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

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