07 June 2012

Sending body parts in the mail: The Biblical way to send a message



OK, this is going to be another grisly post. Sorry about that.

But, hey, I am, after all,  blogging about the Bible. If you don't like disgusting stories, you're not going to like the Bible. Or my posts.

So here goes.

You've probably heard by now about the Canadian body part messages. If not, here's a summary:

Last week the leaders of the Canadian Liberal and Conservative parties received some body parts in the mail.

Now that's pretty disgusting, isn't it?

Well, not to the Biblical God it isn't. It's one of his favorite ways of sending a message. And if you believe in the Bible, you should consider sending messages yourself that way.

Take Saul, for example.

The spirit of the Lord came upon Saul and he chopped up a couple of oxen and send the pieces to all the leaders of Israel.
And the spirit of God came upon Saul ... and he took a yoke of oxen, and hewed them in pieces, and sent them throughout all the coast of Israel. 1 Samuel 11:6-7
Which makes you wonder. Did the spirit of the Lord come upon Luka Rocco Magnotta when he chopped up Jun Lin and sent his body parts to the Canadian leaders? 

And then there's the story about the Levite and his concubine.

You know the one where the Levite and his concubine are staying at a guy's house when a mob comes and asks to have sex with the Levite, and the host says no you can't have sex with him but I'll give you my virgin daughter and his concubine instead, so the Levite gives them his concubine and they rape her all night and she crawls back to the house and dies the next morning, and then the Levite puts her body on his donkey and goes home and chops her body into 12 pieces and sends a piece to each tribe of Israel? 

Yeah that one. (You can read all about it in Judges 19.)

Well, God didn't seem to have much to do with that, at least not directly. But he approved that message. Because in the next chapter God personally arranged a holy civil war between the Benjamites (the tribe that happened to include the town of Gibeah where the incident with the concubine occurred) and the other tribes of Israel, each of which received a concubine body part message in the mail.

So maybe Magnotta sent the body parts to the Canadian political leaders to call for a holy war between the province of Quebec (from where the body was sent, and probably hacked up) and all the other Canadian provinces. Maybe that's what God had in mind.

If so, then, the Canadian leaders should read the end of Judges and go and do likewise, by killing every man, woman, and child in Quebec, as the Israelites, under God's direction, did to the Benjamites. 

Or something like that. 

It's hard to know what God, the Great Communicator, had in mind when he inspired Judges 19-21.

4 comments:

Andrew Hall said...

I totally agree. I just read through Judges a year ago and that story of the concubine was very, very gross.

Autumn said...

Didn't someone argue that the concubine wasn't dead yet?

Steve Wells said...

Yes, Abeille, Brucker points out on his blog that the concubine might have been alive when she was dismembered. There's nothing in the text to indicate otherwise.

No said...

People in Montreal are lucky this guy didn't read the Old Testament for goodness sake.