The Necessity of Atheism

by David Marshall Brooks

1. That Belshazzar was not the king of Babylon.

2. That the name of the last king was Nabonidos.

3. That the city was taken peacefully, by guile, not by bloodshed.

4. That it was Cyrus, not Darius the Median, who took it.

5. That Darius, who is said (XI, 1) by Daniel to have been the son of "Ahasuerus" (Xerxes), was really his father.

6. That all the Babylonian names in Daniel are absurdly misspelt and quite strange to the writer.

7. That the writer described the Chaldeans in a way that no writer could have done before the time of Alexander the Great.

It is now beyond question that the man who wrote Daniel, and pretended to be alive in 539 B.C. (when Babylon fell), did not live until three or four centuries later. The book is a tissue of errors, as we find by authentic documents and by reading the real Babylonian names on the tablets."

The Martian discovers glaring instances of forgery in the book of Isaiah and the Psalms of David, which, while they pretend to have been written by Isaiah and David, are really compilations by various writers. Similarly, he finds that the Book of Esther has been pronounced by scholars as a clumsy forgery of the second century, and that the story of the slaying of Goliath by David is not consistent with the unlegendary tradition that the slayer of Goliath was Elhanan, and the period of this adventure not in Saul's but in David's reign. The Book of Psalms, although attributed to King David, was not written by King David; and the Book of Proverbs, although attributed to Solomon, was not written by King Solomon.

The Book of Genesis relates the mythical traditions of the Hebrews from the creation of the world to the death of Joseph. "A French physician of the eighteenth century, Astruc, was the first scholar to point out that the two principal designations of God in Genesis, Elohim and Jahveh, are not used arbitrarily. If we place side by side the passages in which God is called Elohim, and those in which he is called by the other name, we get two perfectly distinct narratives, which the author of the Pentateuch, as we possess it, has juxtaposed rather than fused. This one discovery suffices to discredit the attribution of these books to Moses, who could not have been an unintelligent compiler, and also discredits the theory of the divine inspiration of the Bible text. A comparison of the two narratives shows that all which relates to the creation of Eve, the Garden of Eden, and Adam's transgression, exists only in the Jehovist text. Thus it is evident that two versions of the Creation are given in Genesis. But there are traces in the Old Testament of a third legend, akin to that of the Babylonians, in which Marduk creates the world by virtue of a victory over the waters of chaos (Tiamat). This conception of a conflict between the creator and hostile forces was contrary to the monotheistic thesis, and has disappeared from our two versions of Genesis; but the suppression sufficiently proves that it was very ancient and had long been accepted."