I find contemporary disgust of the Bible stories to be curiously selfish. Let’s begin with the demands and expectations we put on God today.

What do we want from God? We usually want two things: drastic intervention against that which we declare as being evil, and myopic neglect for the areas we decide should be up to us. We rage that God has been negligent in stopping genocide, hunger and abuse, even though these conditions are clearly the result of human agency, yet we would be highly offended if God were to directly intervene on our decisions of how to spend our money, our time, and our leisure indulgences. We expect God to communicate in our language, within our intelligible frame of reference (we often fool ourselves into imagining that we don’t have one of these, only “primitive” peoples did/do) and according to the cultural values we have elevated. In short, we play the flute and are angry when he does not dance.

Now via your imagination slip back to the world two or three thousand years ago. It was a world where slaves were taken for indebtedness or through military raids. Children were sacrificed to avoid crop failure. Genocide against your neighbors was merely a reliable economic stimulus package. Wives and children were economic assets. How would a God communicate in that world?

Zip back to today. When we read anything that doesn’t nicely line up with our selective sensitivities that are embraced by a minority slice of contemporary world population and have existed maybe within a span of 15 or 20 years we bristle. We stand in judgment over a book that has lasted thousands of years and been read intelligibly by hundreds of cultures and subcultures. Given that perspective who really is the self-absorbed, self-important party in this conflict?