tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6145686535514494437.post2648243863597435658..comments2023-12-14T14:59:13.175+01:00Comments on Shadows in Eden: The Butcher of CanaanHawkwoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07993700120131916459noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6145686535514494437.post-12007519162482898372021-05-08T05:42:17.623+02:002021-05-08T05:42:17.623+02:00Really informative article, thanks.
I t hold your ...Really informative article, thanks.<br />I t hold your opion.<br />Joshua is more a curse than a blessing.JDhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03251401646826188656noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6145686535514494437.post-24108815584057312342013-11-27T12:26:13.454+01:002013-11-27T12:26:13.454+01:00Thank you for taking the time to comment as you ha...Thank you for taking the time to comment as you have, Antares. But I'm bound to say that nothing which you say, and none of the points which you make, are new to me, and your comments are standard Christian Apologist fare. To address the points you raise:<br /><br />If you imagine that I “consistently refute the Bible internally”, why do you think that I always cite my academic sources (where appropriate) at the end of each post? It is ironic that you accuse me of this on a post which has more external sources cited than average on my blog, both archaeological and anthropological, and which material forms a substantial part of my post. That having been said, if the Bible indeed cannot be refuted internally, as you claim, that in itself suggests an internal logic and consistency which cannot hold up. <br /><br />I regret that you seem to misread my statement about assuming the Book of Joshua to be factual; certainly as I go on clearly to state immediately afterwards that I do not believe it to be. So how can you possibly consider that I am 'alone in this assumption'? Even were it so, I would not be, of course. Millions around the world do not think in metaphor but accept the historicity of such books in scripture as a point of faith.<br /><br />You make a statement which particularly intrigues me. You say that I "cannot impeach the God of Israel with his own autobiography." My question straight back to you is: 'Why not?" If that God is by any normal standards of decency recklessly immoral, why should such immorality not be questioned? Although it is not, of course, an 'autobiography' as such.<br /><br />As I clearly state in my post, my central 'challenge' is not (as you seem to think) "the problem of the massive body count in the book", or even whether the events in the Book of Joshua are historically true or not. It is whether the descriptions of genocide which it contains are morally justified merely because they happen in scripture. My further concluding point is that it’s all down to whose side you are on. Had Joshua been a Canaanite (or a Philistine or an Assyrian), he would be viewed as a monster, as a ‘butcher’. So there clearly is a Biblical double standard operating.<br /><br />As I also clearly state in my post, my whole point is that it is stated in scripture that (whether they actually happened or not) God sanctions these acts of mass slaughter. So what does that say about God's own morality? In six long paragraphs of comment you have not addressed this central point.Hawkwoodhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07993700120131916459noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6145686535514494437.post-56497891939060760722013-11-26T23:33:03.986+01:002013-11-26T23:33:03.986+01:00Part 3.
So then we come to your central challenge...Part 3.<br /><br />So then we come to your central challenge, the problem of the massive body count in the book. I would begin with a reiteration of what I said before: focus on the genre of the story, i.e. what the story was intended to mean to the people to which is was told. The book of Joshua is primarily a tale of purgation and the return of a people to their God and faith, as would befit a people coming out of a generations-long captivity to pagan Babylon. Right away you can see the connections. As the villains in the story, the Canaanites would have communicated just as much about what the Israelites at the time thought about themselves then what they thought about the actual Canaanites of history. The prevailing sense foreign, pagan presence that surrounds the people of God in their own land recalls how the post-exilic Israelites must have felt about being set free. The bloody conquest of Cannaan was, I submit to you, a way for 6th century Israelites to address the spiritual re-conquest, not only of their own homeland, but of their own spiritual selves. Sundered from their home, their God, and their covenant with him through years of succumbing to pagan influence, it is now their time to purge the sin from their lives as Joshua did the Canaanites from the land of the Jordan. It is this theme that colors pretty much the entire narrative, and the numbers and killings are therefore cast in the same light. The Church Fathers argued something similar. Origen famously overcame the moral problem of Samuel's brutal treatment of the captive king Agag by making a spiritual analogy of it, using it to illustrate how ruthlessly the individual must put to death the sin in his life. I submit to you a similar analogy. The body count of Joshua's purge of Canaan is extreme by anyone's reckoning, but the extremeness of the brutality may be calculated for a particular effect on the reader. When taken in the proper context, the harshness exhibited on the Canaanites becomes a metaphor for the harshness the Israelites would levy against the "foreign elements" within their own people, rooting them out and putting them to death as if they were "the enemy within." This context makes it difficult to indict the book of Joshua on any moral grounds, much less any historical, as the warfare illustrated therein would have been understood by the people it was written for as a portrayal of how to recapture their native spirituality rather than a serious account of a religiously-motivated war.<br /><br />Sincerely,<br /><br />AntaresAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6145686535514494437.post-57751392194650476342013-11-26T23:32:28.860+01:002013-11-26T23:32:28.860+01:00Part 2:
With this established, many of your histo...Part 2:<br /><br />With this established, many of your historical qualms about the book fall by the wayside. One might as well take issue with the anachronisms in a story like Django Unchained. At the least, such historical errors are deemed unimportant to the central narrative while at the most they are made for calculated effect on the audience. The Bible has done this sort of thing before. Take for instance the character of "Darius the Mede" in the book of Daniel. Not only did not such a character not exist in history, but he would have been known not to exist by the contemporary people. Rather, his character is more of a rhetorical tool by the author of Daniel for a particular literary effect.<br /><br />With this established, your points about the characterization of the Canaanites, or the omission of the Beit She'an and the Egyptians, or the mention of "Iron chariots" in the Bronze Age setting of Joshua have little substance. One might as well attempt to use the historical inaccuracies in Dumas' Queen Margot or Three Musketeers or in Shakespeare's Richard III or Henry V or Anthony and Cleopatra to unravel their respective narratives. Yes, Cardinal Richelieu may not have been as big a git as Dumas portrayed him to be, but that's not the point of the story is it? The same goes for Joshua. <br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6145686535514494437.post-87408375502959092102013-11-26T23:31:39.397+01:002013-11-26T23:31:39.397+01:00Mr. Hawkwood,
Antares here again, with a three-pa...Mr. Hawkwood,<br /><br />Antares here again, with a three-parter. <br /><br />Always glad to see you're still at it; I really enjoy reading your posts from time to time. However, there is one problem with this particular post that illustrates a prevailing issue that I've found across your blog in general. You consistently try to refute the Bible internally, by using its own books to unravel the narrative as a whole. This cannot be done. It is a fool's errand. One might as well try to overcome a flood by drowning it or try to put out a forest fire with a flamethrower. You can criticize Bible externally, by relying on other concepts imported from outside sources, but every time you try to use the Bible to refute the Bible, you will fail. Understand that every verse rests on thousands of years of history, scholarship, and interpretation and has been explored and considered from every possible angle. Neither you nor I can go through scripture and "discover" a textual error or inconsistency that hasn't already been addressed countless times centuries before. In the Christian faith, the trope of the "Violent God of the Jews" was dealt with over a thousand years ago with the expurgation of Gnostic Mariconists, whereas the Jews themselves would have settled any imagined inconsistencies long ago before even that. As a text, the Bible and the characters therein are wholly consistent, as is the message and moral standards it contains. You cannot impeach the God of Israel with his own autobiography.<br /><br />That being said, your post on Joshua contains a number of oversights. Firstly is your error of genre. From the outset, you say you will assume the events therein to historical fact. I submit to you that, among serious scholars of the book of Joshua, you will be wholly alone in this assumption. Both Christian and Jewish scholars understand and have indeed understood for centuries that the book of Joshua was not written as an historical account, nor would it be understood to have been by the people it was written for. It is primarily a theological work that discusses the nature of a people's obedience to God, a kind of "Exodus in reverse." It is, I submit to you, a myth, and would have been seen as such by both its writers and its audience. That is not to say that the events and characters of the book of Joshua are wholly fictional, but rather that their purpose is to aid in the telling of a "sacred narrative" that addresses the concerns of a particular people in a particular time and place. They do not stand as "historical" events and characters as such, let alone anything approaching our modern understanding of what such can be taken of as "historical."<br /><br />This oversight derails most of your analysis from this point on. Most likely, Joshua was written and compiled around the end of the Babylonian captivity, at which time the Israelites were allowed to return to the Jerusalem by order of Cyrus the Elder, around 538 B.C. The Jews were, in the truest sense, "returning home." The book of Joshua therefore, would be an instance of cultural "back-casting," if you will, where the story of a real or fictional cultural hero from an era of historical significance to a people is re-told with new significance to that people in a new historical setting. Drawing on our previous exchange, JFC's Last of the Mohicans is one such instance of this (albeit with vastly more proximate historical eras), where the events of one "age" of American history (the French/Indian War) are used to illustrate the concerns of another "age" (the dawning of Westward Expansion). The same thing may be said of films like Roots or Glory, which are as much about race in the 1960's and 90's as they about race in the antebellum South or the American Civil War.<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com