Undeception

(Updated)

Recently on the [ad hoc] Christianity podcast we linked to a few articles around the blogosphere discussing Khirbet Qeiyafa and its implications for minimalists, i.e. those historians who expect that the historicity of the Bible’s stories is minimal at best. Khirbet Qeiyafa is a site on the border of ancient Israel and Philistine territory that many say problematizes the claims that no Israelite kingdom of any appreciable size existed during the time of David.

Image via Wikipedia

A podcast I enjoy, and this despite frequently disagreeing with it vociferously, is The Christian Humanist Podcast. Well, this week‘s discussion is on archaeology, particularly as it relates to the Bible. I am much more of a minimalist than anyone on this show, but fortunately a significant block of time was given to discussion of the Khirbet Qeiyafa dig, due to guest Luke Chandler, an archaeologist an ancient historian who’s been working at the site for the last few years (who blogs here).

Among the discussions of this show were the ancient name of the site, whether the language of the inscriptions is an early form of Hebrew, whether evidence actually suggests that the inhabitants were keeping kosher(!), and a conservative yet appreciably circumspect view of the limits of biblical archaeology for determining the Bible’s reliability. Chandler also takes some time to discuss the recent trend of fraudulent claims made by some who may justifiably be known as “naked archaeologists” in that they have been entirely denuded of credibility.

Just a minute more to plug the Christian Humanist podcast again: as I said, they are theologically quite a bit more conservative than I, but if you would enjoy some unusually erudite and interesting discussions of literature, history, and culture involving likable personalities, I suggest that you subscribe (iTunes link here).

(Update) The guest is not an archaeologist but an ancient historian working with the archaeologists at Khirbet Qeiyafa.

Parchment and Pen has a post up that seeks to classify  the different Christian views on origins. C. Michael Patton is usually pretty good at describing different points of view sympathetically, and things were going along pretty uncontroversially as he described different types of special creation, that is, views of creation that envisage miraculous intervention of one sort or another. Then he gets to “Deistic Evolution”, whose advocates, he asserts…

Believe, as Darwinian Evolutionists, that God created the universe over billions of years, using naturalistic evolutionary processes to create humanity without intervention.

Wait…that sounds a lot like “theistic evolution” (or  ”evolutionary creation”), doesn’t it?

I call this ”deistic evolution” due to the “hands-off” approach God takes to the development of man in the evolutionary process. Darwinian evolution, through the process of natural selection, is accepted. While there is across the board agreement that God did not/does not intervene in the process of evolution, DEers are divided as to whether God directly caused the first life to begin or whether he let life come into being naturalistically (abiogenisis).

Among those he describes as “Deistic Evolutionists” who apparently believe that God was “hands off” in creation, he cites Pete Enns, who just happens to be a Reformed Christian who has recently posted part 13 of a series that outlines the relationship between evolution and God’s sovereignty from a Calvinistic perspective. For any Calvinist, the notion that God would be laissez faire about such a thing as the creation of the universe is unthinkable; deism is a four-letter word among the Reformed. Patton, a Calvinist, knows this, which I take to be an obvious backhand. It’s not as though that were the only adjective he could possibly find (I would argue that no adjective is needed for “evolutionist”), and that particularly adjective is laden with a view of God’s nature that is eschewed by most Christians, including most who accept the findings of mainstream science. I must say that this choice was unbecoming of him and his reputation as a straight-shooter.

The fact is, God can be at work in and through creation whether or not He feels the need to tweak this or that during its development. My favorite analogy is of a competent software engineer who is able to develop a program that, once executed, will perform her desired goals without requiring her intermittent input. She is no less responsible or “hands on” about how it performs, since she wrote every piece of code responsible for how it operates; in fact, the more of an expert she is, the less of her interference in its execution is necessary. This analogy is of course limited, and I’ve heard others who modified it to say that God in a sense wrote Himself into the code (which I quite like the sound of, even if I don’t fully understand all of its implications).

The last category in Patton’s list is Intelligent Design (ID). He notes that one can be both an ID advocate and a special creationist of any sort: it simply requires acknowledging that the possible influence of miracles must not be excluded from one’s laboratory research. What’s interesting here is that he subcategorizes “Deistic Evolution” and evolution-friendly Intelligent Design alike under a category called “Theistic Evolution” (TE)! Although most ID advocates (at higher levels, not so much in churches) acknowledge significant evolutionary activity, sometimes including universal common descent, the views of TE and ID have usually been placed in contradistinction to one another.

As I said above, I don’t think accepters of mainstream science need a special label, whether they’re believers or not. But for the purposes of lists like this in which the theological component is a criterion for classification, I usually prefer “theistic evolutionist” – with no ID, thankyouverymuch – (not so keen on “evolutionary creationist”).

I would suggest, however, that as long as we’re classifying these origins positions by theological commitment, perhaps my own position is best characterized not specifically by the origins component, but by the hermeneutical component responsible for it. My hermeneutic is characterized by a firm conviction that the Bible is first and foremost a literary work and a product of the times in which its constituent content was written. Further, I am convinced that an examination of the genre of early Genesis will confirm it as a work of ANE literature and that consequently we need bring no expectations of a theological nature to the table when asking questions about origins. Almost incidentally, since I do not expect Genesis to answer the question of how the heavens and the earth and all that are in them originated (its authors seemed to be more interested in why), I look to mainstream science to answer that question — as most Christians do unquestioningly for questions of weather, embryology, etc. regardless of their view on origins. Perhaps this doesn’t give me a neat, tidy two-word descriptor, unless you like (as I confess I do) a term I coined a few years back: literary-genericist.

I would be remiss in not pointing out and appreciating Patton’s fair-minded ecumenicism on the origins issue:

I believe that one can be a legitimate Christian and hold to any one of these views….While I believe that this is an issue that we should continue to discuss with excitement and hope, this is not an issue, in my opinion, that should fracture Christian fellowship.

Thom Stark has just published an extensive critical review of Paul Copan’s recent book, Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God.

And I do mean “extensive”: by page count, the review is actually longer than the original book. But most messes take longer to clean up than they do to make, don’t they?

As messes go, Copan’s book is certainly a doozie. An apologist par excellence, Copan pulls out all the stops to argue that God as pictured in the Old Testament is not in conflict with the God most Christians worship as the foundation of absolute morality. With Copan’s guide in hand, you’ll be more than equipped to do battle with non-inerrantists and other atheists who raise objections about the morality of the Old Testament:

• Q: Why did God tell the Israelites to slaughter people groups wholesale?
  A: He didn’t! Unless He did, or commanded something marginally less unconscionable, in which case it was unfortunate but necessary.
• Q: Wasn’t Torah misogynistic, responsible for the institutionalization of slavery, and the product of benighted ethnocentrism?
  A: Au contraire, the laws of Torah were wonderfully enlightened! Except when they weren’t, in which case they were the best thing going at the time.

And much, much more!

I’m trying to be light-hearted, but it’s probably coming off as snark. It’s just that I get a little annoyed whenever I talk about apologetics tactics: they’re characteristically shoddy, and do a lot better job keeping people from answering the good questions raised by outsiders than they do answering those questions for the outsiders’ benefit as advertised. It’s a pep talk for the choir and little else, yet apologists are lauded as the evangelical Christian version of real life intellectuals — which I guess kind of works in the same way that the Left Behind movie is the Christian version of a real movie.

I don’t want to uncharitably smear the motives of the leading apologists with too broad a brush; there’s far too much of that going around these days on all sides. But when you read some of Copan’s arguments it’s clear at least that even the well-intentioned occasionally let the need to make an argument get the better of their desire to make sure the argument is actually valid, whether by the requisite research or mere common sense.

Thankfully, contrary to popular opinion, apologetics and the inerrantist presuppositions they are formulated to prop up are not the only things standing between the faithful and godlessness. Our faith is only ever justified when placed in a God worth serving, a God who can indeed be found within Scripture but who would surely rather the whole thing be burned than to have people making careers out of passing off slick and ingenious (or not) justifications for every misconception about Him recorded in its pages. Further, I’d be willing to stake real money on my guess that apologetics are a more significant factor in both 1) the deconversion of people tired of pat answers and clever dismissals of hard facts and 2) the hostility toward Christianity as a system of irrational belief.

Thom’s review is more than a take-down of Copan’s book: it’s devastating for apologetics as an industry (I almost said “discipline”). Thankfully, we have all been provided easy access to the antidote:

This review may be freely distributed, reposted on your personal blogs and websites, printed off, emailed to friends and enemies, or completely ignored. If you do post it online or quote from it, please link back here or cite the source.

So once again, here’s the source: Is God a Moral Compromiser? A Critical Review of Paul Copan’s “Is God a Moral Monster?” via Religion at the Margins.

When Justin Brierley, host of the UK radio show Unbelievable?, told us of an upcoming show that would pit the author of Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan, against atheist humanist Norman Bacrac on the subject of Copan’s book, I fired off an email in protest. I was afraid that, if one non-ANE scholar claiming to speak authoritatively on ANE matters was going to be challenged by another non-ANE scholar, the discussion would consist of Copan’s claims about how moral and wonderful the OT picture of God actually is and Norman Bacrac being put in the position of merely weighing in on whether he thought those claims were moral/ethical enough, when in fact there are hosts of possible guests who would hold Copan’s feet to the fire and challenge his claims about what the OT and ANE history actually say.

There are times when being right is a bummer. This was one of those times, and Bacrac was placed in the odd position of having to assume Copan had presented the ANE and biblical evidence correctly and critiquing the more marginal of Copan’s points.

Yet one interesting point Bacrac made early on is as follows:

The interesting thing is that what Paul Copan has done is…given a kind of commentary, but that is exactly the tradition which in fact is two thousand years old, commentaries on the Bible. You can even look at the later prophets in the Old Testament, how they . . . sometimes contradicted earlier statements; then Talmud, Mishna, the rabbis living at the same time as Jesus, they all made commentary on it, and [Copan has] done [his] commentary on it. And then in Islam, you’ve got the traditions there.

His point?

“So what it seems to me to mean is that you need human beings to comment on all these allegedly divine instructions and commands, and soften them down and reinterpret them.”

Don’t let them tell you otherwise: inerrantists make judgments about what Scripture ought to say no less than those of us who affirm its thoroughgoing human provenance. When they come across biblical texts that they decide cannot mean what they seem to say, they contrive clever apologetics to defend God from being charged as a moral monster. They are using their own moral sense to evaluate and find the plain readings of Scripture wanting each time they determine that, “If God did that, it would be wicked, so God must not have done it,” which they follow up by taking into account their presupposition of inerrancy, hence, “…so that text only appears to reinforce that wicked thing.” This is the best that can be done given the faulty assumption of inerrancy; even Bacrac allows, “This is a perfectly valid humanistic thing” to do.

How Copan and the likeminded would answer the question, “Is God a moral monster?” would be to say, “Yes, if He did the things you think He did — we just don’t think He did.” I agree with them, but differ especially when they say that the Bible doesn’t say He did those things: it does.

But things get worse, I’m afraid. Copan’s book is not merely content to reinterpret texts to redeem them from bad charges, but he argues against all hope as well as reason that some of those same passages are actually meant to affirm something quite good, including the idea that the Israelites’ displacement and subjugation of non-Israelite people groups was necessary to prepare people several hundred years in the future for Messiah.

Copan’s main position is that genocide of men, women, and children did not happen as such, but that the texts use this hyperbolic speech to describe a military/political takeover of the indigenous population — to save them, of course. Says he, “…God is primarily concerned about disabling the moral and religious structures of the Canaanites.” Then, without any apparent recognition of irony, Copan continues, “For example, in Deuteronomy chapter 7, it uses the language of ‘wiping them out,’ of ‘destroying them,’ and so forth, but then it says, ‘Do not intermarry with them’ in the next verse.” Was such hyperbolic, violent rhetoric itself not a problematic moral structure, an effective strategy for dehumanizing the people whose land they were being commanded to steal? This language was not only left unproblematized but was actually perpetuated for posterity in the text of inspired Scripture. Intermarriage was a big no-no, but the language of eradication, of not showing mercy even to infants…that was ok. That would have been too hard to revise. It was much easier for God to have Israel dispossess people at swordpoint and destroy their culture and religious institutions than to reform His own people’s ideas of what constituted acceptable rhetoric, rhetoric that cannot be denied to have belied the brutal ancient morality and value systems that formed it.

Translation: God used rhetoric worthy of Hilter to describe a course of action more convincingly justified as humane by George W. Bush’s speechwriters. Israel was the ancient world’s police force, it appears, speaking loudly but carrying a little stick.

But the unnoticed irony doesn’t stop there: in defending his belief that God’s wrathful judgment such as he believes was brought upon the Canaanites via the Israelites, Copan quotes Miroslav Volf (as he does in his book), who wrote of the seminal event that changed Volf’s mind about whether God could be angry and be a loving God. I sympathize with Volf, and recognize the power of what he is saying, but amazingly, I don’t think Paul Copan has realized how much this undermines the very operation he thinks God commissioned the Israelites to perform:

My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, a region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed, and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them?

If Volf is correct, God might not be too happy about the same sort of forcible upheaval perpetrated by the Israelites, or pleased with Copan and his kissing cousins, the divine command theorists, who do their best to find excuses for it.

Critics of source criticism will inevitably be directed to stories such as the two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 or the story of a patriarch’s attempt to pass off his wife as his sister when passing through a powerful man’s territory. These types of scenarios are referred to as doublets, which are said to be evidence of multiple traditions combined into one.

The argument for multiple sources based upon doublets used to strike me as a little odd: why would whoever edited the sources together leave information so blatantly contradictory, or at very least in tension? Is it just that people nowadays are finally smart enough to notice?  Apparently, the redactors were either too stupid to notice the tensions, which no one seems to want to suggest outright, or the tensions are based on a misunderstanding of one or more of the texts in question.

In a recent post at Religion at the Margins, Thom Stark explains why there is a good alternative for explaining doublets (and triplets, etc.):

Redactors compiled source materials not as a modern would, in order to weave a seamless, consistent narrative, but rather to bring together various traditions into one body. Their reasons for doing this were often political. As one people with one set of traditions came together with another people with another set of traditions, redactors would combine the traditions so that the new unity of the two peoples is reflected in the new unity of their various traditions. This political motivation is seen especially in the combination of traditions from the Yahwist and the Elohist, reflecting the period after the fall of the Northern Kingdom when many Israelites migrated south to live among their Judean kinsmen.

As a case in point, Thom singles out the conflicts in the Flood narratives and the way scholars have tried to extract the two traditions that were integrated into the one story we have: he gives links to the composite version and a side-by-side comparison that scholars have come up with to make the best sense of the elements in friction, such as the number of animals taken on board, the names by which God is referred to, and others.

Now, as is clear from the reading, if the redactor of these two traditions thought the texts weren’t contradictory, then he really must have been stupid! But source critics don’t think the redactor was stupid. The redactor’s purpose was not to combine the sources into a coherent, internally consistent narrative, but rather to combine the narratives in a way that allows them to maintain their distinctiveness while at the same time uniting them. Redactors cared about their source material, not because they thought it was “inerrant,” but because the source material reflected the traditions of the peoples. When the post-exilic redactor compiled these two flood narratives, he was doing so on behalf of two traditions both of which continued to be represented by the inhabitants of a post-exilic Judea.

This is something Thom talked about in Human Faces: that our expectations of inerrancy are not nearly as old as the texts themselves. The Jewish religious authorities long before Christ accepted both Kings and Chronicles, both Ezra and Jonah, apparently without being too bothered by the contradictions in history and theology within them.

Deane Galbraith chimes in with his own reflections on Thom’s post, helpfully quoting a 1981 article by Jack Miles:

It is the [modern] critics’ inability to imagine an aesthetic of disorder, or of deliberately mingled order and disorder, that may separate them most sharply from the ancient writers and editors they study. As they acquire this ability, perhaps by relinquishing what in modern times has been their quasi-religious vocation, they may find that they have less taste for the harmony and smoothness that historical scholarship would impose on the text.

Obsessing over purity can be hazardous to one's health.

I’m afraid that this contention that the ancients could live with more tension and uncertainty about historical details than we nowadays prefer will not make enough inroads among modern Christians who have swallowed modernism hook, line, and sinker. They have vilified post-modernism so much that they won’t recognize in it the cure for the disease they are trying through desperate apologetics to overcome: no, we don’t have all the facts, can’t look at everything as objectively as we’d like, undoubtedly get even key points of our theology wrong, and our sources of knowledge are likely screwed up even in important areas — but that’s ok. We live with the tension by making the best we can of what is available to us, and as Christians, we trust God with the rest.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: devout evangelicals will never be able to come to terms with evolution as long as they believe that it denies the existence of an historical Adam with an historical Fall. As goes creationism, so goes Christianity. Some will cling to their Christianity so tightly that they will never entertain any beliefs that contradict it; others cannot live with the cognitive dissonance and will eventually call it quits on Christianity once they recognize that universal common descent is, for all intents and purposes, indisputable.

The issue is why Jesus had to die if there were no original sin. Why do we need the second Adam if there was no first Adam? What did Jesus do if he didn’t undo the sin that came in because of Adam? At various times and places on this blog I have offered my answers to those thoughts, which include understanding the nature of the Bible and alternative views of the atonement, most especially. But I have often felt and occasionally expressed exasperation that there were no high profile Christians grappling with this problem, which is surely on the short of list of the most problematic issues in Christian theology.

The BioLogos Foundation has done a good job of turning that around, especially since bringing on Dr. Peter Enns as senior fellow. But he has really outdone himself this time. The next time I have someone ask me about the Adam problem for evolution, I will ask that person to carve out 50 minutes to watch the following presentation. In it, Pete Enns manages to lay out the finest explication of the narrative motivations behind Genesis and Paul’s use of the Adam story that I’ve heard in quite some time. Enjoy, and spread it around.

Hard link

H/T I Think I Believe

Review: The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It)
Author: Thom Stark
Wipf and Stock, 2010
Chapter 6: “Blessing the Nations”

Why would God have ordered the systematic massacre of whole people groups, including women and children? Could He maintain a reasonable expectation of being acknowledged as “good” in any conceivable sense, let alone worshiped, while commanding something like that — not once, but many times throughout Israel’s history? In this chapter, Thom Stark answers these questions with a definitive, “He wouldn’t” and “He couldn’t,” respectively, by explaining that in actuality, “He didn’t.”

To be clear, my argument is not that God is evil for commanding genocide. I am not claiming “to know better than God” — an accusation Christian apologists often make against Christians who hold my position. My contention is that God never did command the Israelites to slaughter the Canaanites wholesale. These accounts reflect a standard ideology that Israel shared with many of its ancient neighbors, and I read them as products of ancient culture, rather than products of pure divine revelation. Therefore, my claim is not that I know better than God, but that we all know better than those who wrongly killed women and children in God’s name.

The chapter opens by forcing you to imagine yourself in the place of one of countless millions of human beings throughout history who have suddenly had their worlds, their homes, their loved ones, even their babies cruelly destroyed by the hand of genocide. His vivid portrait of what these events essentially look like does not at all come off as a cheap appeal to emotion, but as a well-aimed blow intended to restore reality to the theoretical postulations of Christian apologists who by various sleights of hand seek to turn our attention away from the atrocities described in the Conquest narratives. There have been many theological attempts to reconcile the apparently schizophrenic character of one who both ostensibly told His followers that it was not only okay but necessary to massacre their neighbors and commanded other followers to love their neighbors and enemies alike. Stark shows his familiarity with and mastery over more of these arguments than I’d ever encountered before.

Justifications for genocide

One after the other, Stark addresses these justifications for genocide as articulated by several prominent Christian apologists and thinkers, including William Lane Craig, Christopher Wright, and Paul Copan. Time and again, he resists the temptation to become snarky, allowing the absurdity of their attempts to justify genocide to shine instead through fair presentation. Although the more philosophical reasoning and scholarly counter-evidence he adduces are strong, I was particularly impressed by how often Stark was able to show that their flimsy arguments were contradicted within the Bible itself.

So what are some of the defenses that Christians are wont to present as an excuse for God’s purported bloodlust? Let me give you a thumbnail sketch of Stark’s responses to some of the apologists’ arguments.

Apologist: Israel needed to eliminate the bad influence of the Canaanites wholly and completely, or else she might be led astray (Deut 7.1-6). God was acting as a caring surgeon who knew he must cut out the cancer before it spread throughout the body. (esp. William Lane Craig and Christopher Wright)

Stark: How could infants pose any such threat of bad moral influence? Were they raised by Israelite parents, all pernicious moral influence would be as foreign to them as it supposedly was to native Israelites. Not only that, but Deuteronomy 7′s insistence upon a total massacre of all humans young and old because of their corrupting influence is flatly contradicted in Numbers 31.7-18, in which the Israelites were told to keep the girls and virgin young women around to interbreed with them! Moreover, Deuteronomy itself later lays out a double standard, allowing for intermarriage for towns outside the borders of Israel (Deut 20.10-18) — where the people outside the borders somehow not going to be a bad influence?

Apologist: The wholesale massacre of Canaanites was long-delayed and fully deserved divine punishment undertaken by human agency. It was not until the Canaanites’ iniquity was complete that God destroyed them.

Stark: Let’s say that they really did deserve to have their babies ripped from their wombs and their grandmothers killed before their very eyes. Why did God not send Israel in as a witness to His ways through a form of evangelism? Remember that Jonah (as most inerrantists believe) was chided for being reluctant to save Nineveh from destruction, which he was able to single-handed accomplish regardless of his reluctance. Were infants and children culpable of grave moral sins? Even if one accepts a thoroughgoing doctrine of original sin, in what way were those infants more fully deserving of being murdered than others? (esp. Christopher Wright)

Apologist: Joshua 11.1-5 and Numbers 21 show that the nations were aggressors that could have wiped Israel off the map. In order to fulfill His promise to Abraham to bless the nations (ultimately through Jesus), the preservation of Israel was necessary by any means, however gruesome it looks to us.

Stark: First, compare Deut 2.24-35 for a different picture as to whom the aggressors were in the situation described in Joshua. But regardless, this is unmistakably an “ends justifies the means” argument; it is an argument against the absolute, objective morality that Christians everywhere claim to believe in. Was it permissible not merely to (dubiously enough) preemptively attack the cities that might attack them later, but also to put babies to the sword just so that God’s promises could be fulfilled? Could a wise and powerful God truly find no other way?

Apologist: Justice and good are not defined by what we humans think: whatever God does, by definition, is good and just.

Stark, quoting Eric Seibert’s Disturbing Divine Behavior, p. 74: “…if God’s standard of justice is so fundamentally different from ours that physical abuse and the slaughters of babies can be considered just, then it no longer seems possible to have a meaningful conversation about what constitutes justice.”

I will briefly summarize Stark’s response to one more solution to “the problem of genocide”, one that’s gained a lot of traction in the time since his book was being prepared for publication due to its advocacy by Christian philosopher Paul Copan and more recently by apologist/philosopher Matthew Flannagan. The proposed solution: that genocide talk was (mostly at least) rhetorical exaggeration.

Stark doesn’t hesitate to admit that they have a point, but it’s not particularly helpful for inerrantists: in fact, very little of the archaeological record backs up the biblical account of the Canaanite Conquest. A few exceptions like Hazor notwithstanding, archaeological evidence shows that the Conquest narratives describe many more instances of the Israelites assaulting cities that didn’t even exist (as such) at the time the Conquest was supposed to have taken place, such as Arad, Heshbon, Dibon, Jericho, Ai, and Gibeon.

The more popular but even less defensible version of this “rhetorical exaggeration” defense is Copan et al.’s contention that the inclusive, ultra-violent commands were never intended to be followed through literally: “kill everything that breathes” and “leave no man, woman, or child alive” were (supposedly) just the way the ANE crowd psyched themselves up about their mostly conventional warfare.  Starks points out multiple reasons why this simply cannot be the case: cf. the already noted contrast between the atrocities demanded for the inhabitants of Canaan in Deuteronomy 7 and the relative leniency prescribed for those outside the borders in chapter 20. Even if God didn’t command the babies to be killed, “girls” were obviously under the ban in chapter 7. These justifications amount to flailing helplessly, and everyone knows it.

Stark explains that all the boasting of sacking the cities which were never actually sacked actually forms something of a national origin myth, probably from Josian reform days:

The literature reflects the attempt of rising empires to express their hegemony through origin stories that crystalize their present-day claims to power. These origin myths present the young nation as an unstoppable force, specially empowered by their deity whose strength far outstrips that of the other tribal deities. The myths serve to crystalize and legitimize the nation’s rise to power. I believe the preponderance of the evidence shows us that this is precisely what is going on in the conquest narratives. (147)

Many more arguments from people who should know better are addressed and decimated in this chapter. I also found his discussion of Origen’s and Gregory of Nyssa’s response to the genocide passages helpful. I especially loved one of his responses to those who refuse to reject the immorality of genocide and the impossibility of a good God’s commanding it by appealing to “divine mystery”. Yes, it is indeed a mystery. “How it is possible to affirm that God committed genocide and that God is good — that is a mystery. Whether it’s a profound mystery or a convenient one is up to you to decide.” (138)

This topic seems to be Stark’s métier. At times it is an astounding thing to watch him cite and interact with so much of the literature, both that of the apologists and the archaeologists. All the while his own good sense drives the discussion in an admirably readable and fair direction. I really wouldn’t be a bit surprised if this chapter were eventually expanded into a book of its own, although given the thoroughness of his discussion in this book, such an undertaking would probably be unnecessary.