Mocking Religion: Penalties and Ironies Peter Heinegg He who blasphemes the name of the LORD shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him; the sojourner as well as the native, when he blasphemes the Name, shall be put to death. Lev. 24.16 Along with the waves of rage and indignation from the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris have come not a few worried warnings that mocking the deity and faith of our fellows is morally wrong: cruel, insensitive, arrogant, unseemly, and so on. That may be true, but it may also be worthwhile to note that the Hebrew Bible, aka the Old Testament, does not hesitate to dish out such mockery. That does not necessarily validate the use of satirical or contemptuous language about anyone's religion; but it certainly shows how ancient and embedded in tradition such language is. As everyone knows, the Hebrew Bible fiercely rejects the worship of false gods (alien beings sometimes seen as actually existing, sometimes as imaginary). The First Commandment asserts that, “You shall have no other gods before me,” followed by the Second, which forbids bowing down before any image of foreign “divinities.” The reason given is that God is “jealous,” which suggests that, however loathsome they may be, he sees them as real. The punishment for idolatry is death, as spelled out in the ferocious thirteenth chapter of Deuteronomy, which declares that anyone, from a deluded “prophet” or “dreamer of dreams” to ones nearest and dearest (“your brother, the son of your mother, or your son, or your daughter, or the wife of your bosom,” Dt. 13.6), who calls “Let us go after other gods” must be stoned to death; and if an entire city defects, then all its inhabitants and domesticated animals must be put to the sword and the place itself burned to the ground as an offering to the Lord (“it shall be a heap forever, it shall not be built again,” Gen. 13.12–17). True, there is no historical record of a brutal command like that ever being carried out; but the vehemence of the language makes it clear how seriously both God and the Israelite community take the offence of idolatry. And their wrath evidently grew out of a long history of national betrayal, from Aaron's fashioning of the golden calf (an act of desperate ingratitude to the Lord who had just rescued them from the house of bondage in Egypt) to the perverse goings‐on in Israel over six centuries later, when the righteous king Josiah of Judah had his hands full removing idolatrous paraphernalia and the house of the male cult prostitutes from the Temple, destroying the “high places”, slaying their priests, annihilating pagan shrines, and so forth (2 Kings 23). That was a heroic effort, but all in vain, because just a generation after his death (in 709 BCE), Jerusalem was leveled by the Babylonians, and the cream of the population swept away to Babylon to punish the sins of Judah, especially its inveterate habit of breaking the First Commandment. Then too, the prophets, who are generally focused on sins against social justice, also rail against idolatry. In keeping with the ubiquitous biblical metaphor of Israel as an adulterous spouse and the Lord as her furious husband, Jeremiah repeatedly claims that, “upon every high hill and every green tree” (the natural location for shrines of nature gods), “you bowed down as a harlot.” (Jer. 2.20). Ezekiel has a tormented vision of the Temple of Jerusalem defiled by the images of animal deities, by women weeping for Tammuz, and some twenty men worshiping the sun” (Ezek. 8.7–16). Hosea 11.2 sums up the theme of Israel's endless backsliding: “The more I (the Lord) called them, the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals, and burning incense to idols.” No surprises here. In a polytheistic world, monotheism always was a hard sell; and it would have been strange if the originally nomadic Israelites, with their unsophisticated material culture, had not been drawn to the colorful, alluring, time‐honored cults of their powerful neighbors, and if that attraction had not brought down...