America's Largest Catholic Newspaper
QUESTION: I am a regular reader of the Old and New Testaments, and have been troubled about how the Jewish people, with God's approval, treated their enemies so viciously as they progressed to the Promised Land. Joshua says they killed everyone and everything. Other instances in the Book of Deuteronomy are even more graphic and violent.
I know the Bible is the inspired word of God, but are we to take all these violent actions against women and children literally? (Maryland)
Answer: The practice to which you refer was known as the ban. Conquering armies (including the Hebrews), often following some alleged divine sign or command, massacring everyone. As you note, Joshua observed the ban after taking the city of Jericho, "putting to the sword all living creatures in the city: men and women, young and old, as well as oxen, sheep and asses" (6:21).
We probably will never have a completely satisfying answer to your question, but I believe a few points are helpful.
Because the sacred authors always necessarily wrote in the context of their own beliefs and cultures, Scriptures generally speak of God and his actions anthropomorphically, describing God in human terms, and with human characteristics.
In fact, the only way we can speak of God is with our inevitably limited human words and experiences. When we say God is loving or gracious or jealous or just, we're speaking analogously; we mean only that God is "something like" what we mean when we apply those words to human beings.
Similarly, when someone deliberately hurts us badly, our instinct is to punish them, hurt them in return. When they're nice, we try to be nice in return. We tend to assume, wrongly of course, that God reacts in the same way.
When the Hebrew people win or lose a battle, it is because God is either for them or against them at the moment. God is either punishing or rewarding them, depending on his feelings that day. In other words, their ways of thinking are projected onto God.
One essential element of God's holiness throughout the Scriptures is his righteousness, his justice. The Hebrew word ("sedek") has a legal background; God is righteous because he desires and helps people to achieve the rights to which they are entitled.
God expresses a fierce concern for those who have nothing to depend on except his righteousness. God's "anger" is toward those who would deprive the poor and the weak of what is rightly theirs. This is the source of what we have come to refer to as God's option for the poor.
We have here at least hints about the apparent divinely inspired viciousness of the Jewish treatment of their enemies. God, they believed, considered as his own enemies any who would destroy or violate the existence of the insignificant people he had mysteriously chosen as peculiarly his own.
Originally, the ban was considered a Hebrew offering to God. Later on, details changed and eventually the practice lost nearly all religious connotation. As the Jewish concept of God matured, it gradually disappeared.
After King Saul's slaughter of the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15) about 1,000 years before Christ, the practice does not reappear in the historical books of the Old Testament.
Tragically, the mass murder of innocent populations by victorious religious and other military forces has continued through the centuries, up to our own day.—CNS
Questions may be sent to Father Dietzen at Box 3315, Peoria, IL 61612, or e-mail: jjdietzen@aol.com.
