Episode Details

A sordid story of “divinely-sanctioned” violence in the Old Testament … which seems to be anything but that.

There are many stories in the Old Testament of carnage and slaughter, perpetrated by the nation of Israel, which are presented as divinely-sanctioned. In fact, the claim is that God / YHWH not only condoned them, but actually commanded them. Many books, articles and podcasts have looked at these and found ways to “justify” this violence. Explanations given include:

• YHWH had put a curse on the line of one of Noah’s sons (Ham, from which the Canaanites came), commanding that those descendants would be perpetual slaves of another one of Noah’s sons (Shem, from whom the Israelites came);
• YHWH had promised that land to Abram and Sarai, and the Canaanites were just in the way of Divine urban development;
• YHWH had to use Israel to carve out a protective little niche in a savage heathen land in order to establish a Messianic bloodline;
• the wickedness of the people of those lands was so great that YHWH couldn’t tolerate it anymore, and he used the nation of Israel to cleanse the land;
• YHWH/God had his reasons, he does not have to explain himself to us, and we’re in no position to judge him on that.

Personally, I can’t accept those explanations any more: they’re entirely inconsistent with a God of love and forgiveness, and it’s appalling that an omnipotent God would use an innocent people (Israel) to do his dirty work. Imagine a religious leader or a winner of a Nobel Peace Prize sending his teenage-daughter with a shot-gun to the neighbours next door to slaughter every person and animal in the house because they did something to offend him.

But maybe we’ve got it wrong. Maybe those stories aren’t divinely sanctioned; maybe people were just being people and using their national deity as their alibi. The push-back on that suggestion is simply the slippery slope argument: if the text claims that God commanded it and we decide that he didn’t, then where do we draw the line on other parts of the Bible?

But there’s a story in the Old Testament which, in my mind, gets around the exp