The Ultimate Patriarch

"Woe unto them that desires the day of Yahweh! What do you look for from the day of Yahweh? It will be darkness and not light."
-Amos 5:18

"I create the light; I create the darkness": so boasts the God Yahweh (Isaiah 45:7).
We are accustomed to thinking of Yahweh in his creative aspects, but let us now consider his shadow.
When the Israelites invaded Canaan, Joshua "captured the city [of Hazor] and put its king to death with the sword. [The Israelites] killed every living thing in it, and wiped them all out; the spared nothing that drew breath and Hazor itself they destroyed by fire." . . . "It was the Lord's purpose that they should offer an obstinate resistance to the Israelites in battle, and that thus they should be annihilated without mercy and utterly destroyed." Yahweh ordered the conquest of Canaan, he then caused the Canaanites to resist, and he finally ordained their utter ruin at the hand of his chosen people. Few gods of Egypt, Babylonia, or Canaan itself were so ruthless.
And to the Israelites themselves Yahweh was scarcely more kind. When one among them had kept some of the spoil from a captured city for himself rather than giving it to Yahweh (in care of his priests), Yahweh punished the children of Israel, causing them to be defeated at the hands of the Canaanites. Joshua asked Yahweh what was to be done, and the God replied that Joshua was to discover the culprit. Lots were cast, by which the God's mind could be made manifest. The lot fell upon Achan. Achan confessed, and the Israelites took him up to the Vale of Anchor, where they stoned him to death. And "the Lord's anger was abated."
The shadow of the God appears even more clearly in Exodus 4:24-26, where the God seeks to murder Moses on his journey back to Egypt from Midian: "During the journey, while they were encamped for the night, the Lord met Moses, meaning to kill him, but Zipporah picked up a sharp flint, cut off her son's foreskin, and touched him with it, saying, 'You are my blood-bridegroom.' So the Lord let Moses alone."


-Jeffrey Burton Russell