This week we'll look at one of the moral issues that was one of the most troublesome when I was religious. It was an issue I never was able to square with my own sense of morality. To this day I have yet to hear a satisfactory explanation of why such commandments were ever in the Torah. Let's jump right in.
Commandments in the Torah
In this week's parsha we read about one of the commandments of genocide. We read (Deut 12:16)
And thou shalt consume all the peoples that the LORD thy God shall deliver unto thee; thine eye shall not pity them; neither shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare unto thee.The word "consume" is literally eat. It's an odd word for the context. Later verses explain a bit clearer what exactly you should do to these nations. For example (Deut 12:23-25)
23 But the LORD thy God shall deliver them up before thee, and shall discomfit them with a great discomfiture, until they be destroyed. 24 And He shall deliver their kings into thy hand, and thou shalt make their name to perish from under heaven; there shall no man be able to stand against thee, until thou have destroyed them. 25 The graven images of their gods shall ye burn with fire; thou shalt not covet the silver or the gold that is on them, nor take it unto thee, lest thou be snared therein; for it is an abomination to the LORD thy God.In last week's parsha we read (Deut 12: 1-2.5)
1 When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and shall cast out many nations before thee, the Hittite, and the Girgashite, and the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; 2 and when the LORD thy God shall deliver them up before thee, and thou shalt smite them; then thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them... 5 But thus shall ye deal with them: ye shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and hew down their Asherim, and burn their graven images with fire.Later we'll read about the laws of conquering a city outside of Canaan. We see (Deut 20:10-14):
10 When thou drawest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it. 11 And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people that are found therein shall become tributary unto thee, and shall serve thee. 12 And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it. 13 And when the LORD thy God delivereth it into thy hand, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword; 14 but the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take for a prey unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the LORD thy God hath given thee.We see that if you want to conquer another nation just go to war with it. If it capitulates, fantastic, you now have enslaved the entire populace. If it doesn't, you kill every male, and keep the women as property. We'll get to slavery and misogyny later, but we're on genocide this week. The thing is, if you thought this was cruel, you need to read further (Deut 20:15-18).
15 Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations. 16 Howbeit of the cities of these peoples, that the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth, 17 but thou shalt utterly destroy them: the Hittite, and the Amorite, the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee; 18 that they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods, and so ye sin against the LORD your God.The Torah commands nothing less than complete annihilation of the entire populace of the Canaanite nations. In fact, according to the author in Kings, it was specifically because they failed in this matter that they were ensnared by idolatry and God eventually caused the destruction of their lands. Of course, this is revisionist history, as we've seen (and will discuss a bit in the rest of the post). The point for this week is that God is commanding the Israelites to commit genocide.
Carrying out the Divine Will
The destruction of the Canaanite nations is described in the book of Yehoshua (Joshua) For example (Josh 11:10-12)
10 And Joshua turned back at that time, and took Hazor, and smote the king thereof with the sword: for Hazor beforetime was the head of all those kingdoms. 11 And they smote all the souls that were therein with the edge of the sword, utterly destroying them; there was none left that breathed; and he burnt Hazor with fire. 12 And all the cities of those kings, and all the kings of them, did Joshua take, and he smote them with the edge of the sword, and utterly destroyed them; as Moses the servant of the LORD commanded.Note that Yehoshua only destroyed those nations because God told him to. Later with regard to Ai (Josh 8:26-28):
26 For Joshua drew not back his hand, wherewith he stretched out the javelin, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai. 27 Only the cattle and the spoil of that city Israel took for a prey unto themselves, according unto the word of the LORD which He commanded Joshua. 28 So Joshua burnt Ai, and made it a heap for ever, even a desolation, unto this day.Later we what happens when you transgress the commandments and have pity on a nation you are supposed to annihilate. Let's look at why Shaul (Saul) was stripped of his kingship. First Shmuel (Samuel) commands Shaul to kill the Amalekites. (1 Sam 15:2-3)
2 Thus saith the LORD of hosts: I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he set himself against him in the way, when he came up out of Egypt. 3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.'Shaul dutifully carries out the commandment of killing the people, but doesn't quite kill everything (1 Sam. 15:7-9)
7 And Saul smote the Amalekites, from Havilah as thou goest to Shur, that is in front of Egypt. 8 And he took Agag the king of the Amalekites alive, and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword. 9 But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, even the young of the second birth, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them; but every thing that was of no account and feeble, that they destroyed utterly.Shmuel questions Shaul why he didn't kill everything. Shaul answers (1 Sam. 15:15)
And Saul said: 'They have brought them from the Amalekites; for the people spared the best of the sheep and of the oxen, to sacrifice unto the LORD thy God; and the rest we have utterly destroyed.'Shmuel is pissed (1 Sam. 15:18-19,23)
18 and the LORD sent thee on a journey, and said: Go and utterly destroy the sinners the Amalekites, and fight against them until they be consumed. 19 Wherefore then didst thou not hearken to the voice of the LORD, but didst fly upon the spoil, and didst that which was evil in the sight of the LORD?' 23 For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry and teraphim. Because thou hast rejected the word of the LORD, He hath also rejected thee from being king.'And he personally disembowels Agag. (1 Sam 15:33)
33 And Samuel said: As thy sword hath made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among women. And Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the LORD in Gilgal.When God says kill everything, you damn better well kill everything. And for the modern commentaries who like to reinterpet the commandment to kill Amalek as some sort of allegorical commandment to destroy whatever philosophy Amalek is supposed to stand for, be aware that there is no such allegorical explanation available in this story.
Moral Relativism
A common thing you'll hear as one attempt to defend the indefensible is these kind of genocidal situations were standard for the time. In this, I completely agree. The Torah's commandments to commit genocide are exactly what you might expect to see in any of the cultures of the time period. In fact, the very first extra-biblical appearance of Israel, on the Merneptah Stele, describes the Egyptians committing genocide on the Israelites
Israel is laid waste and his seed is not;It's not clear what "his seed is not" is supposed to mean, but we could probably assume it means that the Egyptians thought the Israelites were utterly destroyed.
However, this kind of moral relativism should provide no solace to those who would uphold the Torah as a divinely gifted document. If it is no different than all the documents of the surrounding nations on key issues, then what extra appeal does it possess? Keep this in mind as we look at some of the moral issues of future weeks.
Also of little solace is the fact that these conquests didn't actually happen. Although, I should point out that Hazor, mentioned above, is one of the cities that do actually show a destruction layer during this time period. The Tanach itself admits that the genocide failed (Judges 3:1,5-6)
1 Now these are the nations which the LORD left, to prove Israel by them, even as many as had not known all the wars of Canaan; 5 And the children of Israel dwelt among the Canaanites, the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites; 6 and they took their daughters to be their wives, and gave their own daughters to their sons, and served their gods.However, in this the Torah is describing the ideal, not what happened. In the Torah's ideal world, the Israelites would succeed in not only committing mass genocide on the inhabitants of Canaan, but completely cleansing the land of their culture.
My Own Difficulties
Learning about Jewish history is learning about nation after nation that wanted to kill us or get rid of us somehow. We were cultural and genetic pollutants. Evil at its essence. The language used by each generation of Anti-Semites to describe how bad the Jews mimics all-too-closely the language that the Torah uses to describe the Canaanite nations. The desired result is similar.
So, how am I to feel, as a Ba'al Korei reading these commandments to genocide? I distinctly remember one year, feeling no different from any demagogue riling up a population to commit atrocities on its neighbors. So, like any good religious Jew, I searched for ways that scholars and exegetes before me rationalized the moral problem here. I had little success.
Sometimes, people said that the nations were free to convert to Judaism. This is despite the Torah giving no such indication that it was an option. Yet, how is this any better than something like the Spanish Inquisition, a dark period in Jewish history? Some commentators said that the nations could flee the land, but how is this any different from the myriad Jewish expulsions such as from Britain and Spain, or more recently from various Arab countries. How is this option any better? Is it truly possible that we, a people often on the short end of the stick when it comes to ethnic atrocities can't recognize when we ourselves are the perpetrators of those same atrocities? We should be disowning these verses; scrubbing these commandments from our books. We should recognize that these commandments are the result of heinous propaganda, and no divine being would ever encourage such actions.
Shouldn't God have Foreseen?
Again, Judaism supposes an omniscient God, one who sees the future. Couldn't that God have foreseen how throughout history nations would commit vile deeds against others? Even if the nations of Canaan were somehow superbly evil and the world would be far worse if they were allowed to worship their asherot, wouldn't God know that other nations would use the divine sanction of genocide to justify carrying it out against peoples that were not superbly evil, you know, like the Jews? Apparently not.
The end result is that the biblical morality is far different from my own. In the biblical world, genocide is ok. In my world it is not. For this reason, and a few others we will see in later weeks, I have rejected the Torah as a good source for morality.
Obvious point but still worth stating: You can't use the argument from morality in favor of God and also believe in Torah MiSinai, unless and until you respond to the types of arguments you mention here. Also, I noticed that Richard Swinburne's influential evidentialist arguments for God depend crucially on a modern Western conception of morality, so you can't use his arguments either.
ReplyDeleteAgreed. I find the genocide one to be particularly troubling for Jews, specifically because we've been on the receiving end of this atrocity many times and viscerally consider genocide to be immoral. Therefore, it is often difficult to come to terms with a divinely sanctioned genocide. It is a question that Rabbis of all denominations have great difficulty answering.
DeleteActually, my experience is that the more Orthodox one is the less one is bothered by such things. The "yeshivish" people to whom I've mentioned this sort of thing usually shrug and maybe even grin a bit, and just say "oh well, apparently the Torah doesn't conform to modern Western sensibilities". It's a not-so-well-kept secret in yeshivish circles that Judaism is extremely self-centered morally. We're amazingly altruistic to other Jews (religious Jews, of course), but goyim are only a step above animals (maybe) on the moral value scale. One friend of mine, a really nice sweet kollel guy, responded by laughingly telling me the following: A friend of his had asked a well-known yeshiva rebbi whether one should be sad when a goyishe neighbor dies. The rebbi responded that one should be happy since it makes God happy when a sinner like that dies.
DeleteModern orthodox, on the other hand, are usually very troubled by these sorts of things.
"the Torah doesn't conform to modern Western sensibilities"
DeleteUnholy Cthulhu, you repeated verbatim what some of my family has said...
That's eerie.
Also some more points:
ReplyDelete- By Midyan it says that Israel wiped out all males and all non-virgin females (originally only males, but Moshe was angry so they killed the females too), with the virgins taken "for yourselves". The posuk says there were 33,000 virgins remaining. Figure that in a promiscuous country like Midyan virgins probably accounted for maybe a fifth of the female population at most, so counting the males that means Israel killed several hundred thousand people.
- [According to Chazal "virgins" refers to anybody under the age of 3, so that's even more people - probably well over half a million. Also according to Chazal, the way they knew if a girl was 3+ was to bring her in front of Elazar and the Urim V'Tumim. As I recently pointed out to someone, picture the scene: You've got maybe 20,000 or so cute little girls around 3 years old. Elazar's sitting there and one by one they bring the girls in front of him. Thumbs up and she goes to a life of slavery, thumbs down and she's dragged off and brutally decapitated. That's Mengele.]
- By Sichon and Og it says "ad bilti hish'ir lo sarid". Also by Og it says there were 60 powerful walled cities that were completely annihilated.
- When you add that all together we're clearly talking about the massacre of several million people (leaving aside questions about the plausibility of such numbers).
- The pesukim you mentioned regarding cities outside of Israel are for a milchemes reshus - in other words, there's no commandment or particular reason to enslave / annihilate those cities other than the fact that king decided he feels like doing it for whatever reason.
And then of course you have the issue of killing Amalek. The way I like to frame that issue is: "Do you really think it's right to chop off the heads of those cute little kids next door because of something their distant ancestors did 3500 years ago?"
ReplyDelete@A Kefirah good post. - I was going to include a post on such things and I am glad you beat me to it. It was also one reason I rejected Orthodox Judaism and the Divinity of the Torah. Orthodox Jews may reply God commanded it and the ways of God are a mystery. He had his reasons. Some Orthodox would argue the Jews had to wipe the other religions (at least in Israel) because the ends justify the means. The ends being the establishment of the one true God - Yahweh (also known as the desert rat in some atheistic circles). I believe Rashi was troubled by it a bit as he writes it's God's world to with as he chooses. Anyway, rather than the commands coming from Yahweh, they were devised by people all too human and for all too human reasons. It obvious to anybody not brainwashed or deluded.
ReplyDeleteAnother reason that Orthodoxy may give is the Canaanites had and were still doing 'evil' deeds. Blame the victim.
DeleteI don't agree with your conclusions this week. The genocidal verses are all part of the deuteronomic history, right? By all account these were written at a late stage, when there was actually no opportunity to put them into action. Not only that, but Rabbinic Judaism thoroughly rejects the applicability of these verses, "Sennacherib came up and mixed the peoples, etc..." Maybe you'd charactrize this as a technicallity, but the upshot is that Jewish traidition used the tools at its disposal to render them obsolote. So when you say that you reject the Torah as a source for morality, what are you rejecting? The retrojected fantasy of ethnic cleansing that was never applied? A Karaite read of the Torah? All that's left for these verses is drosh weqabbel sakhar, they are not a source of morality for Jews either.
ReplyDeleteI've been wondering about this recently, having read theories that push down the final composition of the Pentateuch into the late hellenistic age. The funny thing is that the further it's pushed, the more the Rabbis become the immediate successors of the Torah itself, and the more validity of their traditions of interpretation have. If that's the case, it becomes even more difficult to posit some preexisting bronze age morality to reject. Well maybe that's taking it a bit far, but I think I made my point.
Eliyahu, I certainly do agree that if you are comfortable enough to put the writing of Deuteronomy to the period of Josiah (or later) as Academia tends to, then a lot of the major moral problems are diminished. The stories then represent a sort of fantasy, and while it's still inappropriate as far as my feeling of morality is concerned, there is some solace you can take in that the authors never expected it to be possible to do such actions. Although it's still troubling that they're essentially bragging about committing past atrocities. In other words, if you were reading some Neo-Nazi fan fiction, you'd probably still be disgusted, even though the events described were fictional.
DeleteHowever, when I was struggling with this issue, DH wasn't even on my radar. I was still saddled with a very simplistic view of Torah M'Sinai with these commandments actually given to a group of people directly from God who dutifully carried them out as recorded in Yehoshua. I do imagine that there are plenty of people who might stumble across this blog who are not convinced that the Torah was not written by Moshe prior to the conquest of Israel. It is to these people, and to my former self, that the moral problems are most stark.
I was puzzled by this: "the more the Rabbis become the immediate successors of the Torah itself, and the more validity of their traditions of interpretation have. "
ReplyDeleteWhat does that even mean, the "more validity" that their interpretations have? If the Torah is a later man-made composition then what does "valid" mean? Or are you just suggesting that the interpretations of the Talmudic rabbis 1000 years later (assuming Torah was written in 500 BCE) more closely reflects the original intention of the authors (a very Kugel-esque discussion)? In any event, while some passages (ben sorer, ayin tachas ayin, etc) have been interpreted (or reinterpreted) to suggest that they are polemical or not literal, I have never come across any suggestion by Chazal that the genocide passages are anything but literal. And therefore they felt that nothing was wrong with genocide, killing children except for the virgin female children, taking & perpetuating slavery (offspring of eved ivri and female slave), etc. So you have just changed the concept of an immoral God into immoral rabbis (again, relative to today's morality).
BTW, here is an apropos article in the Time of Israel: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/bad-time-stories-when-torah-justifies-the-immoral/
ReplyDeleteYes, that's kind of what I was suggesting. Except the gap is not 1000 years, it may be more like a maximum of 200 years, and if the anshei kenesset hagedolah lasted from the beginning of the return until the time of shimon hatzaddik 200 BCE, the gap may be non existent between the circles that finished the composition of the Pentateuch and the establishment of the schools of interpretation and exegesis.
ReplyDeleteI admit that this is speculation, I don't have enough data yet to back it up.
Again, specifically referring to the laws of holy war against particular ethnicities (Amaleq, seven canaanite nations), Rabinnic interpretation has completely abrogated those laws, exactly as it did for ben sorer u'moreh.
The history of the return from exile is fairly muddled both in the Tanach and in Academic circles. The chronology of Ezra is highly problematic and it appears that they were trying to enforce accuracy in Yirmiyahu's prophecy as far as how long the exile will last, and wound up with chronological inconsistencies because of it. So it's not clear when the 2nd temple was even built. As to when the anshei knesset hagdolah began, pushing this into the Persian period is highly problematic, it looks to be a Hellenic period creation. And while its tempting to draw a straight line of continuity between this era and the Talmudic era, every non-Orthodox individual is skeptical of this claim. In other words, it's not surprising that the Amoraim in 500 CE would negate the genocide claims of 700 BCE on their own. There is no need to assume that the 300 BCE generation abrogated those laws as well.
DeleteYes, from what I've read, there are especially problems with Ezra specifically, and specualtion whether the royal epistles recorded in the book can be considered authentic.
DeleteBesides that, though, I was basing my comment on the following thesis presented by Louis Finkelstein in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol 2. Which takes the existence of the anshei kenesset hagedolah as authentic.
------------
CHAPTER 6
THE MEN OF THE GREAT
SYNAGOGUE {circa 400-170 B.C.E.)
The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the high probability of
the following propositions: 1
(1) That the Men of the Great Synagogue (Hebrew, *anh kneset ha-g'dolaft)
constituted a tribunal, which was the supreme judicial authority of the
Pharisees in its time.
(2) That the members of this tribunal and their followers considered it the
body to which Deuteronomy iy:8fF referred in its command that a local
judge or other authority in doubt as to the interpretation or application of
the law should resort for guidance.
(3) That this tribunal was called into being by Ezra and Nehemiah, in an
effort to offset the authority of the court consisting of the Temple priests
and the lay aristocracy, which gave Nehemiah so much trouble.
(4) That the Great Synagogue claimed that its traditions derived from the
prophets, and through them for Moses, having been revealed to him on
Mount Sinai.
(5) That another theory regarding the Great Synagogue ultimately devel-
oped, denying that it alone possessed such traditions, but ascribing to it
supreme judicial authority, as the legitimate heir to the pre-exilic tribunal
of Jerusalem, established by the kings of the Davidic dynasty.
(6) That the rabbinic tradition, ascribing to this body the authority of
Mishnah Sanhedrin IO.I, and the formulation of the central prayer of the
Synagogue, as well as the most important home prayer, namely the Grace
after the Meal, is authentic.
1
The reader of this and the following chapters will, of course, observe that the writer's approach and conclusions are at variance with those of many distinguished scholars, for whom he has high regard and affection. They include, among others, such eminent figures as Professors Elias Bickerman, Sidney B. Hoenig, Jacob Neusner (whose own chapters dealing with related subjects appear in another volume), Morton Smith, and the late Solomon Zeitlin. The reader is, the editors believe, entitled to have before him varying opinions on these controversial subjects.
Eliyahu,
DeleteIf we're willing to move Ezra into the 4th century BCE then the thesis outlined above seems at least plausible to me. I will admit that this period (late Persian, early Greek) is one where I have the least knowledge.
It does appear to me that a court to counteract the priests fits closer into the the Hellenic period where we started to see Greek appointed high priests. But again, I'm no expert here.