Hobbs

Yes. He wanted Saul and his army to kill all the Amalekites, even the little babies, and even their animals, and he wanted them killed because a few centuries earlier their ancestors had done something to displease God. All the people guilty of the crime being punished, even assuming they were guilty, were long dead. The Amalekites of Saul's time were not guilty of the crime for which they were punished. But God wanted them all killed. Even the infants.

You worship this god? I'm certainly glad that this is nothing more than a xenophobic myth of an ancient tribe from ignorant and barbarous times. If this god really were real, it would be the moral duty of all good people to oppose him.


Yea, just like how in Deuteronomy 24:16 God makes it clear that "fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin," but then He Himself ordered Saul to put the Amalekites to death for the sins of their ancestors. God Himself violated his own rule directly in 2 Samuel 12 to punish David for his adultery and murder in the Bathsheba incident: "the LORD struck the child that Uriah's wife had borne to David, and he became ill. David pleaded with God for the child. He fasted and went into his house and spent the nights lying on the ground. The elders of his household stood beside him to get him up from the ground, but he refused, and he would not eat any food with them. On the seventh day the child died."


Just because this Yahweh character says something clearly in one part of this book, it obviously doesn't mean that it necessarily holds for all other parts of the book. Here we have clear examples of God ordering or even directly doing something he had clearly stated was wrong. In Jephthah's case, as I have admitted, God does not explicitly state that Jephthah must go through with his oath. But in other places, as I have pointed out, God clearly ordered people to violate his previous command, and in fact violated it himself. We also know that God violated Pharaoh's free will so that he could send an angel to kill a bunch of innocent children. As gregor just pointed out, God violated the laws of nature and extended a day so that his army would have more time to kill their enemies, knocked down a wall so all the men, women, and children of a city could be slaughtered, created lots and lots of enough extra water to flood the entire world and drown almost everything alive including all the infants alive at the time, etc etc. God goes out of his way, and violates others' free will, when necessary to kill more people. But he wouldn't bother himself to do the very simple act of releasing Jephthah from his vow, an act that would not violate anyone's free will, an act that would not have contravened any laws of nature, to save the life of an innocent child. As I said before, God needs to get his priorities straight.


I hope it is clear that they do have lots to do with the Jephthah case: they establish the rotten, evil nature of the character Yahweh in the ancient Hebrew myths.


But he certainly does not hesitate to intervene when something 'bad' is not about to happen so that it can happen.


Yes, it would be a very strange world if it didn't look for all the world like a world in which there really isn't any god after all. Yes, a universe in which there really is a god would be a zany fantasy world type situation.


God isn't really culpable, because he doesn't really exist outside of the minds of his believers. But the fictional character Yahweh in the ancient Hebrew myths clearly is, in these stories, directly culpable for many acts of violence he himself perpetrated or directly ordered or interfered with people's free will or the laws of nature so they could occur when they otherwise wouldn't.



LP675, look at what you are saying here. You are excusing God for not doing the very simple act of releasing Jephthah from his vow in order to save the life of an innocent child. Releasing Jephthah from his vow would not have violated anyone's free will. It would not have contravened any laws of nature. All that performing this very simple, brief, easily accomplished act would have done would be to save the life of an innocent child.

LP675, what human would you excuse from such negligence?

Besides that, and far worse, you are defending genocide. You are defending killing infants because of something their ancestors had done centuries earlier.

Look at what you are saying.

If you saw this stuff in any other source other than the Bible, if you saw it in the Koran, the Epic of Gilgamesh, a novel by Tolstoy, a short story by Hemingway, you would condemn the fictional deity character in no uncertain terms. Why do you blind yourself to what you are reading when you open up a book with the word "Bible" on the cover?

Jack the Bodiless

...Erm, no, he didn't.

The Bible does not condemn human sacrifice per se (and it specifically endorses human sacrifice in places). It contains a prohibition on a specific kind of human sacrifice: the obligatory sacrifice of the firstborn child, as practised by certain Caananite peoples (including, originally, the Hebrews: there are Biblical verses which allude to this).

Jephtah's daughter is not described as a child. She certainly wasn't a newborn infant, the normal victim of this sort of sacrifice. Nor was she sacrificed for this now-prohibited reason.

The priests (not Jephtah himself) would have slit the girl's throat in the belief that God required them to do so, and without any guidance to the contrary.

LP675

Hobbs, why didn’t you respond to this?:

LP675

Well done. Why don’t you make some kind of response to my actual argument? God does not ordinarily distort the laws of nature to prevent the consequences of people’s actions. He occasionally does, which you have kindly pointed out. Are you asserting that He is morally obligated to supernaturally intervene by changing natural laws in strange ways in every situation where something undesirable is about to happen? (Try to imagine such a world). Which circumstances should he not intervene in?

LP675

Cool. Instead of just asserting it why not give some verses others can see for themselves?

Hobbs

I figured I had at least implicitly covered that, too, in pointing out that in this story God "wouldn't bother himself to do the very simple act of releasing Jephthah from his vow, an act that would not violate anyone's free will, an act that would not have contravened any laws of nature, to save the life of an innocent child. As I said before, God needs to get his priorities straight."


Let's look at 1 Sam 44 now:

It says God is intervening left and right in things, including helping Jonathan kill a bunch of enemies and save Israel. But because someone sinned, God didn't answer Saul's question about what to do next. Saul must have expected that naturally God would answer, since he immediately concluded that something fishy was going on to have kept God from answering. So what we have here is God changing the way he normally does things when someone violated Saul's oath to Him. Why couldn't he have just answered Saul, or told Saul what was up, as Saul was expecting based on how God had been acting before?

Saul looked into the situation, and discovered that Jonathan had unknowingly violated an oath that Saul had put on his whole army. Saul had vowed that whoever had sinned must die. But Saul's soldiers, Jonathan's comrades, stepped in to rescue Jonathan. And one would think that this was not at any small risk to themselves: they weren't just defying their king, they were defying their king's oath to God.

Saul's soldiers did a good thing: they rescued an innocent man from a stupid oath. And they did it at what was probably great risk to themselves. Can't we expect as much from God, especially when he could do it with no risk at all?


Yes, I agree that Jephthah had the same course available to him that Saul did. But Saul was not aware of, or forgot, that the other course was available to him, until his soldiers pointed it out. And Saul had to rely on his soldiers to point it out, God didn't bother, just as He didn't in Jephthah's case. Yes, I agree that Jephthah's vow "simply had nothing to do with Him" (except, of course, that Jephthah's vow was to Him, God was the one to whom Jephthah had bound himself). But Jonathan's violation of Saul's vow had nothing to do with anyone other than Jonathan. And yet they stepped in, at great potential risk to themselves, to rescue Jonathan.

Can we really expect less of God? Why do you expect less of God? Why do you worship a God you expect so little of?

Jack the Bodiless

The verses which endorse human sacrifice are well-known. The SAB's Does God approve of human sacrifice? covers them pretty well.

One omission from the SAB's list is God's admission that he allowed/required child sacrifices in the past:
The priestly monopoly on religious rituals is made clear in 2 Chronicles 26:16-21:
...However, if you wish to claim that Jephtah "should have known" that God would not approve of the sacrifice of his daughter, then the burden is on YOU to provide the appropriate Biblical ban.

Here are all the anti-sacrifice verses I could find:
So we have two condemnations of Molech-worship, plus a third verse which apparently refers to the same sort of sacrificial ritual.

Here's the context of Deuteronomy 18:10, which is about as close as I can get to a ban on the sacrifice of Jephtah's daughter:
So, don't dabble in the rituals of nasty foreigners. Not a very clear or unequivocal ban on having your daughter sacrificed to YHWH in a more appropriate manner.

Jack the Bodiless

...Of course, the fate of King Uzziah itself says much about when God sees fit to intervene.

Burning incense without a permit: leprosy.

Having your daughter sacrificed: no action.

Presumably, if Jephtah HAD assumed the role of priest and wielded the knife himself, he'd have been smitten with leprosy, as Uzziah was.

Hobbs

LP675, why do you worship this god you are describing? It is obviously not because he is good. Clearly this Yahweh character is not good, he is not morally worthy of anyone's worship. So why do you worship him? Do you worship him because of his power? Certainly the stories do present a character who is extremely powerful. Powerful enough to assure that anyone who displeases him is severely punished.

If such a god exists, I'm not sure what I'd do. I hope that I'd be able to maintain my moral integrity and refuse to bow to the power in spite of the evil, but I might break down and sacrifice my moral integrity in the face of extreme torture. Fortunately, I see no reason to expect that I'll ever have to make that choice.

gregor

LP765, you state:
____________
"He occasionally does [intervene], which you have kindly pointed out. Are you asserting that He is morally obligated to supernaturally intervene by changing natural laws in strange ways in every situation where something undesirable is about to happen? (Try to imagine such a world). Which circumstances should he not intervene in?"
____________

So, what criteria does he currently use?

Why do people bother with intercessory prayer right now?

If he is omnibenevolent, he should at least intervene in those situations like childhood cancers and the like {WARNING: I sense a lpoe thread developing}