Did Joshua commit genocide?

FireDragon76 said:

The accounts of the conquest of Canaan are not histories in the modern sense.

The story of Moses and Joshua represents a legendary narrative from the northern kingdom of Israel, the Jahwist tradition, probably written down around the time of the Babylonian Exile. The social and political significance of such stories should be nearly obvious in that context, since Babylon represented another kind of captivity. The theological meaning of such a legendary tale is that Jews had been in captivity before (as a vasal state of the Egyptians), and God delivered them, and would do so again in the future.

The later Hebrew prophets and the story of Jonah, on the other hand, represent a contrasting theological response to the Babylonian captivity, one that ultimately shaped the Christian self-understanding alot more than looking for a military messiah.

Click to expand...

okay said:

Regardless of whether it ‘counts’ as genocide, God ordering the mass slaughter of perhaps hundreds of thousands of children is pretty hard to handle.

I am not familiar with the fellow you are refuting, and I agree that he overstates things and seems sloppy, but I suspect I mostly agree with his views at the end of the day.


You don’t think Joshua 11:23 is claiming this?

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.

Of course chapter 13 contradicts this by mentioning a bunch of cities that were not captured.

I think this is probably just another case where the biblical writers and editors included views of different traditions even though they didn’t agree. So I agree with the Dr McClellan that the text is inconsistent, although his addition of the word ‘entirely’ might be problematic.

One very interesting thing about the conquest of the land of Canaan as presented in Joshua is that it very often contradicts the archeological evidence. At least that is what you hear from mainstream biblical scholars.

Pete Enns writes a few dozen pages on this in The Bible Tells Me So. But some folks aren’t fond of him because he is a ‘progressive’ Christian. In The Jewish Study Bible they also write about this. From the intro to Joshua:

The story of the conquest in Joshua does not accord, either in its general outlook or in its specific details, with the archeological data.
…
Archeology also contradicts the detailed stories of the conquest of the two cities, Jericho and Ai, which were apparently not inhabited during the late Bronze Age.

They actually write more about it (and also have a 10+ page essay on archeology and the Bible), but I think that gives the general idea.

How could the writers/editors claim to conquer a city that was uninhabited? One option is that it was written much later, like biblical scholars seem to think. Even the text itself seems to imply it was written a fairly long time after the events were supposed to have taken place, otherwise the multiple statements about things (like the stones placed in the Jordan in ch 4) that are ‘there to this day’ would not really mean anything.

So again I probably agree with Dr McClellan in that many of the events did not occur, and that they were written a long time after they would have occured. Whether or not they were written to be propaganda might be harder to say, though.

Getting back to how I started this post, in light of the archeological evidence I highly doubt that God ordered the mass slaughter of all of the Canaanites to include all of the children. It also goes against what Ezekiel writes (ch 18) about children not being punished for the sins of their fathers. Finally, I also cannot see Jesus ordering such a slaughter of children. But this is just my own opinion of course.

Click to expand...

2PhiloVoid said:

While I understand the Post-Wellhausen position, I think that relegating the "core" content pertaining to Moses and Joshua and the pre-unified kingdom to the status of mere legend is too easily done and assumes too many unknowns where the study of ancient historiography(-ies) is of the essence. I think there is a lot of speculative stretching on both sides of the divide, both among Minimalists and Fundamentalists.

Click to expand...

FireDragon76 said:

I need to clarify, I suppose: I do not mean by "legend", to be something completely made up, like Tolkein's Lord of the Rings. I mean that these are histories embellished by contemporary ideologies and theological concerns, and told within the historiography of the time, which often included imagery such as complete destruction of peoples, or great conquests of cities, often for the purposes of solidifying a national identity.

In reality, it is believed that the formation of the kingdom is something that happened on a far less grand scale, and involved alot more cultural negotiation, something that even the Bible itself hints at from time to time. In the Bible, we just get a particular historiography that tries to make things seem smoother and less ideologically and politically complicated than they were.

Click to expand...

2PhiloVoid said:

Ok. Thanks for the clarification, FD. We're on a similar interpretive page where 'legend' and 'history' are distinct historiographical concepts.

I realize folks like Finkelstein report their archeological findings and think that Israel was less grand in scale from what is represented in the pages of the Old Testament writings, and they may be correct. It could be the case. But since so much of ancient archeology depends on relatively sparse remnants from the past, it's difficult to know for sure, which is why we always see someone like Finkelstein 'hedge' his current, scientifically oriented, interpretations of what it is he and other archaeologists uncover.

It just sort of irks me that some folks on the extremes of both sides of the interpretive spectrum are so sure of themselves.

Click to expand...

FireDragon76 said:

I think it's not without theological significance, in ways that could be illuminating.

For instance, there's alot of current theory that originally YHWH was a god of the flash floods of the Negev and southern Levant. This illuminates the story of Israel's deliverance under Moses by Pharaoh's armies being washed away by YHWH. It also illuminates Elijah's duel with the priest's of Ba'al. Ba'al was another Canaanite storm god, but represented the storms that came in from the sea and gently fell on the plains. You can even find echoes of this YHWH as the dynamic and wrathful deity in some of the psalms, where imagery of water coursing through the Negev is used (Psalm 126). So the wrathful character of God as presented in the J texts isn't acciddental, but is meant to hint at a more dynamic theology than the relatively remote and distant, more "Islamic" Eloohist account of God. YHWH's destructive activities present the opportunity for deliverance and renewal, which is actually closer in alot of ways to many eastern religions that also feature wrathful deities.

Click to expand...

FireDragon76 said:

I don't know. Jesus was obviously a person of his time as well as being a divine figure, to say otherwise is to deny his essential humanity. He had to work within the assumptions he was given through his religious upbringing. I think it's less important to try to get inside Jesus' head, than it is to emulate what Jesus said and did, and try to think about how that impacts our own discipleship.

The Judaism Jesus inherited was complicated- I think many immature or intellectually naive Christians underestimate that. Even many Jews since Jesus time have struggled with the meaning of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), which is why there is a rich history of interpretation that is in itself a discipline to study. I think Jesus takes the whole of his tradition and reduces it to a few touchstones: Love God, love your neighbor as yourself, defend the cause of the most vulnerable, etc., which open up the tradition to different interpretations in different situations, and don't present the kind of formulaic, legalistic practice that alot of more conservative Christians would like to see.

Click to expand...