Genocide in the Bible: does this trouble anyone else?

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Yep, another thread on that. Before someone says search for other threads, those are closed, and I’d like to discuss the topic.

What can one say? The order in the Bible, directly from God, to conquer the land of Canaan and put the inhabitants to the sword… how does that not qualify as genocide?

I’ve seen lots of attempted justifications. Oh the book of Judges says there are Canaanites still left; Joshua is allegorical; the inhabitants were pure evil; etc. But I still wonder, how was a Canaanite baby guilty of anything? Even if the Canaanites were guilty of the most heinous crimes and human sacrifices known to man (which archaeology and historical research does not show), how were the babies guilty?

What do people think about this? Is anyone else troubled by it? Has anyone found an explanation that makes sense?
 
StudentMI said:
What do people think about this? Is anyone else troubled by it? Has anyone found an explanation that makes sense?
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Hello! I feel bad when innocent people had been victims of wars and etc.

The only answer that I find so far is they had to experience these things for the better of humanity. For example, the Holy Innocents, they are naïve and don’t know anything about sin but they had been killed for the sake of God’s plan to redeem us and to bring the Good News to the world. I believe that God don’t want to harm this babies, He wants us to realize our faults and bring us to a preferable stage of life.
 
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Hiya. 🙂

In case it jogs thoughts until wiser minds than mine step in, may I paste content I previously mentioned in a now-closed thread?
Trent Horn suggests three potential interpretive approaches a Catholic may apply when examining such ancient texts. (The Church does not tell Catholics which to believe…) Please keep in mind, by the way, that I’m massively summarizing. Trent goes into great detail and nuance and I can’t recommend his book (‘Hard Sayings’) enough.

1. 'Literal Commands, Literal History’
  • Here Trent addresses the approach that takes these texts literally, and examines the argument that God – the giver of human life – has the right to take human life, and to do so in any manner He sees fit: whether He deputizes gradual cell decay, disease, or other humans to carry this out. This approach takes into account the context of, e.g., the Canaanites, who are stated to have committed such wickedness against God that they were going to be visited by divine justice no matter what (e.g. for murdering their children) – and it’s just that rather than sending fire and brimstone from the sky, he sent the Israelites with swords. Also, even on a literal reading, it’s clear that not every Canaanite was meant to be killed (e.g. Rahab, Caleb). This approach also acknowledges the horror of the temporal suffering of the innocents (e.g. children) among the Canaanites, in an ancient ‘total war’ culture between tribes of that whole region, by pointing out that God, who loves each person, is capable of making up any finite suffering with infinite joy.
2. 'Nonliteral Commands, Literal History’
  • This approach involves addressing an ancient mode of speaking about reality, in which basically everything was said to be the will of God or to be commanded by God, out of recognition that technically all existence and action relies in some sense on God’s will enabling it (without distinguishing, for example, between His preferential and permissive will). E.g. someone could see a tree blossoming outside and give thanks that God ‘commanded that tree to blossom’. Under this interpretation, the ancient Israelites did kill entire groups of people, but God did not actually morally direct them to do so, and the way they told stories about their killings that framed God as commanding them, is just an ancient cultural/literary technique.
3. 'Nonliteral Commands, Nonliteral History’
  • God never issued these commands, and they were never carried out. Under this approach, these ancient texts are considered part of the genre of exaggerated, non-literal ‘warfare rhetoric’ of ancient tribes – and the Canaanites are not believed to have been literally destroyed at all. There would have been regional fights, but even many details in the ancient texts make clear that (despite making exaggerated ‘total destruction’ claims) a little while later, the same people still lived there. So under this interpretation, these stories weren’t meant to be taken as literal history on either level: God’s commands, or historical destruction of groups of people. They were meant to communicate something else to Israel.
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Well they did not do what god asked and saved some of those people who ended up corrupting them and they started praying to wooden idols again and it says sacrificing children. Should they have followed gods command?
 
MNathaniel said:
This approach takes into account the context of, e.g., the Canaanites, who are stated to have committed such wickedness against God that they were going to be visited by divine justice no matter what (e.g. for murdering their children) – and it’s just that rather than sending fire and brimstone from the sky, he sent the Israelites with swords.
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See this is where I have a problem. According to archaeology and historical research the Canaanites were pretty much a typical Near Eastern culture of the time. I haven’t come across any evidence of their ‘wickedness,’ apart from occupying land that God promised to a foreigner from Ur, or perhaps associating God with other gods. The later bit actually fits as evidence that the Biblical God was originally just one god among many, as the earliest sources show El (as in Isra-El) as simply a Canaanite god.
 
BT3241 said:
Well they did not do what god asked and saved some of those people who ended up corrupting them and they started praying to wooden idols again and it says sacrificing children. Should they have followed gods command?
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Does this somehow impute guilt to a 2 year old Canaanite?
 
I think the idea was that they not be corrupted by foreign Gods
 
No it does not trouble me. God’s ways are not our ways. We are to strive to live God’s will, not our will.

Jesus I trust in you.
 
I think you are making the mistake of assuming that man was able to understand God’s will perfectly. My own view is that the Old Testament includes some examples of man doing his own thing and labelling it as God’s will.

That was one of the reasons for the incarnation of Jesus…to show once and for all what God’s will is.
 
umamibella said:
No it does not trouble me. God’s ways are not our ways. We are to strive to live God’s will, not our will.

Jesus I trust in you.
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Perhaps this is ultimately the best approach. Reading in the Didache Bible, I found the following footnote on Joshua 6:21:
The actions of Israel must be understood in the context of salvation history. God revealed himself and his will to his people incrementally,bringing them along gradually not only in terms of their knowledge of him but also in their understanding of moral law. The Church, teaching in the name of Christ, forbids any form of genocide, the killing of noncombatants, and mistreatment of wounded soldiers and prisoners of war. Soldiers have the moral obligation to refuse to perform such gravely evil acts even if ordered to do so.
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I also came across something in the book The Exodus by Richard Elliott Friedman. He mentions the steles bearing evidence of Israel, and notes that they speak of Israel being no more, that its seed is wiped out. We know this not to be true, and he compares it to language such as “we killed 'em” and “we slaughtered 'em.”

In addition, note that the book of Joshua proclaims that the Canaanites are wiped out. Yet we know from Judges this is not so, and even from the text of Joshua. Look at the story of Rahab. Now one may take a critical approach and say Judges was written by another so it differs, but as Catholics we must understand the text as a coherent whole. Therefore, I propose the following, which I am not claiming to be new: the language of total extermination in the text of Joshua is hyperbolic in the vein of the steles I mentioned above. Just a way of speaking back in those days. Consequently, the order may have been similarly hyperbolic, either in original form or as it was transmitted down to us.

It gets more interesting when one gets into mystical explanations. Some saint, I believe, proposed that the story was symbolic of the seven deadly sins being conquered. This fits into the evidence that there was no large scale conquest of the land and that the Israelites arose relatively peacefully in Canaan itself. The conquest then becomes symbolic. However I have no opinion on whether the conquest happened or not. Kenneth Kitchen, a respected historian, contends it did. Others don’t. I have no idea. Just throwing this out there.

Thanks for the replies.
 
Yes God is in charge. We are to try and do His will and live by His laws, no matter how hard. We all have our struggles. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose.
Look at Abraham, God bid him kill his son. Imagine how hard that would have been.
Old Testament history is fascinating. When the Babylonian exiles were able to return to Israel and start building the second temple , they were told by their leader they had to get rid of their non jewish wives. I think children were included if the mother was not Jewish
 
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I’m at peace with it because God created life, so He may take life.

And the fact is, we are all destined to die.

And for the a Christian, death isn’t the biggest tragedy, damnation is.
I’m pretty sure God didn’t send innocent Canaanite babies to Hell.

This is a difficult passage and a lot of people trip over it and stumble or they gleefully wave it around saying, “See? See? Mean God! (…now I’m off the hook and can do whatever I want…)”.

The biggest problem I have with it personally is that some kook might decide they are a latter-day Israelite and use it as an excuse to justify their own killing.
 
StudentMI said:
I haven’t come across any evidence of their ‘wickedness,’
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Just for the sake of argument: what kind of “archaeological or historical” evidence of ‘wickedness’ might you think you’d be able to find? Or, better yet, you might reasonably expect you should be able to find?

If the answer is “well… none, really”, then you can’t establish the null hypothesis on the basis of not finding it. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”, remember?
 
God was concerned with the survival of his chosen people. If he thought it was necessary for his chosen people to kill off another people in order to fulfill his plan and not be corrupted by the practices of the people they were overtaking, then that’s what God directed.

We can’t really superimpose our 21st century ideas of how we deal with our neighbors onto a culture from thousands of years ago. We also aren’t in possession of all the facts, since Scripture is not a comprehensive historical document. You saying you “haven’t come across any evidence of their wickedness” isn’t particularly persuasive because there likely isn’t evidence this many thousands of years later.

Total acceptance of God means accepting things you don’t fully understand. When it’s something like this that was many thousands of years removed from your immediate experience, it’s hard for me to see why it would concern anyone. God obviously had a purpose, whether that was the survival of his people, preventing them from being corrupted by a pagan culture that might well have been evil, or simply teaching them lessons. I’m happy to leave that purpose to God and focus on my own life now today in the 21st century.

So no, I don’t get troubled by stuff in the Old Testament. It would be a ginormous waste of my time, which I already don’t have enough of. Besides, it’s the OLD Testament. We have a new one now, with Jesus teaching us new lessons and making a new covenant with us.
 
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To me, it’s simple.

Yahweh is the author of life and as such, has the sole right to take it away. Whether through a genocide or otherwise.

Death is death. Not being subjected to a genocide will be no comfort the day anybody wakes up not breathing.
 
Joshua, Deborah, David, and the others were acting in accordance with what they perceived as the will of God. Their idea of God’s will, as recorded in the OT, is not the same as our idea of God’s will today. That doesn’t mean that God has changed, just that – unsurprisingly, over a period of three thousand years – people’s ideas about God have changed.

Rereading those books today, we sometimes see a striking contrast between the almost constant violent warfare on the one hand, and the occasional instances where God’s will was perceived as being to show respect, consideration, tolerance, and forgiveness. On two separate occasions David had the opportunity to kill Saul and escape undetected, but he tells his companions, both times, that killing Saul would be contrary to God’s will (1 Sam 24:6 and 26:9):


 
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God demanding the destruction of a wicked people doesn’t bother me at all. If he decreed all needed death, than who are we to question it?
 
StudentMI said:
According to archaeology and historical research the Canaanites were pretty much a typical Near Eastern culture of the time. I haven’t come across any evidence of their ‘wickedness,’
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The sacrificing babies to Baal thing is the first example that comes to my mind.
 
God was doing something with the Israelite - he was establishing his kingdom through Abraham - he chose his people and he chose the land and he set down his law. He was not doing that in Germany Russian and Cambodia.
 
Last I checked the nazis were defeated and the Soviet Union is no mas.
 
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