Did God tell the Jews to commit genocide?

[Inquiry]

There’s no need to use so much hyperbole here. In fact I think it is getting in the way. You seem to be proposing a false dichotomy where we can either choose a literalist interpretation or accept Christ. However, very often our understanding is not advanced by avoiding seeming contradictions but by facing them. After all, even if we avoid the specific passages about genocide, we can’t avoid God’s authority over man. It shows up in too many locations.

 

[goout]

There’s no need to use so much hyperbole here. In fact I think it is getting in the way. You seem to be proposing a false dichotomy where we can either choose a literalist interpretation or accept Christ. However, very often our understanding is not advanced by avoiding seeming contradictions but by facing them. After all, even if we avoid the specific passages about genocide, we can’t avoid God’s authority over man. It shows up in too many locations.

You miss the point.
What I am specifically doing is rejecting the false dichotomies that do not center on Christ as the fullness of revelation.
The Church seeks the fullness and unity of revelation in Christ.
That is the point that P Benedict makes in the referenced documents and mainstream Catholic scripture exegesis makes.

That’s not hyperbole.

 

[goout]

goout:

True that.

Should have stopped there.

Freedom is not license .

Not agreeing with you isn’t taking license. Agreeing with Sts. Chrysostom, Agustine and Aquinas instead of you isn’t license. I assume you know that since you didn’t address the quotes.

Irrelevant passages are of no interest to me. Reductio ad absurdum is also of no interest. Even though you deny the validity of interpretations other than your own and have tried to imply I’m either not Catholic or am a bad Catholic for doing so, I forgive you and may God bless you.

Just to be clear, I do deny the validity of interpretations that support God commanding genocide in literalist fashion, human to human, soldier to woman and child.
I deny that those are mainstream ecclesial and I will stand with others in the Catholic Church that also reject hideous literalist interpretations of scripture that scandalize others.

I don’t intend to be ambiguous here. Those interpretations ought to be soundly rejected as outside the mainstream of Catholic thought (they actually have been repeatedly)

I am grateful for your forgiveness.

 

[Inquiry]

Of course Christ is the fullness of the revelation. That doesn’t mean that the hard passages of the Old Testament must be figurative, or misunderstandings.

I’ve brought up the Binding of Isaac several times now because it is an example of God asking someone to kill an innocent. We can’t ignore it either because it is also a prefigurement of the crucifixion. God asks Abraham to do something that He Himself is going to do. Nor is that the only command from Abraham’s life that we are forced to consider as real.

 

[EndTimes]

Of course Christ is the fullness of the revelation. That doesn’t mean that the hard passages of the Old Testament must be figurative, or misunderstandings.

I’ve brought up the Binding of Isaac several times now because it is an example of God asking someone to kill an innocent. We can’t ignore it either because it is also a prefigurement of the crucifixion. God asks Abraham to do something that He Himself is going to do. Nor is that the only command from Abraham’s life that we are forced to consider as real.

Exactly… And in my wonderment over arguments over literal vs figurative -
Why even engage so long when one should be attending to doing what we’re Commanded to do.

Beyond potentially endless armchair theology arguments,
we must simply and clearly Love our Neighbor in Action…

_

 

[Neithan]

It’s specifically a divine command to kill babies that I think presents a truly “hard problem” for morality in these passages. Killing men, women and children at least above the age of reason is a moral problem, but could at least be somehow construed as executing divine justice if this was divinely revealed. Killing babies? I don’t see how that could be anything other than ends-justifies-means reasoning.

@FrancisFan43 stated above that these babies were “diseased” somehow. Do you mean morally diseased? How could a baby be morally diseased?

If you mean physically diseased, we could consider a scenario where all the Amalekite babies were somehow infected with a highly lethal plague, and were asymptomatic super-spreaders, such that they would have been a deadly risk to the Israelites. Still, even then, how is this not ends-justifies-means to slaughter them? Israel were the invaders, not defenders. If we could envision a siege where the enemy brings plague-ridden babies around your city then I think we could stretch justification for killing the attackers indiscriminately if it was somehow divinely revealed that these babies would be the death of your city inhabitants. How could we justify invading a city and slaughtering their diseased babies? Just stay away from that city.

 

[Neithan]

And from St. Thomas Aquinas:

But in the neighboring cities which had been promised to them, all were ordered to be slain, on account of their former crimes

I’m curious if Aquinas means the former “crimes” as the serious sins of those men, women and children (which excludes babies and very young children), or the former crimes of those city inhabitants altogether. Then that would mean we can incur the guilt of our ancestors, somehow, without personal guilt? Is that something included in original sin? If that is really what he thought, that might shed some more light on why he argued against the immaculate conception.

 

[MiserereMeiDei]

Recall that when Abraham was promised the land he was told that his progeny would have to remain in Egypt 400 years, until the sins of the inhabitants of the land be filled.

So I think he means that though we are often judged individually, nations themselves are also judged (Sodom and Gomorrah, Assyria, Babylon, Israel, etc.). As such, even the guiltless may be caught up in the judgement of the wicked. They do not suffer in the afterlife that which is suffered by the guilty, but they did share in their temporal suffering. The rain falls on the just and the wicked alike…but they don’t share an equal fate in eternity, where it actually matters. (I can’t recall if this was Augustine or Aquinas).

Also, when Jonah was sitting outside Nineveh, God said “And shall not I spare Ninive, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons that know not how to distinguish between their right hand and their left, and many beasts?” So it would seem God clearly does not wish that this calamity should befall the guiltless, but he also clearly indicates that it will if those around them do not repent-and he doesn’t always warn us-we do have the light of reason after all. It makes me very concerned about all that our nation does. I expect similar calamity to befall us if not worse.

This also brings to mind that God owes us nothing and that invincible ignorance, often seen as an eighth sacrament, has no power to save us from hell, it is only the gift of grace that can save us from that fate. The babies in the cherem are invincibly ignorant, but they are not just. God may choose to save them or not as he wills but who are we to say he is unjust either way? All we can ever do is ask for mercy as Abraham did for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah.

This link has a number of quotations from church fathers discussing the matter directly or indirectly. I only use it as a source for quotes from Church fathers. It’s a doctoral thesis (Reading Herem Texts as Christian Scripture) for a student at Oxford.

I’ve never read why he opposed the immaculate conception. I bet that was a happy surprise for him when he was born into eternity.

Well that was quite the ramble.

 

[choose_to_love]

@goout

" . . . interpretations ought to be soundly rejected as outside the mainstream of Catholic thought"

Do any of the rejections of what you call literalist interpretations exist prior to the 20th century? Is this, in your estimation, a development of the mind of the Church, or was this (relatively) always the Church’s teaching position on the scriptures in question?

 

[Neithan]

God may choose to save them or not as he wills but who are we to say he is unjust either way?

I wouldn’t question the justice of God, but the moral contradiction in commanding people to murder babies. It’s divine command theory justifying the ends (divine justice) by an intrinsically evil means (murdering babies). I don’t see how it doesn’t fall completely under the Euthyphro dilemma. If we want to argue that unbaptized babies are not innocent and we can justify killing them for Lebensraum then it’s impossible to argue that abortion is intrinsically evil. I am not convinced Aquinas thought this way, either, and he left a lot of sketchy answers to questions before he died.

Thanks for the link. As soon as I read “Wirkungsgeschichte of herem” I knew I’d have to read the rest of it.

 

[Neithan]

Re-read 1 Samuel 15 again.

Notice that Samuel is speaking those words, not God directly. Isn’t it possible that Samuel added that part about slaughtering nursing infants without that being a literal divine command or God’s positive will? This was not the Word of God in the flesh speaking.

 

[AlbMagno]

This also brings to mind that God owes us nothing and that invincible ignorance, often seen as an eighth sacrament, has no power to save us from hell

First you say guiltless babies don’t share the eternal fate of their guilty fathers, and then you say they may not enter Heaven by invincible ignorance never the less. Isn’t this an over-strech to attack invincible ignorance?

 

[EndTimes]

I find it interesting that for many centuries there were Christian sects that believed the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament were two completely different Gods, precisely to resolve this question.

that notion was introduced by false theologians of the latter 20th Century…

For Centuries Different Sects?

Like whom? … . Source please… ?

 

[EndTimes]

First of all, calling a biblical scholar a ‘false theologian’ is disingenuous. The people you are referring to (as far as I can tell) are just scholars doing research and forming theories. Their theories could be right, they could be wrong. But there is nothing inherently “false” about proposing scholarly research - in this case forming a theory that Yahweh (YHWH) is not the same as Kyrios (God of NT).

You should know in a heartbeat where that theory is at.
One doesn’t need to be a so-called ‘scholar’
One simply needs the Faith which allows God to Guide one…

 

[Mijoy2]

Presently atheists are very successful at evangelizing people away from Christinaity. It is a big problem with whole generations falling away from the church. So many people losing faith, so many people walking away from God and religion.

What I am saying is that these atheists are very publicly using scriptures like we are talking about to discredit God and religion. Seeing as how difficult passages such as these are not required to be taken literally by the Church, and seeing as how these very scriptures are being used to convert people away from God it would seem like a good idea NOT to press a literal take on them in public.

That is the argument. It comes from not wanting to create unnecessary stumbling blocks for people coming to Christ.

I see your point. I, for example, suffer much angst while listening to many atheist vs christian debates and some other atheist programming. I am of the opinion the atheist more often than not “wins”. Partly because the christian is more often than not a fundamentalist protestant and the atheist attacks the reasoning and the theology which we as Catholics might also refute but from a largely different perspective.

Although I see your point, I do not think one can turn a deaf ear (put their hands over their ears and make noises so as not to hear what the atheist has to say) to the difficult arguments. At least I cannot. I must face them head on or I feel my faith is flawed and faulty. Maybe everyone isn’t this way, but I think we need to welcome the debates, then win. Not easy because we are dealing with mysteries and mysteries in and of themselves are on the front lines with the atheist.

 

[EndTimes]

One says what one can… a few times… and if it goes nowhere… walk away…

I find it curious the question Why? are some atheists involved 24/7 attempting to undermine JESUS… .

It’s not like that’s anything new… as it makes one wonder… .

_

 

[kainosktisis]

I guess from my part, I don’t go for the nons. I tend to see them as undercutting the truth of Scripture rather than undergirding it. Why not just say the Bible lied? That’s what it comes off as to me - which plays into the hands of people who’d already attack its validity.

But I digress…

 

[franklinstower]

Concerning the bible lying. I only know a little but what I was taught by a Catholic theologian on this subject is that we misinterpret scripture when we project our obsession with exact facts and chronologies onto those authors. Semitic peoples used exaggerations and manipulation of facts to make theological points. The authors and the readers of the time knew this and so no one way “lying”.

They were living under a very different state of mind than we are and we have to be careful not to project ours onto ancient texts. I asked this theologian which texts specifically were mythological or allegorical of theological and which were strictly history and he said “We don’t know” but a general rule of thumb is that the further back you go in history, the less strictly historical a text will become.

 

[franklinstower]

There are probably many reasons but one that I am sympathetic with is the damage religious people sometimes do, especially fundamentalists, and a desire to correct these errors.

 

[goout]

I guess from my part, I don’t go for the nons. I tend to see them as undercutting the truth of Scripture rather than undergirding it. Why not just say the Bible lied? That’s what it comes off as to me - which plays into the hands of people who’d already attack its validity.

But I digress…

Couple of issues here:
Christ himself who is The Word… uses non-factual communication to convey Truth. Parables. Does the fact that Christ used non-factual communication mean that He lied?
Why should scripture be so fragile that non-factual passages render the whole thing meaningless?

What about 6 day creation? Or the hammered metal dome? The bible clearly says these things, and if these are taken as contradicting the bible’s validity, you might as well throw the whole thing out. Right?

Why not just say the Bible lied?