GENOCIDE!

Dan McClellan 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 side-saddle on a big donkey with his feet resting on a small donkey. Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan 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?

Dan Beecher Things are great.

Dan McClellan Awesome.

Dan Beecher By the time our friends hear this, this will have already happened, but I'm fixing to go to a religious celebration- Okay ...

Dan McClellan soon.

Dan Beecher Tomorrow morning, I take off for Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

Dan McClellan Nice.

Dan Beecher Which is vaguely related to- ... Lent and Shrove Tuesday and all of that stuff.

Dan McClellan Uh-huh.

Dan Beecher I will not be celebrating any of those things, but I will be celebrating some amazing Cajun food- Yeah ... and some parades and such. So I'm stoked. I'm excited.

Dan McClellan Come back with no beads. You want to have given them all away, right? That's the point, I understand?

Dan Beecher I don't know. I am bead neutral, I will say.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher I have no plans for beads one way or t'other.

Dan McClellan 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 we went to find a restaurant downtown New Orleans on Thanksgiving.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And we found a little hole in the wall. Had the best mac and cheese I've ever had- Love it ... in my entire life.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Love it. Just don't go in August. It's very hot and muggy then.

Dan McClellan Oh, I can imagine.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan No. I don't like when the mosquitoes could carry you away.

Dan Beecher Yeah. That's less appealing.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I scratch those places off my list when- ... I'm looking for a place to go.

Dan Beecher Speaking of less appealing.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Today's show's an interesting one. We're diving headfirst into one of the roughest things to square in the Bible.

Dan McClellan And that's saying something because- That's saying something.

Dan Beecher Yeah ...

Dan McClellan we've engaged a lot of rough topics- Yeah.

Dan Beecher That's fair ...

Dan McClellan on this show so far.

Dan Beecher Yeah. But this one's real tricky. We're going to talk genocide, friends.

Dan McClellan Okay. And that's going to be fun.

Dan Beecher 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 give you Jesus' petting zoo.

Dan McClellan A fun story. A confusing, sometimes, story- Yes, indeed ... about Jesus riding animals.

Dan Beecher Yes, indeed.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher So stick around for that. But first, let's dive in with genocide. That's always fun. It's always a delight when we do that.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Something that comes up a lot, though.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And so first, I guess we should start with just what are some of the really rough passages that we're talking about when it comes to this?

Dan McClellan Because there are a couple. Well, 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- Right ... 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 current inhabitants, but commit genocide and kill everything that breathes. Man, woman, child, animals.

Dan Beecher Yeah, and we're not just talking about the animals. That was the part that was like- Yeah ... man, we're getting rough.

Dan McClellan And there's a logic to this. First thing I want to point out is that most of 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 end of the seventh century BCE and is having layers added to it over the next couple of centuries. 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 for God.

Dan Beecher It is such a large-scale view of everything. I'm not just talking about you have to cleanse the land, but just the concept that there is such a thing as a wicked entire group of people.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Like, not a one of them is worth saving. Literally, we can condemn the entire group, and this happens several times throughout the Bible. But there's this all-or-nothing thinking that pervades all of this- Mm-hmm ... that is I find it very disturbing- Yeah ... these ideas.

Dan McClellan Absolutely. And these are pretty ancient ideas. There's a pretty ethnocentric perspective driving a lot of this, where it's us against them.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And 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 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 pitting us against them. We're the good guys, they're the bad guys. And you even see in Genesis 18, Abraham is negotiating with Adonai, the God of Israel, regarding Sodom and Gomorrah.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And do you recall what the negotiation is about?

Dan Beecher Oh, gosh. I do. We talked about it, and I was so delighted by it. No, I don't remember.

Dan McClellan Okay. So, Abraham's like, "Man, you're not going to destroy the whole city. Come on."

Dan Beecher And he's- Oh, right ...

Dan McClellan he says, "What if there are 50 righteous people in the city?"

Dan Beecher That's right. I do remember this.

Dan McClellan And God says, "I will not destroy it for 50 righteous." And then he goes down, and 10 righteous people, five righteous people.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan And 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 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.

Dan Beecher Oh, right.

Dan McClellan The women are not attributed full personhood.

Dan Beecher So, the daughters and the wife don't count.

Dan McClellan Right. It is Lot, and it is two men who are betrothed to his daughters, not yet married, but betrothed- Uh-huh ... which adds up to three righteous people. And so, guess what? That's not five. And so the city goes down. You mentioned that this kind of framing, this characterizing everyone as fully, entirely, unilaterally wicked, is on display in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan 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 going."

Dan Beecher Well, and it's not just that. You go back to Genesis 6 through 8, there's a very famous story of everyone being wicked.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher And that's everyone being wicked.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That is literally everyone that isn't on that boat. Which- Of course, we're talking about the flood. We're talking about Noah.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And if you didn't know, Genesis 6 through 8 narrates the flood.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And it kind of highlights the rhetorical nature of these stories. These are not real-world circumstances.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan These are people telling stories. "Every last one of them was wicked." Now, we tend to give nuance to villains in books and movies and things.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan You've got Black Panther, where the bad guy, a lot of people are like, "He's kind of making sense."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And the villains that are closer to sympathy and empathy and stuff are more compelling villains. But for a long time, when Superman started up, it was good guys and bad guys.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan 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 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?"

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan 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.

Dan Beecher This is- Which means this is- When you've got DNA-level wicked- Yeah ... there's nothing you can do.

Dan McClellan That's just going to- It's baked in.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It's prior restraint. Did not play- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher anciently.

Dan McClellan 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.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But let's get into some of the actual stories about this.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Okay, so I've got a few different examples that I looked up that I tried to sort out what they were, and I'll be honest with you, I don't understand how the timeline works very well.

Dan McClellan I don't understand how some of these- The biblical authors didn't understand either, so it's okay ...

Dan Beecher and I don't understand how these stories interact with each other.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher 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 found was Joshua 6. This is Joshua taking Jericho.

Dan McClellan Uh-huh.

Dan Beecher And this is where, in Joshua 6, the people all march around the city of Jericho 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 the walls come down. Come a-tumbling down. They come a-tumbling down.

Dan McClellan As the great poet once said, yeah.

Dan Beecher That's right. Those famous fabled walls of Jericho. And then they say, "For the city and all that is in it shall be devoted to the Lord for destruction."

Dan McClellan Yes.

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

Dan McClellan Right. Not just killed, devoted to destruction.

Dan Beecher Right, and that seems like a supporting of your thing, which is that this is a ritual sacrifice.

Dan McClellan It is. And the word in Hebrew is herem. Excuse me. Herem is how you would... H-E-R-E-M. And this is not unique to Biblical Hebrew. There's a stele called the Mesha Inscription or the Mesha Stele or the Moabite Stele from around 840 BCE, and it's written in Moabite, a sibling language of Biblical Hebrew. And the King Mesha talks about devoting cities to destruction using this word herem, which 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 it's a bit of costly signaling to the deity.

Dan Beecher It's very costly.

Dan McClellan Yes, incredibly costly.

Dan Beecher That's a lot of good stuff that they're just getting rid of.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And it's a way to say, "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 going to war." And then 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 guys to devote this to destruction, and one of you did not." And then Joshua's like, "Ah, crap. Okay, we got to figure out who did this." And then they whittle it down through this ordeal thing, and God reveals that it is Achan who was responsible for this. And so he and his whole family, and all the goods that they stole, basically get swallowed up by the earth- Oh, wow ... because he was going against the devotion of all of this to destruction.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So 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 basically a ritual sacrifice of everything.

Dan Beecher Okay. There you go. I guess I'm going backwards to Deuteronomy 7.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher 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.

Dan McClellan Well, normally, God is talking to Moses in Deuteronomy.

Dan Beecher Okay. So we'll just say Moses for now. So I'll skip around a little bit.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Basically, just at the very top 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 Girgashites, the Amorites.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher The giga chads.

Dan McClellan The giga chads.

Dan Beecher The Canaanites is in there. The Perizzites, not to be confused with parasites. The Hivites, and with apologies to Homer Simpson, the Jebusites.

Dan McClellan Praise Jebus.

Dan Beecher "I don't even believe in Jebus." So basically, it says, "Seven nations 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.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher That's seven different nations. So, we hear talk about the Canaanites a lot, but nobody's mentioning the Amorites or the Girgashites. So, what's going on there?

Dan McClellan So, this is actually a variant use of this term Canaanite, because it becomes a blanket term for everybody who occupies the land that they refer to as Canaan, which is basically- Okay ... all the land that they're inhabiting. But in some usage, it is a subgroup of the broader categories. But like 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.

Dan Beecher And so- Okay ...

Dan McClellan to distinguish the Jebusites from the Canaanites is a little misrepresentative according to the broader use of the term. And so you've got the Deuteronomistic author here probably just trying to come up with seven names.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan Because seven represents completion, perfection. So, if you can destroy the seven nation-- I won't sing the song because I understand we can get in trouble for singing songs, but- The White Stripes? Yes, The White Stripes. 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- Mm ... which is looking back almost 1,000 years on what they imagined happened. And so it's constructing a golden age deep in the past where we were the champions who came in, and we were going to rout everybody.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And that's not the way anything turns out according to the rest of the text that we have.

Dan Beecher Well, 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?

Dan McClellan Well, like you said, there are different stories.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So when we look at, and we talked a little bit, we've done an episode 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 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 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, it 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.

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

Dan McClellan Yeah. It's told in a bunch of different ways, but you repeatedly get these pathetic rationalizations for why something didn't go the way God commanded it.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan 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."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so the- They cheated ... God is with Judah, but God's like, "Ah, ugh, you know what? We're going to have to regroup because I didn't know they had chariots of iron."

Dan Beecher That's not fair.

Dan McClellan And this is above my pay grade.

Dan Beecher I call timeout. That's not okay.

Dan McClellan Yeah. 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."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "I mean, they're 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.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And you see kind of the starkest contrasts between Joshua 10. This is where I think this is the most striking, starting 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 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." So that's north and south.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "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.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And then chapter 13 begins on the very next page, so the facing page. "Now Joshua is 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.'"

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan 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.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan "When Israel grew strong, they put the Canaanites to forced labor, but did not, in fact, drive them out."

Dan Beecher Huh.

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

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan It was epic. And then you've got others who are like, "Ugh Dude, they're still around.

Dan Beecher Have you guys noticed something weird- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan like we still live- About that story?

Dan Beecher ...

Dan McClellan around Canaanites. 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 this includes this city, but doesn't include the..." And people try to parse it apart- Right ... 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- Right ... 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.

Dan Beecher And- Is there any archaeological evidence that something like this happened?

Dan McClellan You see a lot of destruction layers. They'll call them destruction layers, conflagrations, 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.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so most likely, there was just fighting that went on in these places, and sometimes towns got destroyed.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And would be a pity for something to happen to this- Pay for something to happen to the- ... beautiful little city.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Real nice town you Amorites got here.

Dan McClellan But like Jericho, 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- Huh ... anywhere in that window.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan 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.

Dan Beecher Well, that would make it easier for Joshua. If there's no one in there, you can take that city pretty easy.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, that's probably just him trying to make sure that his budget doesn't get decreased for the following year.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan It was like, "Look, it took us seven days. 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.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And within the history of scholarship, you started off, everybody 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.

Dan Beecher Yeah, the maturation of the science was a bad idea.

Dan McClellan Well, at least for the apologetic project, yes.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan It was self-defeating. And so you had these other theories that popped up. Peaceful infiltration, that 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. 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 local people. They're not coming from outside. They're from inside, but they just decide, "We're not going to take it anymore," and rise up, and we're going to defeat- Right ... the overlords. 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 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 developing a concept of some kind of identity, a 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 the development of 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 this myth.

Dan Beecher Well, let's talk a little bit about that. We've talked about apologetics for various things. I read a bunch of apologetics about just the genocidal nature of this conquest.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher My favorite of which, or rather the one that I'm absolutely giddy about presenting to you begins with I'll just start reading.

Dan McClellan Okay. This is from- And I have not heard this yet. You mentioned- No.

Dan Beecher I'm- ...

Dan McClellan you were going to spring something on me, so ...

Dan Beecher I'm going to spring it on you. This is from tabletalkmagazine.com That old canard.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Let's hear it.

Dan Beecher I don't know that one. I'll skip down to the one that I know you're going to respond the best to. This one, I think you'll find this convincing.

Dan McClellan Hmm.

Dan Beecher Merriam-Webster defines genocide as...

Dan McClellan Strike one.

Dan Beecher Strike one. The defining of words.

Dan McClellan And the use of Merriam-Webster, too.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Exactly.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan This is a sacrament talk that somebody is giving.

Dan Beecher Yes, exactly. Yeah, please don't start any talk. If your TED Talk starts with "Webster's Dictionary defines..." Anyway, 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 apologetic goes on to say, basically, they say, "Well, genocide defined in this way is the intentional destruction 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 genocide, so we win." 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.

Dan McClellan Because- Okay.

Dan Beecher So talk about that first.

Dan McClellan 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 what society you identified with. It wasn't based on skin color. That is an invention of medieval European hubris.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But it absolutely was, because they're saying, "Wipe out the Jebusites." So, that's an ethnic designation.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Therefore... And the text is not saying, "I want to wipe them out because they're Jebusites and a Jebusite stole my girlfriend in high school." It is identifying the object of this genocide via their ethnic designation, which would- Right ... still qualify even if one were so senseless as to accept a dictionary definition as adequately delineating the concept.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It's like how apologists are going to respond about what Trump did to Ms.

Dan Beecher Carroll.

Dan McClellan Hmm. They'll say, "Hey. It wasn't rape according to the official state definition of rape, because she didn't know if it was one thing or the other."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And it's like, okay, he still sexually assaulted her against her will.

Dan Beecher Yeah. You haven't gotten- Yeah ... very far in ameliorating this issue.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And I think that that was my issue with this apologetic, was that even if you can find a way to skirt around the problem of feeling icky about the word genocide being applied- Yeah ... 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- Yeah ... doing something that is, at least by most modern standards, morally reprehensible.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Absolutely.

Dan McClellan 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." Even if we accepted the argument that it wasn't based on their ethnic identity, which it explicitly was.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, yeah. 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 makes my blood boil is the one that is used to respond to the idea that in Numbers, we have the statement where, I think it's the Ammonites? 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."

Dan Beecher As spoils of war.

Dan McClellan Yes. And folks will say, "Well, better that than just being left alone." And the other argument is, "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.

Dan Beecher Yeah. It's hard to find a two-year-old guilty of anything, really.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And so, the apologetics here are despicable. Because 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 starve to death in their own land."

Dan Beecher Yeah. Look, if you're engaging in an apologetic endeavor, that's fine. But what you can't do is try to mitigate the impact of how bad one thing was by saying it could have been a worse thing.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That's an absurdity.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And it does not make the awful thing less awful.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan It's just identifying a worse thing out there.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Exactly. And there's no suffering that is incomparably bad, that there's nothing worse than. 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 wrong, period.

Dan Beecher Yeah. The apologetics that I find more interesting are the ones that make an attempt to, not to excuse 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.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And I think those are much more interesting and much more honest, at least an honest engagement of the text.

Dan McClellan To some degree, yeah. 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 wholly good."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And no, a god that commands sex slavery or that commands genocide is not good. And here's where there's another apologetic that will try to point out that these things didn't really happen, which is somewhat self-defeating because it's acknowledging that the text is fiction.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan 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 the text is fiction. But sometimes you do see that argument, and I think that's a little more honest, but it still turns the authors into somebody who used the idea of genocide and sex slavery and things like that to kind of pump up. It's a fictitious pep rally for Israel to have them thump their chest and say, "We were once the big baddies."

Dan Beecher Yeah. "Look at how much destruction we can do."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher "If we really put our minds to it, I'm very proud of us.

Dan McClellan We can do..."

Dan Beecher It does seem like this concept, even if we just look at the destruction of the Canaanites as described in these books- Mm-hmm ... it seems like that is a good enough reason for every Christian to let go of the literal reading of the fundamentalist idea that the Bible has to be the literal word of God, every word of it true, every word of it good.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And just see it, at least these parts, as interesting sort of cultural markers, and they point to what an ancient group of people believed and what they wanted to have happen. 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.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Given any other circumstance, it is not okay to do this.

Dan McClellan John Barton wrote a wonderful book called "The History of the Bible," and 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 Psalm 137:9. Are you familiar with that passage? This is a famous imprecatory Psalm.

Dan Beecher I don't even know what imprecatory means.

Dan McClellan Okay. Well, we'll look it up.

Dan Beecher Let alone being familiar with it.

Dan McClellan So, from the trusty NRSVUE, "Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock."

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And that "happy shall they be," the Hebrew is ashrei, which is translated into Greek in the Septuagint as "blessed." This is the word that would be translated as "blessed are the peacemakers."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan "Blessed are the meek." So this is a beatitude.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So you could say, "Blessed are those who will take your little ones and crush them against a rock." And this is a very isolated little single passage, and unlike the conquest accounts, which are embedded in the entire concept of the historical narrative of the Bible, this is something that could just be kind of plucked out, 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, and this is a reference to Babylonian children. So this is post-exile. This is basically a fantasy about getting revenge for the exile.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And talks about how Origen says this is a metaphor, and the little ones are your little Babylonian thoughts, your sinful thoughts.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so, blessed is the one who takes our little neophyte Babylonian thoughts and smashes them against the rock. To say, "Blessed are those who destroy their sinful thoughts."

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan And so you have this 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, rabbinical Judaism, as well as talking about how are we going to reconcile these things with 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 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 perspective. 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 access God outside of Israel. And so you have this universalization of Adonai that I've argued in print is affected, is accomplished rhetorically in Psalm 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. Uh-oh, now 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.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And so a lot of Mormons like to think weird people.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan 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 holy temple, and everybody will be converted. And we get kind of the universalist approach of Deutero-Isaiah and later texts. And so we go from mine, this isolationist us versus them, to being compelled to find a way to make them fit in our identity.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And by the time of the New Testament, we have this idea where all the nations of the earth are under God, and you just have to change your beliefs. Nothing about your ethnic identity has to change at all. You don't even have to get circumcised anymore. So you just have to come to Jesus. So that's all it takes.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan 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 skin color as boundaries of race and- Right ... had to justify all the things that they had to do. So it's a vicious cycle.

Dan Beecher Well, unfortunately, of all the things, this idea of genocide, and 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.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher The bad thing about it is that it provides cover for a lot of people to do some very horrible things- Yeah ... if they should choose to.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

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

Dan McClellan Yeah, absolutely. I think that's an unintended consequence of trying to defend genocide, is then you rationalize genocide- Right ... and then it becomes acceptable. And the notion that the Canaanites, they were evil and so they're better off dead, is phenomenally dangerous.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan 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.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so just like we talked previously about the chewed gum and stuff like that- Hmm ... 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 in different- Right ...

Dan Beecher circumstances. Or just the killing of people that you deem to be evil.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Suddenly that's seen as a good thing.

Dan McClellan On the table.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher On the table.

Dan McClellan Exactly.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Well, don't kill anybody. 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.