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

Matthew Flannagan's exaggeration hypothesis fails to account for Deuteronomy 28:15-63

My debate with Flannagan is hard to find over at his own blog unless you happen to have the direct link, (see also here) so just in case he decides to ban me, I've decided to make a copy of that debate over here.

Dr. Flannagan is a Christian philosopher/apologist who just loves to spend time defending propositions like:

Tooley, Plantinga and the Deontological Argument from Evil Part II

He also co-authored the most recent book that is conservative Christanity's most comprehensive attempt to make the bible god appear more politically correct to modern ears, than as most Christian scholars in the last 20 centuries have believed, "

Did God Really Command Genocide? Coming to Terms with the Justice of God

Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan, Baker Books (November 18, 2014)

My first challenge to Flannagan:

barry Jones
barryjoneswhat@gmail.com
Sep 23, 2017 at 10:49 am
 I have to wonder whether the reason Christian philosophers bother with such involved reasoning is because it is harder to defend Christianity if they simply stick to what’s alleged in their ultimate authority, the bible.
 Deuteronomy 28:15 is the bible’s most depressing list of atrocities and horrors God threatens to inflict on anybody who disobeys him, and these often cross the line into threats to cause rape (v. 30), and parental cannibalism (v. 53).
 The kick in the pants is that this section concludes with a description of God that justifies calling him a sadistic lunatic. He doesn’t just cause rapes and cannibalism, he “delights” to cause them no less than he “delights” to give prosperity to those who obey him:
 15 “But it shall come about, if you do not obey the LORD your God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes with which I charge you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you:
30 “You shall betroth a wife, but another man will violate her; you shall build a house, but you will not live in it; you shall plant a vineyard, but you will not use its fruit.
53 “Then you shall eat the offspring of your own body, the flesh of your sons and of your daughters whom the LORD your God has given you, during the siege and the distress by which your enemy will oppress you.
63 “It shall come about that as the LORD delighted over you to prosper you, and multiply you, so the LORD will delight over you to make you perish and destroy you; and you will be torn from the land where you are entering to possess it.
(Deut. 28:15-63 NAU)
 All conservative commentaries agree when speaking about passages like Psalm 137:9 that the pagans did the same brutal acts to the Hebrews and others, for example:
 The barbarous practice referred to in v 9 was a feature of ancient Near Eastern warfare.
Allen, L. C. (2002). Vol. 21: Word Biblical Commentary : Psalms 101-150 (Revised). Word Biblical Commentary (Page 309). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.
 So when we assume correctly that the originally intended hearers of Deuteronomy 28 believed the threatened curses were often a reality for themselves and other people, it is rather difficult to believe the predictable thesis of Copan/Flannagan that Deut. 28:63 is mere exaggeration.
 Therefore, if God really did inspire Moses to assert these things as all inerrantists believe God did, then the threats were real, and therefore, God’s “delight” to cause rape to disobedient Israelites justifies the conclusion that the god of Moses was every bit a sadistic lunatic. The only people who would resist this conclusion are liberals who simply deny whatever biblical teaching they don’t personally like, or inerrantists, who think God’s goodness is an untouchable foregone conclusion of absolute truth, when in fact their inability to sustain an anthropomorphic interpretation of Genesis 6:6 makes it clear that the bible-god sometimes regrets his own decisions, and is thus far from the perfect being Christians ceaselessly assume he is…and therefore easily amenable to bouts of unjustified anger or other examples of imperfection.

Matt replied once:

Oct 5, 2017 at 2:31 pm
 Barry Jones, note what you did there: You essentially ignored the entire post and changed the subject and then suggested the post was to avoid the subject you raised.
 Sorry, thats pretty paper thin example of evasion.

and again:

Matt
Oct 6, 2017 at 9:57 am
 So when we assume correctly that the originally intended hearers of Deuteronomy 28 believed the threatened curses were often a reality for themselves and other people, it is rather difficult to believe the predictable thesis of Copan/Flannagan that Deut. 28:63 is mere exaggeration.
 Interesting, Barry, I note however that when you argued that original hearers would take this language literally this you only mention three curse laid down in Deuteronomy 28 and didn’t look at the whole text Why is that?
Lets look: in v 21, for example, it has the picture of pestilence clinging to them till they are completely destroyed.
 But then in v22 it states they won’t die of pestilence they’ll die of consumption and fever, but they will also die of the sword and also of mildew.
 But then in v 25says they will be defeated in battle and flee in retreat, so they survive
 However, v 26 has them not fleeing in battle but there carcasses lying dead on the battlefield. So apparently the didn’t flee on mass but were all killed on the battlefield.
 But then v 27 says they will be alive, but suffering from “madness and with blindness and with the bewilderment of heart” its clear they are alive because it describes them as groping unable to see and so being subject to robbers and exploitation for the rest of their days. So they aren’t all dead from pestilence, or mildew or killed in battle or escaped by fleeing they continue to live with no eyesight.
 But then in v 31 they aren’t blind or dead because they “see their sons and daughters being deported and there animals are slaughtered before they eyes. Moreover, they are said to yearn continually for them, which suggests they remain alive living in the land after it happens to see this.
 Then v 33-36 suggests they stay alive in the land and see other people occupy it, these other people enjoy and eat the crops they have planted they aren’t blind because they see this and they aren’t dead because it talks of them being continually oppressed. Due to the fact they will have boils from head to foot. Boils are obviously awful but its not mildew or pestilence killing you is it?
 But then in v 38, apparently other people don’t eat the crops because the crops belong to them, the problem is locusts have eaten them and stripped them, it says they cultivate them, so it is their crops and vineyard but its locusts that are the problem.
 Then in v 43, they are alive in the land but in debt to foreigners.
 In v 41 it says they shall “have sons and daughters but they will not be yours, for they will go into captivity.
But as you pointed out v 55, it says their children are all dead and they will eat the last of their surviving children, so presumably, they don’t go into captivity.
But then v 59 states they will have descendants, it’s just that the 10 plaques of Egypt will fall on them. So their descendant’s aren’t eaten but live on in the land under the 10 plaques.
 Of course, v 64 has them and their descendants alive and not in the land but spread all over the world, and they have failing eyesight, they don’t appear to be blind covered in boils. Dead carcasses.
 V 68 doesn’t have them in the land or all over the world but all travelling back to Egypt where they sell themselves back into slavery to the Egyptians.
 Of course that’s not all in v 23, they are told they won’t survive, nor will they be carcasses in battle or killed by pestilence or disease, or eaten alive or exiled, rather what will kill all them is that the sky will turn to bronze and the land will be turned into iron and dust will fall from the sky and kill them all.
 So, your welcome to state that, in context, these passages are intended to be literally if you like. But some of us who have read the context, and haven’t omitted all the passages you have in your citation, suspect the rhetorical situation is obviously a little bit different to what you suggest. It seems pretty clear to me that the reader and writer don’t intend a lot of that rhetoric to be taken literally.

Here is my response

barry Jones
Oct 21, 2017 at 11:22 am Dr. Flannagan,
 I’ve reviewed the way you answer other critics, so the reason I answer you in a comprehensive fashion here is because I want the reader to know that the most predictable escape routes inerrantists scholars are known for attempting to take, do not help them. I cannot know when or whether you will ban me, so I cannot assume I’ll get another chance to justify my presuppositions after you attack them.
 First, for the record, you argue like a jailhouse lawyer, that is, you seem to think that if I didn’t mention something, I’m “ignoring” and “evading” and that if I bring up something not directly related to the post, then I’m “changing the subject”.
 I could just as easily charge you with evasion for not applying your exaggeration-hypothesis to the blessings in Deut. 28:1-14, but I’ll more courteously assume you didn’t because you felt doing so was not called for. I will not characterize things you might have done, but didn’t, in language that implies fright on your part. Can you extend me the same courtesy?
 Let’s get more specific on single individual threats from God in Deut. 28, because I think that’s precisely where your “exaggeration-hypothesis” breaks down.
 One of God’s threatened curses upon a disobedient Israel is the rape of Hebrew woman (Deut. 28:30) and the parental cannibalism of children (v. 53-57).
 Please explain HOW and TO WHAT DEGREE these particular threats were exaggeration, and how and to what extent they were serious promises of literal atrocities (because the more you characterize the threats as “exaggeration”, the closer you make them to what we call “empty” threats, and if those being threatened already know the threats are empty, the threats cannot successfully motivate them to obey). While on the other hand, the notion that the threats were promises of real atrocities really being literally inflicted for disobedience, would accomplish the most that mere language could accomplish toward coercing compliance with the Law, and compliance with the Law appears to be Moses’ motive in enunciating such curses.
 If you are a bible inerrantist, then you are forced to ensure your interpretation of this harmonizes with other truths about God expressed elsewhere in the bible, such as God taking credit as the one responsible for causing pagans to commit rape in Isaiah 13:16. See context, God is the one who will cause the pagans to do this, v. 13 and v. 17. If the mob boss who paid the punk to murder a man cannot escape guilt by pointing out that secondary causes separate him from the act (i.e., that he wasn’t the person who actually pulled the trigger), then I fail to see how any argument about God working through secondary causes would insulate God from moral culpability here. Would we have listened to Hitler had he lived and asserted at the Nuremburg trials that he cannot be guilty because he only worked through the secondary causes of his Nazi army?
 And since God can successfully motivate even pagans to do his good will (Ezra 1:1), then when you ask whether God can have morally sufficient reasons for facilitating atrocities on children, the answer is “no”, especially given that your god accepts correction from sinners, a thing that demonstrates he is far from the infinitely wise god you presuppose him to be, see Exodus 32:9-14. I would insist there is no basis in the grammar, immediate context, larger context, or genre of Exodus for you to label god’s reaction in v. 14 as “anthropomorphism”, as you must if you are to avoid the conclusion that your god accepts correction from sinners. I cannot find any inerrantist evangelical scholars who say Exodus 32:1-8 is other than literal history, nor any who say 15-19 are other than literal history, so God’s changing of his mind upon discussion with Moses (v. 14) is sitting in a context of “literal” events. And if God never intended to kill the Israelites as that story says he did (v. 10), but only pretended to merely to give Moses a lesson, then God didn’t “really” change his mind, as asserted in v. 14. What do suppose would happen to Christanity if Christians began believing that God doesn’t always mean what he says?
 As far as your own exegesis of Deut. 28, the literal interpretation which accords evil to God (i.e., causing women to be raped v. 30, causing kids to be eaten by their parents, v. 53, etc) is not limited to the interpretation which asserts that God threatens to kill everybody with one type of atrocity, then in the next threat promises to kill those same now-dead people again with another atrocity (!?).
 The literal interpretation only requires that Moses is giving an overview of the various ways God will respond to Israel’s future possible disobedience at various times. Therefore, you are incorrect that the literal interpretation is so stupid that only your “exaggeration” hypothesis, which you think absolves god of the charge of evil, can make sense of this portion of the bible.
 Other evangelical inerrantist scholars do not say that the presence of hyperbole in the chapter thus rids the threatened actions of their horrific and serious reality:

“28:53–57 Though the prediction was no doubt laced with hyperbole, the desperation of those under siege for years could not have fallen very much short of the measures taken here.”
Merrill, E. H. (2001, c1994). Vol. 4: Deuteronomy (electronic ed.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 367). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers. 

God had commanded two Hebrew kings to commit agricultural devastation of King Mesha’s Moabite lands, 2nd Kings 3:19, which obviously was intended to cause Moabites and thus their children, to starve slowly to death, which apparently did actually cause such desperation that Mesha sacrificed his son, otherwise heir to the Moabite throne, to his idol, 3:27 Other Evangelical inerrantist commentators assert that this type of literal attempt to starve a people, as commanded by Elish’s divinely inspired commands, is a mirror image of the horrific realities the Assyrians inflicted on their enemies: 

“Elisha receives his word from the Lord while listening to a harpist play music…Their war against Moab will be successful to the point that they will devastate the land. This victory will be due to God’s grace…”
House, P. R. (2001, c1995). Vol. 8: 1, 2 Kings (electronic ed.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 263). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.
 “Agricultural devastation and deforestation were typical tactics of invading armies seeking to punish those they conquered and as an attempt to hasten their surrender. The Assyrian records and reliefs especially detail punitive measures that include felling trees, devastating meadowlands and destroying canal systems used for irrigation.”
Matthews, V. H., Chavalas, M. W., & Walton, J. H. (2000). The IVP Bible background commentary : Old Testament (electronic ed.) (2 Ki 3:25). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. 

And 2nd Kings is one of the “historical” books of the bible :) So that will stand in your way if you try to assert that the story of 2nd Kings 3 is mostly hyperbole, or midrash, or whatever.
 So when God in Deut. 28:53-57 threatens Israel with causing such starvation that Hebrew parents will eat their own kids, it is perfectly consistent with bible inerrancy to say Israel knew such things were actual realities for themselves and others, and therefore, would more than likely have believed, while Moses was speaking the threats to them, that the threats were real despite a bit of hyperbole.
 I’d like to have a formal written debate with you on what I perceive to be the Achilles Heel of the Genocide book you co-authored with Copan. Namely, that your “dispossession” hypothesis makes God look like a greater moral monster than the traditional “kill’em all” hypothesis you were trying to refute.
 barryjoneswhat@gmail.com

======================

my reply to 60 Second Bible Answers-Why does God command Genocide in the Bible?

Here are my replies to Pastor Paul Jennings of Stockport Evangelical Church, who tried, in a 60-second Youtube video, to defend the Copan/Flanagan thesis that the divine commands in the bible to slaughter women and children did not result in the killing of any women and children.

Jennings refused to answer my questions directly and simply contented himself largely with hiding behind a rather lengthy quote from William Lane Craig which raised the off-topic point that atheists have no justification for moral indignation toward other life forms.  Apparently exasperated, Jennings, indicated in his last comment that he felt whatever he had to say could always be responded to and thus lead to an endless discussion he didn't have time for. 

=================================

Barry Jones1 week ago

If the promised land was well watered with vegetation to accommodate these staples of ANE life, then wouldn't making the pagans flee to outside the promised land, constitute forcing them to resettle in parched arid desert of far less water and vegetation? MOving would mean losing everything they had and increasing the likelihood that they would starve or thirst to death, as the Israelites complained about during the exodus, would it not? In which case, your attempt to use the "give them a chance to flee" stuff actually makes God a greater moral monster than if he just required all Canaanites be killed. Really now, when you read the Pentateuch, do you ever get the idea that God would have the least bit of tolerance for the pagan acts which the bible characterizes as abominations? God would mercifully give the pagans a chance to perform their abominations outside the promised land?

Stockport Evangelical Church1 week ago

Barry Jones Nice try! Geographically speaking, Israel is in an area known as the Fertile Crescent. So unless the canaanites fled to the desert that the Israelites had just come from, which would involve them fleeing through the Israelie army, rather than from them, thats not too likely. Secondly, God is going to punish people for their sin, because He is a holy God, whether they are canaanites, Jews, Christians...whatever! So it is not because they were either in that land or out of it, its the fact they are still sinning against Him.

Barry Jones5 days ago

Mr. Jennings,

When Saul obeyed the divine order to slaughter Amalekites (1st Samuel 15:2-3 ff) he pursued the Amalekites as far as Shur, see v. 7. That means Saul pursued them to a place that was situated between Egypt's outer western territory and the promised land's western border.

Here's the problem: Shur was apparently a waterless desert that was part of Isreal's Exodus wilderness wanderings, such that thirst could only be remedied by divine miracle, Exodus 15:22. Every other time the bible mentions "Shur", it is a place that is not desired. Hagar was by a spring on water not in Shut but ON THE WAY to Shur (Gen. 16:7). Abraham settled BETWEEN Kadesh and Shur; (Gen. 20:1). Ishmael similarly settled in the same general area just before entering Shur (25:18). Shur is a desert wasteland with no water (Ex. 15:22, supra). The Amalekites who escaped Saul in 15:7, apparently regrouped, but when David meets them for battle, they are found not IN, but NEAR "Shur", 1st Sam. 27:8.

If the consistent biblical witness is historically and geographically accurate, this "Shur" was parched arid land utterly inhospitable to life. That is, Saul put Amalekites and their kids in the position of slowly starving/thirsting to death (or facilitating death by disease, since hunger and thirst would also inhibit the immune system), and Apologist Glenn Miller cites the inhospitable ANE as the reason why immediately slaughtering the Amalekite children was more humane.

Another possible definition of "Shur" in scholarship is the one that says this was a place of Egyptian fortresses, what Egypt would logically do with its military to protect its borders from invaders.

If that is the particular "Shur" to which Saul chased the Amalekites, then Saul was chasing them toward another enemy (If apologists are correct to say Amalekites were incorrigible brutes, Egypt would resist them with military force too, and not exactly bring camel loads of food and water), in which case Saul, a military leader, surely knew that chasing the Amalekites so close to Egyptian fortresses would subject Amalekites to further battle with Pharaoh, likely making the allegedly incorrigible Amalekites even more desperately barbaric to plunder any smaller bands or groups that might be found traveling along the way, so they could to avoid being wiped out by Egypt in that generally inhospitable region.

That is, the two most popular scholarly opinions about this "Shur" each does a fair job of justifying the theory that Saul intended for Amalekites to suffer a slow miserable death.

And apparently you didn't notice: the thesis of Copan and Flannagan, that pagans who chose to flee would not be wiped out, is disproved by Saul's chasing them such a great distance from Havilah to Shur, and one conservative Christian inerrantist commentator says Saul's "ambush" in 1 Sam. 15:5, 7 was intended to trap and kill any Amalekites who tried to flee the battle:

"His troops were now poised for a frontal attack on the major Amalekite settlement as well as an attack on the Amalekites attempting to escape the main Israelite force..." Bergen, R. D. (2001, c1996). Vol. 7: 1, 2 Samuel (electronic ed.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 169). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

For these reasons, I believe apologists are incorrect when they say the genocide-thesis is unreasonable and unscholarly. The more you have God intending only to "dispossess", the more this God appears willing to subject women and children to a method of dying involving far more misery and suffering than simple death-by-sword.

Stockport Evangelical Church5 days ago

Wow! That's a lot of copying and pasting! So Shur is an inhospitable land where no one can live, or survive, apart from the Egyptians, apparently! The video and remember, these are '60 second' answers...not in depth apologetics, concerns the accused genocide of the Canaanites by Joshua, not warfare by King Saul. Try and stay on topic...

Barry Jones3 days ago

If you believe you can defend the Copan/Flannagan thesis somewhat more in-depth than in a 60-second answer, contact me at my blog and we can discuss it there, or at any internet location of your choice. http://turchisrong.blogspot.com

First, the Egyptians did not live in "Shur", what they did was build military outposts between Egypt and Shur.

Second, it wouldn't matter if the Egyptians did live in Shur; they were a more advanced well-connected nation who could afford to take the supplies necessary to live there. This wouldn't change the fact that Shur was a waterless wasteland that would have caused the Israelites to die of thirst were it not for a miracle of God (Exodus 15:22). So if God intended for the Amalekites to be shooed into Shur, this would be a greater cruelty than death by sword.

Third, it doesn't matter if you are correct about Joshua never being commanded by God to commit genocide...the case of Saul and the Amalekites in 1st Samuel 15 shows God being sadistic toward Amalekite children nonetheless. If you think God didn't intend any cruelty to the Amalekites in 1st Samuel 15, maybe you'd like to do a 60-second video on that?

Fourth, there are absurdities and unlikelihoods in the book of Joshua. If the Canaanites were as evil as you say, how could Joshua's spies be so willing to spare Rahab and her house, when the only sign of her "faith" and turning from their allegedly evil ways was her willingness to save her own skin by helping the Hebrews successfully attack Jericho?

Fifth, my argument for divine genocide by citing the case of Saul is not off-topic. You were answering the question of whether God commanded genocide, and you chose to delimit your answer to the general question with the particular case of Joshua. The case of Joshua does not tell us what was true in the case of God, Saul and the Amalekites which occurred 400 years later. You cannot resolve the problem of biblical genocide by citing to the instance of Joshua

And I have to wonder why you have a problem with Canaanites burning their children to death anyway: Your God neither expresses nor implies any other method of executing a girl except by burning, should she lose her virginity while living in her father's house, Lev. 21:9. There's also no expression or implication of stoning to death first, in Genesis 38:24, where Judah's reaction to a girls' alleged sexual immorality is to demand that the girl be burned to death.

Some would argue that one's beliefs or motives don't matter; if you think it good to burn a child to death for any reason, you are just as sick in the head as any Canaanite who did this in effort to appease Molech. That would follow under Christian assumptions, so the problem remains for you even if you are correct that atheists cannot justify their own morality.

Why limit yourself to 60 seconds? Is that about all you can manage? Or are you just marketing your videos to the modern attention-deficit culture who cant' stay tuned to any subject longer than 60 seconds?

Stockport Evangelical Church3 days ago

Not all our videos are 60 seconds, there are over 1,000 videos on this channel that cover a multitude of topics, from Bible translation, to healthy relationships. But the purpose of this playlist is, yes, primarily engage with "modern attention-deficit culture who cant' stay tuned to any subject longer than 60 seconds!" If you don't like that approach, I would suggest you don't watch this playlist! With regard to longer answers in which I can deal with your presuppositions, particularly with regard to the Copan/Flanagan thesis, I guess I would cite Dr William Lane Craig's response:

"I find it ironic that atheists should often express such indignation at God’s commands, since on naturalism there’s no basis for thinking that objective moral values and duties exist at all and so no basis for regarding the Canaanite slaughter as wrong. As Doug Wilson has aptly said of the Canaanite slaughter from a naturalistic point of view, “The universe doesn’t care.” So at most the non-theist can be alleging that biblical theists have a sort of inconsistency in affirming both the goodness of God and the historicity of the conquest of Canaan. It’s an internal problem for biblical theists, which is hardly grounds for moral outrage on the part of non-theists. If there is an inconsistency on our part, then we’ll just have to give up the historicity of the narratives, taking them as either legends or else misinterpretations by Israel of God’s will. The existence of God and the soundness of the moral argument for His existence don’t even come into play. The topic of God’s command to destroy the Canaanites was the subject of a very interesting exchange at the Evangelical Philosophical Society session last November at the Society of Biblical Literature Convention in Atlanta. Matt Flannagan defended the view put forward by Paul Copan in his Is God a Moral Monster? that such commands represent hyperbole typical of Ancient Near Eastern accounts of military conquests. Obviously, if Paul is right about this, then the whole problem just evaporates. But this answer doesn’t seem to me to do justice to the biblical text, which seems to say that if the Israeli soldiers were to encounter Canaanite women and children, they should kill them (cf. Samuel’s rebuke of Saul in I Sam. 15.10-16). Old Testament scholar Richard Hess took a different line in his paper: he construes the commands literally but thinks that no women and children were actually killed. All the battles were with military outposts and soldiers, where women and children would not have been present. It is, in fact, a striking feature of these narratives that there is no record whatsoever that women or children were actually killed by anyone. Still, even if Hess is right, the ethical question remains of how God could command such things, even if the commands weren’t actually carried out. Whether anyone was actually killed is irrelevant to the ethical question, as the story of Abraham and Isaac illustrates. So even if Copan is right, I’m still willing to bite the bullet and tackle the tougher question of how an all-good, all-loving God could issue such horrendous commands. My argument in Question of the Week #16 is that God has the moral right to issue such commands and that He wronged no one in doing so. I want to challenge those who decry my answer to explain whom God wronged and why we should think so. As I explained, the most plausible candidate is, ironically, the soldiers themselves, but I think that morally sufficient reasons can be provided for giving them so gruesome a task. There is one important aspect of my answer that I would change, however. I have come to appreciate as a result of a closer reading of the biblical text that God’s command to Israel was not primarily to exterminate the Canaanites but to drive them out of the land. It was the land that was (and remains today!) paramount in the minds of these Ancient Near Eastern peoples. The Canaanite tribal kingdoms which occupied the land were to be destroyed as nation states, not as individuals. The judgment of God upon these tribal groups, which had become so incredibly debauched by that time, is that they were being divested of their land. Canaan was being given over to Israel, whom God had now brought out of Egypt. If the Canaanite tribes, seeing the armies of Israel, had simply chosen to flee, no one would have been killed at all. There was no command to pursue and hunt down the Canaanite peoples. It is therefore completely misleading to characterize God’s command to Israel as a command to commit genocide. Rather it was first and foremost a command to drive the tribes out of the land and to occupy it. Only those who remained behind were to be utterly exterminated. There may have been no non-combatants killed at all. That makes sense of why there is no record of the killing of women and children, such as I had vividly imagined. Such scenes may have never taken place, since it was the soldiers who remained to fight. It is also why there were plenty of Canaanite people around after the conquest of the land, as the biblical record attests. No one had to die in this whole affair. Of course, that fact doesn’t affect the moral question concerning the command that God gave, as explained above. But I stand by my previous answer of how God could have commanded the killing of any Canaanites who attempted to remain behind in the land."

If you wish to understand what Theologians call the Civil Law and/or the Moral Law found in the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) I would recommend John Wesley's Notes on the Old Testament, which are available for free, online. Beyond entering into personal and frequent dialogue with you which (as a full-time Pastor and busy Father of five) I do not have the time to do, the only other option I can give, is that you visit our church and attend the meetings! I feel I have done justice to your questions with reasonable responses, but I cannot continue to endlessly answer specific (and sometimes off topic questions), when they are always going to be followed by another question. I also try not to let one person dominate the page...so, with all due respect, I thank you for your comments and hope my answers have been helpful.

Barry Jones5 minutes ago

Thank you for honestly admitting that your purpose on this channel is to engage with modern attention-deficit culture who can’t stay turned to any subject longer than 60 seconds”.

Your citation to Craig’s observation that atheism cannot justify moral indignation, remains a fallacious red herring even if Craig's arguments are correct. Us atheists have common ground with most modern Christians, we both automatically abhor a culture who treats their people the way Moses and Joshua treated the Canaanites. When us atheists therefore point out that God ordered the slaughter of children, we are bringing up for Christians a matter in their own bible that they quite naturally find repulsive, and the goal is to get the Christian to admit some of God’s ethics in the OT are contradictory to some NT ethics.

Exactly whether and how an atheist could rationally justify expressing moral indignation toward another atheist’s actions in an atheist universe, might be an interesting topic, but is not the issue here... though I am willing to explain to you how an atheist universe allows rational justification for its life-forms to accuse each other of immorality. We can debate that elsewhere, the problems with your genocidal god are quite enough for this particular discussion.

No, the whole problem does not evaporate if Paul’s thesis about Israelites imitating pagan literary methods of exaggeration is correct. If there is any historicity to the narratives at all, Moses and Joshua slew plenty of women and children in their lifetimes, even if the absolute wording in their war-records is “exaggeration”. The boxer who says “I’m going to slaughter you” is exaggerating, but that doesn’t mean he plans to entirely refrain from inflicting serious injury nonetheless.

Craig trots out the old “God-has-the-right-to-take-life” argument, but in actual fact, my criticism of OT ethics draws the conclusion that there is no ‘god’ inspiring the OT prophets or military leaders, rather, these people simply knew what all ANE groups knew, to acquire land and resources was key to survival, and most of the “god-told-us-to-do-it” stuff is later interpolation by the editors who patched these various barbaric strands of Hebrew history together.

And if you'd suspect a man of insanity for intentionally burning down his house and destroying everything he and his family own once per year just because he has the "right", then the fact that God has the "right" to take life, does not mean all exercises of that right are legitimately free from criticism. I have the "right" to swat flies, but what would you think if I took a flyswatter and just walked through my neighborhood trying to swat every fly I could see? Does my "right" to do this, insulate my actions from moral criticism? No.

Craig says “Only those who remained behind were to be utterly exterminated.” Well gee, given the harsh realities of the ANE and life within the allegedly “promised” land, we can expect that those most likely to stay behind would be those most unable to flee the battle…women and children, and further, that they would naturally move over to their cities’ military posts or other fortified places, using common sense to conclude they’d have a better chance there than in simply fleeing for parts unknown. So the more Copan and others argue that the Hebrews only attacked Canaanite military fortresses, the more likely the Hebrews intended to make sure the slaughter of women and children was as extensive as possible.

Craig says “There may have been no non-combatants killed at all.” That makes no sense; Moses’ command to slay the male babies in Numbers 31:17 indicates this wasn’t some traumatic decision he had to make for the first time in his life, slaying children was par for the course, and he clearly had expected his returning army to have done a complete slaughter anyway, that's why he was angry when they returned with POW's (v. 14).

Craig’s comment is also problematic under 1st Samuel 15:2-3, where God specifies that children and infants also be slaughtered. If we presume as Copan does that Samuel and Saul understood the divine order to be limited to a command to attack only military outposts were women and children likely wouldn't be (at least in Copan's view), then God’s specifying that even children and infants also be slaughtered (v. 3) makes no sense. Why mention children and infants, if in fact such human beings were not expected to be present? When pagans exaggerate their own war victories, do they always assert their massacring of women and children even when the battle involved no women and children?

You also fail to consider that there is no record of the Hebrews giving advance warning to the Canaanites (their assertion that God will send the hornet and his terror ahead to drive them out is absurdly ambiguous, and a failure anyway in most cases, apparently, when in fact God could have exercised the high level of power he wields in Ezekiel 38:4 ff and force the pagans to go wherever he wished them to). If in fact the Hebrews gave the Canaanites no advance warning, then if any Canaanites fled, they only did so when battle was imminent, which means they didn’t have time to pack, and thus they not only fled out of their settled areas, but did so with no supplies, which means “allowing them to flee” subjected the Canaanite children to additional unnecessary suffering of starvation and thirsting.

Maybe Copan and Flannagan's next book will be "Why God created food stamp and welfare offices outside the promised land, and why His people never knew this until just now" ?

Craig says “That makes sense of why there is no record of the killing of women and children, such as I had vividly imagined.” Apparently he never read Numbers 31:17 or Deuteronomy 2:34. While it is historically true that ANE people's exaggerated their war victories, it is equally true that children were killed in times of war.

Regardless, your god's desire to cause rape and parental cannibalism to those who disobey him, and his specifying that he would take "delight" to cause this no less than he delights to grant prosperity and peace to those who obey him (Deut. 28:30, 53-57, 63), limits your options:

1 - God's threats are real. He really does "delight" to cause rape.

2 – God's threats are empty. He wants you to believe he'll cause you to be raped if you disobey, but he actually won't make good on his word in this case.

If Copan/Flannagan are correct, we have to wonder how many other ways of the pagan history writers the Hebrews also imitated.

The pagans also lied about history...should we thus conclude that because they did this in the culture that the OT authors lived in, the OT authors thus likely imitated this pagan practice no less than they imitated the pagan practice of exaggeration?

If you ever wish to sustain your position on these matters in a more scholarly and comprehensive way, you can contact me. You have expressed desire to end the debate, so thanks for the discussion. Barry Jones

barryjoneswhat@gmail.com

http://turchisrong.blogspot.com

 

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my challenge to Henry B. Smith Jr. of biblearchaeology.org

After perusing Henry B. Smith Jr's attempts to deny that the Pentateuch has God ordering the Hebrews to commit genocide, I emailed the following challenge to him:




This was Mr. Smith's reply:




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First, my argument was simple:  How can the Copan/Flannagan thesis of "dispossession only" make God look morally superior to the popular "literal genocide" thesis adopted by so many conservative Christian scholars, when to flee the promised land was to end up arriving in inhospitable waterless land that would surely cause Amalekite children's deaths to be prolong with the suffering of hunger and thirst?  Wouldn't a war of absolute genocide have been the lesser of the two evils to inflict on Amalekite children?

Second, Mr. Smith says he suspects that his dialoging with me about this subject nwould result in endless back and forth, but why should this bother an apologist, who surely knows that Christianity itself is nothing but one big collection of ceaseless back and forth in-house debates about God's allegedly perspicuous word?  Why would Smith take the strong fundamentalist stance he does on his publicly accessible website?  Does he think his arguments are so conclusive that any back and forth arises solely from the willful ignorance of the atheist choosing to debate him?

Third, how else could I have worded my specific challenge so that Mr. Smith wouldn't think it likely to result in endless back and forth?  Should I have said the bible doesn't exist?  Would he have felt comfortable believing debating that proposition with me wouldn't result in too much back and forth?

Fourth, why did Mr. Smith bring up his belief that my denial of God's existence leaves me no justifiable grounds for my moral arguments?  What does an atheist's ability to ground their moral beliefs, have to do with the biblical data which indicate God's intent to dispossess the Canaanites would have caused more suffering to the Canaanites than a quick death on the battlefield?

Smith seems to be arguing that if I am an atheist, then I can have no reasonable or rationally justified moral objection to ancient tribes who force others to die slowly from starvation, thirst and exposure.

I think Smith has misunderstood the point of my argument:   When one takes the geographical realities into account (at least those involved in Saul dispossessing the Amalekites in the particular circumstances at play in 1st Samuel 15, God's "allowing" them to flee to outside the borders of the promised land would be to "allow" them to live in waterless desert regions already inhospitable to life, and to there endure threats from existing pagans who previously snapped up the few places that had water or vegetation.

So the apologists who think the Copan/Flannagan "dispossession only" thesis successfully defends God from the charge of being a moral monster, only think so because they never thought about what fleeing to outside the borders of the promised land would entail.

To dispossess the Canaanites in the circumstances described in the bible, is to send them running for their lives, leaving behind most of their food and water and farmland and cattle, and end up forcing them and their kids to live in territory that is far more inhospitable to life, whose few areas of vegetation/water would already be jealously claimed and guarded by other pagans who had previously been "dispossessed" by the Israelites.

Mr. Smith will have to excuse me if I believe I have good grounds for saying that his alleged fear that the conversation would result in endless "back and forth" was a bullshit excuse, and his real problem was a genuine fear that he cannot refute my argument that the "dispossession, kill only those who stay behind and fight" thesis makes God to be a more sadistic monster than the thesis that God ordered absolute genocide.

As far as my ability as an atheist to justify my moral belief that causing children to die slowly is a greater immorality than just killing them immediately, that is the belief held by Copan/Flannagan and their followers.  I'm merely pointing out that the Copan/Flannagan thesis ironically has God desiring the kind of result that these modern Christians themselves would have to agree involves more suffering of children than the quick death required under the absolute genocide thesis.

If Christians don't like the idea of their God commanding the immediate death of children, they likely think God would be more cruel if he wanted to force those pagan kids into circumstances that would prolong their suffering from starvation and thirst.

Since the moral problem detected by Copan and Flannagan is only exacerbated by their "dispossession" thesis, that is sufficient to critique them for it.  Exactly how an atheist could justify the moral belief that causing children to suffer is immoral, is utterly irrelevant.  I do nothing more than point out the irony that Copan and Flannagan's efforts to make god less brutish, ironically achieve the very opposite.   Such scholars would suffer defeat under that critique even if we assume atheism cannot allow rational justification for any moral viewpoint.