Genocide in the Bible: does this trouble anyone else?

  • Thread starter Thread starter StudentMI
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
I have only 2 Kings 3:27, in which the King of Moab did what I suggest the Canaanites did.
 
Scripture demonstrates they were to be spared if they abandoned their idols, for thus was Rahab saved, together with her whole household, and also the Gibeonites.
 
So if exactly the same thing ocurred today then it would be your position that the church would support it. Am I correct?
 
Forgive me if I’m not following, but I do not see how you leap from “some people [no mention of babies] may have been spared” to “they didn’t kill any babies”.
 
Last edited:
I didn’t suggest the babies were spared. I only suggested that they were killed by their own parents and countrymen, not by the Israelites.
 
mythbuster1 said:
I didn’t suggest the babies were spared. I only suggested that they were killed by their own parents and countrymen, not by the Israelites.
Click to expand...
Why would you suggest that? What commentary does the idea come from?
 
StudentMI said:
An abortion provider says God told him to do what he does. A Catholic responds by saying it goes against the moral law so it can’t be God. The abortion provider says but the Church teaches genocide is wrong except in one instance it is a divine mystery.
Click to expand...
The problem with the abortion provider’s rebuttal is that God is above people. We’re not equal to him. For whatever reason, we try to apply the concept of equality between people with God too. That’s a poor premise to start from.
Regardless, we have a New Covenant.
But of course, if you reject the idea the conquest occurred and the Book of Joshua is allegorical (please correct me if I’m wrong but I think Catholics are permitted to take the allegorical position) then genocide didn’t occur but a demonstration that the wickedness of the Canaanites was so vile that such a brutal punishment exacted on them is just.

Generally, the challenging bits of the OT, I remind myself loosely drawing upon the Protestant view Law is for what sinners deserve and Gospel for undeserved mercy for sinners and the New Covenant which was instituted through Jesus’ ministry. Note I’m no theologian so none of this is official or academically assessed but something I work with.

If this abortion provider can make that claim, then I should listen to Pat Robertson too. No, Pat Robertson trumps the abortion provider because unlike the abortion provider, Pat Robertson gets vivid visions directly from God. Take that abortion provider.
 
Last edited:
I think number 3 makes a lot of sense when you study the history of cultures and their mythological warfare stories.
 
Eric_Hyom said:
If there is no god, then millions of people died unjustly, and they will never have justice.

If there is a God, then God can raise all these people to a greater good life after death.
Click to expand...
Amen. These are my sentiments about life’s deepest injustices. I.e. The thought that there are humans whose entire/substantive experience has been nothing but suffering is intolerable.

I remember a few years ago seeing that film, Twelve Years a Slave which was based on an autobiographical account of a free Black man in New York with a happy family of his own and a small successful business living as a true gentleman. He was tricked by some fake friends and kidnapped, sold into slavery in a slave state and experienced and witnessed all sorts of ignomities and debasement of himself and the other slaves before he finally managed, 12 whole years later, to find a good White aquaintance of his owner who smuggled a letter to his family and friends upNorth and they came down to collect him with papers showing he was a free man.

I left that film thinking if God doesn’t exist, it means all those poor people for whom this was “life” till death will NEVER experience anything better. That this was it for them. I cannot, will not believe that. There is a better reality than this fallen world. People can say it’s wishful thinking but I say it’s a knowing in the soul, a recognition that this isn’t “IT” for humans.
 
Last edited:
Julius_Caesar said:
No. To yours.
Click to expand...
Help me make sense of your reply. It seems like a non-sequitur. I’ll repost:
Julius_Caesar said:
40.png
goout:
Many people can not make the distinction between literal sense and “documented facts”.
Click to expand...
So what God says is determined by the reader.
Click to expand...
How do you get from what I said to “what God says is determined by the reader.”
 
goout said:
How do you get from what I said to “what God says is determined by the reader.”
Click to expand...
I’m not the only one who got that sense.

Basically your comments amount to fitting the text to your own preconceived notions.
 
God is not subject to his creation or to the natural moral law he gave to human beings or to the revealed moral law of the commandments. God is the giver of the law not the one who is subject to it. The whole of creation is God’s and he can do with it what he wants. If God commands or orders something to be done by his creatures, then it is incumbent upon us as creatures to simply do it whether we understand it or not. God is God and we are but creatures of God. We are not omniscient, infinitely good, nor do we have the care of the entire creation nor the entire history of the human race.

Concerning the Canaanite babies, we are all guilty of original sin which punishment is death in one way or another. The Canaanite babies were not guilty of personal sin so they are not in hell as the Church teaches that one must be guilty of unrepentant personal mortal sin to end up in the eternal fires of hell. Such being the case, the issue in question here or the killing of the babies can be seen as a great act of mercy from God. It’s possible, that one or more of these babies, had they grown to adulthood, may have been very evil, committed many mortal sins, caused much human suffering and ended up in hell and possibly led other people, maybe many, to hell.
 
Last edited:
I feel for God in this one - he frees them and all they do is complain over and over again to the point he wanted to destroy them twice he even marched them around the desert until that generation died out Moses left them for a while and he comes back and they are praying to a golden calf even after seeing God in the desert as a pillar of fire . Moses hes on the brink of seeing the promised land and he’s told he can’t go because of these people .He tells them what to do when they go into the promised land and they don’t do it again bringing corruption and they start praying to wooden idol and sacrificing children . Nobody was listening to God
 
I have to admit, this is troublesome. I often think of the story of Jericho where they were slaughtered with the explicit help of divine intervention. The Bible says they were “ripened in iniquity” but whose to stop me from slaughtering whoever if I think they’re ripened in iniquity? Yeah, I’ve thought about this a lot.

I finally came to the conclusion that there are two ways this could have happened. God could have smitten the Canaanites or he could get the Israelites to do it. Either way…
 
No offense but what does that have to do with a Canaanite baby being slaughtered by an Israelite holy warrior?
 
What’s the alternative for that baby? Grow up hating Yahweh and sacrifiing his/her siblings?

Yeah. God was being merciful.
 
StudentMI said:
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?
Click to expand...
StudentMI said:
Is anyone else troubled by it?
Click to expand...
Modernity ushered into the West a lot of annoying things, not least of which are obsessions with “facts” and “evidence.” Liberalism, borne of Modernity, gave rise to secular courts wherein the State could entertain and create a venue for contract and criminal law (where, again, one is concerned with facts and evidence). The scientific revolution similarly fostered the Modern man’s mind to look to facts and evidence as the surest guides to important truths.

But did anything get left behind in the shift from the Middle Ages to Modernity? I think wisdom did. I think that an emphasis on deeper matters of the long and ongoing Western conversation got either altogether left behind or were downplayed as less important.

And all of us in the West are inheritors of this (somewhat recent) overemphasis on facts and evidence. So a Westerner today, if she sits down with her OT and begins to read it, she thinks she is reading facts—historical facts. It’s entirely understandable that she would approach the OT this way, given the ethos of Modernity and its focus that I described above.

But the pre-Modern world emphasized very different things than facts and evidence. If one begins to read patristics and medievalists, it becomes apparent that they were concerned with wisdom, spirituality, meaning and virtue. The pre-Modern was concerned with learning the deepest truths about God and creation and putting one’s life into harmony with these deepest truths. This is why allegory and spiritual readings of these sacred writings were rampant among pre-Moderns.

Philo of Alexandria and Origen and St Gregory of Nyssa and St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas (and countless others) had as their starting point an a priori commitment to God being Goodness itself. That is the starting point. Which is to say, if God exists at all, He must be utterly good, incapable of any evil. And they all knew, as we know, that genocide is inherently evil.

I think the only way forward for us is by looking backwards—back to the patristics and medievalists and their understanding of the sacred writings. Obsessing over facticity and historicity is only going to lead to trouble. And, more to the point, you will utterly miss any spiritual lesson conveyed by the sacred texts.
 
Last edited:
So the issue of Canaanite babies being murdered is just a modern problem? We’re too confident in our modern sensibilities?
 
StudentMI said:
So the issue of Canaanite babies being murdered is just a modern problem? We’re too confident in our modern sensibilities?
Click to expand...
Perhaps you could take a closer look at my post. The assumption that you are reading history in the OT would be a Modern problem. The assumption that the OT is anything other than a sacred writing (with the purpose of conveying deep truths to the reader about God and creation) would be a Modern problem. The assumption that we today can read the OT by ourselves, completely out of harmony with the mind of the church for its first 1500 years would be a Modern problem. Are you following me here? Getting my larger point?
 
Magnanimity said:
Are you following me here? Getting my larger point?
Click to expand...
Yep, now I am. That doesn’t really address the issue of genocide. You can allegorize it all you want but the text calls for genocide. And as (name removed by moderator) has made clear the Church believed for a long time it was historical. It can be both sacred writing and history at the same time.

Let me ask you this. Do you think the conquest actually happened or is just allegory?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top