offerings to God. Should they go to battle a third time? And the Lord said, Go up; for to morrow I will deliver them into thine hand.
The next day, the children of Israel killed twenty-five thousand men of Benjamin, and their animals, and their women, and set their cities on fire. Six hundred men fled into the wilderness, and they were all that remained of the tribe of Benjamin.
Having prevailed, the Israelites faced a new problem. They could not allow an entire tribe to perish, but there were no women left to repopulate Benjamin: all their women had been killed, and all the men of Israel had sworn an oath to God not to marry their daughters to the sons of Benjamin. Cursed be he that giveth a wife to Benjamin. Instead they found one city in Israel that had sent no men to battle—and thus, had made no oath. Twelve thousand valiant men were dispatched to the city to kill every man, woman, and child, except the young women. They found four hundred young virgins in the city, brought them to the camp, and gave them as wives to the surviving men of Benjamin.
Still, two hundred men remained without wives.
Therefore they commanded the children of Benjamin, saying, Go and lie in wait in the vineyards; And see, and behold, if the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in dances, then come ye out of the vineyards, and catch you every man his wife.
And thus they did.
This story flashed through my mind in a moment, and I thought—like exhaling a breath I’d been holding my whole life—That is bullshit. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe it. It was that every part of the story disgusted me, from God all the way down. I had forever repressed the outrage and disgust I felt at reading it, and though questioning the Bible like this shook me to my core, I also felt a glimmer of relief. Of liberation. I didn’t have to believe that this story was anything but awful—and not just the senseless carnage that left tens of thousands dead. Every woman in this story had been treated unconscionably: Men snatching unsuspecting women to force them into marriage. Other women given as gifts, having just witnessed all of their loved ones slain and their city destroyed. The old man offering his virgin daughter, and the woman sacrificed by her husband to a feral mob, raped to death. The husband then—finding her fallen with her hands on the threshold of the door—responding with “Up, and let us be going.” I’d wanted to punch him or vomit every time I’d read the words. Others might place the blame upon the men in the story, but as a predestinarian, I was most repulsed by the God who had instigated and orchestrated the whole thing.
Disgusting.
What if the God presented in this story—in this Bible—was not the real God?
I sat down on my bed, reeling. How could I suggest this possibility to Grace? If it frightened me so, there was no question it would scare her, too—especially coming from me. She might wonder whether I was being influenced by Satan. It would sound like every argument we’d spent our lives learning to dismiss out of hand. People who discounted the Bible were angry, just trying to evade the truth of the Scriptures because they were convicted by them. Of all the questions and doubts I raised, doubting the Bible itself would surely be the most preposterous to my sister.
GRACE: Eternity scares me.
MEGAN: Me, too, sometimes. I think there must be God because of existence (“science” doesn’t have answers about Creation). Then I think, what if the God of the Bible isn’t the God of creation? We don’t believe that the Koran has the truth about God. Is it just because we were told forever that this is How Things Are?
It’s comforting to think we have all the answers.
Does it really make you happy when you hear about people dying or starving or being maimed? Do you really want to ask God to hurt people?
I ask myself these questions. I think the answer is no.
When I’m not scared of the answer, I know the answer is no.
GRACE: What does that last text mean?
MEGAN: It means: I know that saying that (that it doesn’t make me happy when people die) is against what this church believes. To go against that scares me (sometimes, but not always anymore). But I know it’s the truth to say that it