Undeception

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.

Even if the book of Jonah didn’t feature the famous big fish, it wouldn’t take much serious study before you realized that it’s not an historical account. Doug Chaplin cites fourteen facts about the book of Jonah that taken together should really point any thoughtful reader aware of the basics of how literature works away from interpreting the book as historical narrative. The book of Jonah is a great example of how reading Scripture literalistically instead of as literature (“literally”) doesn’t do the text justice.

Nowadays, Jonah is on my short list of favorite books in the entire Bible. But it wasn’t until I realized it wasn’t historical that I began to appreciate it or understand its message and ingenious artistry. I find it highly ironic that once we reject the modernist premium on the historicity of stories, we find that among the Bible’s literary pieces, Jonah is surely among the most similar to modern literary sensibilities in its use of literary styles: as far as I know, its employment of irony and comic exaggeration is almost peerless in ANE literature (although you’ll find good doses of those features in contemporaneous Greco-Roman literature). Its messages of concern for others not like ourselves, the heavy responsibility of being among God’s elect, and the misguidedness of ethnocentrism are among the most “Christian” in the Old Testament.

Yes, those particular lessons could perhaps be drawn out by anyone (mis)taking Jonah as historical narrative. But one other astounding aspect of the book that is not so obvious to an inerrantist expecting accurate history everywhere is the intensely subversive and satirical backbone of the book. As I explained before, Thom Stark points out the sharp contrast between the perspective behind Deuteronomy 20.16-19, in which Yahweh prohibits destroying trees amidst the merciless destruction reserved for untold numbers of humans, and Yahweh’s concluding words in Jonah 4.10-11:

You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?

“And also many animals”! The last words of the book! Yet another example of the author’s hilarious sarcasm and sense of irony, the same sense of irony that, as Chaplin notes, depicts Nineveh repenting immediately despite Jonah conveniently neglecting to mention repentance as an option, and that shows Jonah’s displeasure at Nineveh’s repenting in the shadow of adversity — in the same way he had just finished doing (only more willingly than he had done so)! And on and on. This book is a riot — and it’s beautiful. I think I’d actually be disappointed to discover that it actually happened: I appreciate it all the more for seeing its author’s storytelling skills.

If you truly love the Bible and not merely whatever teachings you have been told are within it, then for heaven’s sake, read each selection on its own terms, even when it means entertaining the possibility that those terms in one author might come into conflict with others elsewhere, and even when it means admitting that a juicy miraculous story that is fun to believe really happened never actually did. Loving the Bible means much the same thing as loving other people: enjoying it for what it is, accepting what is imperfect but can’t be changed, and avoiding the temptation to twist it into the shape of our expectations for it.

To get much out of this post, you need to read or already be familiar with the following story from 2 Samuel 14.1-14:

Now Joab son of Zeruiah perceived that the king’s mind was on Absalom. Joab sent to Tekoa and brought from there a wise woman. He said to her, ‘Pretend to be in mourning; put on mourning garments, do not anoint yourself with oil, but behave like a woman who has been mourning many days for the dead. Go to the king and speak to him as follows.’ And Joab put the words into her mouth.

When the woman of Tekoa came to the king, she fell on her face to the ground and did obeisance, and said, ‘Help, O king!’ The king asked her, ‘What is your trouble?’ She answered, ‘Alas, I am a widow; my husband is dead. Your servant had two sons, and they fought with one another in the field; there was no one to part them, and one struck the other and killed him. Now the whole family has risen against your servant. They say, “Give up the man who struck his brother, so that we may kill him for the life of his brother whom he murdered, even if we destroy the heir as well.” Thus they would quench my one remaining ember, and leave to my husband neither name nor remnant on the face of the earth.’

Then the king said to the woman, ‘Go to your house, and I will give orders concerning you.’ The woman of Tekoa said to the king, ‘On me be the guilt, my lord the king, and on my father’s house; let the king and his throne be guiltless.’ The king said, ‘If anyone says anything to you, bring him to me, and he shall never touch you again.’ Then she said, ‘Please, may the king keep the Lord your God in mind, so that the avenger of blood may kill no more, and my son not be destroyed.’ He said, ‘As the Lord lives, not one hair of your son shall fall to the ground.’

Then the woman said, ‘Please let your servant speak a word to my lord the king.’ He said, ‘Speak.’ The woman said, ‘Why then have you planned such a thing against the people of God? For in giving this decision the king convicts himself, inasmuch as the king does not bring his banished one home again. We must all die; we are like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up. But God will not take away a life; he will devise plans so as not to keep an outcast banished for ever from his presence.’ [NRSV]

David was heartsick over his son’s estrangement, but apparently he believed that accepting Absalom would be an unjust response to his son’s violent revenge. After all, Absalom had had his half-brother killed.

Nathan advises King David (image via Wikipedia)

Joab did not try to argue that there was a problem with “banishing” or somehow punishing a wrongdoer. But by appealing to David’s nature as a good king and as a loving father, traits of God that Christians would later emphasize, Joab suggested through the Tekoan woman’s charade that making any such punishment final without the ultimate intent to restore was in contradiction to something David believed about God’s own nature. Two chapters earlier, David had learned through a similar ruse by the prophet Nathan that God would go through drastic measures to restore David to righteousness. So in the end, Joab revises David’s opinion that his justice must exist in tension with forgiveness — and he does so by appealing to the nature of God Himself.

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My arguments above are fairly convincing, I think. At least I was convinced when I first wrote it all down.

But then things broke down for me. I looked back at ch. 12 (Nathan the prophet’s indictment of David’s sin), which is obviously linked to ch. 14 here: in both chapters, David is tricked by one of his advisors into making a judgment against his own instincts, etc. The thing that destroyed it for me was “God does not take away life”: in ch. 12, that’s exactly what God did with Bathsheba’s first son! This made it look for all the world as though David was actually getting duped by Joab, tricked into ignoring the lesson in the Uriah/Bathsheba incident, the lesson that God punishes life for life. By this logic, the brother in the “widow’s” fake story should have been killed. Moreover, the heeding of Joab’s counsel here appears to have had the deleterious effect of enabling Absalom’s treason in the next chapter. This made my take on the passage look like a classic case of confirmation bias: I had liked Joab’s message because I agreed with it. And so this post you’re reading languished in the scrap heap for three months.

Today, however, when I began thinking over it again, I began to revert to my original interpretation. I might personally believe that “what God did with Bathsheba’s first son” amounted to “taking away life” – but would an ANE writer/reader have put an infant in the same category as a mature adult?  I really don’t think so; children were no doubt doted on as they grew, but in such societies they were viewed much more as objects, commodities, and hence as signs of blessing. Read in this light, it appears that Joab may actually be appealing to (exploiting, perhaps) the example of the Uriah/Bathsheba incident accurately: God did not take away David’s life in compensation for his killing of Uriah, but “devised a plan” to restore David without taking [what the original audience would have considered] a full-fledged person’s life away. Punishment was necessary, but God would be satisfied with less than equal compensation in the interests of restoring “an outcast” into “His presence.” This would mean that here we have another voice in the Old Testament crying out that God’s punishment is restorative, not retributive.

The other misgiving I had on my second reading, that Joab’s counsel was proved wrong by Absalom’s later traitorous actions, is actually answered somewhat easily by the context. Absalom’s treacherous behavior should probably be seen as the result of David’s failure to adequately implement the plan of restoration, which should necessarily have included addressing the issue rather than ignoring the problem: when Absalom returned, David gave the order that the two should not come into one another’s presence, which in essence was only a superficial amendment of the policy of estrangement that Joab was trying to change. Things remained this way for two more years (vv. 24, 28), and the situation was finally resolved only by Absalom’s desperate scheming, which again went unpunished. We are left to infer that Absalom’s discontentedness with David’s rule and desire to reign in his stead were at least exacerbated, if not caused (we see no political ambitions on Absalom’s part before the Amnon/Tamar incident), by David’s unwillingness to address problems, which should be seen as a recurring criticism of David’s administration by the author: consider that Absalom’s revenge on Amnon for raping Tamar was only necessary because David refused to punish him (2 Sam 14.21).

How do you interpret Joab’s message to David? Was the audience supposed to view it as essentially correct? Or am I merely guilty of confirmation bias?

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 5: “Making Yahweh Happy”

After coming to terms with the conclusion of the last chapter, viz. that most of the Old Testament texts present Yahweh as a thoroughly typical Ancient Near Eastern deity, the assertion that human sacrifice was originally considered normative for Yahweh worship seems not at all surprising. In fact, although chapter 4 was characterized by more involved argumentation, including some necessary backgrounding in extra-biblical sources and ideas, in this chapter Stark was able to rely more on the biblical texts themselves, many of which I found to be more blatant – or stark, if you will – in support of his claims.

As I have noticed in other chapters, the most ambitious part of Stark’s argument comes first, and it is what this review will focus upon. Stark contends that the ANE practice of child sacrifice underlies certain prescribed rituals within the Law of Moses.

“They have built shrines to Baal, to put their children to the fire as burnt offerings to Baal — which I never commanded, never decreed, and which never came into my mind.” (Jeremiah 19.5)

This will be one of the first verses cited against Stark’s contention. But first let’s look and see what evidence he cites in its favor.

“The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me. You shall do the same with your oxen and with your sheep; seven days it shall remain with its mother; on the eight day you shall give it to me.” (Exodus 22:29b-30)

This passage will no doubt be considered to just as easily describe not a slaughter but a mere dedication to God, such as with Samuel, and a way of building up a herd of livestock for the Levites. But further examination makes that possibility seem the less likely.

For one thing, as Stark explains, Exodus 34.19-20 shows that actual death is required when God claimed “all that first opens the womb”, because here the method of giving the unclean animal to God is death in the usual fashion of sacrificing unclean animals, i.e. breaking the neck. As if sensing our discomfort reading that, the writer of Exodus 34 hastens to add that all human sons will be substituted for. But as Stark importantly points out, the logic that accepts human sacrifice is still there: Yahweh, like the other Canaanite gods, actually deserves to bask in the fragrance of burning firstborn children, but could and perhaps should be appeased by sacrificing another animal in their stead.

This is a far cry from Jeremiah’s blatant assertion cited above that the requirement was never in God’s mind. What makes the most sense of these contradictory commands in chs. 22 and 34 is the supposition that 34.20 was written as clarification (for different reasons, scholars have long considered ch 34 to date from a later period), incorporating into the Law what was likely to have been the actual practice for quite some time. That is, we have little enough reason to believe that the sacrifice of the firstborn was ever a thoroughgoing norm in the ANE, but rather a sign of extreme devotion, capable of eliciting either the special honor (as with Abraham, discussed in this chapter) or the intervention (as with Mesha, discussed again in this chapter) of the deity to whom the child was sacrificed. The Exodus 22 passage, then, is likely to have been read as an affirmation that the very lives of the firstborn were considered to have been owed to Yahweh; in forbearance, and in accord with typical ANE practice, the life of an animal was acceptable as substitute. Exodus 34 was later written or edited so as to make substitution, an only theoretical exception that actually functioned as a rule, into the rule proper.

Another reason to believe that Exodus 22′s command to give the firstborn to God was based in ANE practices of human sacrifice is that we have evidence of multiple Old Testament prophets acknowledging it — and trying desperately to change it, by various means.

As we saw above, Jeremiah’s approach was to just flat out deny the authority of that law altogether. The Book of Jeremiah comes from a time late in Israel’s history in which the prophets were trying to do everything possible to distinguish Israelite religion from the religion of the non-Israelites in their midst. Jeremiah, argues Stark, picks up Hosea’s novel practice of relegating the originally generic title baal ‘lord’, hitherto applied as honorific to Yahweh, to foreign gods alone, in contradistinction to Yahweh. Jeremiah then uses that artificial distinction to further alienate the practice of child sacrifice: Stark believes that during Jeremiah’s ministry there was still child sacrifice to the baal we call Yahweh occasionally occurring in Israel, and Jeremiah employed the strategy of having Yahweh essentially complain, “You are sacrificing children to a ‘lord’, but not me. I never wanted that to happen.” The very fact that Jeremiah feels he has to put forth an argument that Yahweh never wanted human sacrifice shows that he is responding to a contrary position among his Yahweh worshiping contemporaries. In other words, Jeremiah seems to be responding to a group that maintained that the practice was indeed acceptable, or even normative, for Yahweh worship; from our reading of Exodus 22, it certainly sounds like Jeremiah is attempting to fix the Law in much the same way that the editor of Exodus 34 did. It’s an attempt to correct Israel’s archaic understanding of God.

Next, Stark shows that Ezekiel goes about criticizing the practice a different way altogether:

“Moreover, I gave them laws¹ that were not good and rules by which they could not live; I corrupted them through their very gifts, when they offered up all their firstborn, so that I might make them desolate, so that they might know that I am Yahweh.” (Ezekiel 20.25-26)

Here is even more decisive evidence that there was a ritual of sacrificing firstborn sons, reflected in Exodus 22, construed by devout Israelites like Ezekiel as coming from Yahweh Himself. Ezekiel’s solution, which both Stark and I find unacceptable but well-intentioned, was to argue that God was the source of that practice, but that it was instituted by way of judgment. Ezekiel agrees (with us) that the law was “not good” — thank heaven! — but his solution shows that he thought that God would be vindicated by admitting that it was a bad requirement inflicted as punishment. This reasoning is contradicted in the teaching of Jeremiah 31.29-31 and Deuteronomy 24.16 , which both repudiate the idea that the (firstborn) sons should be punished for the sins of their fathers. Here again, Stark illustrates his assertion that Scripture is an argument with itself.

Although he discusses the Abraham and Isaac sacrifice scenario, one angle that he didn’t mention was the possibility that this story was used as a justification for substituting animals for humans. When God Himself stepped in and denied the necessity of Isaac’s death and provided an animal substitute, the pious Israelite was assured that what God really wanted was a resolve to give all to Himself, since even Abraham was relieved of the painful duty of child sacrifice. I know little enough of the literature, but I expect this possibility has been thrown about before.

This is all but a thumbnail sketch of the material in this chapter, and I haven’t even discussed some of his other evidence that helps demonstrate that human sacrifice was not originally so “pagan” as we tend to think. There is valuable commentary on Jephthah’s unfortunately hasty vow, the should-have-been-obvious-but-somehow-completely-escaped-me relation of human sacrifice to the ḥerem (essentially a ritual genocide), and more. If my summary has been especially unconvincing, you owe it to yourself to read his much better and more complete discussion for yourself.

I leave convinced of the basic points of Stark’s argument. But if I had to offer a criticism, it is that Stark sets many good tentpoles but casts a canvas too small to cover them. By this I mean that he evinces many convincing passages within the Old Testament to bolster his claim that human sacrifice was once an official part of Yahweh worship without also offering a satisfyingly complete picture of what this really looked like at any point in time. Thus the reader is left drawing scant conclusions hardly more developed than this: some early Yahweh believers reflected in some parts of the Old Testament believed that human sacrifice was not a bad thing, maybe even a good thing, but they may or may not have regularly gone about practicing it systematically, and later writers seem to be opposed to it, although we don’t know exactly why. These ambiguities are probably not entirely his fault; I imagine that there is considerable scholarly debate over the details, and Stark probably assumed it would dangerously thin out his argument if he were to call attention to this. In deciding not to offer even a conjectural picture, he may have underestimated the strength of one of the primary stipulations of many in his audience: someone with an orderly, airtight system will not suffer their system to just be reduced to shambles, but will insist that it be replaced by a similarly orderly, airtight system. This demand is not deliverable, of course, but I think that even a provisional attempt at sketching out a slightly more complete picture of what “making Yahweh happy” actually looked like throughout OT times would be likelier to convince the skeptical. And my hunch is that Stark is just the man to make such a plausible suggestion.

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¹ Beware the NIV here: Stark explains that the translators took an unwarranted license in translating this phrase to say, “God gave them [over to] bad statutes…” The bracketed words do not appear in any version of the OT text — they were added in a clearly inaccurate eisegetical move. The text is clear that Ezekiel thought that God gave the statutes to them directly; He did not give them to the statutes. Naughty NIV! But at least they agree with Ezekiel that such statutes were in fact bad, and agree with us that God did not give them!

Second century heretic Marcion was quite a character. Because the only contemporaneous descriptions of his beliefs that survived are those of his detractors it’s hard to say definitively, but his distinctive teachings seem to have originated in the belief that the god of the Old Testament, Yahweh, was a cruel and evil god challenged by the good god represented by Jesus; for Marcion, this schema accounted for what was even then recognized as a sharp contrast between the harshness of God’s behavior in much of the Old Testament and the essentially loving nature of God as revealed in Jesus.

What has emerged as the “orthodox” way of dealing with the contrast in OT/NT divine dispositions is a vehement denial of any such contrast. And indeed, as I have said on this blog, the OT’s Yahweh is extolled as full of ever-new mercies and unending lovingkindness, and much judgment and hellfire is found in the sermons of Jesus. We are far astray if we deny that Jesus was said to have come “to bring a sword”; the aspect of the historical Jesus as apocalyptic prophet speaking the doom of the current age should never be too far underplayed. Instead, what we should emphasize is the explicit characterization of God’s motives for judgment as reflecting personal concern and a desire for restoration, not a craving for vengeance and some sort of legal satisfaction of abstract requirements. The religious leaders of Jerusalem were condemned because they caused the little ones to sin, because they did not care for the fatherless and the widow, and because they had proved themselves faithless “hirelings” by their indifference to the welfare of those over whom they were given supervision. The desire for restoration and concern for the marginalized is, again, something not at all alien to the later Old Testament writers; Jesus simply put the focus more squarely on those things by virtue of his place as the “image of God bodily.” God has an interest in judgment but not because of a desire to wreak revenge on those who have personally affronted Him disguised as disembodied “justice”.

Another danger lies in entertaining the idea that the OT depictions of God are completely erratic, when, quite to the contrary, there are actual reasons God was conceived of as the mastermind of the Canaanite Conquest when we consider the history of the Old Testament writings. We can learn lessons from the Canaanite Conquest by recognizing Scripture as something other than pure, undistilled divine truth. Keep in mind that whatever influence a man named Moses might have had on the customs of the early Israelites, it is manifestly clear from several features of the language in which the Pentateuch is recorded that significant redaction (editing) must have taken place between his time and the time those sources were recorded in the form we have them now. Few biblical scholars argue convincingly that there is no ancient tradition behind the OT texts we have, which were all written down and/or redacted into their current form somewhat late into Israel’s history by her religious leaders. With this in mind, consider this.

See, when the Israelite leaders, sometime after the destabilization of the nation of Israel (let’s not worry about exactly when for now) attributed their loss of national integrity to the judgment of God, they did so because they believed that God would not have let go of His people capriciously. If God let Israel and Judah undergo the hardship of being displaced by foreign conquerors, they were convinced it was because of conscious divine judgment upon them.

So, retracing their steps to see where they went wrong, they saw that so many of their people had become lax with the teachings passed down from of old — surely this was the cause of their nation’s fall! Naturally, they attributed their laxity with the laws and rituals of Yahweh to their close familiarity with the indigenous pagan peoples. The bitter “if only!” regret of pious Israelites over having fallen into the ways of the neighboring peoples was expressed in the sharpest terms by their conviction that they should have disposed of all pagan influences (the “good kings” are the ones who carry this out in the Kings and Chronicles), and projected further, they saw that it should have been must surely have been God’s intent for them to “nip it in the bud” by cleansing the land of all indigenous people as a show of devotion to God’s holy commandments. The herem commands attributed to God were merely a logical way of accounting for the predicament post-monarchical Israel was in, assigning the blame not on God’s impotence or unfaithfulness, but squarely on Israel.

What they apparently failed to fully appreciate — for which they can certainly be forgiven, lacking full revelation — was the breathtaking scope of God’s love. The author of Job tried to tell them, as did (Deutero) Isaiah: sometimes God’s servant suffers not because of God’s judgment but simply because of the selfish and hateful reactions of other men. God did not spare his own Son from evil men, but allowed him to be sacrificed; He promises both the redemption of suffering and commensurate vindication, demonstrated once and for all in the public display of the first Passion play. The lesson slow to be learned was that even though God rarely (if ever) intervenes in this life, He remains in control; the faithful response is not to come up with elaborate ways to blame, credit, or (as with the annihilation mandate) excuse God for actions He allowed in the functioning of His universe, but to look forward to how He is going to bring life from them. It is to hold His hand through the storm, holding on to the ideals He taught you in the calm even when you can’t feel His hand, and trust His character and ability to bring about good through it all.

Apologist Matt Flannagan once again defends God against the charge of commanding the Israelites to commit genocide against the Canaanites. Not including the final sentence, his concluding statement articulates a very important reminder about the importance of recognizing the Bible as a product of ANE literature:

Consequently, if one does not read the texts in isolation and is sensitive to the genre of Ancient Near-Eastern writings then a literal reading is far from obvious. As Egyptologist James K. Hoffmeier notes, such a reading commits “the fallacy of misplaced literalism … the misconstruction of a statement-in-evidence so that it carries a literal meaning when a symbolic or hyperbolic or figurative meaning was intended.” This underscores an obvious but often neglected point, the bible is not written in accord with the conventions of 21st century English. It was written in ancient foreign languages and in the conventions that governed historical, legal, epic, etc writings of that time. To understand what it teaches accurately one needs to ask what it teaches given these factors. When one does this, it seems probably that the Old Testament does not teach that God commanded or that Israel carried out, the genocide or extermination of the Canaanites.

Contra Mundum: Did God Command Genocide in the Old Testament?

He evinces several parallels to other ANE hyperbolic descriptions of victory. But because they are all ex post facto commemorations of campaigns, either to immortalize or ameliorate prior events, there is certainly an argument to be made that they fit a somewhat different genre (in the generic sense) than the prescriptive “annihilate” commands from God that we find in the Hexateuch.

But no matter. Let’s just say God did not command genocide or the extermination of the Canaanites after all. Let’s grant that He only commanded them to subjugate, or, in Plantinga’s words, “attack them, defeat them, drive them out.” What does that buy us?

To my mind, little is gained by this sort of reasoning, however well defended. Those who have a problem with divinely mandated genocide are not likely to think much differently of this counter-assertion that He instead “merely” commanded war, killing, and the forcible removal of multiple peoples established in a homeland for centuries or more beforehand. The latter isn’t even a “just war” according to Augustine.

How likely is it that the God who we as Christians claim was exemplified in His self-sacrificial servant Jesus of Nazareth demanded as a non-negotiable act of obedience and faithfulness that His people wage a full-scale assault of an entire region populated by several civilizations — whether or not the method was “total war” or marginally more kid-friendly? That’s the question that needs to be addressed.

At very best, this proposed solution can be nothing but a first step along a long, long apologetics path. Until that path is plotted out and begun to be trod convincingly, especially since even the faintest historicity of the events in question has been challenged by competent ANE scholars, I’m infinitely more content to chalk it all up to retroactive history than to argue that God actually commissioned the Conquest of Canaan as depicted in the Old Testament. And I’m pretty sure God will forgive me if I’m wrong.

He begins with a starkly stated proposition: 

The factual contradictions within Scripture or between Scripture and extrabiblical sources cited in my previous blog are not, in my view, the most serious difficulties that Christians face in the Bible. More troublesome are those cases where a biblical text espouses ethical values that not only contradict other biblical texts but strike us as down-right sinister or evil. 

He then goes on to highlight the clear incongruence between Mat 5.43-45 and Deu 20.16-18. 

Says Sparks, “These words from the lips of Jesus and the Law of Moses are profoundly different. How can one biblical text admonish us to love our enemies and another command Israel to commit genocide against ethnic groups because they have a different religion?” 

I am quite familiar with most of the involved justifications for the ritual act of consecration-by-destruction, or “ban” as it used to be called, known as ḥerem. In my undergraduate Apologetics class (or was it Deuteronomy?) I devoted a paper to arguing how truly ethical and even merciful it was for God to want those men, women, children, and babies murdered. 

Sparks notes that many apologists, such as myself in that paper long ago, have argued that the shock we feel when reading about the ḥerem is merely a clash between modern ethics and older sensibilities. However, it’s important to note that the clash with the ethics of the Hexateuch begins not with us in (post-)modernity but occurred with the very onset of Christianity. It is clearly Jesus’ ethic that clashes with ethics that justify ḥerem. Sparks reminds us that even the early church struggled to justify the ritual slaughter of human beings; he specifically notes Gregory of Nyssa, but I’d also like to point out that the kernel of Marcionism was popped in the heat of that friction long before.

Sparks points out how important it is for evangelicalism to admit and come to grips with these tensions: 

Even if conservative Evangelicals can create eccentric scenarios that seem to preserve the doctrine of Biblicistic inerrancy, the straightforward evidence against this doctrine is so palpable that the doctrine should never be granted any kind of fundamental status in the Christian faith.

I hope you read the whole post.