lpetrich

This is what I like to call the genocidal mass murders of the early parts of the Bible; all those already living in the Promised Land were to be murdered to make way for those it was (allegedly) promised to. And those parts of the Bible describes successfully doing so, with God's Chosen People getting some "living space" (Lebensraum, in German).

And what is disturbing about this is the response of some apologists -- they defend those genocidal massacres. To me, that makes them worse than many apologists for Nazi Germany, whose favorite view is that the Nazis' genocidal mass murders had never happened.

Those apologists sometimes claim that those Biblical genocides were justified on account of how evil those people were; that has a parallel with the Nazis accusing Jews of being very wicked -- of being crooked capitalists and loansharking bankers, of inventing Communism, of causing cultural corruption and degeneracy, of lusting after virtuous Nordic women, etc.

But even if many of the Canaanites and the like had been that wicked, then why kill all their babies and little children?

Psycho Economist

God said so. Duh! :banghead:

My wish is that in a generation students learn about the archaeologically verifyable history of the Hebrews (and other Cannanites). Even a one-page special-feature in high school world history books would be nice. The real history of the movements from herding to farming in the Judean hill country... and back and forth and what may have motivated it is much more interesting than forty years in the desert getting periodically decimated for complaining.