The Devil's Trick: Unmasking the God of Israel

Source: The Unz Review

LAURENT GUYÉNOT • MAY 17, 2020 • 449 COMMENTS

"The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist," wrote Charles Baudelaire (Paris Spleen). He was wrong: the devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he is God.

Do I believe in the existence of the devil? It depends on the definition. I believe that humans are under the influence of the ideas that they have collectively engendered over the ages, for ideas are spiritual forces. And from that standpoint, I regard Yahweh's impersonation of the Divine Creator as the most devastating deception ever played on the human race, a crime against divinity.

Am I a Gnostic? Not in the strict sense. If we are to believe their detractors, the early Gnostics taught that the God of the Old Testament was the evil demiurge who created the world from which Christ came to free us. I do not take Yahweh that seriously. On the contrary, I lament that he has been taken seriously by billions of people, Jews, Christians and Muslims. Yahweh is a character of fiction, but one that has gained tremendous influence over a huge portion of mankind, either directly or indirectly.

What I wish to demonstrate here is that Yahweh has the character of the devil as most people imagine it. That goes a long way towards explaining the satanic quality of Jewish Power that is becoming more and more apparent every day—a quality that Alain Soral is exposing in his most recent videos (now avalaible with English subtitles on the new ERTV International YouTube channel). If I were a Christian, I would quote John 8:44. But I am not arguing from a Christian viewpoint, for although I accept the principle that the Gospel story was designed as a cure for the Jews' mental enslavement by the Torah, I also consider that, unless it could vomit the Old Testament, Christianity will remain forever infected by the virus it was intended to combat.

The Mosaic covenant as Faustian pact

The core of the Hebrew Bible is the Mosaic covenant. The deal is simple: in exchange for exclusive worship and obedience to his laws stressing strict separateness from other peoples, Yahweh will make the Israelites rule over humankind: "follow his ways, keep his statutes, his commandments, his customs, and listen to his voice," and Yahweh "will raise you higher than every other nation he has made"; "You will make many nations your subjects, yet you will be subject to none" (Deuteronomy 26:17-19 and 28:12).

Christians have never come to the realization that the Mosaic covenant is nothing but a program for world domination by the Jewish nation. That is because it is written right under their nose, in a book whose malice they cannot recognize because they have been told it is the Word of God. It takes a free-thinker like H. G. Wells to see the biblical idea of the Chosen People for what it is: "a conspiracy against the rest of the world." In the books of the Bible, "you have the conspiracy plain and clear, […] an aggressive and vindictive conspiracy. […] It is not tolerance but stupidity to shut our eyes to their quality."[1]

Christians have always failed to see the biblical god’s utter contempt for their own nations, although it is repeated again and again: "All the nations are as nothing before him, for him they count as nothingness and emptiness" (Isaiah 40:17). “Devour all the nations whom Yahweh your god puts at your mercy, show them no pity" (Deuteronomy 7:16). The vulnerability of Christian nations to Israel's collective sociopathy is directly related to the their self-inflicted blindness. For their own misfortune, Christians worship a deity who hates them (as one commenter to an earlier article put it).

Christian exegetes never seem to have noticed either that Yahweh's covenant—domination over the nations in exchange for exclusive worship—is basically identical to the pact that the devil tried to lure Jesus into:

"the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. And he said to him, 'I will give you all these, if you fall at my feet and do me homage.' Then Jesus replied, 'Away with you, Satan!'" (Matthew 4:8-10)

As a matter of fact, Satan is hardly distinguished from Yahweh in the Tanakh. He is called an "angel of Yahweh" in Numbers 22 and 32. In 2Samuel 24, Yahweh incites David to do evil, while the role is given to Satan in the same episode told in 1Chronicles 21, where Yahweh, "the angel of Yahweh", and Satan are used interchangeably. There is also no trace in the Tanakh of a cosmic struggle between Good and Evil, as in Persian monotheism. Happiness and misfortune, peace and war, health and sickness, abundance and famine, fertility and infertility, all have their unique and direct source in the capricious will of Yahweh. In his own words, "I form the light and I create the darkness, I make well-being, and I create disaster, I, Yahweh, do all these things" (Isaiah 45:7).

Christ's teaching to "store up treasures in heaven" (Matthew 6:20) is alien to Yahweh. He is the Greedy One, who wants "the treasures of all the nations” amassed into his Jerusalem residence: "Mine is the silver, mine the gold!" (Haggai 2:8). "The wealth of all the surrounding nations will be heaped together: gold, silver, clothing, in vast quantity" (Zechariah 14:14). Interestingly, according to 1Kings 10:14, the amount of gold hoarded each year into Salomon’s temple was "666 talents of gold"—the “number of the Beast" in Revelation 13:18! Make of it what you want. Or ask Jared Kushner to explain it.

The Mosaic covenant functions like a classic pact with the devil: Israel will get wealth and power in exchange for becoming Yahweh's "personal possession” (Exodus 19:5). The notion of a pact with the devil is especially relevant since Yahweh denies his worshippers an individual immortal soul, which is tantamount to claiming their souls for himself. As Voltaire once noted, Yahweh forbade the Jews to screw their goats (Exodus 22:18), he instructed them on how to defecate in a hole (Deuteronomy 23:14), but he didn't give them “that most useful creed in a future life."[2] That is because the Torah is essentially a tool of mental programming meant to lock the Jews into a watertight collective soul (see my article "Israel as One Man").

Metaphysical materialism is the most fundamental aspect of Biblical anthropology, and, although it has been superficially amended in later Judaic developments, its sap runs very deep in Jewishness. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, the afterlife "is rarely discussed in Jewish life, be it among Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox Jews, […] in marked contrast to the religious traditions of the people among whom the Jews have lived. […] The Torah, the most important Jewish text, has no clear reference to afterlife at all."

The relationship between Yahweh and his people is not moral, but strictly contractual and legalistic. According to Jewish scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz, “The Torah does not recognize moral imperatives stemming from knowledge of natural reality or from awareness of man’s duty to his fellow man. All it recognizes are Mitzvot, divine imperatives."[3] The hundreds of mitzvot (“commandments”) are ends in themselves, not ways to a higher moral consciousness. Such Jewish legalism stifles moral consciousness, as Gilad Atzmon pointed out.

Naturally, there are moral precepts here and there in the Bible. But on the whole, it is a misunderstanding to believe that Yahweh expects from his people a moral superiority. The only criterion for approval by Yahweh is obedience to his arbitrary laws and to his antisocial or genocidal commands. To slaughter treacherously hundreds of prophets of Baal is good, because it is the will of Yahweh (1Kings 18). To show mercy to the king of the Amalekites is bad, because when Yahweh says, "kill everyone," he means "everyone" (1Samuel 15). How can we expect from a people whose mentality has been shaped by these narratives and their layers of Talmudic commentaries, that they share the sense of good and evil that most other peoples regard as inherent to humanity? It is totally consistent for a future Israeli Prime Minister like Yitzhak Shamir (1986-1992) to declare (in 1943):

"Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: 'Ye shall blot them out to the last man.'"[4]

The jealous and murderous god

Yahweh is "the Jealous One" (Exodus 34:14). Although he is supposed to be the father of all national gods (Deuteronomy 32:8-9), he feels for them a murderous hatred, manifested in this command:

"You must completely destroy all the places where the nations you dispossess have served their gods, on high mountains, on hills, under any spreading tree; you must tear down their altars, smash their sacred stones, burn their sacred poles, hack to bits the statues of their gods and obliterate their name from that place." (Deuteronomy 12:2-3)

Yahweh's jealousy reached pathological proportions during his struggle with Assur, the national god of Assyria. In the oldest strata of the book of Isaiah, composed soon after the destruction of Israel by Assyria, Yahweh appears unable to cope with the frustration and humiliation, and consumed with the lust for revenge:

"Yahweh Sabaoth has sworn it, 'Yes, what I have planned will take place, what I have decided will be so: I shall break Assyria [Assur] in my country, I shall trample on him on my mountains. Then his yoke will slip off them, his burden will slip from their shoulders. This is the decision taken in defiance of the whole world; this, the hand outstretched in defiance of all nations. Once Yahweh Sabaoth has decided, who will stop him? Once he stretches out his hand, who can withdraw it?'" (Isaiah 14:24-27)

Listen to Yahweh fuming after his defeat, and you hear a dangerous narcissistic megalomaniac: "By my own self I swear it; what comes from my mouth is saving justice, it is an irrevocable word: All shall bend the knee to me, by me every tongue shall swear." (Isaiah 45:23)

Yahweh's struggle with Baal is even more revealing. In ancient Syria, Baal (a term meaning simply "Lord", as the Hebrew Adonai), also known as Baal Shamem ("the Lord of Heaven"), was understood as the Supreme God, encompassing all the manifestations of the divine.[5] And so it is ironic that Yahweh, a tribal god, should compete with the great Baal for the status of Supreme God. The cult of Baal received royal support in the powerful kingdom of Israel under the Omrid dynasty (9th century BC). We learn in the Cycle of Elijah (from 1Kings 17 to 2Kings 13) that the Yahwist prophet Elijah challenged 450 prophets of Baal to conjure lightning upon a sacrificial bull: "You must call on the name of your god, and I shall call on the name of Yahweh; the god who answers with fire, is God indeed”—an implausible situation since Baal, being the God of an agrarian society, never required holocausts. Elijah wins the contest, and people then fall on their faces and scream "Yahweh is God! Yahweh is God!" Then they seize all the prophets of Baal, and Elijah slaughters them (1Kings 18). Later on, after a coup against the Omrids, the Judean general Jehu summoned all the priests of Baal for "a great sacrifice to Baal," which turned out to be their own slaughter. "Thus Jehu rid Israel of Baal" (2Kings 10:18-28). This is the perfect illustration of how Yahweh became the God instead of Baal: by the physical elimination of the priests of Baal. The process mirrors the way Jehu became king over Israel, by exterminating the family of the legitimate king, as well as "all his leading men, his close friends, his priests; he did not leave a single one alive" (2Kings 10:11).

For the Egyptians, wrote German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, "the gods are social beings, living and acting in 'constellations'."[6] The peaceful cooperation of the gods warrants the harmonious functioning of the universe. That is because the gods form the organic body of the world. Such a conception, which Assmann calls "cosmotheism", fosters a form of inclusive or convergent monotheism: all gods are one, as the cosmos is one. By contrast, the Bible's exclusive monotheism is the expression of Yahweh's narcissistic sociopathy. That is why some Egyptians, according to Plutarch (Isis and Osiris, 31), believed the god of the Jews to be Seth, the donkey-head god of the desert, famine, disorder and war, expelled from the council of the gods for having murdered his elder brother Osiris out of jealousy. Identifying the Jewish god with Seth was their way to account for the aggressive exclusiveness of Jewish religion.

Since the polytheisms of all great civilizations were cosmotheisms, they were translatable into one another. This was of practical importance, because, Assmann writes, "contracts with other states had to be sealed by oath, and the gods to whom this oath was sworn had to be compatible. Tables of divine equivalences were thus drawn up that eventually correlated up to six different pantheons." And so, from the third millennium BC, the translatability of various pantheons was crucial to international diplomacy as well as trade. But Yahweh cannot be matched with any other god; Yahwism "blocked intercultural translatability."[7] And when Yahweh instructed his people, "You will make no pact with them or with their gods" (Exodus 23:32), or "Do not utter the names of their gods, do not swear by them, do not serve them and do not bow down to them" (Joshua 23:7), he was in effect preventing any relationship of trust with the neighboring peoples. The Jews must place their entire trust in Yahweh alone. Dietary laws are meant to prevent any socialization outside the tribe: "I shall set you apart from all these peoples, for you to be mine” (Leviticus 20:26).

What Israelites are asked, in fact, is to reproduce towards other nations Yahweh's murderous sociopathy toward other gods. The war code of Deuteronomy 20 commands to exterminate "any living thing” in the conquered cities of Canaan. In practice, the rule is extended to all people who resist the Israelites in their conquest. It was applied by Moses to the Midianites, save their 32,000 young virgin girls, of whom 32 were burnt as holocausts to Yahweh (Numbers 31). It was applied by Joshua to the Canaanite city of Jericho, where the Israelites "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). In the city of Ai, the 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." Women were not spared. "For booty, Israel took only the cattle and the spoils of this town" (Joshua 8:22-27). Then came the turns of the cities of Makkedah, Libnah, Lachish, Eglon, Hebron, Debir, and Hazor. 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). A more cruel end was reserved by King David for the Ammonites, who were "cut with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes," and "passed through the brick kiln" (2Samuel 12:31 and 1Chronicles 20:3).[8]

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