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Sunday 11 March 2018

Haunting Statements in the Bible | Genocide in the Bible Series (Part 1)


What stuns the first time readers of the Old Testament is the apparent killing and death… many a time at the hands of human agents. I remember a convert saying that when she read the Bible for the first time, she started off with the Old Testament and she was stunned with the amount of killing and violence… so much so that she stopped reading the Bible and stayed away from it for a few years till such time that she got a personal visitation from the Lord, got good guidance and accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior.

There are a number of statements in the Holy Bible which can shock a careless or casual reader. A number of cases of mass killings of people, apparently at God’s behest, are recorded in the Old Testament:
1.   The Flood (Genesis 6-8)
2.   The cities of the plain, including Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18-19)
3. The Egyptian firstborn sons during the Passover (Exodus 11-12)
4. The Canaanites under Moses and Joshua (Numbers 21:2-3; Deuteronomy 20:17; Joshua 6:17, 21)
5.  The Amalekites annihilated by Saul (1 Samuel 15)

The first three examples are similar in that there was no human agent involved – in each case it was God, or an angel of God, who carried out the mass killings directly.

Certain passages in the Old Testament even give believers pause. Like these:

When the Lord your God brings you into the land where you are entering to possess it, and clears away many nations before you…you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to them. Furthermore, you shall not intermarry with them…. For they will turn your sons away from following Me to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you and He will quickly destroy you. But thus you shall do to them: You shall tear down their altars, and smash their sacred pillars, and hew down their Asherim, and burn their graven images with fire. (Deut. 7:1-5)

Only in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the Lord your God has commanded you, so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the Lord your God. (Deut. 20.16-18)

Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’” (1 Sam 15:2-3)

Strong words. Reading them brings to mind horrible terms like “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing.” Could this command really come from the God of all grace and mercy, the same God who, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, “became flesh, and dwelt among us…full of grace and truth” (Jn. 1:14)?

Maybe not, according to some.

The mass killing of the Canaanites is the first of two cases in which the text claims that God’s people, the nation of Israel, under commands from the Almighty attacked other nations and affected the mass killings. For this reason, this case will be the focus of this study.

For the sake of convenience and for better arrangement of the content, let me first break up the question into two perspectives: atheists and theists.

Dismissing an atheist who raises such a question is very trivial. Firstly, what is the point that the atheist trying to make? An atheist is trying to say that if there is a God, then he cannot command such things as commit mass genocide… committing mass genocide is a huge moral issue and totally wrong. For an atheist to say that there is a something which is morally or ethically wrong, there has to be something which can be defined as morally right. If there is a clear distinction or a universal law which dictates that actions such as rape, molesting babies, committing mass genocide, etc is wrong, then there has to be a moral law giver, this moral law giver is called God in theistic terms. So, an atheist when raising the question on morality to prove the non-existence of God actually has to assume God’s existence in the question itself, thereby nullifying the very question.
Secondly, since an atheist doesn’t believe that the Bible is the word of God, from that position, I can again dismiss atheist queries on this topic by saying that these were mere exaggerated accounts of warfare which is very common in Eastern warfare accounts. OR, that the Israelites were simply mistaken that an All powerful deity had commanded the incident.
Lastly, nowadays, with regards to freewill, atheists such as Sam Harris and Michael Shermer believe that since all living beings are nothing but a chaotic bunch of atoms and molecules having no designer or purpose, any and all of their actions are nothing but an outcome of the chemical reactions and the firing of neurons in their brains…. In other words, all actions are determined (Click here to checkout Sam Harris' take on freewill) … very much like putting a pot of water containing tea powder and milk results in “tea” as the end product. If a car rolls down a hill and rams into a bus killing people inside it, can the car be put in jail for this “error”? NO, from an atheist’s perspective, there is no difference between a car rolling down a hill and a human being doing something immoral such as a murder. If that’s the case, then the Israelites cannot be blamed or have said to have done anything wrong… since these actions were all due to some faulty chemical reactions in their brains which led to these involuntary actions by their bodies resulting in the destruction of another chaotic mass of atoms and molecules a.k.a. humans.

With the “atheist” perspective out of the picture, let’s move to the theists who may be from the Christian faith or any other worldview which doesn’t discount out the existence of God.

(... To Be Continued in Part 2)

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