Genocide in the Bible: does this trouble anyone else?

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Gorgias said:
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Freddy:
So in this case, if you are absolutely certain that you have refeived a command from God, then you must carry it out. And this is the situation with which I have a problem. Because it is all too easy to be convinced that God has given you a direct instruction to do something and you will comply.
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You seem to be affirming the assertion that humans understand imperfectly. I agree. What’s the problem with that? This seems to ignore a critical caveat: you’re responsible for your actions. If you do something unthinkingly, you don’t get a pass for saying “well… I thought God wanted me to do it.” So… no problem there!
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Nobody would be looking for a ‘free pass’. There would be a statement: ‘God wouldn’t have commanded me to do something evil so what I did was God’s will. And despite what you may think, it was good’.

No-one in that position would be looking for an excuse for their actions. In fact, there have been numerous posts in this thread where that statement has been used in one form or another simply by changing it from first person to third person plural:

‘God wouldn’t have commanded them to do something evil so what they did was God’s will. And despite what you may think, it was good’.
 
stpurl said:
It is a warning to the evil and a consolation to the good. There are far worse things than being ‘put to the sword’ (and I think the West is going to find this out sooner than later) if the choice is temporal death OR eternal life.
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I’m not really sure that you are grasping the enormity of what was meant to have happened.

You’ll probably recall the Falklands war. And there was a fair amount of hand to hand combat at times. And there was a documentry many years back that talked to the soldiers on both sides about how it had changed them. And there was one account, to camera, by one of the Royal Marines, about his squad taking an Argentinian defensive position. With bayonets fixed. Which already sends a shiver down the spine.

He talked of rushing the position and finding a young Argentinian soldier trying to escape. And he bayoneted him. Multiple times. Face to face. All the while the young guy calling for his mother as he was repeatedly stabbed. And the marine sounded puzzled as he softly recounted the horror. He couldn’t understand why the kid wouldn’t just die and shut up. He’d never used his bayonet in action up to that point and he said he felt anger at the time that he couldn’t kill him. And he went into graphic detail about trying to think of the best way to finish the young boy off.

Quite simply the most chilling and horrific account of a war time action I have ever heard.

And you say that there are far worse things than hacking a child to death. Well, maybe there are. But this was the method that you say God chose to depatch these innocents. Do you really want to hold to that?
 
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Julius_Caesar said:
No evidence?

Yeah. The cults of Baal and Asherah aren’t evidence.
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Actually they’re not. The worship of both was widespread enough in Israel to warrant repeated mention in the Bible. As Mark S. Smith has shown, Yahweh eventually took on aspects of both.
 
StudentMI said:
Actually they’re not. The worship of both was widespread enough in Israel to warrant repeated mention in the Bible.
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The Israelites not being different which is what the ban was supposed to prevent!
StudentMI said:
As Mark S. Smith has shown, Yahweh eventually took on aspects of both.
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A scholar can “show” things that are unsubstantiated by the text.
 
Julius_Caesar said:
A scholar can “show” things that are unsubstantiated by the text.
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Considering he’s a professor of Ancient Near East studies and speaks the original languages, I’ll take his word for it. He’s also a Catholic if that matters.
 
Read the post above this. Professor on the subject, author of multiple books on the subject published by reputable publishers, speaks the original languages.
 
I can see you’re not interested in a discussion so I won’t be replying to you any longer on this subject. 👋
 
Wait, are you saying that according to this Mark Smith, that YAHWEH ‘took on the aspects of the cults of Baal and Asherah??
 
Freddy said:
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goout:
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Freddy:
God cannot order something immoral. So if you think He did, then the fault must be with you. And therefore…what He has ordered [snip].
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…must be read with that imperfect human perspective in mind. And that human perspective cannot condition God’s nature. Rather we simply want to know the saving truth God wishes to convey through the collaboration with the imperfect human perspective.
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I think that this is a case of having your cake and eating it. It appears that you are saying that an act can be immoral as far as we are concerned but not for God. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
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I would think that it is entirely possible that an act can be thought “immoral” as far as humans are concerned but not for God.

In fact, an act that some humans think is immoral some other humans may think is moral.

If it were true that every act that humans thought to be immoral necessarily was for God then the implication would be that humans have a God-like infallibility regarding what is immoral.

I wouldn’t think that to be true.

Some humans would assert that it is immoral to legally stop women from having abortions. It isn’t clear to me that God would have to agree with that assessment.
 
So based on what I skimmed in the reviews, Yahweh was part of a pantheon. There wasn’t a real ‘Yahweh” or a One God, and in the early stages the Israelites who took all this from the Canaanites were into child sacrifice and all, and taking Yahweh ‘out’ of the mix was a BREAK from the real early Israelite religion.

IOW, the Israelite people took a pagan God, and ‘converted’ him into a Monotheite.

I’m sorry but this just seems crazy. Instead of having the Israelite people being chosen by the true God who helps them turn away from false gods, we’re now told the whole One God was a ‘late development’ and made up of bits and pieces of a pantheon of gods.
 
I must say that I have not read the entire book. However, it does appear that the taking of Yahweh out of the mix’ rather than seeing the ‘mix’, I.e. Baal and all, as pagan ‘rivals’, seems like somebody who just looked at things the wrong way wrong.

You know what it reminds me of? The whole “Wicked’ schtich by Gregory McGuire. You know, taking the whole Wizard of Oz as per L. Frank Baum and upending the universe to make the witch, “Elphaba”, the ‘heroine’. It is all the kind of ‘anti-hero’ attitude that’s been prevalent the last 30 years or so.
 
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stpurl said:
I must say that I have not read the entire book. However, it does appear that the taking of Yahweh out of the mix’ rather than seeing the ‘mix’, I.e. Baal and all, as pagan ‘rivals’, seems like somebody who just looked at things the wrong way wrong.
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Except that’s not what the historical record and evidence shows.
 
I can recommend books on the subject by reputable scholars. I’m not hunting down specific titles of specific documents for you.
 
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