Abrahamic Religions and their Holy Books

[xpastor]

God isn't even that merciful. There is at least one passage where he outright commands the Israelites to commit wholesale genocide, complete with ripping open the bellies of pregnant women, down to even slaughtering their cattle. Only the virgins were allowed to live and be taken away as sex slaves. OK, that's my interpretation. He only says, take them for yourselves, but I highly doubt, they were taken for housekeeping.

This is a bit pedantic, but I think you are conflating a couple of passages and adding one dramatic detail. I don't remember any passage in the bible where it is commanded to rip open the bellies of pregnant women. Most of what you refer to is from Numbers 31. There is no need to rip open the bellies of pregnant women, because the command is to kill every male (right down to baby boys) and to kill every woman who has ever slept with a man. Only the virgins were allowed to live. You're quite right. They weren't taking them home to help with the household chores. In this instance they did not kill the animals but divided them up along with the rest of the loot. However, in 1 Samuel 15:3 God commands King Saul to kill all the Amalekites "men and women, children and nursing infants, cattle and sheep, donkeys and camels" and when Saul fails to kill all of them, God is so pissed off that he takes the kingship from him and gives it to David. In the Old Testament God commands genocide dozens of times if not hundreds. So far as I can tell the ancient Israelites invented the concept of genocide.

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Then several hundred years after the last book of the OT was written, Alexander the great took over the world and spread the greek as the primary written language in an effort to assimilate the people of the conquered regions. A couple years after that Rome came to power took the region from the Greeks and at the time maintained the written language in that region. So that means at the time of Christ (nt) everyone who could read and write read and wrote koine greek as their primary language.

A bit more pedantry on my part. Alexander the Great certainly did not live "several hundred years after the last book of the OT was written." Alexander died in 323 BC. Daniel is the last book of the bible. It pretends to prophesy events that had already happened and gets everything right up until 167 BC, whereupon it makes a near-future prophecy about the death of King Antiochus Epiphanes and gets it wrong, showing that it was written between 167 and 164 BC when the king died.

There were certainly people writing in languages other than koine Greek (Aramaic, for instance) but Greek was the international language with a status much like English has today. The New Testament was directed entirely at making converts in the Gentile world, so it was written in Greek. It is very doubtful that the authors of Mark, Luke and John even knew any Aramaic, the language which Jesus spoke.