God and genocide in the OT

It's come up a lot in the last month or so on my "Jesus the Word of the Bible the Word" thread, and I have to say that it's one that I've grappled with a lot over the last few years.

This is it: in several places in the Old Testament (for example, Joshua, and 1 Samuel), God commands the Children of Israel to exterminate people groups. Women, children, animals, possessions. Wipe them off the Earth, He says.

The question that many of us ask is, why? If God is good, and genocide is (as practically any sane Westerner thinks in this day and age) a Very Bad Thing, what's going on? Was it right to exterminate those people? If it wasn't, does that mean that God was telling the Israelites to do evil? Or is the Bible simply wrong on the source of the impulse to exterminate entire nations?

Now I never bought the explanation that the Israelites were right to do it by our standards, that they were purifying the land and protecting themselves from contamination, and that the peoples whom the Israelites were commanded to destroy were unrepentantly evil to a man, woman and cat.

Nope. Don't like it. For one, what does it serve to kill babies? And what about the stuff? Why tear down all those houses, and then build new ones?

On the other hand, I'm unwilling to discount any part of Scripture as simply false (and by "false", I mean manifestly untrue and not of use, as opposed to parables, which while made-up, are in fact also true. If you see what I mean). I think that there are lessons to be found in the body of Scripture about who we are and where we came form, and to abandon it without seeing any value in it at all - not even figurative value - does a great disservice to the text.

So anyway, I thought about this a lot, and I had a couple insights. None of them solve the conundrum for me.

First, about the nature of war. In the 21st-century West, we can fight alongside someone and be their enemy twenty years later; likewise, we hold no grudges against the people of Germany and Japan. There are Iraqis living in this country - they haven't been interned or persecuted for that. This is because these days, war isn't personal. I mean, people get killed, but we don't identify the nations who are at war with the individuals fighting, and therefore we can talk to Germans, Japanese, and Argentinians (the Falklands? No, I was thinking about Diego Maradona's hand ball in 1986, actually) without trying to kill them.

In Bible days, when family and nation were closely linked and when the fortunes of a people were a personal matter, war carried on until one nation was beaten. Feuds carried on for generations.

Children would grow up to avenge their people - as indeed the Israelites themselves would (Judges).

To leave a child alive would be to leave alive a potential leader of the enemy, and a continuation of the war. It sounds horrible. That's because it is. But in the age of the Patriarchs, the only way to ensure peace was to end the war, and you ended the war by making sure that no one would ever fight again. There was no Geneva Convention, there were no Rules of Engagement as we know them.

And this makes a point about the changing nature of morality. I think it was something the Israelites had to do. But then they were Bronze Age nomads, living in a culture where most of our givens (the equality of man, the right to self-determination, the right to life) were unknown. What they did was right then.

Not now, but then.

Augustine's Confessions (3.7.13) makes the same point - apologies for the archaic translation , by the way. It was the first one I found:


quote:
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Nor knew I that true inward righteousness which judgeth not according to custom, but out of the most rightful law of God Almighty, whereby the ways of places and times were disposed according to those times and places; itself meantime being the same always and every where, not one thing in one place, and another in another; according to which Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and Moses, and David, were righteous, and all those commended by the mouth of God; but were judged unrighteous by silly men, judging out of man's judgment, and measuring by their own petty habits, the moral habits of the whole human race.

As if in an armory, one ignorant of what were adapted to each part should cover his head with greaves, or seek to be shod with a helmet, and complain that they fitted not: or as if on a day when business is publicly stopped in the afternoon, one were angered at not being allowed to keep open shop, because he had been in the forenoon; or when in one house he observeth some servant take a thing in his hand, which the butler is not suffered to meddle with; or something permitted out of doors, which is forbidden in the dining-room; and should be angry, that in one house, and one family, the same thing is not allotted every where, and to all.

Even such are they who are fretted to hear something to have been lawful for righteous men formerly, which now is not; or that God, for certain temporal respects, commanded them one thing, and these another, obeying both the same righteousness: whereas they see, in one man, and one day, and one house, different things to be fit for different members, and a thing formerly lawful, after a certain time not so; in one corner permitted or commanded, but in another rightly forbidden and punished.

Is justice therefore various or mutable? No, but the times, over which it presides, flow not evenly, because they are times.

But men whose days are few upon the earth, for that by their senses they cannot harmonise the causes of things in former ages and other nations, which they had not experience of, with these which they have experience of, whereas in one and the same body, day, or family, they easily see what is fitting for each member, and season, part, and person; to the one they take exceptions, to the other they submit.
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Now old Auggie was actually talking about Polygamy, but his point is interesting and partly apposite, I think.

Anyway, those are just my thoughts. I recognise that they're incomplete and that they have holes. I want to write more, but time is short, so I'll leave it there.

Please, add your own thoughts on this one.


Yours in Christ

Matt

 

Including new-born children?

Lea, I have in mind particularly I Sam 15 (genocide of the Amalekites, partial by Saul, total by Samuel), Josh 6:21

Assuming we take these passages literally, which I have already said I do, how does this square with a God of love revealed in particular in Jesus?

Yours in Christ

Matt

 

Quick question then - do you believe that genocide is right or wrong, particularly if it involves children?

The question here, is whether genocide is ever moral. Some conservatives argue that whatever God does is moral - the liberal opposition agree. The inerrantists argue that God ordered genocide, therefore when God does it, it's moral. The opposition deny that he ordered it, because it's immoral.

It looks to me as though to maintain the belief that God ordered genocide, you must believe one of these...
a) they all deserved to be murdered, in which case this genocide is moral
b) God likes genocide
c) genocide was ordered in a few specific instances in order to bring about a change that would benefit the whole world - the end justifying the means, perhaps in some way that's incomprehensible to us.

I've seen some inerrantists team arguing a), dodging b) but not really going for c), which I find strange. It's not an indefensible position in light of the fact that much evil happens in the world, in accordance with God's will in a sense since he permits it, but if you played that card I'd have to argue that although he redeems evil, I don't believe he ever orders it.

Speaking as an inerrantist, I agree with a) and c), but not b. God says he doesn't like genocide and that judgement is his "strange work" and "alien task", but it is still one he does.

Yours in Christ

Matt

 

Interesting choice of quote. As far as I can see this passage opposes genocide.

Why prevent intermarriage if there is no-one to intermarry with? Why order the specific destruction of altars if all is to be destroyed?

The only possible genocide command is to "destroy them totally", but this might not be genocide, the text implies that they will be driven out and no longer allowed to worship their gods or practice their culture, which seems fairly destructive in itself.

This passage implies that the Jews were not to compromise with other peoples, but were to remain pure when they came to Canaan, not that they were to slaughter everything in their path.

So did the Jews misinterpretGod when they started killing women and children?

Yours in Christ

Matt

 

Thanks, GODzThunder. That kind of illustrates the sort of dilemma I face - not so much on a personal but on a pastoral level. The 'rejectionist'(if I can call it that) argument runs something like this:-

"How can it be within anyone's "rights" to do something which is utterly immoral? The real - and appalling - problem for me is that the assumption that underlies so much of the opposition is that genocide isn't intrinsically immoral, it's just contingently wrong because God arbitrarily tells us not to do it. Once again, we find a God whose only attribute is sovereign power.

My position is that God, revealed in Jesus Christ couldn't possibly order or sanction genocide, and the bits of the OT that seem to record that he does are in fact records of wrong time-conditioned beliefs about God. And furthermore, the disposition to entertain these bits of the OT as somehow binding on us as Christians is a symptom of a deeply faulty theology of revelation."

To which I kind of reply:-

Are you saying that God is constrained by definitions of right and wrong created by his creatures?

Yes, you can say all that stuff about God's self-revelation being coherent with our understanding. But the fact of the matter is that the book of Joshua is part of the Scriptures which point to Christ, and Christ certainly seemed to believe them as historical.

To my mind, there are two key facts here

1) Because of the way I reject God, I deserve whatever nasty forms of judgement he sees fit to send on me. So did the Amorites, etc.

2) God as love does not preclude him from also being God as light, in whose presence we cannot stand except by the blood of Jesus.

Is it possible, from your point of view that God is love, not in the sense that uncritically accepts everyone but in the sense that offers to accept everyone, even a wretched sinner like me, despite what they are like, but that still leaves room for "Holy, Holy, Holy" and for "Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished"? Is that idea of God possible to you?

(Yet I'm still bothered by the kiddies...)

Yours in Christ

Matt