I recently got into a debate about Numbers 31

[Sirami]

It's very difficult for me to understand the viewpoint of the truly faithful. I recently got into a debate with my aunt, who is a strong fundamentalist. Scripture came into the debate, and I brought up numbers 31.

Here's the New International Version for reference:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?se ... ersion=NIV

I suggest you read the whole chapter, but here's a paraphrase for those that won't read it:

God told Moses to wipe out Midian as a result of them worshiping other Gods. So Moses people did wipe them out.

After all the fighting men of Midain were killed and the women and children were brought back to camp.

Moses got angry and told his officers that all of the women must be killed, and to kill all of the children as well, except for the children that were female virgins. The female virgins were forced into marriage with the people that destroyed their homes and families.

Now, when reading the bible it's pretty clear that not only did God approve of all of this, God demanded that all of this happen. To me that sounds a lot like the LRA of today.

How could somebody respect God and Moses after reading something like this?

[Nec Spe Nec Metu]

Well-practiced cognitive dissonance.

[cnorman18]

It's very difficult for me to understand the viewpoint of the truly faithful. I recently got into a debate with my aunt, who is a strong fundamentalist. Scripture came into the debate, and I brought up numbers 31.

Here's the New International Version for reference:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?se ... ersion=NIV

I suggest you read the whole chapter, but here's a paraphrase for those that won't read it:

God told Moses to wipe out Midian as a result of them worshiping other Gods. So Moses people did wipe them out.

After all the fighting men of Midain were killed and the women and children were brought back to camp.

Moses got angry and told his officers that all of the women must be killed, and to kill all of the children as well, except for the children that were female virgins. The female virgins were forced into marriage with the people that destroyed their homes and families.

Now, when reading the bible it's pretty clear that not only did God approve of all of this, God demanded that all of this happen. To me that sounds a lot like the LRA of today.

How could somebody respect God and Moses after reading something like this?

By understanding that the Bible is a literary creation and not history. This massacre never happened, even according to the Bible itself. Take a look at Judges 6. If the Midianites were wiped out, how were the Israelites "given into their hand" for seven years a generation or two later?

[mitty]

It's very difficult for me to understand the viewpoint of the truly faithful. I recently got into a debate with my aunt, who is a strong fundamentalist. Scripture came into the debate, and I brought up numbers 31.

Here's the New International Version for reference:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?se ... ersion=NIV

I suggest you read the whole chapter, but here's a paraphrase for those that won't read it:

God told Moses to wipe out Midian as a result of them worshiping other Gods. So Moses people did wipe them out.

After all the fighting men of Midain were killed and the women and children were brought back to camp.

Moses got angry and told his officers that all of the women must be killed, and to kill all of the children as well, except for the children that were female virgins. The female virgins were forced into marriage with the people that destroyed their homes and families.

Now, when reading the bible it's pretty clear that not only did God approve of all of this, God demanded that all of this happen. To me that sounds a lot like the LRA of today.

How could somebody respect God and Moses after reading something like this?

Another excellent example of why I don't believe this nonsense, where slavery and crimes-against-humanity are condoned, at least by the writers who were probably the perpetrators of these atrocities and blamed it on their imagined god. Reminds me of a local minister who used the same pathetic excuse about leaving his loyal wife of thirty years or so for a younger model (one of his parishioners) and had the audacity to say that his bronze-age god had told him to do it. And then you have the case of the peasant picking up a few sticks on the Sabbath and being stoned to death whereas Christians seem to think it was fine for Jesus to also break that commandment plus the fifth commandment and they then rant about homosexual relationships between consenting adults as being the worst of the worst of sins. Pathetic. It's all about "do as I say, not do as I do" like Swaggart and Bakker.

[Shermana]

1. Noteworthy is the inclusion of Balaam among the victims. What was Balaam doing among them? Why does it say vengeance? Surely there must be some sort of context involved if it says "Vengeance".

2. Judges 6 doesn't necessarily contradict it. It only says the Princes and males were killed. It does not say all the women were killed with the same word as all the men killed, kol-. It says women and children were taken captive, does not say all of them. Some women of Midian and their children could have run off and regrouped and carried on the name.

[mitty]

It's very difficult for me to understand the viewpoint of the truly faithful. I recently got into a debate with my aunt, who is a strong fundamentalist. Scripture came into the debate, and I brought up numbers 31.

Here's the New International Version for reference:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?se ... ersion=NIV

I suggest you read the whole chapter, but here's a paraphrase for those that won't read it:

God told Moses to wipe out Midian as a result of them worshiping other Gods. So Moses people did wipe them out.

After all the fighting men of Midain were killed and the women and children were brought back to camp.

Moses got angry and told his officers that all of the women must be killed, and to kill all of the children as well, except for the children that were female virgins. The female virgins were forced into marriage with the people that destroyed their homes and families.

Now, when reading the bible it's pretty clear that not only did God approve of all of this, God demanded that all of this happen. To me that sounds a lot like the LRA of today.

How could somebody respect God and Moses after reading something like this?

By understanding that the Bible is a literary creation and not history. This massacre never happened, even according to the Bible itself. Take a look at Judges 6. If the Midianites were wiped out, how were the Israelites "given into their hand" for seven years a generation or two later?

But where does the history start and the "literary creation" finish. I would have thought it starts with the Moses' era when the former oral history and customs and myths were written down. Perhaps only part of the Midianite population were slaughtered, just as Joshua probably only slaughtered some of the Cainanite population which were strategic to his evil cause.

[Wootah]

Consider a modern example: How can we respect the men and women that fought in WW2? Easy, they are the reason we are free today. That's what it boils down to for me.

I honestly think this as close to a complete rebuttal as is needed. What is missing or what irks you about it?

[cnorman18]

It's very difficult for me to understand the viewpoint of the truly faithful. I recently got into a debate with my aunt, who is a strong fundamentalist. Scripture came into the debate, and I brought up numbers 31.

Here's the New International Version for reference:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?se ... ersion=NIV

I suggest you read the whole chapter, but here's a paraphrase for those that won't read it:

God told Moses to wipe out Midian as a result of them worshiping other Gods. So Moses people did wipe them out.

After all the fighting men of Midain were killed and the women and children were brought back to camp.

Moses got angry and told his officers that all of the women must be killed, and to kill all of the children as well, except for the children that were female virgins. The female virgins were forced into marriage with the people that destroyed their homes and families.

Now, when reading the bible it's pretty clear that not only did God approve of all of this, God demanded that all of this happen. To me that sounds a lot like the LRA of today.

How could somebody respect God and Moses after reading something like this?

By understanding that the Bible is a literary creation and not history. This massacre never happened, even according to the Bible itself. Take a look at Judges 6. If the Midianites were wiped out, how were the Israelites "given into their hand" for seven years a generation or two later?

But where does the history start and the "literary creation" finish. I would have thought it starts with the Moses' era when the former oral history and customs and myths were written down. Perhaps only part of the Midianite population were slaughtered, just as Joshua probably only slaughtered some of the Cainanite population which were strategic to his evil cause.

Don't really have time to go into this again -- I've written on it at length before -- but this passage is thought by many scholars to be a much later addition with a political purpose rather than a historical one. You'll notice that the battle or massacre itself is disposed of in very few words, while much more space is given to the dividing up of the spoils and who was in charge -- with the emphasis being on the primacy and power of the priests.

The purpose of this passage was to add support to the establishment of priestly power in the continuing struggle between crown and Temple, which means it was probably written LONG after the fact; when you've read about the P Source, this is one example. This has more to do with the politics of a later time than with the ethics of Bronze Age warfare. If one insists on finding history in this book, one is barking up the wrong tree from the get-go. Real Bible scholarship doesn't work that way.

[Adstar]

It's very difficult for me to understand the viewpoint of the truly faithful. I recently got into a debate with my aunt, who is a strong fundamentalist. Scripture came into the debate, and I brought up numbers 31.

Here's the New International Version for reference:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?se ... ersion=NIV

I suggest you read the whole chapter, but here's a paraphrase for those that won't read it:

God told Moses to wipe out Midian as a result of them worshiping other Gods. So Moses people did wipe them out.

After all the fighting men of Midain were killed and the women and children were brought back to camp.

Moses got angry and told his officers that all of the women must be killed, and to kill all of the children as well, except for the children that were female virgins. The female virgins were forced into marriage with the people that destroyed their homes and families.

Now, when reading the bible it's pretty clear that not only did God approve of all of this, God demanded that all of this happen. To me that sounds a lot like the LRA of today.

How could somebody respect God and Moses after reading something like this?

Where does it say in that chapter that:

"The female virgins were forced into marriage with the people that destroyed their homes and families." ?



All Praise The Ancient OF Days

[JehovahsWitness]

God told Moses to wipe out Midian ...How could somebody respect God and Moses after reading something like this?

The Midianites were "cousins" (decendents from Abraham) to the Israelites and not one of the nations God pronounced would be totally destroyed; however their joining forces with the Moabites put them in harms way and was viewed by God as an attack ; subvertive actions of the Midianites resulted in the death of 23,000 Israelites and God instructed his people later to take revenge on this Midianite-Moabite coalition. The Israelites were told to destroy their cities in a specific territory (the nation was NOT wiped out completely). In this conflict, as in many of the Isaelite wars, only virgin girls were to be spared.

WHY ONLY VIRGIN GIRLS

When fighting a war the ultimate goal is the survival of your nation. Sparing men, adult women and boys would represent a significant threat to their future national security. While girls bought up in a community tend to adopt the culture and standards of their surroundings and children born to them identify with their father's nation and loyalties, this is not the case with boys. The man's dominant position would mean that their children would no doubt continue the allegences of their father and the national identity would be split; it would only be a matter of time before those households sought revenge for past grievances, no matter how many generations back that was. Sparing the boys or adults would be effectively be implanting potential subvertive elements in their nation that would ultimately prove destructive. The Isaelites did in fact live to see the disastreous effects of NOT following God's explicit command to clear the territories completely of their enemies. Obeying God's commands would have spared the nation hundreds of years of warfare and countless lives.

SPARING THE BABIES

Further, fighting a war and asking the soldiers to take all the small children and babies first is a completely impractical war stratagie that would leave the soldiers themselves vulnerable. They would presumably have to either be fighting with a toddler in one arm or attempting to leave the war zone with them get them to safety and then return to fight some more, pick up some more babies and fight holding them while getting them to safety... there is little doubt the Israelites would have been wiped out and their own children eventually killed had they adopted this approach to war.

HOLY/DIVINE WARFARE

A lot of bible texts presented as evidence of God's "bloodthirsty" nature are verses pertaining to divine Warfare where God commission his people to execute nations the refused to bow to divine mandate for example:

"The Lord commands: "... slay old men outright, young men and maidens, little children and women" -- Ezekiel 9:4-6 (also see Numbers 31:17-18; Jeremiah 48:10)


DIVINE RIGHT

Can God steal from himself?

The entire planet belongs to the Creator, it is his property to do with as he sees fit. Arguing that God did not have the right to assign a specific territory to a specific group is like arguing that a father doesn't have a right to move his child from one room in the house to another. God assigned a specific territory to the descendents of Abraham and the nations that lived there prior to their arrival should, upon notification of divine intentions, vaccated the territory and bowed to divine right. Complete capitulation was their only option, enemy nations chose to fight instead of go for this option, they therefore forfeited their right to live in the territory (with "live" being the operative word).


HOW MUCH WAS GOD DEMANDING?

The land the Israelites were given was vastly inferior in size to what neighbouring (and subsequent) powers claimed. While Alexandre the great would conquer whole continents, and the American colonies spread westward over thousands of miles of native American territories, the total area of the State of Israel is 8,522.04 sq. miles (22,072 sq.km.); about 290 miles (470 km.) in length from north to south and some 85 miles (135 km.) across at its widest point between the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean coast.

HISTORY - GETTING A GRIP

While not belittling how sad it was that humans chose to defy the God, critics seem not only to operate in a kind of historic vacuume - where acceptance of the reality of how nations (including their own) were established is completely (and conveniently) irrelevant; but one almost gets the impression they think the great civilisations such as Greece and Roman asked residents nicely if they would mind moving over and history promptly and neatly rearranged itself.

The ugly reality is however that the human race have been fighting for territories as long as its existed with no intervention from the creator, and that, based on much more selfish criteria than those of the biblical narrative.

WHY NOT FIND ANOTHER WAY

God could have magically trasported them, hypnotised them, made them not be born in the first place... in short, God could have taken away the individual free will of a particular group of people. He COULD have but he chose not to. Our creator respects our right to live and make choices. He has faith we will make the best ones for ourselve and our family. Transporting the offending nations would not have changed their attitutde and he'd have to keep them heavily sediated to not eventually chose to return and reclaim their territory. What next Mars? God choses to leave us free will but we will have to live the consequences of our choices. It is not for HIM to find another way, it is for humans to bend to divine will. The nations that frequently attacked his people, joined forces and totally out numbered them and failed ot surrender completely to them faced the consequences of oppositing the Creator and his representatives (in this case the Israelites). When you drive full speed into a war, do you blame the wall? War is hell, warring against the Almighty is suicide.




I'm afraid I don't know what LRA is so I cannot address that.


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