Was dispossessing the Canaanites worse than killing them? Yes: a reply to Matthew Flannagan

Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan co-authored the book Did God Really Command Genocide? Coming to Terms with theJustice of God. Grand Rapids:Baker Books, 2014.

Therein, they argue that a careful reading of the OT makes clear that God, nowhere in his instructions for taking over the promised land from the Canaanites, told the Israelites to kill pagan children, God only required the Hebrews to displace or "dispossess" the Canaanites from the promised land.

Apparently, Copan/Flannagan thought that the dispossession hypothesis doesn't make the bible-god look quite as bad as the "kill'em all" hypothesis they intended to refute.

I posted the following to Dr. Flannagan's blog, arguing that given the harsh historical realities of the ANE in the days of Joshua, forcing women and children to flee their homes caused them to endure far more suffering than had they simply been put to the sword as the traditional Christian interpretation holds.

Barry Jones
Oct 21, 2017 at 1:01 pm
 Matt,
 There are several fatal problems with your hagiographic exaggeration hypothesis:
 (no, I am not attempting to answer your specific arguments on this page, I am attempting to show how other arguments, not directly related to what you say here, nevertheless crush what you say here and render it moot. Bringing Wolterstorff into the fray is like bringing a tack hammer to a war.
 1 – Joshua 2:14, the Hebrews did not intend the pagans to flee, but sought to keep tight-lipped about their intended invasions, that is, to achieve the obvious military advantage of surprising the city when it would be too late for the pagans to ready the military to repel the attack. Whoever told the Jericho king that the Hebrews were spying, it probably wasn’t the spies, who apparently allowed Rahab to hide them when the king sought them out.
 2 – Keeping in mind Joshua’s desire to take advantage by surprise attack, any pagans that fled, would not have done so until they luckily happened to notice the Hebrews closing in. That is, the pagans would have no time to pack, but flee in a panic with the kids and not much more. That puts the kids out into the ANE specifically lacking in critical supplies, thus subjecting them even more quickly to dying slowly and painfully from starvation, thirst, disease.
 3 – The pagans themselves were not necessarily in agreement with each other, Joshua 10. So no, it is not “likely” that any women and children who fled their cities would find hospitality or charity in the next town. Especially since resources were scarce anyway, so other pagans, if as sinful as you think, would likely turn away non-combatants where there was no advantage to be gained from giving charity to them.
 4 – There is no evidence that the pagans knew the outer limits of the promised-land area. If pagan women and children fled from Joshua’s armies, they would likely stop somewhere inside the promised land at the first city that would extend them the least hospitality, if any. But then that means they’d have to flee again because the Hebrews were advancing through the entire territory. Now the children aren’t just subjected to starvation and thirst at the first fleeing, but multiple times, and yet we have no evidence that the Hebrews ever told these women and children of where the safe areas were. We have instead a rather ridiculously ambiguous divine promise that God will send his terror in advance of Joshua, Exodus 23:27, which means the only way you can overcome purely historical arguments based on actual ANE realities, is to appeal to the supernatural, which seems to indicate the only people who would find your apologetics persuasive are other Christians who adopt bible inerrancy.
 5 – We have an example of what it means for pagans to flee to outside the promised land, and it proves the Hebrews wished to cause slow miserable painful death to children: when God tells Saul to attack the Amalekites, (1st Samuel 15:1-3), Saul chases them as far as “Shur” (15:7, we would expect women and children to take cover at the military outposts on the eve of battle, so that if Saul set Amalekite military members to flight, he was also doing that to kids as well). Shur was a place where the Israelites went three days without finding water, and would have perished but for a divine miracle of water (Exodus 15:22). And it’s no coincidence why Shur isn’t part of the promised land, that place really sucks for everybody, apparently including groups who have direct pipeline access to the creator of the universe.
 If what apologists say about the Amalekites be true, they were horrible savage brutes, so that if some of them end up surviving next to other fringe groups near Shur (27:8), this likely wasn’t a case of the existing pagans voluntarily welcoming the desperate Amalekites with open arms of charity offerings, but something on the order of truce called likely after several battles were fought and Amalekite raids repelled, i.e., for women and children to be shooed out past the promised-land borders is to force them to take more desperate measures to keep fed and hydrated, such as raiding other settlements and otherwise stealing and other violence.
 Apologist Glenn Miller says life in the ANE outside one’s established town or province was unbearably hostile and could not be sustained except by routinely stealing and raiding of others, with threats to the dispossessed of forced slavery and prostitution being ever-present. If he is correct, the Hebrews knew it too as they chased any fleeing pagan woman and children outside the promised land. http://christianthinktank.com/rbutcher1.html
 Finally, given these historical realities of the ANE, doesn’t that provide the Canaanites with rational justification to refuse to flee? Can you blame a pagan city who says “if we flee, we have no idea how far we can go to avoid the Hebrews, there are cities that would do battle against us, and any places with food or water we might find would likely already be claimed by others”. If you lived in the middle of a desert region surrounded only by a few other cities whose attitude toward you was not known and possibly hostile, would you “flee” the only source of dependable food and water as soon as you learned of a coming invasion. Would you flee like this if you thought you stood a fair chance of successfully repelling the invasion?
 Please do not do what you did last time and accuse me of “avoiding” or “evading” just because you might find something in the bible you think overcomes this criticism. This issue is vast, and I have to balance making concise relevant points, with the need to avoid posting 15 pages that would be necessary to make sure you have nowhere to run when you reply . I could refute your hypotheses in numerous ways, but what I’ve written will suffice to give you plenty to respond to.
 I contend that you won’t be able to do what you need to do, and show in your reply that your hypothesis is more plausible than mine.
 barryjoneswhat@gmail.com

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As of October 26, Flannagan has been responding to my other replies at his blog, but he has chosen to leave my above remarks without reply.  Will update regularly.

September 13, 2021.

I haven't updated because there is nothing new to add.  Flannagan had no problems replying to other issues I raised elsewhere, such as the matter of objective transcendent morals.  But he chose to completely avoid reply to the above post.  That post is still accessible at his blog.  http://www.mandm.org.nz/2011/01/god-and-the-genocide-of-the-canaanites-part-ii-ancient-near-eastern-conquest-accounts.html.

There are other problems too.  The search tool at Flannagan's blog cannot find any "barry" in any posts before 2010, even though I always included "Barry" in my posts and didn't start posting there until 2017.  http://www.mandm.org.nz/?s=barry+jones.

And yet "barry" shows up routinely in my posts at that blog in 2017.

http://www.mandm.org.nz/2017/10/richard-carrier-on-the-moral-scepticism-objection-to-divine-command-theory.html#comment-232113