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United Nations expert says Israel committing genocide in Gaza

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Was Israel Commanded to Commit Genocide?

By Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan

This article first appeared in the Effective Evangelism column of the Christian Research Journal, volume 34, number 05 (2011). The full text of this article in PDF format can be obtained by clicking here. For further information or to subscribe to the Christian Research Journal go to: http://www.equip.org/christian-research-journal/

Have you ever been in a discussion with a skeptic about God and morality? Perhaps you’ve admirably made the case that God’s good character is the basis for human dignity and worth. Maybe you’ve shown how objective moral values and duties can’t be explained naturalistically. Then someone takes the wind out of your sails by asking, “Well, if God is so good, why would He command Israel to engage in ethnic cleansing and genocidal warfare against the Canaanites? After all, doesn’t Deuteronomy 20:16–17 plainly state this? ‘Only in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them…as the Lord your God has commanded you.’”1 No matter how strongly the believer makes the case for the God-morality connection, this good argument can become overshadowed by the Canaanite question.

So what do we do? By all means, stick with the argument of how God’s existence makes better sense of a moral world in which intrinsically valuable persons exist! Yet we should be prepared to address this “genocide” question, which has gotten a lot more press since 9/11. “Religious radicalism” has emboldened New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who attack “the God of the Old Testament.” In our own experience, the Canaanite question is emerging with increasing frequency, and we will point out key response points.

First, we should avoid using the misleading statement “taking the Bible literally.” We don’t (and shouldn’t) always take it literally. We should always take it literarily. That is, we should treat the Bible’s types of literature (genres)—poetry, historical narrative, apocalypse, prophecy, parable—as they were intended to be interpreted. We can’t apply a one size-fits-all approach to each of them. This is particularly important for interpreting the Old Testament’s war texts properly—in their ancient Near Eastern setting.

Second, the sweeping language of these warfare texts such as Joshua (as well as Numbers 31 and 1 Samuel 15) occurs in highly figurative, hyperbolic accounts—quite common in the ancient Near East. This kind of “utterly destroyed” bravado was common in ancient Near Eastern war texts. Biblical scholars and archaeologists (e.g., K. Lawson Younger, Kenneth Kitchen) have recognized the pervasive use of hyperbolic language—“boasting” about “total destruction”—in ancient Near Eastern warfare literature. Victories were often described hyperbolically in terms of total conquest, complete annihilation, and destruction of the enemy, killing everyone and leaving no survivors. One Moabite king wrote of his defeat of Israel, “Israel is no more.” The knowing ancient Near Eastern reader recognized that this was massive hyperbole, and the accounts were not understood to be literally true. This language was like a basketball team saying of their opponents, “We totally slaughtered them!”

Third, the contrast between “utterly destroying” and leaving ample survivors is fairly obvious. In the biblical canon, Joshua is connected not only to Judges 1–2 (where lots of Canaanite survivors remain alive after Joshua “left no survivors”!), but also to Numbers and Deuteronomy. And Judges reveals that this widespread killing never literally happened, since there were swarms of Canaanites remaining. Even within Joshua we read, “There were no Anakim left in the land” (11:22); they were “utterly destroyed” in the hill country (11:21). Yet later in Joshua, Caleb asked permission to drive out the Anakites from the hill country (14:12–15; cf. 15:13–19). Joshua’s military campaign in Canaan simply wasn’t a territorial conquest, but a series of disabling raids.

In Numbers 31 (after Midianite women had intentionally seduced the men of Israel), we’re told, “[Israel] fought against Midian, as the Lord commanded Moses, and killed every man” (NIV, emphasis added). If literally true, why do we see Midianite multitudes in Judges 6:5? They were “like swarms of locusts. It was impossible to count them or their camels” (6:5 NIV). Also, the language is exaggerated in that every Midianite man was killed without a single Israelite fatality (Num. 31:50).

In 1 Samuel 15, Saul was commanded to “utterly destroy” the Amalekites. Stereotypical sweeping language was used: “Put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (15:3). On a literal reading, Saul carried this out—except for King Agag, who would meet his doom through the prophet Samuel (vv.7–9, 33). Yet this didn’t literally happen; the Amalekites were far from destroyed.

Exaggerated language is abundant. For instance, Saul’s army was numbered at 210,000—far larger than any army of antiquity. This was common in ancient Near Eastern war texts. In 1 Samuel 27:8–9, the same sweeping language of Chapter 15 is used: all Amalekites were wiped out—again! We’re told David invaded a territory full of Amalekites—the same territory covered by Saul. (Shur is near Egypt and Havilah is in Saudi Arabia—an area far too wide for Saul’s army to cover.) So, 1 Samuel 15 and 27 cannot both be literally true. What’s more, in 1 Samuel 30, a large Amalekite army attacked Ziklag (v. 1), and David pursued this army and fought a long battle with them, with four hundred Amalekites fleeing (1 Sam. 30:7–17). That’s not all: the Amalekites were even around during the reign of Hezekiah (1 Chron. 4:43).

So here’s the question: Why is it that virtually every time a narration of “genocide” occurs, it is followed by an account that presupposes it did not happen? Scripture took shape, and the Old Testament canon was formed. The final compiler or editor—who was certainly not mindless—saw no problem with side-by-side affirmations of “total destruction” and many surviving hostiles. He didn’t assume both to be literally true.

Fourth, the dominant language of “driving out” and “thrusting out” the Canaanites indicates further that “extermination” passages are hyperbolic (cf. Exod. 23:28; Lev. 18:24; Num. 33:52: Deut. 6:19; 7:1; 9:4; 18:12; Josh. 10:28, 30, 32, 35, 37, 39; 11:11, 14). Israel was to “dispossess” the Canaanites of their land (Num. 21:32; Deut. 9:1; 11:23; 18:14; 19:1). Just as Adam and Eve were “driven out” of the garden (Gen. 3:24), or Cain into the wilderness (4:14), or David from Israel by Saul (1 Sam. 26:19), so the Israelites were to “dispos- sess” the Canaanites. “Driving out” or “dispossessing” is different from “wiping out” or “destroying.” Clearly, utter annihilation was not intended; you can’t both drive out anddestroy.

Fifth, the biblical language of the Canaanite “destruction” is identical to that of Judah’s destruction in the Babylonian exile—clearly not utter annihilation or even genocide.Indeed, God threatened to “vomit” out Israel from the land just as he had vomited out the Canaanites (Lev. 18:25, 28; 20:22). In the Babylonian invasion of Judah (sixth-century BC), God threatened to “lay waste the towns of Judah so no one can live there” (Jer. 9:11 NIV). Indeed, God said, “I will completely destroy them and make them an object of horror and scorn, and an everlasting ruin” (Jer. 25:9 NIV). God “threatened to stretch out My hand against you and destroy you” (Jer. 15:6; cf. Ezek. 5:16)—to bring “disaster” against Judah (Jer. 6:19). The biblical text, supported by archaeological discovery, suggests that while Judah’s political and religious structures were ruined and that Judahites died in the conflict, the urban elite were deported to Babylon while many “poor of the land” remained behind to inhabit the towns of Judah. Clearly, Judah’s being “completely destroyed” and made an “everlasting ruin” (Jer. 25:9) was a significant literary exaggeration—which reinforces our point about the Canaanite “destruction.”

Sixth, “Joshua obeyed all that Moses commanded” (Josh. 9:24; 11:12), and yet Joshua left many survivors. It only follows, then, that in Deuteronomy 20 Moses did not literally intend for no survivors to be left.

Why should the critic take the passage in Deuteronomy literally but not the passages in Joshua? If he took the latter literally it would be easier for him to see that in context the former is using hyperbole and should not be taken literally.

Seventh, archaeology confirms the biblical record’s account of a gradual infiltration rather than a massive military assault against the Canaanites. This was a development that took more than two centuries to accomplish. This being the case, all tangible aspects of the Canaanites’ culture—buildings and homes—would have remained very much intact (cf. Deut. 6:10–11: “cities which you did not build”). Preserving such structures would have been a very sensible move if Israel was to settle down in the same region. Archaeologists have discovered that by 1000 BC (during the Iron Age), Canaanites were no longer an identifiable entity in Israel. Around this time also, Israelites were worshiping a national God, whose dominant personal name was Yahweh (“the Lord”). An additional significant change from the Late Bronze to Iron Age was that town shrines in Canaan had been abandoned but not relocated elsewhere—say, to the hill villages. This suggests that a new people with a distinct theological bent had migrated there, had gradually occupied the territory, and eventually became dominant.

Thus, the critic’s strategy of emphasizing literal Canaanite annihilation while ignoring literal Canaanite survival is simply inconsistent. —Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan

Paul Copan, Ph.D., is Professor and Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University and is author of Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God (Baker 2011).

Matthew Flannagan, Ph.D., has authored various articles and contributed to various books, including Set Forth Your Case (B&H Academic, forthcoming), and he and his wife Madeleine write the blog M and M, www.mandm.org.nz.

NOTES

All Scripture quotations are from the NASB unless otherwise noted.

Christian Research Institute

Our Mission: To provide Christians worldwide with carefully researched information and well-reasoned answers that encourage them in their faith and equip them to intelligently represent it to people influenced by ideas and teachings that assault or undermine orthodox, biblical Christianity.

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It wasn’t just the Armenians: The other 20th century massacres we ignore

By Adam Taylor, Washington Post, April 24, 2015 This week is being marked as the 100th anniversary of the killings of more than a million Armenians during the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. Despite considerable opposition from the Turkish government, the anniversary is bringing renewed attention to an often overlooked historical issue, with President Obama in particular facing criticism for not using the word “genocide” to describe the killings. This didn’t happen by accident. The attention placed on the massacre this year is the result of a long and coordinated campaign by Armenia and the Armenian diaspora to ensure that a dark and sometimes disputed part of history wasn’t forgotten. It was this campaign that has slowly dragged the Armenian tragedy out of obscure disputes and into mainstream discussion. It doesn’t always work that way, though. In fact, what happens far more often is that the difficult parts of history often are forgotten or ignored. The 20th century was bloody and violent, and while some horrors are at least relatively well-known–the Holocaust or the genocides in Rwanda and Cambodia, for example–others have become mere footnotes in history. So, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian killings, here are some of the lesser-known massacres of the 20th century, many of which are considered genocides, too. Unfortunately, because history is so bloody, this list is far from exhaustive. The Herero and Namaqua genocide. When Pope Francis referred to the 1915 killings recently and sparked a backlash from Turkey, he not only called the killings a genocide, but also “the first genocide of the 20th century.” Even if historians would agree with the former, they might have some disagreements with the latter. Between 1904 and 1908, tens of thousands of Herero and Namaqua people were killed in what is now Namibia during German colonial rule. These people were indigenous to an area then known a German South West Africa which was the first colony of Germany, a latecomer to the imperial land grab. After uprisings by both the Herero and the Namaqua, a German general in charge of the region ordered that the indigenous people should be “annihilated” or, if this was not possible, expelled from the land. Unarmed men, women and children were killed by German troops, and huge numbers of Herero and Namaqua people were sent to concentration camps as a form of collective punishment. It’s now thought that as many as 70,000 Herero and 7,000 Namaqua died. In 2004, Germany apologized for the killings, now thought to be the first genocide of the 20th century. Many see the killings as a precursor to the Holocaust. The Ottoman killings of Assyrians and Greeks. The Armenians weren’t the only group targeted during the chaotic collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It’s thought that as many as 250,000 Assyrians, mostly Christians, living in Mesopotamia were killed by Ottoman forces during the period around World War I. Many of those who survived were dispersed throughout the Middle East. A handful of governments, including Armenia, have recognized the killings as a genocide. At the same time, in Anatolia, the Ottoman Empire killed hundreds of thousands of Greek Christians. While the total number of deaths is unclear, some estimates put it at more than 1 million. Since 1994, Greece has held a remembrance for the killings, which it views as a genocide. Holodomor. Between 1932 and 1933, estimates say that as many of 10 million Ukrainians–almost a third of the population at the time–were killed by a devastating famine. The mass starvation was of a truly horrific scale: There were reports of cannibalism, and entire villages were wiped out. It’s not just the scale of the famine that merits its inclusion here. Most agree now that the famine was man-made, designed by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to either eradicate private landowners or perhaps the targeting of Ukrainians as an ethnic group. In 2006, Ukraine’s parliament officially recognized the “Holodomor”–or “Death by Hunger”–as a genocide. But Russia, like the Soviet Union before it, has resisted calls for any compensation for the mass deaths. The Nanking Massacre. In 1937, during the Sino-Japanese war, the Imperial Japanese Army marched into Nanking, then the Chinese capital. The city, now known as Nanjing, was left virtually undefended, and tens of thousands of civilians were killed, if not more (Chinese historians tend to put the number at 300,000, a higher estimate than their Western peers). The six-week spree of violence left the city devastated in many ways. The post-World War II International Military Tribunal for the Far East concluded that some 20,000 rapes occurred during the first month of Japanese occupation, lending the tragedy its other grim name: “The Rape of Nanking.” Thanks to some remarkable scholarship over the past few decades, the Nanking Massacre is hardly obscure anymore. But it remains a disputed issue, with Japanese nationalists (and the current Japanese government) accused of downplaying its significance, or even suggesting that it never happened. The German Expulsions. While the horrors committed by Nazi Germany are well known, what’s lesser acknowledged is what happened to the Germans scattered in Eastern Europe after Germany lost the war. These Germans, who had been left living in places that reverted to Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, had to make their way back to Germany and Austria. Many were forcibly expelled from their homes, some were sent to internment camps. R.M. Douglas, a historian who studies the expulsions, has described it as “not merely the largest forced migration but probably the largest single movement of population in human history,” with more than 12 million civilians forced out. It was effectively what would now be considered “ethnic cleansing,” Douglas argued, and, inevitably, masses died–at least 473,000 by one count. “The Nazis’ crimes had been far worse,” German newspaper Der Spiegel wrote in 2011, “but the suffering of ethnic Germans was immense.” The aftermath of the 30th September Movement. Following a failed coup d’etat in 1965 by a group referred to as the 30th September Movement, General Suharto led an anti-communist purge in Indonesia that eventually turned into widespread massacres around the country. In the end, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), once one of the largest, was virtually wiped out: Estimates for the number of dead start at 500,000. For decades, there was little discussion of the killings in 1965-1966. Few foreign observers saw the events and many foreign governments–including the United States–viewed the anti-communist movement as a good thing. When Suharto became president in 1967, an official silence was installed across the country. Suharto would end up being president for 32 years: To this day, communist organizations are officially banned. It was only in the past few years that discussions about the terrible events began to take place. In 2010, Indonesia’s Constitutional Court struck down a ban on several books about the coup that mentioned the killings. In 2012, American filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer released “The Act of Killing,” a documentary that saw perpetrators act out their killings, which sparked renewed international attention. The Bangladesh Genocide. The Partition of India after 1947 saw one of the world’s largest migrations ever: Some estimates suggest 2 million or more died in the chaos. It also left Pakistan split between the main rump of its body to the west of the new state of India, and a smaller province of East Bengal, later renamed East Pakistan, to the east. This split state didn’t last, with terrible consequences. In 1971, West Pakistan began a military crackdown on Bengali calls for independence, which eventually led to a nine-month war that birthed Bangladesh. That war resulted in an estimated 10 million refugees, and while there is no clear death toll, estimates put the number of deaths in the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands. The Bangladeshi government has said that as many as 3 million people died, and many observers consider it a genocide. The war’s toll on women was also especially awful: Estimates say that at least 200,000 people were raped. Recent investigations have also focused on the role the United States could have, and perhaps should have, played in ending the conflict. Pakistan was reliant on U.S. military hardware, journalist Gary J. Bass noted in his book “The Blood Telegram,” but President Richard Nixon was fearful of using it, as Pakistan was a secret conduit for communications to communist China. Ethiopia’s Red Terror. Between 1976 and 1978, the Ethiopian government ran a brutal counter-insurgency campaign which they dubbed “Red Terror.” Following the political vacuum created when Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed by a military junta in 1974, a new Marxist government, led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, sought to eradicate the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party and other opposition groups. Estimates of those left dead vary greatly–Human Rights Watch says that the figure was “certainly well in excess of 10,000” and that the killings were “one of the most systematic uses of mass murder by a state ever witnessed in Africa.” Other estimates say as many as 500,000 were killed. Mengistu was deposed in 1991, and fled to exile in Zimbabwe. In 2006, an Ethiopian court found him guilty of genocide, though some doubt that the label is appropriate, as the killings did not target one particular group. Mengistu remains free in Zimbabwe.

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