Quote of the Day: Roland Boer on Ezekiel 20

Usually my quotes come from primary sources and not the scholars who study them, but this line by Roland Boer, who blogs at Stalin's Moustache, stopped me in my tracks and made me laugh...although I am not sure if I was supposed to laugh:

In Ezek. 20 Yahweh comes through as a complete bastard, to borrow Ed Conrad's phrase, one who msut have the last word, be totally in control and anticipate any move the people might make. (Boer, Marxist Criticism of the Bible, 154)

Boer, here, is using the work of Erst Bloch in order to read the text in terms of of a "dialectic of utopia" and sees resistance against Yahweh (which Ezekiel rails against) as an implicit "atheism" or a "protest atheism." Nonetheless, the language of divine bastardy does arrest the reader somewhat.