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Monday 12 March 2018

Is God racist? | Genocide in the Bible series (Part 7)



God described the sin of the Canaanites vividly in these words, “I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants” (Lev. 18:25).

Were the Israelites somehow morally superior in God’s mind? Deuteronomy 9:4-6, God makes it absolutely clear that the Israelites are not being used because they are better than the Canaanites or morally superior, but simply as agents of His judgment. In fact, He repeats twice that it is “not because of your righteousness”… not just that from v 7 till the end of the chapter (9), the Lord even articulates in very precise terms the sins of the children of Israel and how they themselves were deserving to be punished. Perhaps God wanted to use the Israelites in this way so that they would learn the seriousness of sin, the detestability to God of the Canaanite religions and the reality of God’s judgment. These truths would be burned deeply on their consciousness as they remembered the annihilation they had been involved in.

This problem of how God could use sinful people as agents of judgment of other sinful people arises again later in the Old Testament. The book of Habakkuk focuses on this concern in the context of the impending invasion of Judah by the Babylonians. The prophet struggles with the fact that God’s people, sinful as they were, are about to be defeated by an even more sinful nation (Habakkuk 1:13). Chapter 2 details God’s response to Habakkuk as He vindicates Himself and assures the prophet that in due time he will judge the Babylonians by the same righteous standard that He was now holding against Judah. The book ends with a declaration of Habakkuk’s faith as he praises God and expresses his trust in Him (Chapter 3).

In my searching for answers, the Lord blessed me with a wonderful analogy. Let’s assume that a powerful country notices that one of its provinces had totally rejected the governance of the rulers and were now working in an absolutely debauched manner, after a lot of failed diplomacy and requests to revert to submission to the parent state, decides to send one of their generals to get rid of mischief mongers in that land and establish a righteous rule under the parent state. What if, the general after establishing control over this province then proceeds to himself rule in the same debauched manner of the earlier rulers, will the parent state not send another general to displace and punish this renegade general and establish a fair and just rule under the parent state? What if this new general also was no better, won’t the parent state send another general to totally root out the rot? Absolutely… and that’s precisely what the good Lord did.

Israel’s response to Canaanite sin is a parable of how their own sinfulness empowered them to ape the sin of the Canaanites and thereby procure God’s judgment on them. For God does not show favoritism. Israel was warned not to let the Canaanites live in their land, but to completely destroy them (Exod. 23:33; Deut. 20:16–18), lest the Israelites learn the Canaanite ways (Exod. 34:15–16). If they did not destroy them, the land would “vomit” them out just as it had vomited out the Canaanites (Num. 33:56; Lev. 18:28; Deut 4:23–29, 8:19–20).

Instead, the Israelites worshiped the Canaanites’ gods and “did evil” (Judg. 10:6; 1 Kings 14:22; 2 Kings 17:10). They had “male shrine prostitutes” (1 Kings 14:22), committed acts of “lewdness,” adultery, and incest (Jer. 5:7; 29:23; Hos. 4:13–14; Ezek. 22:10–11; Amos 2:7), and even Solomon set up an altar to Molech (1 Kings 11:5, 7–8). But instead of repenting when things went badly, they concluded that their misfortune was because they stopped burning incense to “the Queen of Heaven,” Inanna/Ishtar (Jer. 44:18). So the Lord said that Israel became “like Sodom to me” (Jer. 23:14). In short, Israel was Canaanized.

Although prophets warned the northern kingdom (usually referred to as Israel or Samaria) of impending doom, they didn’t repent, and in 722 BC the king of Assyria killed or deported most of them, and filled the land with conquered peoples from other nations. Similarly, the southern tribes (usually referred to as Judah) were deported when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem beginning in 586 BC. Just as God had demonstrated his knowledge of who would repent in the Canaanite cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, before he destroyed Jerusalem He told Jeremiah that if He could find even one righteous person He would spare the entire city (Jer. 5:1).

Let’s see the fate of the conquerors through the ages:

Assyria - Nineveh

The city of Nineveh, the ancient capital of the Assyrian Empire, was destroyed in 612 B.C. The fall of that great city was not a matter of chance, but rather a fulfillment of Bible prophecy.

Nineveh was established by Nimrod, "the mighty hunter" (Gen. 10:8-10). It served as the capitol of the Assyrian Empire for many years.

Assyria’s conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel began approximately 740 BC under King Pul. First Chronicles 5:26 notes, “So the God of Israel stirred up the spirit of Pul king of Assyria, the spirit of Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, and he took them into exile, namely, the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half-tribe of Manasseh, and brought them to Halah, Habor, Hara, and the river Gozan, to this day.” These tribes, located east of the Jordan River, were the first ones conquered by Assyria.

Nearly 20 years later, about 722 BC, the capital city, Samaria, was overtaken by the Assyrians under Shalmaneser V. After first forcing tribute payments, Shalmaneser later laid siege to the city when it refused to pay. Following a three-year siege, 2 Kings 17:5-6 notes that, “in the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria, and he carried the Israelites away to Assyria and placed them in Halah, and on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.” And in 701 BC the Assyrians marched south into Judah; however, they were unable to capture Jerusalem due to the Lord’s intervention (2 Chronicles 32:22).

The prophet Nahum predicted the destruction of Nineveh in the book that bears his name. The following items were to be a part of the destruction of that great city:

An "overflowing flood" would "make an utter end of its place" (Nah. 1:8)
Nineveh would be destroyed while her inhabitants were "drunken like drunkards" (Nah. 1:10)
Nineveh would be unprotected because "fire shall devour the bars of your gates" (Nah. 3:13)
Nineveh would never recover, for their "injury has no healing" (Nah. 3:19)
The downfall of Nineveh would come with remarkable ease, like figs falling when the tree is shaken (Nah. 3:12)
In 612 B.C. Nabopolassar united the Babylonian army with an army of Medes and Scythians and led a campaign which captured the Assyrian citadels in the North. The Babylonian army laid siege to Nineveh, but the walls of the city were too strong for battering rams, so they decided to try and starve the people out. A famous oracle had been given that "Nineveh should never be taken until the river became its enemy." After a three month siege, "rain fell in such abundance that the waters of the Tigris inundated part of the city and overturned one of its walls for a distance of twenty stades. Then the King, convinced that the oracle was accomplished and despairing of any means of escape, to avoid falling alive into the enemy's hands constructed in his palace an immense funeral pyre, placed on it his gold and silver and his royal robes, and then, shutting himself up with his wives and eunuchs in a chamber formed in the midst of the pile, disappeared in the flames. Nineveh opened its gates to the besiegers, but this tardy submission did not save the proud city. It was pillaged and burned, and then razed to the ground so completely as to evidence the implacable hatred enkindled in the minds of subject nations by the fierce and cruel Assyrian government." (Lenormant and E. Chevallier, The Rise and Fall of Assyria).

"Nineveh was laid waste as ruthlessly and completely as her kings had once ravaged Susa and Babylon; the city was put to the torch, the population was slaughtered or enslaved, and the palace so recently built by Ashurbanipal was sacked and destroyed. At one blow Assyria disappeared from history. Nothing remained of her except certain tactics and weapons of war ...The Near East remembered her for a while as a merciless unifier of a dozen lesser states; and the Jews recalled Nineveh vengefully as 'the bloody city, full of lies and robbery.' In a little while all but the mightiest of the Great Kings were forgotten, and all their royal palaces were in ruins under the drifting sands. Two hundred years after its capture, Xenophon's Ten Thousand marched over the mounds that had been Nineveh, and never suspected that these were the site of the ancient metropolis that had ruled half the world. Not a stone remained visible of all the temples with which Assyria's pious warriors had sought to beautify their greatest capital. Even Ashur, the everlasting god, was dead." (Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage, pp. 283, 284).

The prophet Jonah had gone to Nineveh and preached, saying, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" (Jonah 3:4). The record tells us "the people of Nineveh believed God, proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least of them" (Jonah 3:5). In response to one of the greatest stories of repentance in history, "God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it" (Jonah 3:10).

Babylon
In the Bible, Isaiah 13:1 says, “The burden against Babylon which Isaiah the son of Amoz saw.” At the time of Isaiah’s prediction, Babylon was one of the largest and most important cities in the world. This is what God told Isaiah would happen to Babylon:

Isaiah claimed that God told him that Babylon would be completely destroyed.
“Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them, who will not regard silver; and as for gold, they will not delight in it. Also their bows will dash the young men to pieces, and they will have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eye will not spare children. And Babylon, the glory of the kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldeans’ pride, will be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It will never be inhabited, nor will it be settled from generation to generation; nor will the Arabian pitch tents there, nor will the shepherds make their sheepfolds there” (Isaiah 13:17-20).

When Isaiah wrote his prediction, the Medes were weak. Most of the Medes were ruled by other nations, and the remaining Medes were not unified (The Cambridge History of Iran, 1985, Vol. 2, p. 80). It would have been impossible for them to capture or destroy the strong city of Babylon. Isaiah’s prediction appeared to be wrong. When the Assyrians destroyed Babylon in 689 B.C., Isaiah’s prediction appeared to be completely impossible. The Medes could not fight against a city that was gone!
Finally, nearly 200 years after Isaiah wrote about Babylon, part of his prophecy was fulfilled. God told Isaiah, “Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them, who will not regard silver; and as for gold, they will not delight in it” (Isaiah 13:17). The Medes captured Babylon, just as Isaiah predicted. They captured the city without a battle and did not plunder the city. However, the other details of the prophecy had not happened yet.

Isaiah said that the Medes would kill many people: “Also their bows will dash the young men to pieces, and they will have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eye will not spare children” (Isaiah 13:18). This prediction was fulfilled several years later.

An inscription written on a rock cliff in Bisotun, Iran—made by Darius, king of the Medes and Persians—describes the event. In 521 B.C. the Babylonians appointed their own king and the city rebelled. Darius’ army defeated the rebel army and captured Babylon. Then the rebel king and his main followers were impaled inside the city.

Medes – Persian empire
The history of the rise and fall of the Medes and the Persians forms an important background for over two hundred years of Biblical history. Located in the area south of the Caspian Sea and east of the Zagros Mountains, its original domain stretched for 600 miles north and south, and 250 miles east to west. The nation first came into prominence in the ninth century b.c. and is mentioned in inscriptions concerning Shalmaneser III (about 836 b.c. ). Though under the domination of Assyria until the seventh century b.c., their rise in power was contemporary with the decline of the Assyrian Empire and in 614 b.c. the Medes captured Asshur, the capitol city of Assyria. Later in 612 b.c. in alliance with the Chaldeans they captured Nineveh resulting in the downfall of the Assyrian Empire. In the years which followed they were an important ally of Babylonia and formed various alliances and intermarriages. Toward the end of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, the Persians began to become a powerful force and under Cyrus II Media was conquered in 549 b.c. and was combined with the empire of the Persians to form Medo-Persia. The combined strength of the Persians and the Medes led to conquest of Babylon in 539 b.c., with the resulting extension of their empire over much of the Middle East until the conquest of Alexander the Great in 331 b.c.

The Grecan empire after the death of King Alexander split into 4 kingdoms which then consolidated into 2 kingdoms which then merged into the single Roman empire…

The conquest was neither ethnic cleansing nor genocide. God cared nothing about skin color or national origin. Aliens shared the same legal rights in the commonwealth as Jews (Lev. 19:34, Lev. 24:22, Deut. 10:18-19). Foreigners like Naomi and Rahab were welcome within their ranks.

(... To Be Continued in Part 8)

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