Undeception

Diglotting has another excellent post up called, “Why I Believe in the Resurrection“. I’ve been thinking along these lines myself lately (as so often happens with Kevin’s posts). Do read it!

But while I’m largely in hearty agreement with the post, I figured I’d push back a little regarding the following remarks:

I have seen some Christians make the (strange) argument that the success of the early Christian movement is evidence in itself regarding the veracity of Christ’s resurrection! I find that to be complete nonsense.

Data useable in support of an explanation is evidence. Obviously, how good the evidence is varies vastly and depends largely on how exclusively it favors one explanation over its competitors. And clearly the success of a movement based on a miracle is not great evidence of that miracle’s historicity, still less “evidence that demands a verdict”, and a far cry from anything like proof. But it does seem to be at very least something that deserves an adequate, coherent explanation instead of ad hoc, anything-but-miracles hand-waving. Even if the movement had failed it wouldn’t disprove that the miracle happened, so it’s a thing of interest that it did not only not fail, but passed with flying, history-shading colors. So even if the success of the Christian movement as a result of the fervor of the earliest believers is not a piece of evidence exclusively in favor of the Resurrection, it’s at least more in line with “something remarkably unusual happened to start this whole thing off” than with “nothing very significant happened to inspire and fuel a movement that would shape the future of the world anyway”. This is surely necessary as a first rung on an evidential ladder — though probably not much higher than that. I do agree that putting too much weight on it as many apologists would like to do indeed tips the scale toward the “nonsense” side of the spectrum.

That minor quibble aside, I highly recommend the post!

This last week’s episode of the Unbelievable? radio show was a rerun, but a good one to listen to (if you’re patient, that is). It was a conversation between apologist Jay Smith and atheist Stephen Pilcher concerning the so-called “Easter Challenge“: can you weave together all the NT accounts of that seminal event in Christian theology, the Resurrection?

The show goes as might be expected. Naturally, the apologist thinks he can meet the challenge. And so he tries, pulling together all the disparate accounts with different eyewitnesses, sequences of events, and other information and weaving them into a harmonized tapestry (compliments of Andy Bannister). The atheist isn’t buying it. The apologist hears all of the atheists’ objections, but he doesn’t buy them, either, because he has an explanation that can support his presupposition of the NT’s complete correspondence with actual history. On the whole it reminds me of another creative “enterprise” of affirming and concocting continuity.

Can Star Trek’s continuity over several series and movies be resolved? Despite certain hiccups (the Klingons’ foreheads, anyone?!), a devout Trekkie will tell you, “Sure, if you try hard enough.” The originators of new content were often simply not familiar enough with all the other existing content to produce a seamless narrative and probably nearly as often were aware but intentionally recast certain plot points or character details for the purposes of their current script. Convincing resolutions of continuity errors are debated among the fans, so it was welcome news when ENT finally explained why Klingons’ appearance changed between TOS and TMP. But unlike apologists, Star Trek fans realize that they’re only interested in the effort of clearing up continuity errors in order to preserve an ideal of continuity that was simply not shared by their sources (especially Gene Roddenberry). They were all functioning from within varying perspectives and emphases, and so their material differed.

Smith readily acknowledges that each NT author also had different perspectives and emphases: he clings to this, in fact, since that alone begins to account for the very different ways the Resurrection accounts are presented. But different emphases and perspectives are not enough to explain why the authors of the accounts selected testimony with so many surface incongruities with one another. As is commonly pointed out, for any given complex of confluent events such as those leading up to and following a car wreck, four eyewitnesses will most often have some conflicting testimony, and while those differences can often be explained (bad eyesight, fear of implicating themselves, etc.), they can’t always be believably explained away to be completely reconciled as independent, factual observations. Nor does anyone expect them to be, unless requirements of unfailing factual accuracy are applied ex post facto.

Ok, so the various authors were drawing on different sources, viewing them from different angles. But can we credibly account for the reasons the authors drew on those different sources, especially when they seemed to contradict one another? Yes, each author wrote for his own purpose and to his own audience, but if Luke’s explicitly stated purpose was to consult the various sources and compile them into an “orderly account”, this was his opportunity to do so for a subject of peak importance. Even if he did what he could with what he had available, it’s a shame indeed that the Holy Spirit didn’t inspire him to undertake what Andy Bannister would some two thousand years later!

Granted, if the events took place precisely as Jay Smith thinks they must have, the details could indeed be pulled apart and divvied up over the different NT authors to give us exactly what we have. And I’d like to go further and state that some of the discrepancies can indeed be plausibly accounted for or dismissed. For instance, Smith points out the weak objection that there are “men” at the tomb in Luke’s account vs. “angels” in Matthew’s: in the first century, angels were not pictured with wings, and so may not have been readily distinguishable from humans (cf. Heb 13.2). We can indeed get nit-picky to the point of nonsense if we’re consciously trying to pull apart a story (just ask a defense attorney), and many critics do. Still, how plausible is the intricate aggregation of all the rationalizations required to order to present a single unified account?

As with Star Trek, given the conviction that it all must hang together, continuity can be achieved. Square pegs can be crammed into round holes. This is why it’s hard to dissuade someone from believing in inerrancy: humans are well-suited for coming up with explanations to fit their expectations, even if it requires “explaining away”.

While admitting their own presuppositions, Jay Smith and host Justin Brierley both contended that Pilcher came to the table with certain theological presuppositions of his own. While no doubt true, I think this is mostly irrelevant for Pilcher’s view, but it is telling on the part of Smith and Brierley. As a Christian who believes that in one way or another the Resurrection occurred, my baseline theological presuppositions do not differ so very radically from the Christians on the show. What puts me closer to Pilcher’s views than Smith’s on this issue is only a difference in theological presupposition insofar as the Smith’s theology is based upon certain expectations of Scripture that I do not share.

As Justin Brierley admitted, “We come [to the Bible] with an attitude of faith, and when we see things that are contradictions we will happily say ‘yes’ to something which helps us to reconcile them.” First, notice that their faith is in the Bible, or at best, in God’s intention to give us a crystallized piece of truth (which happens to be the Bible). And so they approach the Bible with a certain expectation that is to be defended at all costs, and consequently they’ll gladly accept anything that appears to help their case, cumbersome and implausible as it may be on its own merit. On the other hand, I come to the NT accounts with an expectation that they are a collection of ancient texts consisting of differing people’s takes on a bewildering event that certainly would have easily outlasted the memory of the events surrounding it. If anything, for me this aftershock haze of refracted recollection and attempted reconstruction, which was then visualized by the theological emphases of the different Gospel narratives’ craftsmen, actually serves the purpose of focusing the lens on the event in question: the Resurrection.

If we wake up one morning to find Reuters, the AP, the New York Times, Yomiuri Shimbun, and the Times of India all reporting on the same astoundingly surprising story, will we insist upon a complete harmonization of their accounts before believing the story that induced them all to publish? Will we demand that every single story each paper publishes in their respective issues be inerrant as a condition for believing the basic event they’re recounting? In the end we may not believe their story, but it won’t be because of such unreasonable expectations as those.

No, the first century accounts of the NT do not come close to matching the reporting standards of a modern newspaper — understood, acknowledged, undisputed. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Outside of a presupposition of an inerrant Bible, which I don’t at all share, why should we expect such a thing from Paul, Luke, and the other Evangelists? They wrote decades later than the events they describe, only marginally intending to solidify an already fuzzy remembrance of peripheral details, and they presented the events in ways that applied particular lessons tailored to their respective audiences.

The Easter Challenge, like so many other evangelistic atheist methods, is most successful at putting Christians on the defensive about something they really have no need to be defensive about. We don’t need inerrant, reconcilable Easter accounts in order to place hope in the Resurrection. Losing one’s faith in the Bible’s ability to perfectly convey certain facts does not require a loss of faith in the facts underlying their imperfect conveyance. It requires considerably less blind credulity on my part to believe in the event testified to in the various conflicting and competing Easter morning accounts than to bank my entire faith upon the faultless concord and historicity of those accounts. Sure, we can’t prove the Resurrection, given that the event is only recorded in a Bible that is neither inerrant nor completely consistent internally, but it’s easier to believe in that event for which no contrary evidence exists than to believe that the Bible is inerrant and completely consistent internally, a contention for which contrary evidence abounds and which requires…well, creative explanations to support it.

Luckily, Paul did not say that we had to feign or psyche ourselves into absolute certainty that God raised Jesus from the dead, or that the NT contains an inerrant account of it (what rum luck it would have been for anyone alive before the Inerrant and Completely Trustworthy Account was available!): he said that believing it in our hearts was sufficient. And that I do, continuity errors notwithstanding.

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.

I’m very much disturbed to see how often it is that Christians are so devoutly interested in upholding their scriptures that they don’t mind if either God or neighbor gets black and blue in the process.

The trick to being an evangelical these days seems to be the willingness to maintain that evil is not necessarily evil when it comes to God. Besmirching His character under the ironic cover of defending God, what passes for good Christian apologetics is actually much more of a defense of prized doctrines such as inerrancy or Augustinian/Reformed soteriology than the only thing worth defending, viz. God’s character. Defending both our carefully constructed doctrines and God’s character cannot always be done simultaneously because they are often at loggerheads (or else many popular apologists would be without a job). Slick, ear-tickling apologetics serve the much-in-demand function of reassuring people that the Bible is everything they think it needs to be in order for their faith to remain comfortable and unquestionable.

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more successful result if someone were consciously trying to relieve Christians of their responsibility to grow up into mature men and women of God. Unlike what I wanted to believe long ago, I do not find it so easy to believe that the truth can be discerned by looking for “that than which nothing more counterintuitive can be conceived.” Now I am convinced that we need to be willing to question things that conflict with our conscience. In some cases, we may have to disagree with Scripture; in many others, we may find that we have simply been forcing something unnatural onto the text.

Regarding the atrocities of the Canaanite conquest: do you think it’s better to worship a God whose morality requires exceptions and redefinitions of key concepts than to live with the uncertainty that perhaps even the biblical authors were not fully aware of the depths of God’s grace? Are you content to excuse even the worst charges against God if by any means it vindicates your Bible and the comfortable theological confidence it gives you?

Regarding the destiny of unbelievers: are you willing to accept lying down the damnation of your unbelieving brothers and sisters, shrugging it off with a mere, “Like it or not, that’s what the Bible says”? Forgetting the examples of Moses and Paul, are you content to cling to that ill-founded defense in assurance that your own fate is secured? Search your heart: are you nursing a strong prejudice against the idea of inclusivistic or universalistic Christianity in order to ensure the relevance of your religion’s special claims? I beg you to reconsider your priorities. As with the brutalities described in the Old Testament, if the Bible truly does unequivocally aver that some souls can never be recovered (which I doubt), it should be the fervent hope of every lover of God that the Bible is wrong about it. Where is the passion for what is right and compassionate that motivated the characters of Job, Abraham, Moses, the prophets, and Paul to contend with their Maker over their understanding of His words? “The Bible says it” simply isn’t good enough.

I’ll be blunt: Holy Scripture or “historic, orthodox” doctrines notwithstanding, the only way God is worth worshiping is if He’s good and loving through and through. I will not subjugate love to scarcely warranted glory or petty retribution disguised as justice. My faith is in a God whose soul is more lovely than ours, who has a higher, more wholesome sense of love and justice than we are able to walk in as humans. My hope is built on nothing less than this!

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 destroyed by the cruel hand of genocide. His vivid portrait of what genocide events look like in the real world 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) — were 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-handedly accomplish despite his reluctance. Were infants and children culpable of such 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 their forebears whose iniquity was “not yet full” (Gen. 15.16)? (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, says Stark, 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.

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.