Cane noticed some writing on the Israelite genocides in the Old Testament and gave a solid response (read it). I’m going to write on the topic as well. This post will also tie in with my earlier post, The Holocaust: God Loves the Jews.
First, we must remember that God is good and God is good. Good is defined in relation to God, He is the absolute measure of good apart from which good becomes meaningless, so whatever God does or orders is good.
To try and judge God or His works is arrogance, nothing more. To try to hold judgment over His commands is error. To try to explain away, minimize, or apologize for His works and His orders is to attack God’s righteousness. To think that God’s commands present a problem is not a problem of God, but rather a deficiency in your own understanding and own morality.
How dare Christians take their modern liberal morality and try to impute it on God, then wonder why God falls short in their judgment. This is moral pride, nothing more. Christians who do need to read more Job:
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:4-7 ESV)
The question is not ‘why did God command this evil?’ That question assumes that man has the right to judge God’s work as evil. The right question is ‘what can we learn about God’s goodness from this command?’
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Second, to think the genocide at the behest of God is murder is a grave misunderstanding of the law. Murder is unlawful killing and God’s law is the highest law. If God orders a killing, it is by definition lawful, and is therefore, by definition, not murder.
To even think it theoretically possible that God can order murder is to put human law above God’s law and to assume that humans have the right to judge God. That is sinful pride.
But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory—even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles? (Romans 9:20-24 ESV)
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Finally, the good of the genocide of the Canaanites is easy to see if one looks to the eternal rather than the temporal.
The iniquity of the Canaanites had come to completion, they had given themselves fully to Moloch, the dark god of the Ammonites. As a race the Canaanites had damned themselves through their offerings of their children to the fire. The sons of the Canaanites, at least those who were not themselves sacrificed, would follow in the sins of their fathers and damn themselves. To kill them in the name of Yahweh, before they could reach the age of reason and damn themselves, saved them from both the fires of Moloch and the fires of hell.
Death was the greatest mercy those children could receive for it would keep them from eternal damnation.
On top, of this, leaving the Canaanites and Ammonites alive would have led to their bringing the rebellious Israelites into the worship of Moloch, damning the Israelites alongside them. Even as it was the Israelites occasionally fell to Moloch. How much worse would it have been had the Lord not ordered their destruction.
They built the high places of Baal in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them, nor did it enter into my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin. (Jeremiah 32:35 ESV)
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To conclude, to ask the question concerning the slaughter of the Canaanites in the manner the question is usually asked is both sinful pride and too focused on the temporal. It is putting one’s own morality, one’s own understanding, and one’s own law above God, His understanding, His morality, and His law. Instead of judging God by their limited, temporal standards, Christians should focus on learning of the eternal good from God and His commands.
Trust in the LORD with all your heart,
and do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make straight your paths.
Be not wise in your own eyes;
fear the LORD, and turn away from evil.
It will be healing to your flesh
and refreshment to your bones.
(Proverbs 3:5-8 ESV)
The concept of corporate punishment come to mind:
http://www.tektonics.org/af/achanbrachan.php
The Almighty God is the God of war, Lord of the host. That He commanded genocide of His enemies bothers so many Christian men demonstrates how little they understand God.
FN,
Your writing continues to improve. Concerning children sacrificed to Molech and God’s justice, I shudder to think of the abortion mills in our culture and the inevitability of Divine judgement.
Say, would you mind me killing your children?
You like to go on about how bad and corrupt this world of ours is, so it stands to reason that there is significant chance one or more of your children will fall to its corruption and damn themselves to our modern Moloch and the fires of hell.
In the interest of eternal rather than temporal good and saving your children from eternal damnation I would like to perform the merciful act of killing your children.
I know that your moral law forbids you from killing them yourself or aiding me in killing them, so I won’t ask this of you, but would you resent me if I were to kill them?
Sam thinks the voices in his head are God talking to him.
Something claiming to be the voice of God commands you to kill children.
Do you obey, or are you convinced this was the voice of Satan, and refuse?
Sam and Michael,
Do you believe the bombing of Dresden was justified? Why or why not? Do you understand why the question is germane to this discussion?
Is revenge justified in general? Was indiscriminate bombing of southern England and Belgium with V-1 and V-2 a sufficient reason to inflict revenge on the civilians of Dresden?
Exfernal,
You are begging the question. If that is the best “argument” you can manage then I believe we can safely conclude the matter settled.
This is the same argument that the Muslims make: we cannot put man’s law above God’s law, and man has no right to judge God. Anything Mohammed did is good by definition.
So clearly your argument is wrong, because it defends and promotes the great evil of Islam.
You need to re-think things.
Is revenge justified in general? Was indiscriminate bombing of southern England and Belgium with V-1 and V-2 a sufficient reason to inflict revenge on the civilians of Dresden?.
Enlighten me then. How does your settlement look like? Somehow I can’t wrap my head around the concepts of ‘loving one’s enemies’ and vengeance as compatible with each other.
In Dresden, there was deliberate preference of killing and maiming civilians over the destruction of industrial infrastructure. Spare me the line about ‘collateral damage’. That damage wasn’t collateral. It was premeditated.
This is a false dichotomy, ironically because you are putting yourself – your personal interpretations of Scripture and your understanding of inerrancy – in God’s place.
Questioning your understanding of the Bible, of moral doctrine, and of epistemology isn’t questioning God. It is questioning you.
Malcolm:
This is similar to the question “shouldn’t you always follow your conscience?” It is frequently asked by modernists who are fishing for excuses to disobey the moral law.
Of course you should always follow your conscience. But a properly formed, informed, and conformed conscience will never sanction evil.
Why did Moses spare females of some tribes and not others? From a Darwinist perspective, marrying captured virgins into the tribe makes more sense than killing them *if* they are of similar racial stock, so that their children will be full members of the tribe and not half-breed mulattoes. In either case, there’s little reason to spare males of any age.
American Indians seem less concerned with racial purity — they sometimes initiated white captives of both sexes into their tribes.
“Zippy” would rather attack the Protestant tradition of interpreting scripture so as to distract from the genocidal Roman Church trying to pressure white Protestant United States into destruction via the brown Roman Catholic mestizo flood.
Pope is a genocidal screamer, yells “racist” “xenophobic” http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/07/15/Pope-Welcome-Them
Anti-white screamers, thugs, thought police http://www.whitakeronline.org/blog/2014/07/26/the-bizarro-world-of-anti-whites/
Alan J. Perrick writes:
[… something completely off topic that doesn’t address any of the actual points I made…]
Look! Squirrel!
Throughout scripture, God has only required genocide during the foundation, conquest and defense of Israel. As far as I can tell, He has never uttered a Palpatine-esque “Wipe them out. All of them.” under any other circumstance. It’s almost as if God was giving his people a garden, and told them to pull up the weeds by the roots.
What is interesting is the consequences for disobedience. In 1 Samuel 15, God tells the Saul to terminate the Amalekites — including Agag, their king, with extreme prejudice. History records that Saul had other ideas and did not complete the job. That’s a shame, because a few centuries later, Haman the *Agag*ite came within a whisker of wiping Israel off the map. Action, meet consequence. Fast-forward a few more centuries, and after repeated warnings, when the people of Israel stepped out of line one time too many, he took that land away from them and sent them into exile – with a promise of eventual redemption.
There are those who might contest the legitimacy of the modern state of Israel, and they may have a point. But throughout history, whenever a people-group have been captured and taken into exile, they have been absorbed into the culture of their captors within a couple of generations. To my knowledge, the Jews are the only people who have kept their cultural identity intact, in their case for two millennia. If that ain’t God looking after his people, I don’t know what is.
“Zippy”
It was on topic conisidering your motivation in writing what you did.
Genocide is on topic, to what F.N. wrote.
Alan J. Perrick:
Yet another Internet clairvoyant, responding to the voices in his head rather than the words on the screen.
I’m not sure you guys really appreciate the full implications of Euthyphro’s dilemma. Defining god as good either denies god agency, the ability to choose, or it makes good relative, not absolute. I didn’t take you for a moral relativist. God could have never sent the angel to stop Abraham from sacrificing Isaac and it would have been equally good as sending the angel. If right and wrong are absolute and not apart from god then he has no will of his own. The temptations of Jesus would be meaningless since he never had the capacity to sin in the first place.
Bottom line, you can’t use god to justify something. Either justice stands on its own or is rendered meaningless.
This is similar to the question “shouldn’t you always follow your conscience?” It is frequently asked by modernists who are fishing for excuses to disobey the moral law.
Of course you should always follow your conscience. But a properly formed, informed, and conformed conscience will never sanction evil.
I agree, and that is my point.
@
“”But why take the lives of innocent children? The terrible totality of the destruction was undoubtedly related to the prohibition of assimilation to pagan nations on Israel’s part. In commanding complete destruction of the Canaanites, the Lord says, “You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons, or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods” (Deut 7.3-4). This command is part and parcel of the whole fabric of complex Jewish ritual law distinguishing clean and unclean practices. To the contemporary Western mind many of the regulations in Old Testament law seem absolutely bizarre and pointless: not to mix linen with wool, not to use the same vessels for meat and for milk products, etc. The overriding thrust of these regulations is to prohibit various kinds of mixing. Clear lines of distinction are being drawn: this and not that. These serve as daily, tangible reminders that Israel is a special people set apart for God Himself.
I spoke once with an Indian missionary who told me that the Eastern mind has an inveterate tendency toward amalgamation. He said Hindus upon hearing the Gospel would smile and say, “Sub ehki eh, sahib, sub ehki eh!” (“All is One, sahib, All is One!” [Hindustani speakers forgive my transliteration!]). It made it almost impossible to reach them because even logical contradictions were subsumed in the whole. He said that he thought the reason God gave Israel so many arbitrary commands about clean and unclean was to teach them the Law of Contradiction!
By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel’s being set exclusively apart for God.”
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/slaughter-of-the-canaanites
@Exfernal
Somehow I can’t wrap my head around the concepts of ‘loving one’s enemies’ and vengeance as compatible with each other.
Proverbs 25:21-22
If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; And if he is thirsty, give him water to drink; 22For you will heap burning coals on his head, And the LORD will reward you.…”
http://thirdmill.org/studybible/note.asp/id/41290
Hopefully this will bring you to a greater understanding.
“To the contemporary Western mind many of the regulations in Old Testament law seem absolutely bizarre and pointless….”
They may seem bizarre and pointless now, but back then there were pragmatic reasons. Many of those rules and regulations were public health ordinances (don’t eat pork, quarantine lepers etc) that are no longer necessary. Others (avoid sex outside of marriage) are still necessary. To me, the only effort required is telling which is which, but most are fairly obvious.