talmud, approximately 21,333 children between the ages of 2 and four were lined up and passed before the high priest. Out of these 21,333 children, 10,666 were killed, and 10,666 were spared.
So picture in your head a long path with a line of over 21,000 children. All these children are orphans, having just witnessed their father, mother, brothers, and older sisters butchered in front of their eyes. They are war captives, and their towns and villages are all smoldering ruins. But no mercy is extended to these pitiful orphans. They must stand in their place on the path. At the end of the path stands the high priest with a line of executioners. Each child approaches the high priest, and depending on his verdict, are either led to the executioners, or, if they are lucky, to the Jewish camp to begin their life of captivity.
So how long did this cold and calculating butchery of children go on for? Let us assume that the Jewish people worked around the clock, processing these girls at an astonishing 15 seconds per child. This would allow approximately 5 seconds for the child to walk up to the high priest, 5 seconds for the high priest to make a determination, and 5 seconds for the child to be executed or sent off to her captor. Assuming these numbers and assuming the high priest took no breaks the entire time, it would 88 hours 52 minutes and 53 seconds to process all the children. This means that these children were forced to stand in a line for a minimum of 3 and a half days, waiting to find out if they will be spared or killed like the rest of their family. This means that at one point in history, there were Jewish executioners standing over a pit, killing little girls between the ages of three and four - for three and a half days straight.
Fortunately for me, I do not believe this story ever happened. But for most of my life, I was raised to believe in the inerrant word of the Bible and of the Jewish sages. Ask yourself, can a child ever do something so evil that they deserve to be executed in such a barbaric fashion?
People often attack us OTD people by claiming that without a divine lawgiver, there is no basis for objective morality. My response to this is simple. Any religion which claims that their God commanded them to spend three days chopping off the heads of little girls has forfeited the right to make declarations of moral superiority.
If you were brave, you would confront your texts head-on, acknowledging that whoever wrote those words is the quintessential representation of barbarism and evil in its most potent form - and must be resisted by anyone who wants to live a moral and true life. Instead, all we are offered is mealy-mouthed excuses about potential exaggerations in the biblical text, ironically Naziesque claims about the Jewish need to uproot evil societies who practiced immortality and infanticide (our solution: kill 60,000 children) and idiotic comparisons to endless hordes of female baby Hitlers.