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.
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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?
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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
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Barry,