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Henry Imler September 29th, 2008
Keith Ward, in chapter 6 of Is Religion Dangerous, deals with the issue of morality and the Bible. He addresses the charge that religious morality is based on an unthinking acceptance of old religious laws. As his example, he brings up one of the most notorious of religious injunctions – Deuteronomy 20:15-18.
“But these instructions apply only to distant towns, not to the towns of the nations in the land you will enter. 16 In those towns that the Lord your God is giving you as a special possession, destroy every living thing. You must completely destroy the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, just as the Lord your God has commanded you. This will prevent the people of the land from teaching you to imitate their detestable customs in the worship of their gods, which would cause you to sin deeply against the Lord your God.
Geno-what did you say? Isn’t that the very piece of evidence that we use to indict the Nazi’s, their attempted genocide of the Jews? If we are to be morally consistent, shouldn’t we reject this piece of the Old Testament and anything/anyone that relies on this passage/the book/the collection of books that uses it. Any religion that accepts this as part of their canon (read: Jews and Christians) are guilty of blindly basing their morality on old and outdated religious laws. There are three ways that religious adherents have approached this problem.
Approach One : The Morally Primitive Imagining History
This approach looks at the historical record first. They notice that the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites keep popping back up in the narrative and the archeological record. As such, the ban was not actually implemented. Secondarily, they note that the text itself was “written” [1] around 700BCE, but are describing events that are much, much older. Taking these two points in tandem, they hypothesize that scribes and priests wrote into the narrative God commanding the slaughter of “present day” rival groups to delegitimize any territorial claims they might have. This moral tradition (that it is ok to slaughter your opponents wholesale for the protection of your group) is morally primitive and is later corrected by the Prophets. [2]
Pros:
- The Genocide did not happen historically
- God is not a mass murderer
Cons:
- The Text is a pack of lies
- The authors of our text are a bunch of evil liars
Approach Two: A Unique Situation
This next approach bites the bullet(s). They say – our text says that God gave the command. However, this is a unique situation and not universally applicable. God only intended it for the Israelites in this particular situation, which was necessary for the perpetuation of the Israelites. We see that it is unique because of all of the other moral injunctions in the Hebrew Bible contradict “the Ban.” This allows us to maintain the integrity of the text while cutting off this law from the others that we can abstract moral principles from. It was said and it happened [3] but it was only for one situation and one time.
Pros:
- Maintains the integrity of the text and its authors
- The Ban was a one-time affair and not repeatable nor abstractable.
Cons:
- God is evil and bipolar
- We have mass murderers in our religious tradition.
Option Two point Five: A developing God
Ward does not mention this, but it is possible that God is developing along with his creation. In order for him to know how and what to be and act, he must have something to act and be contrasted against. After all, how can I know what red is if I have never seen it? Likewise, how can God know what wrong is unless he has done it? This is a Hegelian view of God. Under this view, God had not fully developed his morals yet. The narrative reflects God’s moral at that point in time. Later on his morals developed and he understood that all life had value and that it was wrong of him to order the genocides.
Pros:
- God was not evil – only immature and is now mature through his interaction with his creation
- Maintains the integrity of the text
Cons:
- God is a developing being and is not always right and moral
Approach Three: Morally Primitive People Acting on a Self-Correcting Partial Understanding of God
This third approach tries to address the weaknesses of the other two. It suggests that we have a roughly accurate reporting of what these people think was happening. That is to say, the ancient Israelites thought that God wanted them to purge all peoples who threatened their identity. After all, surviving and maintaining your identity was an incredibly difficult thing to do in the ancient world – something we cannot fully grasp in this blessed age of comfort and inconvenience. They had part of God figured out – that she wants total devotion, but they also had part of him wrong – that he has deemed all human lives of worth and the wholesale slaughter of peoples is wrong. In time, they would discover more and more about God and come to understand this, but at this time in their development, they had not reached this understanding. There is some perception of the divine will, but a limited one. Under this interpretive model, the Bible contains humanity’s developing understanding of God.
Pros:
- God is not evil
- Maintains the integrity of the text and the developing moral understanding of its authors
- The Ban was based on a partial but flawed understanding of God
Cons:
- The Bible is something to be wrestled with, not a direct perfect view of God and its interaction with history (can’t take it at face value)
Out of these three [4] views that Ward presents, I am uncertain as to which I follow. My background tells me that all live is Gods and he can do with it as he pleases. Based off of that, option two seems the most viable. However, I also maintain that God is morally consistent and always has been. This forces me to at least consider option three. If I am forced to choose, this is the option I am going with right now, even though I am uncomfortable with how this view forces me to hold the Bible. As Ward notes on page 138, “Believers have no magical route to moral certainty, nothing that undercuts the hard process of moral analysis and reflection.” But it is the same for nonbelievers. They have to give an account of how life can have meaning in the face of nothingness – or at least fleetingness. If my flame flickers and then is snuffed out – does it really matter what it burned while it was here? I am not saying atheists cannot give such an account [5] – only noting that it too is a path forged through analysis and reflection and is not self-evident.
- that is, the “final” version was edited together around this time – not that these traditions were invented at this time. the traditions behind the text are much, much older [↩]
- see Ezekiel 18:20 [↩]
- or at least was attempted [↩]
- four, if you add 2.5, the one that I added [↩]
- even though I freely admit that I ultimately reject their account [↩]
If the process of moral analysis and reflection can override and interpret the Bible, isn’t that type of morality superior to the Bible? Wouldn’t we be better off to skip directly to it, bypassing the Bible in our search for moral guidance?
Moral analysis and reflection does not merely override and superceede the Bible - the Bible is intricately involved in the process. It contains not just the genocides of Joshuah. It contains the correction of the Prophets, the example of Jesus, and the infusion of humanity (and the rest of creation) with worth in the opening of Genesis. With the narrative of the Bible, I have a reason to treat people as ends, not as means. My morality is intricately tied to the narrative of the Bible. Without it and I lose my basis, the history of reflection and correction, a history of errors and sucesses.
If I left out the Bible, I’d be either a by-the-numbers consequentialist (and I’d be hard pressed to rationalize the good that I was trying to maximize ) or an Ayn Rand objectivist.
The narrative of Bible does not have to only either be blindly accepted or rejected wholesale.
I would like to address a few things. First, the use of the term genocide. This is actually a word game that people like to play. If you replace genocide with righteous judgment, instead of making God a murderer looking to destroy ethnic groups who do not fit his group of people suddenly he is impartial and is looking at what the people do as bringing on their punishment, not their mere existence.
I guess I will have to support this. So we should start back in Genesis, God gives the promise to Abraham of the land the Canaanites are living in and tells Abraham that he will destroy the people there because the fullness of their sins had not been reached and because of the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods. Not just because they worship other gods, but the way in which the gods are worshiped.
So several hundred years pass and the Hebrews are exiting Egypt. A lot of slaves just walk out of Egypt, who is arguably the most powerful empire in the world at the time. Of course I did not mention the miracles that the Bible records as happening, but I think we know most of them. So Moses leads the people to Canaan and basically the people revolt against God and say that they will not enter the land. God punishes them with 40 years of wandering. After the wandering Joshua now leads the people into Canaan, stating with Jericho. Also the Bible records, through the statement of Rahab, a Canaanite woman, that the people of the land know the things that have been going on with the Hebrews since they left Egypt and are afraid of them. So they know the things God has done for the Hebrews, and should recognize the Hebrew God.
Now here is where are the arguing occurs. However, this is also where it shows that God is not just interested in committing genocide, but looking to destroy the enemies of him and his people. In Jericho the spies that are sent are hidden by Rahab. Because she helps them, and accepts the Hebrew God as supreme, she is protected by God and not destroyed with the rest of Jericho. So someone from the wrong ethnic group survived because they chose to follow God.
Next there was a command to destroy everything. However Achan, a Hebrew disobeyed and took some things for himself. Because of this action, acting against what God told the Hebrews, he and his family were destroyed. So acting against God is what is punished.
I guess what I am trying to say is that the people were not destroyed because of their ethnicity. They were destroyed because of their colloused refusal to obey a God in which they had seen his power first hand.
We see examples of God showing mercy on people outside the Hebrew race and judgment on the Hebrew people all throughout the Bible, sucha as what happened in Jerusalem in 586 BCE, Jonah and the Ninevites, Israel 722 BCE, and even into the New Testament with Ananias and Sapphirah. God is not destroying the people of the wrong ethnic background, he is judging the people who stand contrary to his people and his promises.
So if the command is taken out of context with no understanding of the world or the situations described in the Bible and a complete disregard for the ancient Canaanite religious practices, then yes God is evil or bipolar or anything else you choose to label someone like this. However, if God judges impartially, and judges based on how people act, it shows him as someone who will not tolerate those who disregard who he is and what he has done and what he requires of them.
[...] Imler presents An Evil, Bipolar God posted at Hundie Jo [dot] Com. How do scholars interpret Old Testament commands to destroy other [...]
I’m going to come in along the same line as Andy:
God isn’t “evil;” He’s just. God — who made us, who owns every living thing — chose this as the just punishment of the Canaanites and to protect the nation who would point the world to Christ.
He warned Israel that they were to destroy those people to keep them from infecting Israel. Isreal didn’t do it. They infected Israel. Every invasion of Israel/Judah by the Philistines, Egypt, Syrian, Assyria, Babylon, and Greece and more, and the resulting deaths, can be traced back to Israel’s failure to obey God in this matter.
Andy said, “This is actually a word game that people like to play. If you replace genocide with righteous judgment . . .” True! If you replace “Holocaust” with “final solution” it doesn’t sound so bad either, does it? Also, you can call smashing someone’s head in “unintentional neuron displacement,” but using a nicer word doesn’t make the act any more moral. How do you define genocide? Despite the etymology, it is not limited to race. I looked over several definitions and most of them are something like this: “Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group.” So, the acts described in the Hebrew Bible qualify as genocide in at least the religious way.
Are you really making the case that it is okay to wipe out all people that hold to a certain religion if your religion commands it?
Andy,
It does seem as though you are describing a just genocide. Also, if we say that it is ok for people to kill any group that threatens their identity as long as God says it is ok, then we really lose any moral ground we wanna stand on when we reject the fundamentalist Wahhabi Muslim claims that their war on the west is justified. We conceed that point to them. Godly murder is a.o.k.
One last thing that I am going to say on this is that I will still argue that this is judgment and not genocide. Genocide is based on affiliation, judgment is based on deed. If we believe God can judge we must believe that he judges based on deeds. Also it is God using people as his instruments of judgment, not people saying a group is bad and that they must be destroyed. I do not believe that it is shaky ground to concede to allow God to judge in the manner he chooses to judge.
Andy,
I can buy a good and just God enacting punishment on the nation, or on its adults. However, one is hard pressed to rationalize the killing of children (but the case can be made that they were sinning) or babies (read Ez 18 again).
By the standards laid out in Ez 18, the message of Duet 20 is morally wrong. If the whole of a people, including those who cannot be held culpable, is systematically murdered, then that is genocide.
You don’t have any moral problems with that, any unease, even if you ultimately side with the text (which, I will grant, has some rationale behind it)? To be honest, I don’t exactly know where I line up here. I find merits and problems with 2 and 3.
Of course, approach 1 is the only morally correct choice and it’s only available to non-Christians and Christians who are highly skeptical of the Hebrew Bible.
<blockquote>To devote one’s moral reflections to constructing elaborate rationales for past genocides, human sacrifices, and the like is to invite applications of similar reasoning to future actions. -Elizabeth Anderson</blockquote>
Andy, I don’t think you would ever hurt anyone, but you are using the same rationale that suicide bombers use every day. You say that if God commands an action, then it must be just. So, if you believed that God was commanding you to blow up a building, then you would have no problems doing it. Is that correct? Fortunately, no one is telling you that God wants that, but you’re willingness to obey such a terrible command (or defend such an action) is a problem in my opinion.
We either serve a just God and believe his Word to us or we try to rely on our superior gifts of discernment, wisdom, moral analysis and reflection to determine what we will believe. And “everyone did as he saw fit.” Judges 17:6 A rather shaky proposition without an absolute standard. The punishment due from sin is death - spiritual death. Jesus warns us our real fear should be the second death of hell, since physically, we all die once. And, as the prophet said, “Woe to him who quarrels with his Maker, to him who is but a potsherd among the potsherds on the ground.” Is. 45:9 Who is the clay to question the Potter?
As per:
“Shouldn’t we reject this piece of the Old Testament and anything/anyone that relies on this passage/the book/the collection of books that uses it. Any religion that accepts this as part of their canon (read: Jews and Christians) are guilty of blindly basing their morality on old and outdated religious laws.”
By the way, that is basically Obama’s position, in a recent speech, though he included Christ’s Sermon on the Mount as well:
Claudia,
Honzo, would you consider God’s use of Israel against the Canaanites different than God’s use of Assyria and Babylon against Israel and Judah when Israel was just as guilty of sin and injustice as the Canaanites? If so, on what basis? If not, how do they differ? I’m just curious. I find that Yahweh treated Canaan, Egypt, Assyria, Israel, Judah, Edom, Babylon, Syria all the same when he judged them, he brought in an invading nation to conquer and destroy them. It so happens that Israel happens to be the invading nation against Canaan. I see that Yahweh is consistent under that Covenant/era.“
I start with the assumption that genocide is always wrong. It is completely impossible to reconcile that belief with the belief that the Bible is inerrant (or even historically reliable). All of your options have to call into question at least one of those two beliefs. I respect you for acknowledging that. When someone tries to defend genocide as a morally good action, they are straying into dangerous territory.
Many primitive cultures attributed their victories and defeats in battle to their local deities. They did the same for fertility and weather. I would hope that we know better than that today.
I didn’t make myself very clear there. It’s my belief that God gave us his Word, and as an all-powerful Being was able to do so in an accurate, consistent, and clear manner. If we read it and believe the God who inspired it, then we can know he is good, compassionate, long-suffering, and at the same time just and righteous. God eliminated the entire world of people, with the exception of 8 individuals, at Noah’s Flood, and is the One who charged the Israelites with exterminating the Canaanites, and the Babylonians with conquering Israel. He opened up the earth to swallow Dathan and Abiram along with their entire households (Israelites). He caused the Red Sea to drown the Egyptian army, and etc. Life and death are in his hands. When we extrapolate and try to justify something like Jim Jones did or Hitler or anyone else acting on their own initiative, that is presumption and a sin in itself. Because some leader, present-day or historical, says God told him to do thus and so, doesn’t mean it’s true. What is true is what’s recorded in Scripture.
This life is a blink in eternity. We are all terminal, and if we miss the opportunity of knowing God here and for eternal life then that is something to really cry about.
I have a question for Claudia and anyone else who is willing to take the position that the Bible is inerrant and genocide is not always wrong. If you became convinced that God wanted you to hunt me down and kill me for my unbelief, would you do it? Leave aside the fact that you think God wouldn’t say that and the issue of how you would determine whether God was giving you that message. If he did give you that message, as you believe he has done to other people in the past, would you obey him and kill me? What if he also commanded you to kill my young child? Would you kill her? She’s six.
Danny, your assumption that genocide is always wrong, is wrong, if that is what you call what the Israelites were commanded to do. God is the one who determines life and death. He is the Potter. Hypothetical situations are useless here.
Henry says “if we say that it is ok for people to kill any group that threatens their identity.” Who says, and where did that come from? God was using the Israelites to set aside a people for himself (a sort of tithe of humanity) for various purposes, and to eliminate a group of people who were completely offensive to him. They were only partially obedient to God’s command. I don’t think he gave a rip about their identity, but about their relationship with him. There were lots of Egyptians mixed in, not to mention Cushites, Midianites and etc., with that motley crew.
Claudia,
How do you know that God commanded the Israelites to do that? Is it possible that they did something, then said God told them to? Is it possible that the book of Joshua has legendary elements?
I’m not surprised that you refused to answer my question. Answering it would show how terrible your belief is. The fact that you won’t own up to that at least tells us that you’re ashamed of your belief, which is a step in the right direction.
Danny,
Yeah it’s possible that it happened that way. But the assumption that she and others (and maybe me) are going off of is that these texts are an accurate description of what God said.
Your hypothetical example is missing one very important element. In order for your example to be parallel, we’d have to say that you had been going around murdering men women and children and been teaching your child to do the same. Then God would say, “I have given Danny and his child many chances to stop their murdering ways. I have decided to have you administer justice to Danny and the child he has corrupted.” Only then would you example begin to approach what the text is saying.
I haven’t made a decision on where I stand on this issue yet, but I think we wrongly assume that people in the Old Testament always heard from God better than we can today and that the message didn’t ever get distorted, or filtered through their prejudices.
Adam and Eve had direct quotes from God and still doubted Him enough to take from the tree. Moses felt justified in striking the rock for water. The “young prophet” was diverted from his destination by the “old prophet”.
Today we have the complete scripture, the WORD of God (Jesus) in our hearts, AND the counsel of the Holy Spirit and we still have a hard time figuring out our calling, whom to marry and where to move.
Something else to consider is that perhaps God (in allowing us to have free will) just has to use the tools (humans) he is presented with. In that time, it was primitive people who warred with each other. In the NT, Paul instructs slaves to stay slaves, but we don’t today take that to mean that God condones slavery (I hope). :)
OR, it could be that God sometimes takes responsibility for the actions people, as he did when Pharoah hardened his heart and when King Saul fell upon his sword.
Also, the dictionary definition of genocide is the systematic murder of an entire political, cultural, or religious group. Whether or not we like the tone of the word, its use is still valid.
One question for the group. Why do you think God didn’t choose to just insulate/protect his people and just let the heathens kill themselves off around them?
Claudia, while I admire you dedication to the scriptures, I would like to see you interact with Danny’s question. It is a tough one, even if it needs to be modified to maintain the parallel. I’d even like to see Andy come back and answer it.
Henry,
I’d like to see you answer my question, too. Add on your qualifier if you want, though I don’t think it’s necessary. Surely you don’t think that every last adult in the culture that God ordered to be exterminated was participating in and approving of murder. If you were sure God wanted you to kill me, even if you weren’t convinced that I deserved it from what you saw of me, would you trust in God enough to do it?
GiGi, I applaud your honest struggle with these issues. You ask some very good questions. The OT actively condones slavery and the NT simply mentions it without commenting on the moral status. If Paul had been asked directly, what would he have said about slavery? I doubt that he would have condemned it. He probably would have admitted that the OT condoned it, and said that the equality his letters proclaim transcends slavery and can be enjoyed by slaves without freeing them from their physical bondage.
It is difficult to have a discussion with a group of people, all operating under different assumptions. However, we can look at the internet as a sort of agora. First of all, the Bible is, from my point of view, God’s Word to us, truth, a manual for life. Some is history, so he is not necessarily condoning or approving of that - dancing around and worshiping a gold calf, rape and murder, Moses slam-dunking a rock in anger. So, sin and life lessons for us from people’s past mistakes. Slavery, for example, came about as a result of poverty, sin (of theft, greed, etc.) and war. Not necessarily worse than prison, a death penalty or, in wartime, elimination of all prisoners. Not God’s highest for us, but is our system so much improved? We do think we know better. We’re so advanced. Our society a real pinnacle of high morals and equality. But, maybe we’re still a “primitive” people, warring with one another?