GENOCIDE!

Matthew will tell the story so as to make it fulfill prophecy, even if it is ludicrous. And so Matthew is describing Jesus riding two animals at the same time into Jerusalem. You can find paintings of Jesus sidesaddle on a big donkey with his feet resting on a small donkey. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Things are great. You know, by the time our friends hear this, this will have already happened. But I am. I’m fixing to go to a religious celebration.

Soon I am to. I. Tomorrow morning, I take off for Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

Which is vaguely related to Lent and Shrove Tuesday and all of that stuff. I will not be celebrating any of those things, but I will be celebrating some amazing, amazing Cajun food.

And some. Some parades and such. So I. I’m stoked. I’m excited.

Come back with no beads. You want to have given them all away, right? That’s the. That’s the point. I understand. I don’t know.

I. You know, I. I am bead. I will say. I, I’m. I’m. I, I. I have no plans for beads one way or other, so.

Okay. Well, New Orleans is a wonderful city. The first time I was there was way back in 2009. Flew off to Oxford with my family, and a month later came back for a conference taking place in New Orleans. And we had just a wonderful time. In fact, I think I had. We went to find a. A restaurant downtown New Orleans. On Thanksgiving, we found a little hole in the wall. Best mac and cheese I’ve ever had in my entire life. Yeah.

Love it. Just don’t go in August.

It’s very.

It’s very hot and muggy.

Oh, I can imagine.

No, I’m. I, I don’t like when the mosquitoes could carry you away.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s. That’s less appealing.

Yeah, I, I scratch those places off my list when I’m looking for a place to go.

Speaking of less appealing.

Today’s show’s an interesting one. We’re diving head first into one of the. One of the roughest things to. To square in the Bible.

And that’s. And that’s saying something, because we’ve engaged a lot of. A lot of rough topics on this show so far.

Yeah. But this one’s real, real tricky. We’re gonna talk genocide and that’s going to be fun. And if we have time for it at the end, we’ll do a little.

Sorbet course, a little palate cleanser.

A little palate cleanser and we’ll, we’ll, we’ll give you Jesus’s petting zoo.

A fun story, a confusing sometimes story about Jesus riding animals.

Yes, indeed. So, so stick around for that. But first, so let’s dive in with, with, with genocide. That’s always fun. It’s always a delight when we do that.

Yeah. Comes up a lot though.

Yeah. And, and so first I, I guess we should start with just like, what are some of the really rough passages that we’re talking about when it comes to this? Because, because there are a couple.

Well, the, I think the main one we’re looking at is. And we find it scattered in a few different places, but we’re talking about the conquest of Canaan at the hands of the Israelites. Following the 40 years in the desert. Moses is gone. Joshua is now leading the Israelites and they are commanded to go in and take over the land and not just drive out the, the current inhabitants, but commit genocide and kill everything that breathes, man.

Yeah, and we’re not just talking about, yeah, the animals. That was the part that was like, yeah, man, that where it gets rough. Like.

And there’s, and there’s a logic to this. First thing I want to point out is that most of the, the stuff that kind of champions this genocidal appropriation of this land is coming from the Deuteronomistic literature. So this is something that’s being written toward the, the end of the 7th century BCE and is having layers added to it over the next couple of centuries. And, and they’re looking back on something that ostensibly happened multiple centuries before. And they’re treating this as basically a human sacrifice to purge the land. And that’s something that is sometimes lost in this. But the idea of killing even the animals, destroying all the goods, man, woman, child, everything must go is— This is how you purge the wickedness of the Canaanites from the land. It’s basically you must sacrifice all of the life in order to purge the land so that it is fit for you to come in and then be holy.

It is a wholesale, it is, it is such a large scale view of everything. Like not just, I’m not just talking about like you have to cleanse the land, but like just the concept that there is such a thing as a wicked entire group of people. Like not a one of them is worth saving. Not a one. Like literally, we can condemn the entire group. And this happens several times throughout the Bible. But there’s this. This all or nothing thinking that pervades all of this. That is. I mean, I find it very disturbing. Yes, I. These ideas.

Absolutely. And. And these are pretty ancient ideas. It’s. There’s a pretty ethnocentric perspective driving a lot of this where it’s us against them. Yeah. And we’re. We’re out to preserve and protect our community. And everything on the outside of our community is potentially and usually an enemy that we need to defeat, because it’s either we defeat them or they defeat us.

Right.

In this perspective. And so, yeah, you’ve got this idea of cleansing the land through this human sacrifice. And as the. The Bible progresses, we’ll talk about this a little later on. But that perspective is forced to change. Circumstances compel the biblical authors to renegotiate their understanding of the relationship of Israel to the nations around them. And I think it’s a fascinating rhetorical innovation that takes place. But for the time being, yeah, this is, this is pitting us against them. We’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys. And you even see in. In Genesis 18 , Abraham is negotiating with. with Adonai, the God of Israel, regarding Sodom and Gomorrah. And do you recall what the negotiation is about?

Oh, gosh, I do. We talked about it. And I was so delighted by it. No, I don’t remember. I don’t remember.

Okay, so, um, so Abraham’s like, man, you’re not going to destroy the whole city. Come on. And he’s, oh, right. What if. What if there are 50 righteous people?

That’s right.

And God says, I will not destroy it for 50 righteous. And then he goes down, down, down. And 10 righteous people. Five righteous people. And. And Abraham says, I. Or God says, I will not destroy it for the sake of five righteous people. And then this is why the story is told the way it is in Genesis 19 . Lot goes in there, needs a place, or Lot is there. The angels, excuse me, go in there, need a place to stay. Lot brings them to his home. How many righteous people are in Lot’s home? And here’s where there’s a distinction. Full personhood here is only attributed to men.

Oh, right.

The women are not attributed full personhood.

So the daughters and the wife don’t count.

Right. It is Lot, and it is two men who are betrothed to his daughters, not yet married, but betrothed. Which adds up to three righteous people. And so guess what? That’s not five. And so the city goes down. And. And that’s kind of. You. You mentioned that this, this kind of framing, this characterizing everyone as far as fully, entirely, unilaterally wicked, is kind of on display in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, because Abraham’s like, surely there are five. And it turns out there are only three. And God says, get them out, because.

Everybody else is that. I mean, you go back to Genesis 6 through 8, there’s a very famous story of everyone being wicked.

Right.

And that’s everyone being wicked. That is literally everyone that isn’t on that boat, which we’re talking about the flood we’re talking about.

Right, right. And if you didn’t know, Genesis 6 through 8 narrates the the flood. And it kind of highlights the rhetorical nature of these stories. These are not real world circumstances.

Right.

These are people telling stories. Every last one of them was wicked. It’s. It’s. It’s like, you know, now we tend to give nuance to villains in books and movies and things. Like, you know, you’ve got. You’ve got Black Panther, where the bad guy, a lot of people are like, he’s kind of making sense.

Right, right.

And like, you want. You, like, the villains that are closer to kind of sympathy and empathy and stuff are more compelling villains. But for a long time it was, you know, when Superman started up, it was good guys and bad guys.

Yeah, you were all good or you were all bad. It was black and white.

And so that’s the storytelling that we have in the ancient world. They’re all wicked. And. And that kind of plays into some of the apologetics about this as well. When we talk about, oh, all the Canaanites, men, women, children, newborn babies, they’re all going to die. And apologists will say, well, they were all wicked, or if they weren’t yet wicked, there was no way they were going to be anything other than wicked. Which means this is.

When you’ve got DNA level wicked, there’s nothing you can do like, that’s baked in.

Yeah, it’s you. It’s. Prior restraint did not play anciently. So. And so, yeah, some of the apologetics kind of play into the way everything is represented in black and white terms, which very clearly shows these are not real world circumstances. This is rhetoric that is being used. But let’s. Let’s get into some of the actual stories about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So I’ve got a few different examples that I looked up that I tried to sort out, you know, what they were. And I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know. I don’t understand how the timeline works very well. I don’t understand how some of these.

The biblical authors didn’t understand either, so.

And I don’t understand how these stories interact with each other. I don’t know if they’re the same stories or if they’re different stories. So you can help me out with this. The first one that I wanted, that I found was Joshua six. This is, this is Joshua taking Jericho.

Uhhuh.

And this is where, you know, the, in Joshua 6 , the, you know, they, the, the people all march around the city of Jericho with six days in a row and they’re blowing their trumpets and everything and then they all shout and then it’s time to go in and, and, and you know, the walls come down, come a tumbling down, they come a tumble.

Great poet once said.

Yeah, that’s right. Those famous fabled walls of Jericho. And then literally, and then they say, for the city and all that is in it shall be devoted to the Lord for destruction.

Only Rahab the prostitute and all who are with her in her house shall live because she hid the messenger. So they sent in spies. This prostitute helped the spies out, so she gets to live. Everyone else is to be killed.

Right. Not just killed. Devoted to destruction.

Right. And that seems like, just like a supporting of your thing. Which is, which is that this is a, a ritual sacrifice.

It is. And this is the word in Hebrew is. Excuse me, herem is how you would h e r e m. And this is not unique to biblical Hebrew. There’s a, a stele called the, the Mesha inscription or the Mesha stele or the Moabite stele from around 840 BCE and it’s written in Moabite a, a sibling language of biblical Hebrew. And the king, Mesha talks about devoting cities to destruction using this word, which is, is basically saying we’re not taking the goods for us, we’re destroying everything. We’re just going to pile it all up and burn it. And that is to, it’s kind of a bit of costly signaling to the deity.

Very costly. Yeah, that’s a lot of good stuff that they’re just getting rid of.

And it’s a way to say this is. We are just destroying this to show the deity that we’re doing this because the deity said we’re not doing it so that we can benefit financially from these going to war. And then you have, there’s a famous story of Achan who engages in a little five finger discounting of some of the material and hides it. And then God says, oh, I told you, you guys to devote this to destruction. And one of you did not. And then Joshua’s like, ah, crap. Okay, we gotta figure out who did this. And, and then they, they whittle it down through this, this kind of ordeal thing. And God reveals that it is Achan who is responsible for this. And so he and his whole family and all the goods that they stole basically get swallowed up by the earth because, because he was going against the devotion of all of this to destruction.

So this, this is a principle that is in circulation in the area around Israel when this kind of thing is going on. But yeah, it’s, it’s basically a ritual sacrifice of everything.

Okay, there you go. Let’s go to. I, I’m, I guess I’m going backwards to, to Deuteronomy 7 , which is, which is sort of, it’s got a command in it. The Lord is talking to. Who is the Lord talking to? I don’t know who. Maybe you know who the Lord is talking to.

Well, normally God is talking to Moses and in Deuteronomy.

Okay, so we’ll just say Moses for now and Deuteronomy. So I’m, I’ll skip around a little bit. Basically he says, well, in just at the very top of the, of the chapter, he says, when the Lord your God brings you into the land that you’re about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you, and he lists them off. The Hittites, the Gigashites, the. No, Girgashites, the, the Amorites, the Gigachads. The Gigachads. The Canaanites is in there. The Perizzites, not to be confused with parasites, the Hivites, and with apologies to Homer Simpson, the Jebusites.

Praise Jebus.

I don’t even believe in Jebus. So basically he says, it says, seven nations more, more numerous and mighty than you. Skipping a little bit then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, blah, blah, blah. That’s a whole lot of destroying. That’s, that’s seven different nations. So like we hear talk about the Canaanites a lot, but nobody’s mentioning the, the, the Amorites or the Girgashites. So what’s going on there?

So this is actually a variant use of this term Canaanite, because it becomes kind of a blanket term for everybody who occupies the land that they refer to as Canaan, which is basically all the land that they’re inhabiting. But in. In some usage, it is a subgroup of the broader categories. But like the. The Jebusites, this is the people who are occupying, ostensibly, the city of Jerusalem until that’s taken by David, which is dead center of the whole land of Canaan. And so to distinguish the Jebusites from the Canaanites is a little misrepresentative according to the. The broader use of the term. And so you’ve got the Deuteronomistic author here probably just trying to come up with seven names, because seven represents completion, perfection. So if you can destroy the seven nation, I. I won’t sing the song because I understand we can get in trouble for singing the White Stripes.

Yes, the White Stripes suck. But if you destroy the seven nations, as God has commanded, that is, you’re perfectly fulfilling God’s requirements, and then you’ve perfectly cleansed and purged the land. And so that’s what that strikes me as. And again, this is coming from the period of Josiah, or after, which is looking back almost a thousand years on what they imagined happened. And so it’s kind of constructing a golden age deep in the past where we were the champions who came in and we were going to rout everybody. Okay. And that’s not the way anything turns out according to the rest of the text that we have.

Well, why don’t you look, what I’ve got is a whole bunch of different scriptural references to the same kind of idea. So will you just tell us the story that we’re referencing here and just sort of give us the broad strokes?

Well, like you said, there are different stories. So when we look at. And we talked a little bit, we’ve done an episode on. On the Priestly source or account or document. Right now we’re in D, we’re in Deuteronomy. And Deuteronomy is one of the main sources that. That came together to create the Pentateuch. But the Deuteronomistic project extends well beyond the Pentateuch. It includes Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings. And so the majority of. Of all of that is being brought together by the Deuteronomists who are influencing how these stories are being told. And so when we go into Joshua and Judges, we’re actually going to see the Deuteronomists preserving some earlier accounts while also including their own accounts. And this is where I think one of the most interesting things about the story of the conquest is that you have this command in Deuteronomy 7 . But if you go down to verse 22, says, the Lord your God will clear away these nations before you little by little, you will not be able to make a quick end of them, otherwise the wild animals would become too numerous for you.

And you see this in a couple of different places where it says, we can’t just kill everybody because then the land is empty. You have nobody to curate it. It’s going to take too long for you to get your people out there. And so the wild animals will just take over. So it’s kind of this weird rationalization for why it’s actually going to take a while for this conquest to happen.

And so leave those guys there until you build up enough people that you can actually take over the land instead of the animals coming in.

Yeah, it’s told in a bunch of different ways, but you repeatedly get these, like, pathetic rationalizations for why something didn’t go the way God commanded it. And so a good example is Judges 1:19 . The Lord was with Judah. So in Judges 1 , what we have is, okay, so everybody’s going out and they’re dispossessing the Canaanites of this land. The Lord was with Judah, and he took possession of the hill country, but could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain because they had chariots of iron, right? And so God is. Is with Judah. But it’s like God’s like, you know what? We’re going to have to regroup, because I didn’t know they had chariots of iron.

That’s. That’s not fair.

This is above my pay grade.

I call timeout. That’s not okay.

And then you’ve got that other one. And it’s like, look, the wild animals would take over. There’s nothing we can do about that. Wild animals, they don’t listen to me. And so you get stories of, they killed everything that breathed. And then you get stories of, so they didn’t quite kill everything that breathed. And you see kind of the starkest contrast between, like, Joshua 10 . This is where I. I think this is the most striking, starting in. In verse 40. So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country. So that’s the northern hill country and the Negev. So that’s the. The desert in the south and the lowland and the slopes. That’s the Shephelah. So that’s everything running from the western hill country down to the coastal plain and all their kings he left no one remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed as the Lord God of Israel had commanded. And Joshua defeated them from Kadesh Barnea to Gaza, and all the country of Goshen as far as Gibeon.

Joshua took all these kings and their land at one time because the Lord God of Israel fought for Israel. Then Joshua returned and all Israel with him to the camp at Gilgal. And we have something similar at the end of the very next chapter. What do we got? At the time Joshua came and wiped out the Anakim from the hill country, from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, and from all the hill country of Judah, and from all the hill country of Israel, Joshua. So that’s north and south. Joshua utterly destroyed them with their towns. None of the Anakim was left in the land of the Israelites. Some remained only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod. So the Philistines are still there. So Joshua took the whole land according to all that the Lord had spoken to Moses and Joshua gave it for an inheritance to Israel according to their tribal allotments. And the land had rest from war. And now I’m looking at this on page 356 of my SBL Study Bible. And then chapter 13 begins on the very next page. So the facing page.

Now, Joshua was old and advanced in years, and the Lord said to him, you are old and advanced in years and very much of the land still remains to be possessed. Oh, so all the land was previously possessed and now suddenly there’s a bunch of stuff that is not possessed. And we can go to elsewhere, Joshua 17 , we have this statement, let’s see verses 12 and 13. Yet the Manassites could not take possession of those towns, but the Canaanites continued to live in that land. But when the Israelites grew strong, they put the Canaanites to forced labor, but did not utterly drive them out. And we have a number of references, even in Judges 1 , to this idea that they didn’t quite do what the text said they did. When Israel grew strong, they put the Canaanites to forced labor, but did not in fact drive them out.

And so we, I think what we have here is this rhetoric about this legendary idealized past where we came in and we just wiped them out.

Right.

It was epic. And then you’ve got others who are like, dude, they’re still around.

Have you guys noticed something weird?

Yeah, like around Canaanites and, and, and there are apologetic attempts to say, well, no, when he said all the land they’re actually just talking about the land that goes from this side of this hill. And then it is. This includes this city, but doesn’t include. And. And people try to parse it apart. To try to insist that it is still perfectly accurate and it doesn’t work. It requires inventing scenarios that are not in evidence. Right. In order to insist. Well, it’s not impossible that all of these agree. And so we’ve got a collection of conflicting texts. And I would argue that the genocidal ideal is something that is being invented in a much later time period.

And is there any, like, archaeological evidence that something like this happened?

You see. You see a lot of destruction layers. What they usually call them is destruction layers. Conflagration is. Is the $2 word for this in a lot of the sites that are mentioned in these narratives, but they don’t line up with the timeline, and they don’t fit any broader conquest narrative. Okay. And so most likely there was just fighting that went on in these places. And sometimes towns got destroyed and it would be a pity for something to happen to these.

For something to happen to the. Yeah, real nice. Real nice town you Amorites got here.

But like Jericho, you know, the. Depending on how you date Moses and the Exodus and everything like that, there’s a window of time in which Jericho was supposed to have been destroyed. And archaeologically, it doesn’t seem to have been inhabited anywhere in that window.

And there were walls that were knocked down before that window begins, and then they built it up again after that window. But during that window, it was either uninhabited or if it was inhabited, it was not fortified.

Well, that’ll make it easier for Joshua. If there’s no one in there, you can take that city pretty easy.

Yeah, well, that’s probably just him trying to make sure that his budget doesn’t get decreased for the following year. It was like, look, we had. It took us seven days. We had to. And all the costs. We need this much money next year as well. When in reality, they were like, hey, man, you can have it.

There’s not even a wall. So the conquest narrative is not supported by the archaeological data. And in. Within the history of scholarship, you started off, everybody kind of just presumed the historicity of these accounts. In fact, the whole field of biblical archaeology began with the saying, is a spade in one hand and a Bible in the other? Where they would go try to dig up these places that were mentioned in the Bible to prove the historicity of the Bible. And as it progressed and as methodologies were refined and matured. And as people figured out how to treat this more as a science than an apologetic endeavor, we developed better principles and we got to the point where this was no longer tenable, the idea of this conquest. And so you had a bunch of theories pop up.

The maturation of the science was a bad idea. It was a clear.

Well, at least for, for, for the apologetic project. Yes, right. It was, it was self defeating. And so you had these other theories that popped up. Peaceful infiltration that the, the Israelites coming out of Egypt peacefully infiltrated the land. And this is how they account for. Well, this is why the Canaanites were still around. It was because they came in and were like, hey man, can we set up camp over here? Nobody’s over in this part of. We’re okay. And then you had this other idea of a peasant revolt. It’s like, well, peaceful infiltration isn’t violent enough to account for all the violence in the text. So let’s have a peasant revolt where it’s, it’s local people, they’re not coming from outside, they’re from inside. But they just decide, you know, we’re not going to take it anymore and rise up and we’re going to defeat the overlords. And, and these days, I think most scholars, most archaeologists would say none of those really work. It’s probably a bunch of small scale things kind of took place across the whole spectrum.

Probably some people conquered some towns. Probably there was some peaceful infiltration. But for the most part, the nation of Israel and the tribes of Israel were already living in the land. And it was just a matter of slowly kind of developing a concept of some kind of identity and shared identity that then became a nation. And later down the road, they were like, well, where did this nation come from? Well, let’s say it came from conquest. So it’s, it’s the development of a, a mythos, a myth, a foundation myth about where we came from and why we have a right to this land. And unfortunately, genocide was the foundation of, of this myth.

Well, let’s talk a little bit about that. You know, we’ve talked about apologetics for various things. I read a bunch of apologetics about just that, the genocidal nature of, of this conquest. My favorite, of which, or rather the one that I’m absolutely giddy about presenting to you, begins with the. With. I’ll just start reading. Okay, this is from.

And I have not heard this yet, you mentioned you were gonna spring something.

I’m gonna spring it on you. This is from TabletalkMagazine.com that old, that old canard. Okay, yeah, I don’t know that one. I’ll skip down to my. To the one that. I know you’re going to respond the best to this one. I think you’ll find this convincing. Merriam-Webster defines genocide as.

Strike one.

Strike one. The. The defining of words.

And the use of Merriam-Webster, too, Right? Exactly.

Like this is a sacrament talk that somebody.

Yes, exactly. Yeah. Please don’t start any talk. If your TED talk starts with Webster’s dictionary defined. Anyway, this. They say that it defines genocide as the deliberate killing of people who belong to a particular racial, political, or cultural group. Now, I find that to be a fairly useful way of talking about this. But this, this apologetic goes on to say, basically, they say, well, genocide defined in this way is the intentional destruction of a people, of a people group because of their race, politics, culture, or religion. And since you can’t say that the destruction of Canaan was because of their race, culture, or religion, then it’s not. It’s not genocide. So we win.

It’s literally, they basically say, see, it wasn’t because of race, so you can’t call it genocide. The other thing that I wanted to.

But it was right.

Okay, so talk about that first.

Okay, so race anciently meant your ethnic group, which it could mean just what language you spoke. It could mean what city you lived in. It could be, you know, what society you identified with. It wasn’t based on skin color. That is an invention of medieval European hubris. But it absolutely was, because they’re saying, wipe out the Jebusites. So that’s an ethnic designation.

Right.

Therefore. And it’s not saying. The text is not saying, I want to wipe them out because they’re Jebusites. And I just, you know, a Jebusite stole my girlfriend in high school. It is identifying the object of this genocide via their ethnic designation, which would still qualify even if one were so senseless as to accept a dictionary definition as, as adequately delineating the concept. But it’s still saying it. It’s kind of like how apologists are going to respond about what Trump did to Ms. Carroll. They’ll go, they’ll say, hey, hey, hey. They didn’t find. It wasn’t rape according to the official state definition of rape, because she didn’t know if it was one thing or the. Or the other. Right.

And. And it’s like, okay, he still sexually assaulted her.

Yeah, you haven’t gotten. You haven’t gotten very far in, in ameliorating this issue. And I think that that was. My issue with this apologetic was that like, even if you can find a way to skirt around the problem of feeling icky about the word genocide being applied to something that the good guys in the Bible were supposed to have done, you still haven’t addressed the problem of the good guys in the Bible doing something that is, at least by most modern standards, morally reprehensible.

Yeah, absolutely. It doesn’t, it doesn’t resolve the issue, it doesn’t make the deity any less genocidal. It just says, well, technically it wouldn’t be genocide, it would just be the mass murder of an ethnic group. You know, even if we accepted the argument that it wasn’t based on their ethnic identity or which it explicitly was. Yeah. So, yeah, that, that doesn’t work at all. And one that I’ve heard, I don’t know if you were going to get to this one, but the one that, that makes my blood boil is the one that is used to respond to the idea that, you know, in Numbers we have the, the statement where they’re. I think it’s the. Is it the Midianites? That’s Numbers 31 . I believe we have, yeah. Moses became angry with the officers of the army, the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds who had come from service in the war.

Moses said to them, have you allowed all the women to live? These women here, on Balaam’s advice, made the Israelites act treacherously against the Lord in the affair of Peor, so that the plague came among the congregation of the Lord. Now, therefore, kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him keep alive for yourselves. And this is basically saying we are taking captive the virgin women as sex.

Slaves as spoils of war.

Yes. And folks will say, well, better that than just being left alone. And you know, the, and other argument. The other argument is, well, well, they were the only ones who were not guilty of seducing all the Israelites in this affair of Peor, which actually never says anyone ever seduced anyone. But they’ll say, so it’s the virgins who are not guilty of that. So they’re keeping them alive because they’re actually the only innocent ones. Even though it also says to kill all the males, old and young. And they were not guilty of any such thing either.

Yeah, two year olds are. It’s hard to find a two year old guilty of anything, really.

Yeah. And, and so the, the apologetics here are, are despicable because they, they try to take something like this and use comparative measurements to try to say, well, at least they didn’t just leave them to, to starve to death in, in their own land.

Yeah. I mean, look, if you’re, if you’re engaging in an apologetic endeavor, that’s fine, but you. What, what you can’t do is try to mitigate the, the impact of how bad one thing was by saying it could have been a worse thing. Yeah, that’s, that’s just, that’s, that’s an absurdity.

Yeah. And does not make the awful thing less awful.

Right.

Just identifying a worse thing out there.

Right.

And you know, there’s, there’s a, there’s no suffering that is incomparably bad. That there’s, there’s nothing worse than you’re, you’re always going to be able to point to things that could be worse. And it could be worse is not a defense of God commanding that you take girls as sex slaves or that you commit genocide against entire ethnic groups. It’s just, it’s wrong, period.

The, the apologetics that I find more interesting are the ones that make an attempt to just not to excuse, you know, these actions, but rather to just sort of explain them or to come up with a reason why it might have happened or why they might have thought of it in the ancient times.

I think those are much more interesting and much more honest. At least an honest engagement of sort.

Of the, of the text to some degree. Yeah. And, and unfortunately, usually what they end up doing is then come around and say, so we can still think that this is inspired and that this is of God and that God is, is holy good. And, and no, a God that commands sex slavery or that commands genocide is not good because. And, and here’s where there’s, there’s another apologetic that we’ll try to point out that these things didn’t really happen, which is somewhat self defeating because it’s acknowledging that the text is, is fiction.

Right.

And, and good on you if you can acknowledge that. But usually an apologetic that wants to defend God for genocide is not one that’s going to be open to saying that, that the text is fiction. But sometimes you, you do see that argument. And, and I, I think that’s, that’s a, a little more honest, but it still turns the authors into somebody who used genocide and sex slavery and things like that to kind of pump up. It’s It’s a. A fictitious pep rally for Israel to have them thump their chest and say, you know, we were once the big baddies. Yeah.

And look at how much destruction we can do.

If we really put our minds to it, I’m very proud of us. We can.

We can do it.

It does seem like this. This concept that, you know, just this. If we. Even if we just look at the destruction of the Canaanites as. As described in. In these. In these books, it seems like that that is a good enough reason for every Christian to let go of the literal reading of, you know, the. The fundamentalist idea that the Bible has to be the literal word of God. Every word of it. True. Every word of it. Good.

And just see it at least these parts as interesting sort of cultural markers and in, you know, and. And sort of. And they point to what an ancient group of people believed and what they wanted to have happen. And. And there. And it becomes so interesting. But if you have to hold to it as good because it came from the Lord and there’s just no weaseling around, the fact that the Lord in these verses said to do something that we can all acknowledge is not okay. Given any other circumstance, it is not okay to do this.

And there’s. John Barton wrote a wonderful book called The History of the Bible. And part. A good chunk of the discussion is about how the Bible was interpreted once it was set loose. Once we had the Bible, how did they read it? And he talks about Psalms 137:9 . Are you familiar with that passage? This is a famous imprecatory psalm.

I don’t even know what imprecatory means.

Okay, well, let alone being familiar with it. So from the trusty NRSVUE: “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock.” And that “happy shall they be.” The Hebrew is ashre, which is translated into Greek in the Septuagint as blessed. This is the word that would be translated as “Blessed are the peacemakers,” “Blessed are the meek.” So this is a Beatitude.

So you could say, “Blessed are those who will take your little ones and crush them against a rock.” And this is… This is a… A very isolated, little, single passage. And unlike the conquest accounts, which are embedded in the… The entire concept of the historical narrative of the Bible, this is something that could just be kind of plucked out and… And you could rationalize it away without threatening the foundation of your belief in the historicity of all this stuff. And so Barton talks about how early Christians dealt with this passage, how folks like Origen talked about how the little ones here is… And this is a reference to Babylonian children. So this is post-exile. This is basically a fantasy about getting revenge for the exile and talks about how Origen says this is a metaphor and the little ones are your little Babylonian thoughts, your sinful thoughts. And so, “Blessed is the one who takes our little, our little neophyte Babylonian thoughts and smashes them against the rock,” to say blessed are those who destroy their sinful thoughts.

And so, and so you have this in, in early Christian kind of renegotiation with the text—how are we going to think about this kind of stuff? And you have it in some of the Jewish discussion as early Judaism, Rabbinic Judaism, as well as talking about how are we going to reconcile these things with our… A very, very different ethical framework. And this is something I wanted to make sure we brought up. I mentioned at the beginning that a lot of these texts are coming from very ethnocentric viewpoints, a very insular, isolationist, separatist kind of notion of… Of the different people and the different states and nations of the world. And then with the exile you had something unfortunate happen—or fortunate, depending on your… Depending on your perspective. The… The main body of Judahites is now outside the land. They had no access to their God whose purview was limited to the land. They needed to find a way to… To access God outside of Israel.

And so you have this universalization of Adonai that I’ve argued in print is effected, is accomplished rhetorically in Psalms 82 which deposes the gods of the nations and calls on Adonai to rise up and inherit all nations, basically becoming the God of all the different geopolitical identities. And so now God is available in any nation. And now God has direct rule over all the nations. Which then raises a question. Oh, now every… All… All the other nations of the earth are God’s subjects. So we’ve got to reconfigure our relationship to all the other nations of the earth. And we have this idea that God has chosen Israel as God’s… The King James Version says “peculiar people.” And so a lot of Mormons like to think “weird people,” but “peculiar”… There is an outdated usage of this word that meant “unique possession.”

So Israel is chosen as God’s unique possession, even though God has concern for and is responsible for the creation of all the other nations of the earth as well. And so now that we have universalized God, we now need to find a way to understand everybody as being God’s… Responsibility and even offspring and things like that. So then we get, “Oh, all the nations of the earth will come into the…” The holy mountain temple and everybody will be converted. And, and we get kind of the universalist approach of Deutero-Isaiah and later texts. And so we go from this. This isolationist us versus them to being compelled to find a way to make them fit in our identity.

Right.

And by the time of the New Testament, we have this idea where all the nations of the earth are. Are under God. And, and everybody can just. You just have to change your beliefs. Nothing about your ethnic identity has to change at all. You just. You don’t even have to get circumcised anymore. So you just have to, you know, come to Jesus. So that’s all it takes. Yeah, and. And I think that’s a trajectory from a more isolationist, ethnocentric perspective to one that is more universal and less ethnocentric. Unfortunately, circumstances later incentivize Christians to come up with the idea of. Of skin color as. As boundaries of race and had to justify all the things that they had to do. So it’s a vicious cycle, unfortunately.

Like, there’s so much of all the things, you know, this, this idea of genocide and, you know, we’ve talked about sort of God commanding genocide. We’ve talked about the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah. That’s when God commits genocide himself. What it does, the. The bad thing about it is that it provides cover for a lot of people to do some very horrible things if they should choose to.

And so that’s the big danger with, it seems to me, with. With taking a literal approach to, to these passages.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s an unintended consequence of trying to defend genocide is then you rationalize genocide and, and then it becomes acceptable. And the notion that the Canaanites, they were. They were evil and so they’re better off dead is phenomenally dangerous. Because then the people that we dehumanize and the people that we dismiss as wholly and unilaterally evil, it becomes a lot easier to rationalize their extermination. Right. And so just like we talked previously about the chewed gum and stuff like that, and if we talk about people that way, we lead them to believe that maybe I am better off dead. Maybe this was so important that my life is ruined and I am unredeemable. And so we have children taking their lives because of these things. In a very similar way, this rhetoric that strikes me as just an attempt to defend the inerrancy of the Bible and the goodness of God can have this unintended consequence of making genocide an.

Option or just the killing of people that you deem to be evil.

Suddenly that’s, that’s seen as on the table. Yeah, on the table, exactly.

Well, don’t kill anybody. I don’t. That. I think, I think we are going to make this the official position of the Data over Dogma podcast, which is no matter how evil you think they are, you don’t get to go into a country and kill all the people of it.

And yeah, and I, I would say even that although some Christian nationalists have recently been really hyping the death penalty, I would go so far as to say even the death penalty, I think is inappropriate. And I don’t know if you feel the same, but I do, I do.

I’m anti. I, I like it. So. So we’re going that far, guys. All right.

Yeah. That is the official position of the Data over Dogma podcast.

Boom, there it is. So you’ll. Don’t worry, we’ll give our email address at the end when you want to write in angrily at us. Should we switch to a much sillier topic really quickly?

Yeah, let’s do. And so let’s, let’s do a chapter and verse on.

Boo. So where are we at? Where we. This is. This is. Jesus is coming to Jerusalem, the triumphal entry.

We’re.

We’re going. We’re going to the New Testament now. We’re. We’re in Jesus times and, and our friend needs a ride.

So we’re in. We’re in Matthew 21 . Jesus is coming in and in fulfillment of this prophecy that we have. And let me just pull up the text so I make sure I don’t misquote anything. Thing. That would be Zechariah. Yeah, Zechariah 9:9 . 9 is. Is the prophecy. And so in fulfillment of this, which reads, your king is coming to you unassuming and seated on a donkey and on a colt, the foal of a donkey. So Matthew is the. The gospel author who is most concerned to present Jesus as fulfilling Hebrew Bible prophecy to a fault, meaning that Matthew will tell the story even if it’s told differently in his source. And Mark was likely one of the sources that Matthew used. Matthew will tell the story so as to make it fulfill prophecy, even if it is ludicrous. And so when we look at Zechariah 9:9 , we have a bit of poetic parallelism. He’s seated on a donkey and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

Now, this is actually just apposition. This is kind of poetic apposition. Seated on a donkey, that is, to wit, a colt, the foal of a donkey. So it’s repeating and giving more information. Yeah. Now, whether or not the author of Matthew was confused by the Greek translation and understood this as just a simple conjunction, Matthew tells the story in a peculiar way, and it’s kind of hidden in some translations. Let me open up the King James Version. Okay, so in verse seven, so. So Jesus says to them, hey, go. Go into this village. You’re gonna find a donkey and a colt tied up. Untie him and bring him to me. And. And. And. And you can see the. You can imagine the disciples kind of looking hesitantly at each other and Jesus saying, don’t worry. If anybody says anything, just say, the Lord needs them. And wave your hand like that and say, these. You know, these are not. These aren’t the animals that you are in need of right now.

And then it says, this took place to fulfill what has been spoken through the prophet. And then we get Zechariah 9:9 . 9. The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them. They brought the donkey and the colt and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them.

So the King James Version tweaks this a little bit, says they brought the ass and the colt and put on them their clothes, and they set him thereon. So now. Now the Greek preposition is unambiguous. It literally says on them, which means Matthew is describing Jesus riding two animals at the same time into Jerusalem. And the King James Version has obscured that a little bit.

Can I offer two. Two ways that this comes up in my head? Because I love both of them.

The first way that this happens in my brain is it’s like, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen in a rodeo where somebody will ride two horses at the same time, except side saddle. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Except that he has to do it like uneven bars style. One with one knee, like, raised up high because he’s on a colt and a donkey. That’s one fun way of looking at it. But my favorite way of looking at it is he rides side saddle on the big one, and the little one is just his donkey ottoman he just puts his feet up on, and then they. They march in that way.

So the. The latter conceptualization of this event is actually how some Christian artists depicted this, because you can find paintings of Jesus sitting side saddle on a big donkey with his feet resting on a small donkey. So the. I, I think the third way is, is the one I need to see in a painting, though. And that is where they take the, the smaller one and put it on top of the big one.

Oh, so it’s like. Oh, it’s like, it’s a. You got like a, a pyramid thing.

Yeah, yeah. I haven’t seen that depicted anywhere.

That’s what I. Oh, I just found it on Reddit. Somebody’s done it on Reddit. I like it. Oh, there’s another one where, where like, somebody’s like, put a board between the two animals and he’s sitting on, he’s riding on the board.

He’s sitting on the board. Oh, and how does he not slide off? Do they make the animals the same size?

Yeah, they’re the same size in this.

Okay. Yeah. So they’re, they’re, they’re already messing with the, with the scriptures. Tergiversating the scriptures. If you. I use that word every now and then and every time it like, people are like, I did not know that word existed. And the only reaction, tergiversate. And that means to it. It means basically to intentionally misinterpret or to twist or pervert your interpretation of something. And the only reason I know about it is because I used it all the time when I was a missionary because it’s a more common word in Spanish.

Oh, okay.

And so I, I was like, I, I come back to the States and I was like, is this a word in English? And I looked it up and it is. And I was like, okay, good. I’m. I can use this word.

You guys are like, you gotta. You guys don’t have that one.

That’s. Oh, okay, yeah, that’s. That’s too bad.

So, so what do the other. We’ve got Matthew doing this. What are the other.

They just, they just mention a single colt.

Yeah. So piece of cake. It’s. And because they’re not. Either they were not worried about trying to describe this in a way that exactly matched their reading of, of Zechariah 9:9 . 9. Or they were just, you know, pick. Mark was the first one to say, to tell it, and he just says a colt. And so Luke is probably just like, I don’t know, following. But yeah, we’re just gonna go with a colt. So. And, and interestingly, this is one where for any Latter-day Saints in the audience, the Joseph Smith Translation changes it to a colt.

Okay, yeah, got.

There you go.

Got one. Right. By harmonizing with the other two Gospels. Yeah, but yeah, this is one of the examples where, where Matthew, I think, twists the story a little bit to make it fit a little better with this rhetorical goal of having Jesus fulfill Old Testament prophecy. And, and you see something similar in the, in the death of Judas as well, because he says this was to fulfill this, this prophecy. Right. Where the story of Judas’s death is very different from the story told in Acts 1 . And it’s because Matthew wants it to fit the prophecy rather than just tell the story as it probably came down to him.

Sure. Okay. Well, I mean, it’s just a silly story and what I love about this is that it’s so fine. You know what I mean? If, if the, if the author of Matthew just was, yeah, like you say, got a little uptight about making sure that it matched with what he read in Zechariah and, and got, and made it a little weird, that’s okay, so long as this doesn’t have to be an inerrant book. Yeah, it’s, it’s just the work of a guy who was trying to do a thing. Yeah, but, but it does present a real problem again, like, like, I think that’s the thing that, the theme that we keep bumping up against as a, as a show is that like, if you’re trying to make this a literally true inerrant book, you’re just, or, you’re just in trouble.

There’s just, you’re just, you’re going to have to write novel length explanations of why it’s okay.

And also explanations that just make up data and scenarios and stuff. Like I’ve seen attempts to try to reconcile this. People try to argue that, oh well, the, the other one was there, but the other authors, they just didn’t mention the other one.

Right.

For whatever reason.

Well, Mark thought it looked dumb, so he didn’t want to talk, he didn’t want to embarrass Jesus or whatever.

And here’s another way I’ve seen apologetics make use of the dictionary in a problematic way. They’ll look up the word contradiction in the dictionary and they will assert, they will assert like the most hard line definition. And, and, and one of them, I don’t remember what they are off the top of my head, but one that always comes up is this notion that they cannot possibly be reconciled. And so what they understand that to mean is that if there is any possible way that two different passages could be reconciled or harmonized, it’s not a contradiction. And what that means is you can run wild with your imagination. Yeah, the, the only limit is physical possibility, which means you can have two things that are, that are described in just totally different ways. But as long as you can imagine and make up scenarios that could render this possible, that means it’s not physically impossible. That means it’s not a contradiction.

That means the text is still univocal. And that is one of the most tortured attempts to try to rationalize away contradictions in the Bible that I have ever seen. Leaving aside how much I just hate definitions to begin with. But, but it’s so silly when, and you know, you have the deaths of, of different kings where it’s like one says he was shot with an arrow and died in, in Megiddo, and the other said he was caught hiding out in Samaria and killed on the spot. And they’re like, well, he could have run off to Samaria with the arrow in him, and they caught him, and then they took him back to Megiddo and then there he died, but then they took him back to Samaria and they buried him in Samaria. And, and like, there are all kinds of tortured, tortured attempts to invent scenarios that are not in evidence just to show that, look, there’s a way it could be possible. And, and my feelings are that if your apologetics are based on, hey, it’s not impossible, you’re fighting a losing battle, at least to the degree that that battle is aimed beyond the people who already agree with you and are just looking for validation for agreeing with you.

If your battle is extending at all beyond that, you are losing.

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s the point, right? Yeah, I mean, I think that’s the point, right? Like, if you’ve just—if you’ve come up with a way that makes it work in your head and it’s not hurting anybody else. Yeah, I’m adding that caveat.

But usually apologists—the apologists who are trying to get more out of apologetics, make a living out of it—are usually trying to perform plausibility, perform a scholarly approach. They want not only to communicate to those who already agree, “Hey, you are—” “—you are validated in agreeing,” but they also want to make it seem like—they want to gin up the illusion of plausibility so that the people who agree can say, “Yeah, look, they’re actually legitimate mainstream scholars, and they’re saying this, which means this is a part of legitimate mainstream scholarship, and so this is legitimate scholarship.” And so they have to perform valid scholarship, even if it’s actually not valid scholarship.

And I think that the thing that you said that I think is most salient to that idea is the presentation of facts not in evidence. Like if you’re—you can present all kinds of ways that you could maybe make it harmonize if you squint a little bit and you turn your head and whatever. But you don’t get to call that evidence. You don’t get to call that a reason to believe your position. Yeah, that’s a reason why your position may not be impossible, but that’s not a reason to believe it. You’re not presenting anything that is—that is useful in convincing someone else.

It’s not a positive argument for plausibility, probability, certainty.

Right.

It’s just defense against impossibility.

So. And, and maybe they have defense against impossibility professors at these Bible colleges. Yeah, maybe they have those. Yeah, maybe they have plausibility ruses that they use to try to gin up scenarios that aren’t in evidence. But, but yeah, that’s not—that’s not scholarship.

Yeah. All right, well, thank you everybody for joining us on the Data Over Dogma show. We’re very fond of data here. If you would like to become a part of making this show go, as well as receive access to an early ad-free version of every episode, you can become a patron over at patreon.com/dataoverdogma. If you’d like to reach us, you can do so—contact@dataoverdogmapod.com is the email address. Other than that, thank you so much for joining us and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

GENOCIDE!

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology