"Fans of Professor Richard Dawkins fear he may be losing his grip on reality, following his article on the Guardian website last week, explaining why he turned down a recent invitation to debate with the American Christian philosopher William Lane Craig.
Craig, he wrote, is 'a deplorable apologist for genocide', in that he has defended God for commanding the massacre of the Canaanites, as recounted in the book of Deuteronomy. 'Would you share a platform with him? I wouldn't, and I won't.'
Whoops! A reader pointed out that Dawkins had shared a platform with Craig at a debate last November. The prof replied that 'obviously I didn't KNOW at the time that Craig was a defender of genocide and infanticide'. Whoops again! In April 2008 Dawkins wrote an article attacking Craig's 'dumbfoundingly, staggeringly awful' account of the massacre."
Now, what Dawkins is referring to is Deuteronomy 20 .13-17: "When the LORD your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the LORD your God gives you from your enemies. This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby. However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God."
However, this is not the only example of God ordering mass destruction and the slaughter of those who stand in the way of the Israelites. We all know the story of the battle of Jericho, where the walls fell down, and, as we often forget, everyone there was killed except the prostitute Rahab and her family. Later on in the book of Joshua we find the annihilation of the city of Ai ordered by God and carried out by Joshua. Then, of course, there is the most famous destruction of all - God causing the whole world to be inundated by the Great Flood. All animals and humans were wiped out - except Noah and his family and the creature collected by him in the ark.
Also, there is a terribly unfair instruction given by Ezra the prophet and scribe - that all the exiles who had returned from Babylon should put aside any wives that they had taken from the local population, and any children that had been produced.
All this seems pretty dreadful. And indeed, Dawkins is far from the first to be shocked by all this. Seventeen centuries ago, Marcion who was Bishop of Edessa in Syria complained about exactly the same thing. He stated that this God, the God of the Old Testament could not possibly be the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. No! This was the devil who created the world who was set over and against the Father of Jesus. This God was the good God, the God of the Old Testament was the source of all evil.
But what are we to make of all this in the Twenty First century? I think that Dawkins does have a serious point here. If, unlike Marcion, we believe that there is one God, and that the God who created the universe is the God who is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, then we have to have an answer to Dawkins. There can't be just special pleading - 'oh, people were just more primitive then', or something like that. And to be fair to Dawkins, this is just what William Lane Craig does. To quote from Dawkins agin:
"You might say that such a call to genocide could never have come from a good and loving God. Any decent bishop, priest, vicar or rabbi would agree. But listen to Craig. He begins by arguing that the Canaanites were debauched and sinful and therefore deserved to be slaughtered. He then notices the plight of the Canaanite children.
"But why take the lives of innocent children? The terrible totality of the destruction was undoubtedly related to the prohibition of assimilation to pagan nations on Israel's part. In commanding complete destruction of the Canaanites, the Lord says, 'You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons, or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods' (Deut 7.3-4). […] God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. […] Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God's grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven's incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives."This is taken from Dawkins' article on the Guardian website.
I hope that I am 'any decent vicar', and I side with Dawkins here. But still what are we to make of all this? The writers of the various Biblical passages we have seen deliberately recorded these shocking instructions from God. They are not peripheral to the story. They are central to it. So it seems we have a choice: either we stick to these passages as being the inerrant word of God, or we dethrone them in some way. Does the contemporary Christian hold firm to the Bible, and thence be described as condoning genocide as Craig does, or can we find some other way and try to understand these passages in a different light?
Let's look at the archaelogical evidence for some help.
As far as we can see the destructions recorded in Deuteronomy and Joshua have left no evidence. At the time they were supposed to have happened about 1200BC, there is no record of Jericho being inhabited - the same goes for Ai mentioned above. There were people there before the period in question, and there were people there afterwards, but at that time both places were uninhabited.
So this is even stranger. We have no evidence from outside the Bible that these shocking incidences ever happened. (And just to say that the results of archaeology in the Holy Land have confirmed the broad sweep of the Biblical narrative, as much as it has questioned it.)
What is going on?? It seems that these stories may not even have happened as recorded. Would the Bible writers invent stories that portrayed God as being vengeful and murderous when they never happened in the first place? What possible reason could they have had for including these stories that actually put us off God, rather than endear him to us?
I think that there is a very powerful reason, one already mentioned, albeit a reason which we would find very strange. There is a saying in the study of history and historical texts that goes something like this: it may seem to be about there then, but actually it is about here now......................Que?
In this case, the stories about Joshua and his massacres of the Canaanites appear to be about the Israelites entering into the Holy Land, and carrying all before them. But actually, they are saying something about the situation in Israel when these stories were being written.
At that time the Israelites were struggling against the superpowers of the age - Assyria and then Babylon. One of the things that they were insistent upon was to be faithful to God, to show how pious they were, and how they were uncorrupted by the beliefs of the peoples around and about them. Only God could save his people from their problems, and they needed to show how pure they were in the doing of God's will.
If you are seeking after purity of action, purity of thought, purity of intent, then you are going to want to show that not only are you uncorrupted now, but also that you have been uncorrupted in the past. In other words, it is absolutely essential that you can show that you are as kosher as possible. That is all fine, but what if you can't do that - you just can't prove that you are as kosher as you think you are - for example, let's say that when our ancestors entered the Holy Land, they met up with some of the Canaanites, got on well, and then interbred with them.....which means that.....we are half Canaanite ourselves. No. We can't entertain that idea. And so the notion spread amongst the population of Israel that they were thoroughbreds - racially, absolutely uncorrupted. Convenient beliefs like that spread far and fast.
But then you have another problem. There were some awkward questions. What about all the people who were living in the promised land when your ancestors came in? Surely there is something of them left around the place? Well, comes the answer.......if we are as pure as we think we are, then our ancestors must have chased them away, or got rid of them. It is a stark answer. It is not a nice answer. But it is an answer that does the job.
This is why we have these stories in the Bible. They are not deliberate lies. They are the ideas that communities evolve about themselves, especially if they are convenient for the present day circumstances. You can only put a distance between yourself and foreigners if you can prove to yourself that you do not have any foreign blood.
We do not have to go all that far in the past to see the same thing at work in our own cultures. In America, the history of slavery made the white culture intensely fixated with the degree of whiteness that any particular individual had. In the end they came up with the farcical notion that if it could be shown that you had one drop of black blood (!?!), then you were black - and, therefore, unacceptable in white society.
All this is rendered totally absurd because the whites of the southern states of America, mostly of English descent, were one of the most mixed races in the whole world. England has had more invaders and conquerers than any other part of the world: Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Normans, Huguenots, Jews, Russians - and I've only got up to the 1850s!
The simple matter about these genuinely disturbing stories in the Bible is that they were about a whole cuture's wishful thinking about their origins, simply to show that they were somehow racially pure. They weren't about massacres and genocide, it was all really just about proving that they were kosher.
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