lpetrich

This reminds me of my very first post in IIDB, in the thread Moses the war criminal?. It was from my Biblical Satanic Verses (with this parent page). From the section on genocide:

After concluding that most of humanity is wicked beyond redemption (isn't he capable of reforming anyone?) God decides to slaughter all but 8 of humanity in Noah's Flood. Also, we learn that the Promised Land is for the Israelites, and not for the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, or the Jebusites (Deuteronomy 7:1-2); these peoples are to be exterminated without mercy. The Israelites proceed to do just that (if we are to believe their own account); they kill the Amorites of Heshbon (Numbers 21:25, Deuteronomy 2:34), the followers of Og (Numbers 21:34,35), practically all the people of Jericho (Joshua 6), all the people of Makkedah, Libnah, Lachish, Gezer, Eglon, Hebron, and the surrounding landscape (Joshua 10:28-40), the people of Gaza, Askelon, and Ekron (Judges 1:18-19), 10,000 Moabites (Judges 3:29), 10,000 Perizzites and Canaanites (Judges 1:4), "all the hosts of Sisera" (Judges 4:16), 120,000 Midianites (Judges 8:10), the Philistines (1 Samuel 14:12,13,20), the Ammonites (1 Samuel 11:11), the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15:3,7), etc. etc. etc. About this last, we are told that Samuel found fault with King Saul because he did not try to kill all the sheep and cattle; killing all the people evidently was not enough. There is an interesting exception, we find that the Israelites were supposed to kill all the men and married women of the Midianites; the unmarried women who have not gone to bed with any man the Israelites can keep for themselves (Numbers 25:16,17, 31:7,8). All this Ethnic Cleansing was the Final Solution of the Canaanite Question, as it were. Or at least so we are told. Not only Canaanites were to suffer, consider a lamentation of being exiled to Babylon, where we learn that "Babylon will be destroyed. Happy is the one who pays you back, who takes your babies and smashes them against a rock" (Psalm 137). That this activity is contrary to a certain one of the "Ten Commandments" nobody seems to notice.

Whether this Final Solution of the Canaanite Question is historical or not is another question; there is good reason to suspect that it only existed in the imaginations of the writers of the earlier parts of the Bible (Stiebing: Out of the Desert?, etc.). Even so, it says something suspicious about the inventors of that "history".

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It now seems to be the consensus of Biblical archeology that the Conquest is unhistorical, and that that Final Solution of the Canaanite Question had never happened. So the next question is what provoked the inventing of those accounts. Were they invented out of a belief that the land belongs to us Israelites and not to whatever squatters might be living there? Claiming the land of Israel is a big preoccupation in some of the early parts of the Bible.

And were the stay in Egypt and the return to Canaan invented during the Babylonian Exile as a kind of reassurance?

I find it curious that many Xian apologists are more than willing to defend Biblical genocide. Compare them to Nazi apologists, who are fond of arguing that the Holocaust (Nazi genocide) never happened.

lpetrich

Like what?

But some of that stuff is claimed to be what God had decreed, like how such rival claimants to the Land of Israel as the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites are to be exterminated without mercy (Deut. 7:1-5).
What a god -- one who doesn't protest such attributions.

jemand, would you enjoy it if some people described you as ordering mass murder when you had never done any such thing?

So murder is OK because one's victim(s) will eventually be resurrected?

There are three sets of them -- and they are not marked off very clearly from the other laws.
However, all those laws were presented as being delivered at the same time.

Also, this makes god seem very wimpy and helpless.

Steven Carr

Christians are living proof that this is all false.

Christians believe all this without question , just because they read it in a book, yet we are expected to swallow that the Israelites were led out of Egypt by highly visible miracles, were given manna and billions of quails from Heaven, had God appear in front of them, yet were still 'rebelllious'.

Even Aaron was supposed to have helped make a golden calf despite being the brother of somebody who glowed after talking with God.

Nonsense.

Haven't Christians ever seen religious people?

I'm sure Jews were no more 'rebellious' than Christians are now, at least assuming that even one-tenth of the stories of God's direct involvement in their lives is true.

By the way, when did Jews *stop* being a rebellious people? Are they still rebellious?

Nero's Boot

...does this mean that if I join the US army, Biblically speaking, I'm allowed to rape virgin Iraqi women?

--after all, your God seems to agree with the above statement NB

Aspirin99

What are you talking about?

Wads4

I am trying to imagine God "struggling";--poor little God, can't even control his own playthings. If you are looking for more progressive laws and more civilised behaviour at that time, how about moving to the Nile? The Egyptians were much more civilised, and did not live their lives around repeated episodes of genocide.

jemand

Compare the verse on this topic in Deuteronomy with the one in Exodus, and I think it will become less objectionable. Any sex outside of marriage was to be considered rape (as it probably should have been, considering the many ways a man had more power over a woman then than she did over him.) So some of those rape cases were probably those in which the girl actually did consent, or at least didn't mind but only disagreed because she was afraid of the consequeces. In such cases, a subsequent marriage would probably have not been objectionable to either side, but the man would be required to pay the dowry and get married properly.

Here's the Exodus text:

Exo 22:16 And if a man entice a maid that is not betrothed, and lie with her, he shall surely endow her to be his wife.
Exo 22:17 If her father utterly refuse to give her unto him, he shall pay money according to the dowry of virgins.

The father had the right to refuse to allow the man to marry his daughter, and would receive the money anyway. In other words, there was no financial intrest on the father's part to "complete the deal" that might have caused some to force his daughter to marry a cruel husband. That this right was not repeated in the Deuteronomy text was simply because people probably considered it obvious.

Like any law, this one has could be applied strongly to a case where it does more harm than good, but it isn't quite as bad as it originally appears. It is still disturbing though that there is absolutely no mention of the girl's wishes in either text.

pharoah

Are you saying that God expected these people to be able to grasp all of the intracacies of the diet laws but he couldn't make them understand that rape, slavery, murder and genocide are bad things?