We had lunch with a delightful Christian couple, very nice people. They mentioned how their grandchildren were getting such good teaching at their church, especially the Old Testament stories. I suggested, “That probably includes the story of Jericho?” (Joshua 6)
“Sure.”
“Do you think they were taught what the soldiers were to do when the walls fell down?”
“You mean, kill the people?”
“Yes, every man, woman and child. So, if I was teaching their Sunday School class, I would pose this question to make it more real for them: Suppose you were one of the Israelite soldiers and you entered a home in Jericho and found a family. Now, would you kill the children first so they wouldn’t have to watch their parents die, or would you kill the parents first so they wouldn’t have to watch their children die?”
I think they were a bit taken aback by this, maybe offended a little. We did not go into a detailed discussion, but they did mention that later the prophets chided Israel for not wiping out all the pagans in Canaan as God had instructed then to do. The destruction of the people living in the Promised Land was decreed in Deuteronomy 7:1,2 and 20:16-18. That last verse gives the reason: “So that they will not teach you to do all the same detestable practices of theirs which they have done for their gods.”
It leaves me wondering: what is more detestable than killing women and children in the name of your God?
But this was not the first time I had heard a Christian observe that the problem was not the killing of men, women and children, but the real problem was that they did not kill them all! They did not do enough killing so as to wipe out all those pagans. Thus Israel ended up being corrupted, such that it was said that they had become just as bad as the people they had displaced, as in 2 Kings 21:9 and other passages.
Now, if you are even a casual student of the Bible this concept of killing all the pagans should sound familiar to you. In Genesis 6 we are told that humankind had degenerated to the point that God decided to wipe them all out except one righteous family and start over. How did that work out? I mean, in that case God Himself really did wipe out ALL the pagans. That solved the problem, right? Not quite. In fact, immediately after the flood God Himself acknowledged that the destruction would have no effect: see Genesis 8:21. And history has borne this out. So why did God think it would then work to have the Israelites wipe out all the pagans in Canaan? Does God have a short memory or is not as smart or omniscient as His PR would suggest?
Ah, but you repeat, the problem was the Israelites did NOT wipe out ALL the pagans in the Promised Land! Do you really think that would have accomplished anything, given human nature as noted by God in Genesis 8:21? Do you really believe that the Israelites were so pure-hearted that they would have remained a righteous kingdom as long as the pagan influence had been removed? Remember the Exodus from Egypt as told by the book of that name? The Hebrews left pagan Egypt behind thanks to spectacular miracles they saw performed by their God and in 6 to 7 weeks were at Mt. Sinai, where Moses ascended to commune with God. The people panicked in Moses’ absence and Moses’ own brother Aaron fashioned a golden calf for them to worship. It took them less than 2 months to revert to paganism! Thus is human nature, again as GOD HIMSELF had observed in Genesis 8:21.
Also consider the kingdom of Judah during the time of King Hezekiah as described in 2nd Kings 18 to 20. He cleared out all the pagan worship in Judah, even destroying the bronze serpent of Moses because people were worshipping it. He is regarded as one of the most righteous kings in their history (see 2nd Kings 18:5, 6). Surely they were on the righteous path for the long term now! No, his son Manasseh becomes king and undoes all of his father’s reforms (2nd Kings 21), reintroducing paganism into the land, and is considered the worst king in their history. It took only one generation for Judah to revert to paganism. Do you really believe the problem was the outside pagan influence and that slaughtering them all was an effective solution? To paraphrase Shakespeare, “The fault lies not in our neighbors, but in ourselves.”
But let’s assume that Israel had succeeded in clearing out all the pagans from the Promised Land. Look at a map or globe and look at the size of this patch of land now known as Israel compared to the rest of the world (half the size of my home state of North Carolina). They were situated at the crossroads between Africa, Europe and Asia. Israel would have been a tiny island of Yahweh worship in a huge world of paganism. Is it realistic to think they could have avoided contact with pagans and their influences? Given their history would they be able to resist such influences? Would all that killing really have accomplished anything in the long run?
Some will still respond, “But those pagans were doing terrible things like human sacrifice that had to be stopped!” Yet the same thing occurred in Judah shortly after Hezekiah’s righteous reforms (2nd Kings 21:6). And is killing the men, women and children of entire cities in the name of your God morally superior to their occasional human sacrifice? It is morally acceptable to sacrifice other people’s children to your God as long as you don’t sacrifice your own children? What kind of a moral standard is that?
Would a wise God have had such a plan? Or is it just a series of stories told by people who had a very harsh concept of a judgmental warrior god, as seems common in ancient religions? I saw a Facebook post recently that suggested that God doesn’t kill people; people kill in the name of God. Did the ancient leaders of Israel simply invoke God’s name to justify the savage takeover of the Promised Land? Think of the soldiers’ perspective: they did not even hear directly from God these orders to slaughter others: they just took their leaders’ word for it. I would hope that our soldiers today would question any orders from their leaders to slaughter women and children en masse. Perhaps the good news is that most scholars, including Israeli scholars do not believe that the terrible genocidal conquest of Canaan happened as described in the Bible. There is no evidence of a large-scale military conquest at that time. It is more likely that Israel coalesced out of the tribes living in the land rather than being the result of a hostile takeover by the descendants of Abraham.[1]
Some philosophers have suggested that while bad people naturally do bad things for a good person to do bad things it takes religion. I might add politics and uber-nationalism, too. To modify this slightly, sometimes it takes religion for good people to endorse horrible ideas. Personally, it saddens me to see that some people have been so conditioned to accept unverified ancient stories as “gospel truth” that they are unwilling to question such stories but instead endorse cruel atrocities as downright good. Good because God (supposedly) said so. Worse yet that they teach their children that committing crimes that in any other context would be viewed as immoral become moral when God says to do them. It is not just murder, but also things like taking land and possessions, slavery and even the legalized rape of war orphans (as in Numbers 31 and Deuteronomy 21:10-14). It reduces morality from seeking what is truly right and good to simply following orders. That is not morality, even if the orders supposedly come from God.
I do not blame the Judeo-Christian religion for the violence we have been witnessing in America in recent years: violence transcends all times and cultures and other religions have similar stories and teachings. But I do wonder if the failure to think critically about these ancient stories of killing for a righteous cause and the implicit and sometimes explicit teaching that “those people” are the problem and therefore their elimination is the solution is at least a contributing factor to violence in our religion-infused society. Consider the killing of 23 Hispanics in an El Paso Walmart, or 10 black shoppers at a grocery store in Buffalo, or 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue, or 49 people in a gay night club in Orlando.[2] As if any such shootings make society better. In light of this ongoing violence we certainly do not need to be instilling into our children and grandchildren the idea that killing “bad” people is a good, even God-endorsed idea or we may never move beyond our violent past. Plus, there was this fellow named Jesus who suggested that we should love even our enemies. Not that having a different skin color or lifestyle or national origin or religion makes one an enemy. And by love I do not think he meant mowing them down with guns. Maybe “love your enemies” is the lesson we should be teaching our children and grandchildren instead of genocide in the name of God.
Thinking exercises:
1. Go back to the conquest of Jericho. Close your eyes and put yourself in a house in Jericho with the family cowering in the corner. You have been instructed to kill all the men, women and children. What do you do? Do you follow orders? Who do you kill first? What does your answer tell you about yourself?
2. Later in Israel’s history it is said that they had become worse than the people they had displaced (e.g., 2nd Kings 21:9, 2nd Chronicles 28:3). God had already wiped out humanity in the flood and admitted that didn’t change things (Genesis 8:21). He even threatened to kill off all the Israelites in Moses’ day (Exodus 32). Then He tries it again in the Promised Land. Why do you think God is so slow to learn this lesson about the ineffectiveness of trying to kill off evil people? Or is it just that the ancient story tellers had a one-track mind about killing off their perceived enemies?
3. Some argue that the pagans the Israelites were trying to eliminate were doing abominable things like human sacrifice, even the sacrifice of children. So, how is killing men, women and children in the name of Yahweh any different? Is it acceptable to sacrifice other people’s children, just not your own?
[1] The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Silberman and Finkelstein is an excellent book discussing this in detail.
[2] The Pulse night club shooter may have been targeting Americans on behalf of Islam, rather than targeting gays specifically (probably both), but it was still a case of religion directly inspiring violence. Again.
2 responses to “19: The Problem: Not Enough Killing!”
I appreciate the reasoning and the critical thinking about God-approved slaughters in the Bible. I remember as a child thinking it wasn’t a good thing to kill everybody in Jericho. We can carry this over to current events in Israel / Palestine. We had Zionist ethnic cleansing and exile of Palestinian Arabs to refugee camps in 1948. Ethnic cleansing was then followed by brutal occupation and continuous theft of Palestinian homes and property from 1948 to today. Today Israel is using Hamas as an excuse for genocide in Gaza, while at the same time, under cover of the conflict in Gaza, ramping up land theft and attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. All of this is naturally God’s will, justified because God decreed that Israel was for the Jews. The Israelis ease their own minds about their murderous acts by identifying the Palestinians as “human animals” instead of pagans, but it amounts to the same thing.
Yes, and many in our US government accept the Biblical claim that the land was given to Israel by God himself, so they’re hardly objective on the issue.