This fall my Theists and Atheists site often includes items from my new blog, Did God Really Say THAT!? A Blog about the Bible. Here’s the latest entry. I hope both theists and atheists will find it interesting:
I should warn my readers that some verses in today’s post are rather grisly. But as I’ve said before, one reason these passages sound so disturbing is that they clash with core Judeo-Christian values [and with the values of most secular humanists].
We’ll be considering excerpts from stories of the Hebrew conquest of Canaan. It’s interesting to ask whether God would want anyone to march into someone else’s country and wipe out its inhabitants. Some would say “absolutely not,” while others would maintain that violent conquest is OK under certain circumstances. In this blog I just want to focus on what virtually all of us will agree does not sound like God’s will. For example:
“So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded” (Joshua 10:40).
“Then we turned and went up the way to Bashan; and Og the king of Bashan came out against us, he and all his people, to battle at Edrei. But the Lord said to me, ‘Do not fear him; for I have given him and all his people and his land into your hand . . . So the Lord our God gave into our hand Og also, the king of Bashan, and all his people; and we smote him until no survivor was left to him. And we took . . . sixty cities . . . And we utterly destroyed them, as we did to Sihon the king of Heshbon, destroying every city, men, women, and children” (Deuteronomy 3: 1-6).
Take a moment to let that soak in: “. . . utterly destroyed all that breathed” “destroying every city, men, women, and children.”
Deuteronomy 20:10-11 sounds merciful by comparison: “When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you.”
I doubt that Jesus would have agreed with this interpretation of “making peace!” If the city does not agree to enslavement, the Israelites are to kill every man. “. . . but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you” (Deuteronomy 20:12-14).
This is extremely unsettling. It implies that after wiping out all the men, the Hebrews are allowed to sexually enjoy the widows and daughters of those they had killed. In the book of Numbers God’s prophet Moses spells out a similar policy quite explicitly. Moses tells the people, “Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves” (Numbers 31:17-18).
It’s hard to face the full implications of this passage. After the conquest, young virgins were sexually exploited by the men who had murdered their fathers, mothers, and brothers. One can imagine God confronting Moses about these brutal orders, roaring in a thunderous voice : “What the !!$**$??! are you doing here, Moses? This is just despicable!” But as far as I know Moses was never rebuked for this policy.
At one point we read that virgins were left alive only in faraway cities. By contrast, “. . . in the cities of these peoples that your Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes . . . as the Lord your God has commanded. . . .” (Deuteronomy 20:16).
Not all of these passages say that God gave genocidal orders, but several do. These verses cannot be reconciled with the Hebrew prophetic tradition, nor with teachings of Jesus such as his focus on the value of children. (See, for example, Mark 10:13-14, where Jesus says of little children, “to such belongs the kingdom of God.”)
And notice what’s missing: There is never the slightest suggestion of a positive alternative to conquest. Rather than miraculously delivering city after city into the hands of the invaders, why wouldn’t God have worked a finer miracle, making an uninhabited desert region bloom into a paradise and ordering the Hebrews to migrate there instead of into Canaan? That way they would have inherited a Promised Land without causing untold pain and devastation to those who were there first.
Regardless of whether dramatic and obvious miracles occur, I doubt that the conquest of Canaan was sponsored by deity. Instead, I suspect that some of those who wrote the early books of the Bible were still thinking in terms of a fierce tribal war-God instead of a universal deity who loved every person on Earth. Other writers had a different understanding, as we can see in Joel 2:13: “Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity.”
Roger Christan Schriner
To subscribe to Theists & Atheists: Communication & Common Ground, click the “Follow” link on the upper left.
Theists & Atheists: Communication & Common Ground 