Tenorikuma

Of course, the story is fictional and implausible, whether one judges by archaeological and historical evidence or simply by the literary evidence in the texts themselves.

But within the context of the story, there are countless ways it could have otherwise been written. Any competent writer could have come up with a way for settling a nomadic people in a region the size of Palestine that didn't require genocide right down to the killing of helpless children and the kidnapping of virgin girls as sex slaves.

What we have at work in the text is a ruthless and repugnant theological doctrine of cultural and ethnic purity that is obsessed not with morality but with real estate.

To add insult to injury, Yahweh's plan to keep the Israelites religiously and ethnically pure by ethnic cleansing of the land is a complete failure. The Israelites spend the next few centuries marrying foreigners and worshipping foreign gods. Did Yahweh not see this coming? Could he not have devised a plan that would have actually worked, and preferably one that didn't require the Israelites to commit mass murder as a national pastime?

As enlightened exegetes of the text, we can acknowledge that none of this actually happened and let God off the hook (if one is so inclined), but we cannot ignore the intentions of the writers either. The writers (some of them, at least; other OT writers were just as critical as we are) imagined a Canaanite Holocaust as a glorious event they wished had really happened, and one they hoped (one can only presume) would happen again in the future.

Net2004

this diety is not making much sense.


in gen 15:16 canaanites were not morally corrupt.god waited till they became morally corrupt and their sins hit sky high


according to the apologists, in moses' time canaanite sins hit sky high and god wants to wipe them off the map. god wants to wipe off their children also.

if children were wiped off because THEY DID NOT SIN, then why didn't god give the command to wife them off in gen 15:16?


god tells the jews to to stop worshipping idols over night
god tells them to stop doing detestable practices over night
but god was unable to tell them to stop killing children in combat




1 Samuel 30:1 Then it happened when David and his men came to Ziklag on the third day, that the Amalekites had made a raid on the Negev and on Ziklag, and had overthrown Ziklag and burned it with fire; 2 and they took captive the women and all who were in it, both small and great, without killing anyone, and carried them off and went their way. 3 When David and his men came to the city, behold, it was burned with fire, and their wives and their sons and their daughters had been taken captive.


if the amalekites could have thought of sparring the children, then why couldn't the hebrew god who had told the hebrews to be DIFFERENT from the people around them?

Net2004

in the book of kings the israelites did more sins than the nations yahweh had destroyed before the israelites, but yhwh did not wipe off the israelites because the worshipped becomes the worshipper of "chosen" people

sotto voce

When it is realised that there is cogency in the idea of historicity, the account becomes a myth. When the idea of myth recedes (presumably because it isn't credible), the culpability of genocide is proposed. Proposed, deliberately ignoring the fact that genocide is not only not culpable by a deity, but exceedingly appropriate remedy, for beings who culpably killed millions of their own in the last century. There's nothing as farcical as a human being.

Jaybees

Nope. Not ALL false. Nubbins of historic happenings are undoubtedly there, resurrected by scribes long after small, ragged nomadic tribes staged raids on each other. The notion that a herd of a million or more Israelites roamed back and forth across Canaan wiping out settled communities is absurd on many levelss. However, the point is that these cobbled-on anecdotes survived and became part of the basic beliefs of Judaism, at first, then Xtianity later.

Whether true or not, the genocide described in loving detail in the bible was (and still is in some quarters) literally believed in and approved of.

ideologyhunter

So...you're all saying the God Of Love was a tribal war deity, before his Oprah makeover?? I don't believe it.
Actually, there's nothing funnier in the field of theological foofaraw than having church people worm around this subject. Nothing. In one of Lee Strobel's books, he goes with a heavy heart to discuss Biblical genocide with a Christian college religions professor, who starts to tell him all the corrupt things those dirty Moabites were dragging the Israelite men into (Num. 25, ibid.) Read those passages and you'll have a good picture of horny Hebrew priests and scribes repenting for their visits to the Moab shanty-town and planning vengeance for their own lack of sales resistance.
If you like to mess with door to door missionaries, ask them about the plague on the firstborn in Ex. 11, essentially god killing children as they slept. Ask them to equate that with love. I've had church ladies do it!! One of them smiled at me and asked me if it wasn't a better thing for the child of a corrupt people to go straight up to heaven to be with god! (Which is about what some of the mothers at Jonestown were saying as they watched their kids drink the Koolaid.)

Steve Weiss

Like I said, it's the intention that counts not the verifiability of ridiculous obviously concocted mythology. The Hebrew god makes things happen for his cheering squad and wipes out anyone who doesn't glorify him in all his bloodthirstiness. Abrahamic enthusiasts believe this genocidal mass murder and believe that it is good and true because it is in their unquestioned holy books. If dictators need to find support for their mass murderous actions, they have ample support in holy books. God is just a meglomaniacal, sociopathic Nazi, isn't he? Let's all do as god bids us and murder anyone who isn't of the chosen tribe. Or not.

James Brown

--Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian

Iskander

LOL. Are you quoting from the inerrant bible?

andrewcriddle

Bertrand Russell doesn't give any reference for this claim, and I can't confirm it.

(Children were certainly wantonly massacred in South America, I can't find any evidence that they were baptized immediately beforehand.)

Andrew Criddle