Exodus 23:32-33

 

In Exodus 23, Yahweh warns his people now entering the Promised Land that he did not want them consorting with pagan and heathen people that were their neighbors or occupiers of the land before the Hebrews took over. Yahweh sought to keep them segregated: my hunch is that Yahweh, a Father Sky monotheistic Deity, required his people to live apart, so that the Hebrews might become the world’s first tribe that lived apart from nature, not immersed in Mother Earth cults, and the segregation was basic to this building a culture foreign to them, but which would, one habituated as their national culture, would make the Chosen if apart from other peoples, and this may be why other peoples have hunted and sought to kill of the Jews for millennia.

 

Here is this quote from The New American Bible: “You shall not make a covenant with them or their gods. They must not abide in your land, lest they make you sin against me by ensaring you into worshiping their gods.”

 

My response: Implicit in this discussion of how Yahweh prohibits the Hebrews from making a covenant with them or their pagan gods, because they were evil and their gods were evil, and such a covenant was tantamount to sinning against Yahweh.

 

To follow this further, it seems likely that the ancient children of light (the Hebrews) made a righteous covenant with God, and, in the process, made a binding covenant with each other to honor the covenant established between their people and God.

 

Conversely, if they sinned and set up a covenant with pagan neighbors (ancient children of darkness), they would set up covenant of darkness with demons or pagan gods, in effect becoming devil worshipers.

 

Here is the quote from the Holy Bible (KJV): “Thou shalt make no covenant with them nor with their gods. They shall not dwell in thy land lest they make thee sin against me: for if thou serve their gods, it will surely be a snare to thee.”

 

One would not subscribe to Yahweh’s commands above if one was skeptical of monotheistic claims to be the one truth faith (of Judaism, Christianity or Islam), whose followers are all good, all holy and all saved, and followers of any competing deity, a demon or nonexistent deity, would be worshiping a faith that is false, misleading and evil, and none of its adherents are good, holy or saved. All will burn in hell. If one associates with such wicked, lost demon and false god worshipers, then one will be lost too. One associates only with the good and pure, one’s own people in isolation, and all foreign, competing peoples and their false gods are to be put the sword and banished forever.

 

As a spiritual, moral, epistemological, and ontological moderate, I believe that some faiths are superior to others, but, usually foreign faiths and the gods that those people worship may be mostly bad, but there would be some good and some truth for those cultures to be sustainable for hundreds of years.