Transcription
Um, want to turn our attention now to God's view on justice.
All right, let's see it.
You have in Deuteronomy the command to go into Canaan to Joshua and wipe everybody out. You see, and people say, "But this is ethnic cleansing. This is genocide. And this is God behind it." Now, I take that very seriously.
I think we're going to find out that you don't actually take it very seriously at all. My response very briefly is this. Number one, this event is described in a book, not an obscure book of the Bible, but a book that defines the very morality with which we criticize it.
This is profoundly false.
The laws of humanitarian war, the first ones in history, are in the same book, Deuteronomy. And as Lord uh Saxs, our former chief rabbi, pointed out, he said they're very humanitarian. Spare the women and children, spare the trees, and so on. Seek peace before you do war. They're all in the very book that describes this event.
So, this profoundly misrepresents what's going on in the book of Deuteronomy. We're talking about the commands in Deuteronomy 20 for conquest. This is not defensive war. This is not just war theory. This is not humanitarian war theory. This is conquest. And I want to pull up the nine relevant verses here. Deuteronomy 20:10, "When you draw near to a town to fight against it, offer it terms of peace." Okay?
Now, he said, "We seek peace before war." However, these terms of peace are not, "We don't want to fight. Let's just go our separate ways. Call it good. Good." That's not what's going on here. The terms of peace are terms of absolute surrender. Because as we're going to see in the next verse, if it accepts your terms of peace and surrenders to you, then all the people in it shall serve you at forced labor. So the terms of peace are rocking up and saying, "Become enslaved to us." That is our terms of peace. That is not humanitarian war. But it gets so much worse. The next verse.
But if it does not accept your terms of peace and makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. And when the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword. You may, however, take as your plunder the women, the children, livestock, and everything else in the town, all its spoil. You may enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. So, it's not saying spare the women and the children. It's saying kill all the men and then take the women and the children as your enslaved people, as your sex slaves. This is not humanitarian war in any sense whatsoever. And yet, it still gets worse. Next verse.
Thus, you shall treat all the towns that are very far from you, which are not towns of these nations here. So, we're distinguishing the nations of Canaan, the nations occupying the land that God wants to give to the people of Israel from the nations that are occupying the territory around Canaan. What do we do for the nations that are occupying Canaan? Let's take a look.
But as for the towns of these people that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. Indeed, you shall annihilate them, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Parizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, just as the Lord your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God. So for the nations that are not occupying the land that God wants to give to the nation of Israel, you go show up and say, "Guess what? It's time to become enslaved to us. Those are our terms of peace. Accept them or we will kill all of your males and we will enslave the women and the children and we will enjoy the spoils of our enemies." But when it comes to the nations that are occupying the land of Canaan, no, you must not leave alive anything that breathes so that you are not defiled or rendered impure by their culture, by their social mores and conventions, by their manner of worship, by whatever they do for their god. So this is not remotely the very morality that we are using to critique this passage. This is not just war. This is not humanitarian war. This is genocidal conquest rhetoric. And this is going to be important to the attempt on the part of this individual to deflect the conclusion that God is commanding genocide in this and another book of the Hebrew Bible.
So the first thing you're faced with is this must be extremely unusual. That's the first point. The second point is that the reason given in Deuteronomy for that invasion of Canaan is moral. I would say it's more ritual than moral because it is about ritually cleansing the land of impure peoples. That is the rationale for the principle of which is a word that is sometimes translated devoted to destruction. That's not a good rendering. It has more to do with ritual sacrifice for the sake of purging the land of impurity. And what are those impurities? The people who are doing things that God doesn't like. They must be purged from the land. It is a species of human sacrifice. We're going to purify the land by sacrificing all of the impure elements, which is mainly people, but in some instances also livestock and goods and things like that. So it is not moral in a purely moral sense as this individual wants you to think. It is moral in a more ritual sense having to do with contamination and purity.
It's because of the extreme wickedness and it involved some of the worst excesses of child sacrifice that the world has ever seen. So now we're getting into the well they deserved it part of rationalizing away genocide. And if we look in the Hebrew Bible, we actually see that the narratives of the Hebrew Bible accuse Israelites far more regularly and far more specifically and far more directly of engaging in child sacrifice. In fact, there are an awful lot of scholars, and I think they are right, who argue that God actually commands child sacrifice in the covenant code in Exodus 22, the very end of the chapter, where your firstborn is supposed to be given to God in precisely the same way as the firstborn of your cattle and your flocks are to be given to God, which is indisputably a reference to burnt offering. offerings and there's a lot of scholarship on this and I have talked about this many times in the past but just saying well they engaged in child sacrifice does not mean it is okay to engage in genocide.
And in fact the bigger biblical picture is as it puts it that God waited for 400 years and waited and waited and waited and he allowed that entry into the land of Canaan to coincide with the zen tenth of that wickedness and judged it. Judged it based on what? Those nations were never given any kind of ultimatum or given any commandments. God just comes in from the outside and judges them arbitrarily based on commands that even the God of Israel is represented as giving again at the end of Exodus 22 in the covenant code. So, we're still doing the let's rationalize it away part of making genocide sound okay.
The next point is that God told Israel if they behave the same way, they'd receive the same punishment. So, this isn't a question of an arrogant nation coming in to ethnically cleanse. They're told, "You must deal with that because it's morally evil. But if you compromise with the same thing, you're going to get the same punishment." And that actually happened.
No, it did not. There's absolutely no part of the Hebrew Bible where the nation of Israel is the subject of genocide. There is forced migration. There is loss of autonomy. There is imperial subjugation. But there is no genocide of the nation of Israel. So that what it then resolves itself to and now I'm indebted to the scholars like Nicholas Waltersf here in is he in Harvard I think or Yale um who studied this in detail there's a big conference on this just recently all this business to kill them all kill them all and it's repeated and he points out that it's repeated so often that it must be an ancient formulaic now if I said to you all England came to the funeral of Princess Diana. Well, some people were in bed with flu, you know, and the whole But we know what it means. A substantial quantity. And Walters's Dor's conclusion as one of the world's leading biblical scholars is that what this means is score a decisive victory over. And the reason it's in one of the most moral books of the Old Testament is that the rules of war contained in that book were not actually broken.
So we got some problems here. Uh to begin, Nicholas Walter Stof is not one of the world's leading biblical scholars because Nicholas Waltersf is not a biblical scholar at all. He's a philosopher and a theologian. And in the discussion that this individual is alluding to, Walter Stof punts to other scholars and says, "Well, the biblical scholars say this." Now, specifically, we're talking about this 2010 book, Divine Evil: The Moral Character of the God of Abraham, which features a bunch of essays from moral philosophers and then responses and then responses. So, we're talking about this essay, Reading Joshua, where Walter Stof goes in and cites Kaos and Younger, uh, this 1990 book, and says Younger says it's all hyperbole, so I'm going to take it as hyperbole. God didn't ever actually command it. They never actually went through with it. So, morally, we're in the clear. And then there is what I think is a very effective response from another moral philosopher, Louise Anthony. And then Walter Stof responds to Luis in another essay.
Now this is the 1990 book by Younger that Walter Stoddorf is referring to ancient conquest accounts a study in ancient Neareastern and biblical history writing. And there are a few different places where Younger talks about this hyperbolic understanding of what's going on here. And this is a representative one talking about the conquest of Joshua in chapters 9-2. The seven episodes of 10 28-39 like any historical account are figurative. These episodes are even more so because of the hyperbolic nature of the various cintagums. For example, the sin tagums they completely destroyed it and everyone in it and he left no survivors are obviously hyperbole. This is also true for these not sparing anything that breathed, repeated a different way and until they exterminated them. that these are figurative is clear from numerous ancient neareastern texts. For example, and then we've got accounts from Tutmos III, the MPA steely, the Misha inscription, Sinakarb and Moshilli II. Thus, it is evident that the syntagums they completely destroyed it and everyone in it and he left no survivors etc. are to be understood as hyperbole. Just like other ancient neareastern conquest accounts, the biblical narrative utilizes hyperbolic stereotyped syntagoms to build up the accounts.
Now, this is from 35 years ago. The 2010 book really just has Walters Dorf say, "Hey, younger said that's what's going on, so that's what's going on." In the 35 years since Younger's text, there has been a lot of research into the conquest accounts, the concept of the concept of violence and genocide and all of this kind of stuff. And these days, including in 2010, but much more so since then, the overwhelming majority of scholars would wildly disagree, not only with Younger's conclusion, but also with Walter Stof's incorporation of this conclusion into this consideration of the morality of the conquest. And I'm going to review some of the publications that discuss that.
1993 Susan Nidich's War in the Hebrew Bible, a study in the ethics of violence is very good. And while it's going to acknowledge that this is hyperbolic, it makes clear based on comparison with all kinds of different literature that being hyperbolic does not mean that it is ethically okay or that we're morally in the clear. Because we don't just have these past tense references, oh, he utterly destroyed everything. We actually have three different temporal scopes to consider because you have the preceding commandments as we already saw in Deuteronomy 20. You must destroy them completely. Leave nothing alive. That's what is that ritualistic slaughter that is intended to purge the land of the unwanted influences. So we have the command which is theologically integrated into the deuteronomistic covenant and the whole idea of their occupation of this land. So it's not just saying yeah we totally wiped them out. We didn't leave anything alive that breathed. It is God commanding them in order for this to work you must entirely annihilate them. You must not leave alive anything that breathes. And we even have narratives where God commands someone to go and destroy this people and leave alive nothing that breathe. And somebody leaves something alive and then guess what? They get destroyed by God for not exactly following the explicit command to leave alive nothing that breathes. So it's not just this past tense, yeah, we beat him by a million points. It was a decisive victory rhetoric. If that were all that were in the Hebrew Bible, you'd have a better case for pointing to parallels in other literature and saying, "See, they exaggerated, too." But it's not just that. It's also repeated and explicit commands that are thoroughly integrated into the theology of Israel's identity and their possession of the land that they must engage in this.
We also have by Yaier Hoffman from I believe 1999 the Deuteronomistic concept of the karum khum is very important to this whole ideology memory witness and genocide in the book of Joshua by pekka picanan we also have John J Collins what are biblical values where there's a chapter on violence and it focuses quite a bit on the conquest and the genocide that is commanded salon has done quite a bit of good work on this ritual violence in the Hebrew Bible, New Perspectives, is an edited volume. Uh Tracy Lemos has probably done the most incisive work on violence and personhood in ancient Israel and comparative context and has a really good paper in the previous edited volume comparing the genocide in Rwanda to what's going on in Joshua. The biblical, a window on Israel's religious experience by Philip Stern is very good. Here is Saul Olon's monograph, Violent Rituals of the Hebrew Bible. And there's a chapter that focuses on the keram. We also have Carly Crouch's war and ethics in the ancient near east, military violence in light of cosmology and history. And Arillo, the command to exterminate the Canaanites. Deuteronomy 7 basically just contemplates the significance of this command in light of all of the other literature from ancient West Asia and this concept of the karum and what does it mean and how is it used and how should we be understanding it.
So there are a few points to make based on the consensus view that all of this scholarship has helped create and a lot of other scholarship. This is just a very very brief selection. There's a lot more. But the consensus view these days is that yes, it is exaggerated, but not because, oh, everybody knows we would never do that. This is just saying, oh, I went and played golf and shot a million. This is not that kind of exaggeration. This is exaggeration because these are accounts that are being written hundreds and hundreds of years later by people who are fantasizing about a golden age of the past where we were dominating everybody else. And these are accounts that exist side by side with earlier less rhetorical less ideologically freighted accounts. In other words, we have multiple different sources. And one of these sources is this fantasy about engaging in engaging in the ritualistic slaughter of the inhabitants of the nation in order to cleanse the land of the polluted bloodlines and peoples. And that's why you can have a chapter in Joshua where it names a bunch of cities and said, "Yes, we went through and we slaughtered everybody and we left no one alive." and then a chapter later you can have those same cities listed as cities where there were still a bunch of people left alive because it's multiple sources being brought together and if you read Walter Stof's paper you'll see him say yeah obviously that's the case but the final editor who brought them together had to have some way of harmonizing these different accounts they were certainly aware that there were contradictions going on here so let's consider whatever ethical unifying principle allowed them to consider this okay and that's where we get the well it's hyperbole so that makes the problem go away and God did not command genocide and the reality is that the deuteronomistic accounts do have God quite explicitly commanding genocide in a bunch of different places and in a bunch of different ways sometimes more generally sometimes more specifically regarding like a certain city or a certain people. And that is not saying, well, I don't really mean it this way. I'm just saying it this way because that's the way we do things around here. No, it is very clearly, very explicitly saying, you must kill them all as part of a broader notion of the ritualistic slaughter of the undesirable peoples who are occupying our land in order to cleanse and purge the land. That's human sacrifice for a purpose. that is very clearly deeply embedded in the Deuteronomistic theology. And so when we then hear, okay, we went and slaughtered them all. We can't just say, well, MPA said Israel's seed was not, so same, same. It's all good. No, there's a command. There's the fulfillment of the command. And then we have later rhetoric that is saying, "Hey, you didn't actually fulfill the command like you were supposed to." So, it's not comparable. And the appeal to Waltersdorf as a leading biblical scholar only shows that this individual doesn't really know where the discussion is. He just found a reputable source that made the problem go away in a very short and sweet manner without actually knowing anything at all about the broader scholarly discussion. But that's okay with them because they don't care about understanding. They're not interested in committing the time and the effort and the brain power to actually understanding what's going on here. They have a dogma they're bringing to the question. They're going to stop at the first gas station that gives them a solution that makes the cognitive dissonance go away.
And here's something I want to share that's a little extra. I frequently get questions sent in to me from people who say, "How can I know that I am not being fooled by dogma? what can I do to ensure I'm critically thinking?" And I think there's a very good approach that can help us do this and it's called street epistemology. And it comes from a rather problematic source, but that's okay because it is an approach that I think does a lot of good. And I think we can utilize it to interrogate our own ideologies and the facts that we think we know. And the point of street epistemology is not to prove things right or wrong, but it's to help us figure out why we feel strongly about the things about which we do feel strongly. And so the idea is this. You start with a position on something. And ideally, this is a this is kind of a dialectic back and forth that a person might have with another person on the street. Thus, street epistemology to help them think more critically about why they feel strongly about certain things. But take a position that you have. And the first question you need to ask yourself is how strongly you feel about that. You know, on a scale of one to 100, 100% sure versus 0% sure. Where are you regarding this? And then you've got to figure out what are the reasons that I feel strongly about this. What are the proposition, the facts, the data, the claims? And usually you would do like the top three. So if you think that God did not command genocide in the book of Joshua or in the book of Deuteronomy, what are your top three reasons for thinking that? And maybe you say, "Well, cuz Walterdorf said this was all hyperbole." So once you have your reasons for thinking this, then think about this. Okay, if reason number one turns out to be false, how far down does your uh certainty drop? you said you were like a 95 or a 90% sure. Where are you if reason number one is not true. And if you think about it and you go, "Oh, I'm still at a 95 or a 97. It doesn't change much." Okay. Well, guess what? That wasn't the reason you have that degree of certainty. What is the reason you have that degree of certainty? When you find one where you can say, "Okay, if this is not true, then my certainty drops so many percentage points." When you have identified that, then you've got to interrogate why you're convinced by that. And if it is that Walters Dorf said so, then what do you do in light of the fact that the overwhelming majority of actual specialists on that topic disagree entirely with Walter Stoddorf and have pretty substantial arguments against Waltersf's position? What do you do with that? If you cannot be moved from that position based on the fact that the actual experts entirely disagree with Walters Dorf, who is not an expert, then you're looking at a dogma. You're looking at something that you can't fully account for and fully explain. You can't drill down to the bedrock of the data and the arguments. You are taking the word of someone that you accept as an expert. And when the overwhelming majority of actual experts say no, they're wrong, you are refusing to accept that. But you yourself do not have the skills to assess the quality of the argument of Walter Stof or of the majority of experts. So if you're at that point where you're saying, "Well, I don't care. I still accept that position even though you cannot entirely engage with the arguments and you cannot engage with the rejections of that argument. Now you're dealing with a dogma. So that's something to consider. Certainty is a feeling. It is not logic. It is a feeling. And I don't think this individual who's made this video can even begin to competently engage with the data. and certainly not with the mass of scholarship that has been accumulating since 1990 and actually it predates that but since we're basing this on Walter Sto's appeal to younger that's a good terminus postqu so uh that's a good way to figure out if you're dealing with something dogmatically or if you're actually convinced by the data and the arguments and the people who know better
And this is part of what I'm doing on my channel that that a lot of people don't understand. When I appeal to the consensus, I'm not saying consensus therefore true. I'm saying consensus therefore the argument that convinces the majority of the people who know better than me and know better than you and know better than the other people who are sharing this argument on social media. that is considered to be the most likely conclusion based on the available data and that could change tomorrow that could change this afternoon. But if you cannot personally interrogate all the data, if you don't know the source languages, if you don't have access to all the primary literature, if you're not familiar with the discussions that have come before in the secondary literature, if you cannot do all of that to arrive at your own conclusion, you're going to be relying on someone else's expertise and conclusion. And when I appeal to the consensus, I'm saying this is in my opinion the most efficient and effective way to identify what seems to be the most likely conclusion based on the available data. Does that necessarily mean it's accurate? No, of course not. In fact, I myself argue against the consensus view on a handful of issues. But I'm not here to say every single time this is what I think. I'm here to say, hey, if you want to know where the scholarship stands, let's consider where the scholarship stands. Although, when it comes to issues on which I have published my own research, I'm going to stand up for my own position there.
So when it comes to when it comes to conquest, when it comes to genocide, this presentation ignores the overwhelming majority of the scholarship and the data and obviously cannot engage that scholarship and that data and is appealing to a nonspecialist opinion based on outdated scholarship. And this is an awful and a harmful attempt to try to rehabilitate genocidal rhetoric. And it's particularly harmful today when there is a genocide ongoing because it excuses and it authorizes the use of similar rhetoric. It makes it okay for people to share genocidal rhetoric today in the facilitation of an ongoing genocide.
you need to do so much better.
because if you ask yourself the question, were all these cities wiped out? The answer is no because they all reappear again populated. So it wasn't carried out in the literalistic sense.
It didn't happen because this is not historical. This is a foundation myth written many centuries after the narration is set that is cobbling together multiple different sources. One of which explicitly has God repeatedly commanding them to wipe out everything that drew breath. And then that source has them carrying that out. And then that source refers back to them carrying that out. And that source is then juxtaposed with different sources that said, "No, that did not happen." And it is not only presupposing historicity to say, "Well, we've got to harmonize these accounts. We've got to make it all agree." It's also presupposing univocality. Now, Walters Dorf says, "Well, this is coming together from multiple different sources, but we still need to override the disunityity because obviously the final editor found a way to reconcile them." So that's the locust of our moral concern is how do we make this ethically okay from the editor's point of view. We're presupposing univocality and that is just in the service of our dogma that God is good. We cannot have a bad God in the Bible. Therefore, we need to find a way to make this ethical. We need to find a way to get God off the hook. We need to rehabilitate the Deuteronomistic God of Israel. And all that does is erase that genocidal rhetoric. Gloss it over in a deceptive way in a way that facilitates the further use of that genocidal rhetoric under the banner of we don't really mean it even though we're going to do it. We're going to try to do it anyway. This is phenomenally harmful and this is a dogmatic approach to understanding what these authors were trying to do and why the texts are the way they are right now. This is an awful attempt to try to rehabilitate the genocidal rhetoric of the Deuteronomistic history.
And so for all of those reasons, I think we're beginning to get a picture that changes.
Now, I think here we're just getting a picture of what bad apologetics looks like. And the fit for this video has been Daredevil.