A Bad Reputation By David Lamb Summary

When you first take hold of the book God Behaving Badly and look at the cover art and the subtitle, you might be scared to read it, as was I. The title written on a sticky note in blood red on the front of the Holy Bible? “Is the God of the Old Testament Angry, Sexist and Racist?” as a subtitle? What more could the author, David Lamb, do to make you not want to read this book? I felt guilty every time I reached to pick this book up when I first started reading it. However, once I started to read it, I began to see the counterarguments the author made towards the points of the Atheist writes mentioned in this book. Lamb titles the first chapter of the book, “A Bad Reputation” because the God of the Old Testament truly does have a bad reputation.

It is very easy to get instantly mad, especially on the road. If someone pulls out in front of you, you quickly become angry and have instant road rage, because wrath comes quickly. We normally get angry quickly and react as soon as possible in a bad way, and then regret it later, wishing we could’ve stayed calm in the beginning. We want a kind of “Eye for an Eye” community because it is so hard for us to not want to retaliate with the same kind of action that was done to us. God calls us to not retaliate, but go the extra mile and pray for them and love them, even when they do us wrong. Just as we get angry quickly, so does Yahweh sometimes. Lamb starts this chapter off with a joke about a pastor and an elder playing golf, and in the end, the pastor gets struck by lightning. “If there is one popular image that instantly flashes to mind on the topic of God and anger it would have to be being struck by lightning for doing something (usually trivial) that makes God mad” (Lamb 26), and in this case, we can refer to the story of Uzzah. Yahweh instantly killed Uzzah by striking him with lightning, because Uzzah reached out for the ark when the oxen stumbled. Now, if you’re reading this story for the first time, you might think that God smited him for no reason since Uzzah was just protecting the ark from falling off the oxen. However, the author states that the correct way to transport the ark was with poles through the sides by priests. God

Lamb states that there are two “stand out” reasons as to why God is deemed racist by many, one of them being, “nineteenth century Christians used Old Testament texts to support slavery based on race” (Lamb 72). If you start reading in Genesis, you learn that everyone is essentially related to each other, so this should undermine racial prejudice because you would be insulting your own extended family. The other reason Lamb states is that the Old Testament God “commanded the Israelites to kill all the Canaanites, which sounds like a divine mandate for genocide” (Lamb 72). God commanded the Israelites to take out the foreigners, the Canaanites. However, Lamb states that when they say that they were wiped out and left none remaining, this could be a hyperbole. In Joshua 13, 15, and 17, as well as Judges 1, we can interpret that it was impossible to wipe out the entity of the Canaanites since there were foreigners involved in their daily rituals and ceremonies. Yahweh commanded his people to be kind to foreigners, Leviticus 19:34, but the people did not always follow his commands. Take the book of Ruth for example, in the beginning, many people despised Ruth because she was a Moabitess, a foreigner to the city. However, Boaz showed her kindness by letting her reap in his fields and ever married her in the end. The God of the Old Testament is not racist because he tells his people to love their neighbors as themselves in Leviticus