By Robert Wright

Monday, Jun. 15, 2009

The ancient Israelites got straightforward guidance from scripture on how to handle people who didn’t worship Israel’s god, Yahweh. “You shall annihilate them – the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites – just as the Lord your God has commanded.”

The point of this exercise, explained the Book of Deuteronomy, was to make sure the “abhorrent” religions of nearby peoples didn’t rub off on Israelites.

Yet sometimes the Israelites were happy to live in peace with neighbors who worshipped alien gods. In the Book of Judges, an Israelite military leader proposes a live-and-let-live arrangement with the Ammonites: “Should you not possess what your god Chemosh gives you to possess? And should we not be the ones to possess everything that our god Yahweh has conquered for our benefit?

The Bible isn’t the only scripture with such vacillations between belligerence and tolerance. Muslims, who like Christians and Jews worship the god who revealed himself to Abraham, are counseled in one part of the Koran to “kill the polytheists wherever you find them.” But another part prescribes a different stance toward unbelievers, “To you be your religion; to me my religion.”

You’d think the Abrahamic God would make up his mind – Can he live with other gods or not? What’s with the random mood fluctuations?

But the fluctuations aren’t really random. If you juxtapose the Abrahamic Scriptures with what scholars have learned about the circumstances surrounding their creation, a pattern appears. Certain kinds of situations inspired tolerance, and other kinds inspired the opposite. You might even say this pattern is a kind of code, a code that is hidden in the scriptures and that, once revealed, unlocks the secret of god’s changing moods.

And maybe this code could unlock more than that. Maybe knowing what circumstances made the authors of scripture open-minded can help make modern-day believers open-minded. Maybe the hidden code in the Bible and the Koran, the code that links scriptural content to context, could even help mend the most dangerous of intra-Abrahamic fault lines, the one between Muslims and Jews.

….

Enduring peace would be win-win.

This peace would also have been foretold. Isaiah (first Isaiah, not the Isaiah of the exile) envisioned a day when god “shall arbitrate for many peoples” and “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” And in a Koranic verse dated by scholars to the final years of Muhammad’s life, god tells humankind that he has “made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another.”

This happy ending is hardly assured. It can take time for people, having seen that they are playing a non-zero-sum game, to adjust their attitudes accordingly. And this adaptation may never happen if barriers of mistrust persist.

But at least we can quit talking as if this adaptation were impossible – as if intolerance and violence were inevitable offshoots of monotheism. At least we can quit asking whether Islam – or Judaism or any other religion – is a religion of peace. The answer is no. And yes. It says so in the Bible, and in the Koran. Find this article at:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1902851,00.html