Moses bin Amram and Adolph Hilter

[Willum]

SallyF is hinting at similarities between Hitler and Jesus - honestly I don't see it, but I am ready to be surprised.

But it did make me see a relation between Moses and Hitler.

Both led their people from slavery.
Both were xenophobes.
Both attempted genocide, only one succeeded.
Both were artists.

Let's look at other similarities and differences.

[Mithrae]

You're citing examples in which the Allied forces A) as victims of aggression undertook drastic measures B) killing tiny fractions (~0.04% and ~0.3% respectively) of the targeted nations' population, reportedly on the basis of C) shortening the conflicts and saving more lives and yet even so D) have been issues of controversy and at best regrettable necessity even in those Allied countries themselves.

. . . .

C) Saving more American lives. Clearly, sparring Japanese lives was not the objective. Hardly a defence from genocide.

Sparing Allied lives was certainly a primary concern, but even if only a third of the (actual) number of Japanese soldiers had died in defense of their homeland and emperor - an absurdly optimistic assumption - it would have greatly exceeded the number killed in the bombings.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation ... casualties
  
  In a conference with President Truman on June 18, Marshall, taking the Battle of Luzon as the best model for Olympic, thought the Americans would suffer 31,000 casualties in the first 30 days and ultimately 20% of Japanese casualties, which he estimated would include the entire Japanese force. This implied a total of 70,000 American casualties in the battle of Kyushu using the June projection of 350,000 Japanese defenders (or 183,365 American casualties when the actual Japanese strength of 916,828 is taken into account).[101] . . . .
  
  Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson stated "We shall in my opinion have to go through an even more bitter finish fight than in Germany. We shall incur the losses incident to such a war and we shall leave the Japanese islands even more thoroughly destroyed than was the case with Germany."[106] From D-Day to V-E Day, the Western Allies alone suffered some 766,294 casualties.[107] . . . .
  
  A study done for Secretary of War Henry Stimson's staff by William Shockley estimated that invading Japan would cost 1.7–4 million American casualties, including 400,000–800,000 fatalities, and five to ten million Japanese fatalities. The key assumption was large-scale participation by civilians in the defense of Japan.[17]

A) Is a, “Yeah, but he started it!� defence. Self defence is justifiable providing it’s not excessive. Was Nagasaki not excessive? And as far as I’m aware the British weren’t directly, themselves, the victims of Nazi aggression. Certainly the women and children of Dresden did nothing to the British. The Americans were victims of Japanese aggression in Pearl Harbour. But let’s keep in mind this was aggression localized to a military target, an American naval base. There were 68 civilian casualties. The Americans in turned bombed thousand of women and children melting their skin off. The Japanese never bombed and American city. Further, the Americans were also involved in the fire bombing of Dresden killing about 25,000 civilians including women and children. The Americans weren’t victims of Nazi aggression either.

Are you trying to argue that the British and American nations should not have come to the defense of their French allies? Britain was bombed by Germany resulting in over 40,000 civilian deaths.

B) I could make the same argument regarding the Bosnian genocide. Only 8,000 were killed. Representing roughly 0.4%, a tiny fraction, of the population. These kinds of cold calculations veil the real numbers as though it’s not genocide because the number of deaths represented are a relatively low percentage of the total population. Approximately 140,000 men, women, and children were killed in a matter of moments in the bombing of Hiroshima alone. That’s possibility quite a bit more than the Israelites killed.

If you choose to perversely ignore the facts that a) Germany and Japan were aggressor nations and c) there probably would have been far more deaths had the Allies acted differently, then yes, you could perhaps make the argument that they are comparable to the Bosnian genocide. Is that what you're doing?

According to the bible there were 32,000 virgin Midianite girls left alive by the Israelites (for reasons apparently not applicable to the young boys, let's leave it at that) implying somewhere in the order of 100,000+ killed in that religious cleansing alone. Both at the start and end of their wilderness wanderings the Israelites themselves supposedly numbered over 600,000 men over the age of twenty (Numbers 26:51), implying a total population close to 2 million, and they were commanded to completely annihilate seven nations more numerous than they:

• Deuteronomy 7:1 When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you—the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you— 2 and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.

In the case of Moses' actions against the Midianites and commands against the seven nations of Canaan A) the Israelites were active aggressors B) intending and according to the stories largely succeeding in wiping out all or the overwhelming majority of those peoples, C) with no justification save religious purity in the Midianite case and the usual kind of baby-killing propaganda against the Canaanites, and later in the Israelite story D) praised and lauded as the glorious actions of Yahweh.

A) And that makes it genocide because...

Because their actions were not directed by circumstances beyond their control, as in the case of defensive warfare: They freely and specifically chose to annihilate those eight ethnic/national groups.

B) But if it’s in the context of total war, why is this genocide? And what if the Japanese had not surrendered? The Americans dropped atomic bombs on two different cities within three days of each other. Who’s to say they would not have continued until the Japanese people were virtually obliterated from the planet?

It is genocide because they freely and specifically chose to annihilate those eight ethnic/national groups. Surely this isn't difficult to understand? Fallaciously invoking a state of "total war" - that the Israelites devoted all their 'military and civilian' resources towards the destruction with no regard or protections for non-combatant victims - doesn't change that fact: If anything it would make it all the more reprehensible for their whole society to be geared towards this ethnic annihilation. But in the case of the Midianites, for example, it's specifically reported that only 12,000 fighters were sent out to destroy their towns and cities.

C) You don’t think the practise of child sacrifice was sufficient moral grounds for waging war? How is the Allied justification really any better then?

Do you think that extrajudicial killings of Americans by their own police and intelligence forces, for example, would be sufficient moral grounds for another country to wipe the USA off the map?

In the case of the 100,000+ Midianites slaughtered under Moses' direct oversight there is not even the propaganda claim of child sacrifice; just the decision of Israelite men to have consentual sex with their women and participate in non-violent religious rituals with them. Meanwhile the propaganda claims against the nations of Canaan, the kind of baby-killing demonisation which is not uncommon against any enemy (let alone a race intended to be completely annihilated), in the interests of intellectual integrity should be taken with a large dose of salt: Where exactly did that information come from if (as traditionally supposed) the Pentateuch was written by or in the lifetime of Moses? In the only record of agents being sent out to report on the land of Canaan (Numbers 13), there is a conspicuous lack of any reference to these practices which should have been completely nauseating and at the very forefront of the spies' minds!

Abraham's attempted sacrifice of Isaac perhaps suggests that it was practiced by at least some folk in Canaan several centuries before Moses' day, stories of which might have been passed down and built upon during the stay in Egypt, but I've been hard-pressed to find any credible sources suggesting archaeological or firm historical evidence of widespread child sacrifice in Canaan in the 2nd millennium BCE. One biblicist site struggles to make its case based purely on the hope that its readers won't realize that Carthage wasn't in Canaan! Carthage was a Phoenician city, so it's plausible that Jezebel introduced child sacrifice from Sidon into widespread Israelite practice later in its history, opposition to which was included in later versions of the Torah. Isolated instances or brief periods of practice in a particular locality likewise can't be ruled out. But on the whole no, I don't think the dubious propaganda that Canaanites killed some of their children could justify killing all their men, women and children!

D) And that’s relevant to the charge of genocide because...

Again, it is genocide because the Israelites freely and specifically chose to annihilate those eight ethnic/national groups; their pride in annihilating those nations contrasts sharply against the regrettable necessity of the civilian (or even enemy combatant) casualties inflicted by the Allies in WW2.

Exactly where in this comparison do you imagine that the numerous Israelite genocides come out looking good?

No amount of justification will make these kinds of acts “come out looking good.� Do you really think the above justifications (A-D) for the Allied bombings make the Allies “look good�? The point, one which you don’t seem to be disputing, is that the acts of the Israelites and Allies were done under the context of total warfare. As such, the criminal charge of genocide seems to be misplaced.

This isn't a courtroom; I'm not laying criminal charges against anyone Genocide is a widely used and understood term in the English language. Nor am I saying that the Allied bombings look good; I said quite the opposite. You are the one who raised that comparison, and as far as I can see it's a comparison which serves only to highlight how much more reprehensible the stories of Israelite actions are.

The morality of the Allied bombings can be and indeed are questioned and debated... so what does that say about stories of the Israelites which are far more reprehensible on every imaginable level?

The morality of the actions is quite irrelevant to my point. Let’s just say it is always immoral for one person to kill another and leave it at that.

My reason for bringing these events up was to challenge the charge of genocide. I’m not so sure genocide is the correct charge here. It’s a highly emotive term coined to describe a relatively recent event, the Holocaust. An event which had some very specific characteristics which seem to be lacking in the wars of the Israelites. Applying a specialized modern criminal term to tribal warfare which took place thousands of years ago seems to be some kind of anachronistic fallacy.

And yet you're very keen to introduce the 19th century concept of "total war" into the discussion. Could you please clarify exactly which specific characteristics you believe were shared by the Holocaust, Rwandan and Bosnian genocides, but not by the Israelite annihilation of the Midianites and seven nations of Canaan?

When in the context of tribal warfare of the time, the actions of Moses and the Israelites were consistent with how warfare of the time took place.

That's bollocks and I'm pretty sure you know it. Even within the Biblical narrative (Genesis 14) it's shown that a more normal state of affairs was for weaker nations to serve as tributaries to more powerful ones and, even upon rebelling, for the victorious rulers to carry off plunder and slaves... not slaughter every man, woman and child! In the book of Judges it's said that the Israelites were repeatedly subdued by a series of different enemies, but never massacred in the way they were said to have massacred the earlier inhabitants of the land. Moses and Joshua were exceptionally bloodthirsty even by the standards of their own time.

But even if for the sake of argument we pretended that wasn't the case - that completely wiping out millions of inhabitants of a region was commonplace at the time - how do you imagine that changes anything? Moses still committed genocide, still commanded the slaughter of a comparable number of innocents as did Hitler. According to the stories he was still a brutal bronze age warlord who no reasonable modern person should admire, even if he wasn't significantly worse than other brutal bronze age warlords (which he was, in the case of these stories).

My argument being, given your definition of genocide, it seems to me either Moses, Truman, and Churchill (and by extension the American and British people) are all guilty of genocide or none of them are.

Moses' free and specific decisions to annihilate those eight ethnic/national groups certainly constitutes genocide, eight times over. The argument that it wasn't specifically defined as genocide at the time holds as little merit as arguing that having sex with a five year-old in 1960s America can't be considered child sexual abuse.

I don't accept your accusations of genocide against Truman and Churchill. Attempts to create an equivalency between cases of limited (arguably minimal possible) casualities in closing a defensive war and aggressively wiping out entire nations are obviously and utterly irrational.

[Willum]

[Replying to post 10 by Goose]

Sorry, this post is not about all these subjects you are desperately trying to invoke to justify genocide.
They would make fascinating topics, why don’t you start your own?

This is about comparing and contrasting the benevolence of Adolph and Moses.
It seems clear, in terms of scope and opportunity, Moses was by far the greater monster.

How many Germans did Adolph kill for transgressions? So few That history doesn’t record.
How many Jews did Moses kill for worshipping the Golden Calf/Hathor? Some gruesome number.

How many people did Adolph murder? None.
How many did Moses? At least one, but we may assume he did many an execution personally. He certainly watched.

[Mithrae]

How many Germans did Adolph kill for transgressions? So few That history doesn’t record.
How many Jews did Moses kill for worshipping the Golden Calf/Hathor? Some gruesome number.

According to one estimate the Nazis killed some 1900 Jehovah's Witnesses, thousands of homosexuals, an indeterminate number of political opponents, over 70,000 "repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocials," up to 250,000 people with disabilities and up to 250,000 Romani people. Many if not most of their 6 million Jewish victims were also Germans.

[William]

William: Just to inject an observation...if this is indeed a Creation of a Creator we are experiencing, and as a Species, have being doing so for a while now...

...The idea of a Creepy Creator does fit into the evidence...and my thinking is that if Jesus was the Son Of YHVH and that is who Jesus was calling his Father...then a question in need of an answer must be... "what happened to change the Creepy Creator into a more acceptable vision"?
And;
"Why specifically was Jesus injected into THAT particular part of The Story-Line Timeline?

All the back and forthing about murderous humans aside, "It is Our Nature" but for some reason that has been changing in The Collective Species Psyche...

This seems to indicate that The Creator - Creepy or otherwise - wants to find better ways of doing things.

Arguing about which human atrocity is worse, seems a kind of madness...no disrespect intended, as I do acknowledge the intelligence involved with said arguments.

[Willum]

[Replying to Mithrae]

Get better estimates.
And sorry, I did mean Nazi.
Moses killed people he considered his own people.
Adolph killed people he did not consider his own.

That was where I was going with that.

[Willum]

[Replying to post 14 by William]

Posted in the wrong topic?

[Mithrae]

Moses killed people he considered his own people.
Adolph killed people he did not consider his own.

Do you have evidence/sources for those claims? Seems to me they both wanted to create a 'chosen people' from out of the diverse masses they had leadership over. Note that a "mixed multitude" left Egypt alongside and remained with the Israelites (Ex. 12:38, Num. 11:4, Deut. 29:11); the reported number of people in the traveling horde (over 600,000 men) seems excessive enough on its own, but even more absurd to imagine that they were all descendants of 12 patriarchs a mere three or four generations earlier! Regardless of what tribe all those other hangers-on claimed affiliation with, actual blood descendants of Jacob would necessarily have been in the minority.

So I don't think there's any sound basis for supposing that Moses' religious purges/cleansing within his own nation was any different in kind (and on a much smaller scale) than Hitler's purges of homosexuals, 'criminals and asocials,' political opponents and people with disabilities; whereas Moses' commanded genocides of foreign nations/ethnicities according to the stories had more than twice as many victims as Hitler's genocides against the Jews and Romani (but still less than Hitler's tally when war deaths caused by the latter are included).

I think it's safe to say that Hitler was the 'more evil' of the two (as if that means anything), not just for having caused more suffering and deaths but for living in a more enlightened era when he and his society could and should have been much better. But it's still a remarkably close comparison in terms of the two men's objectives and reported impacts, and quite shocking that folk will go to such lengths to defend the biblical genocides. Being a bronze age savage (or the fiction of iron age propagandists) does not excuse the genocides attributed to Moses as Goose seemingly tried to argue... let alone make him the revered figure that he still remains to most Jews and Christians!

[Goose]

You're citing examples in which the Allied forces A) as victims of aggression undertook drastic measures B) killing tiny fractions (~0.04% and ~0.3% respectively) of the targeted nations' population, reportedly on the basis of C) shortening the conflicts and saving more lives and yet even so D) have been issues of controversy and at best regrettable necessity even in those Allied countries themselves.

. . . .

C) Saving more American lives. Clearly, sparring Japanese lives was not the objective. Hardly a defence from genocide.

Sparing Allied lives was certainly a primary concern, but even if only a third of the (actual) number of Japanese soldiers had died in defense of their homeland and emperor - an absurdly optimistic assumption - it would have greatly exceeded the number killed in the bombings.

But that’s somewhat irrelevant. Soldiers are expected to die in a war. Civilians and children aren’t. That’s the issue under contention here is it not?

The standard apologetic narrative is that the Americans dropped the atomic bombs to save lives on both sides. There is a different narrative which paints a picture in which many of the top American military leaders felt dropping the atomic bombs was unnecessary.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation ... casualties
  
  In a conference with President Truman on June 18, Marshall, taking the Battle of Luzon as the best model for Olympic, thought the Americans would suffer 31,000 casualties in the first 30 days and ultimately 20% of Japanese casualties, which he estimated would include the entire Japanese force. This implied a total of 70,000 American casualties in the battle of Kyushu using the June projection of 350,000 Japanese defenders (or 183,365 American casualties when the actual Japanese strength of 916,828 is taken into account).[101] . . . .
  
  Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson stated "We shall in my opinion have to go through an even more bitter finish fight than in Germany. We shall incur the losses incident to such a war and we shall leave the Japanese islands even more thoroughly destroyed than was the case with Germany."[106] From D-Day to V-E Day, the Western Allies alone suffered some 766,294 casualties.[107] . . . .
  
  A study done for Secretary of War Henry Stimson's staff by William Shockley estimated that invading Japan would cost 1.7–4 million American casualties, including 400,000–800,000 fatalities, and five to ten million Japanese fatalities. The key assumption was large-scale participation by civilians in the defense of Japan.[17]

But of course these estimates assumed the Japanese civilian population would offer resistance. And those Japanese civilians defending Japan would be doing so willingly thereby making themselves combatants. Those Japanese civilians who might have sought to surrender to the invading American forces would not be afforded the opportunity to do so with an atomic bomb.

This also assumes the dichotomy of only two options - invasion or atomic bomb. America had effectively won the war in the Pacific virtually annihilating the Japanese navy. America could have simply waited cutting off trade routes. Or dropped the atomic bomb in an uninhabited are where the Japanese could observe the destructive power.

A) Is a, “Yeah, but he started it!� defence. Self defence is justifiable providing it’s not excessive. Was Nagasaki not excessive? And as far as I’m aware the British weren’t directly, themselves, the victims of Nazi aggression. Certainly the women and children of Dresden did nothing to the British. The Americans were victims of Japanese aggression in Pearl Harbour. But let’s keep in mind this was aggression localized to a military target, an American naval base. There were 68 civilian casualties. The Americans in turned bombed thousand of women and children melting their skin off. The Japanese never bombed and American city. Further, the Americans were also involved in the fire bombing of Dresden killing about 25,000 civilians including women and children. The Americans weren’t victims of Nazi aggression either.

Are you trying to argue that the British and American nations should not have come to the defense of their French allies? Britain was bombed by Germany resulting in over 40,000 civilian deaths.

I’m providing a counter argument to your assertion that the Allies were, as you put it, “victims of aggression� since you seemed to imply this was an important factor against the charge of genocide. I pointed out that’s strictly speaking not quite true on all accounts. Without so much as a shot being fired at Britain or France they declared war on Germany, not the other way around. So who was the aggressor then between Britain and Germany? The Americans were not initially victims of Nazi aggression either but they bombed Dresden anyway. The “victims of aggression� were mainly the American naval personnel stationed at Pearl Harbour. Dresden was particularly noteworthy because it seemed the civilian population was primarily targeted. And yes Britain was bombed. But that’s irrelevant to the charge of genocide against Britain. One genocidal act does not justify another does it?

As for being victims of aggression. I could make the case that the Israelites were also victims of aggression.

“Remember what Amalek did to you along the way when you came out from Egypt, how he met you along the way and attacked among you all the stragglers at your rear when you were faint and weary; and he did not fear God." – Deut 25:17-18 (cf. 1 Samuel 15)

B) I could make the same argument regarding the Bosnian genocide. Only 8,000 were killed. Representing roughly 0.4%, a tiny fraction, of the population. These kinds of cold calculations veil the real numbers as though it’s not genocide because the number of deaths represented are a relatively low percentage of the total population. Approximately 140,000 men, women, and children were killed in a matter of moments in the bombing of Hiroshima alone. That’s possibility quite a bit more than the Israelites killed.

If you choose to perversely ignore the facts that a) Germany and Japan were aggressor nations and c) there probably would have been far more deaths had the Allies acted differently, then yes, you could perhaps make the argument that they are comparable to the Bosnian genocide. Is that what you're doing?

What I’m doing here is countering the argument that the Allied bombings were not acts of genocide because only “tiny fractions� of the populace were slaughtered. That kind of argument seems quite absurd on the face of it.

According to the bible there were 32,000 virgin Midianite girls left alive by the Israelites (for reasons apparently not applicable to the young boys, let's leave it at that) implying somewhere in the order of 100,000+ killed in that religious cleansing alone. Both at the start and end of their wilderness wanderings the Israelites themselves supposedly numbered over 600,000 men over the age of twenty (Numbers 26:51), implying a total population close to 2 million, and they were commanded to completely annihilate seven nations more numerous than they:

• Deuteronomy 7:1 When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you—the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you— 2 and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.

What’s your point here? 4 Million Germans were killed in WWII.

In the case of Moses' actions against the Midianites and commands against the seven nations of Canaan A) the Israelites were active aggressors B) intending and according to the stories largely succeeding in wiping out all or the overwhelming majority of those peoples, C) with no justification save religious purity in the Midianite case and the usual kind of baby-killing propaganda against the Canaanites, and later in the Israelite story D) praised and lauded as the glorious actions of Yahweh.

A) And that makes it genocide because...

Because their actions were not directed by circumstances beyond their control, as in the case of defensive warfare: They freely and specifically chose to annihilate those eight ethnic/national groups.

But the Americans freely and specifically chose to annihilate over 200,000 men, women, and children in moments by dropping two atomic bombs in three days. The Americans could have chosen to 1) drop an atomic bomb in an uninhabited yet observable location thereby demonstrating the destructive power they now possessed or 2) have invaded Japan or 3) waited for the eventual surrender of Japan by continuing the conventional bombing of industrial targets and naval blockade of Japan they were already engaged in.

But if it’s in the context of total war, why is this genocide? And what if the Japanese had not surrendered? The Americans dropped atomic bombs on two different cities within three days of each other. Who’s to say they would not have continued until the Japanese people were virtually obliterated from the planet?

It is genocide because they freely and specifically chose to annihilate those eight ethnic/national groups. Surely this isn't difficult to understand?

But that makes Hiroshima and Nagasaki acts of genocide as well then. You aren’t seriously arguing the Americans had no choice are you? The simple fact they had to deliberate over the potential death toll of an invasion implies they had a choice. The Americans chose to drop the atomic bomb on women and children, twice. Are we to believe the Americans would not have continued dropping atomic bombs virtually annihilating the entire Japanese nation if they had not surrendered when the Americans had threatened “utter destruction� and were willing to drop at two atomic bombs three days apart?

Fallaciously invoking a state of "total war" - that the Israelites devoted all their 'military and civilian' resources towards the destruction with no regard or protections for non-combatant victims - doesn't change that fact: If anything it would make it all the more reprehensible for their whole society to be geared towards this ethnic annihilation.

What protections for non-combatants were offered to the victims of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Allied bombing of Dresden?

But in the case of the Midianites, for example, it's specifically reported that only 12,000 fighters were sent out to destroy their towns and cities.

Not sure your point here.

C) You don’t think the practise of child sacrifice was sufficient moral grounds for waging war? How is the Allied justification really any better then?

Do you think that extrajudicial killings of Americans by their own police and intelligence forces, for example, would be sufficient moral grounds for another country to wipe the USA off the map?

That doesn’t seem at all analogous to child sacrifice.

In the case of the 100,000+ Midianites slaughtered under Moses' direct oversight there is not even the propaganda claim of child sacrifice; just the decision of Israelite men to have consentual sex with their women and participate in non-violent religious rituals with them. Meanwhile the propaganda claims against the nations of Canaan, the kind of baby-killing demonisation which is not uncommon against any enemy (let alone a race intended to be completely annihilated), in the interests of intellectual integrity should be taken with a large dose of salt: Where exactly did that information come from if (as traditionally supposed) the Pentateuch was written by or in the lifetime of Moses? In the only record of agents being sent out to report on the land of Canaan (Numbers 13), there is a conspicuous lack of any reference to these practices which should have been completely nauseating and at the very forefront of the spies' minds!

Argument from silence. The practise of child sacrifice was implied if not explicitly stated. Sure there may have been a polemic element and we can take some of it with a grain of salt. But it seems strongly enough engrained in the minds of the writers to argue against it being nothing more than propaganda. You know the old saying, where there’s smoke there’s fire.

�Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 2 “Speak to the sons of Israel and say to them, ‘I am the LORD your God. 3 You shall not do what is done in the land of Egypt where you lived, nor are you to do what is done in the land of Canaan where I am bringing you; you shall not walk in their statutes... You shall not give any of your offspring to offer them to Molech, nor shall you profane the name of your God; I am the LORD...‘Do not defile yourselves by any of these things; for by all these the nations which I am casting out before you have become defiled. 25 For the land has become defiled, therefore I have brought its punishment upon it, so the land has spewed out its inhabitants. 26 But as for you, you are to keep My statutes and My judgments and shall not do any of these abominations, neither the native, nor the alien who sojourns among you 27 (for the men of the land who have been before you have done all these abominations, and the land has become defiled); 28 so that the land will not spew you out, should you defile it, as it has spewed out the nation which has been before you.� – Leviticus 18

�29 “When the LORD your God cuts off before you the nations which you are going in to dispossess, and you dispossess them and dwell in their land, 30 beware that you are not ensnared to follow them, after they are destroyed before you, and that you do not inquire after their gods, saying, ‘How do these nations serve their gods, that I also may do likewise?’ 31 You shall not behave thus toward the LORD your God, for every abominable act which the LORD hates they have done for their gods; for they even burn their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods.� – Deut 12:29-31

�9 “When you enter the land which the LORD your God gives you, you shall not learn to imitate the detestable things of those nations. 10 There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, 11 or one who casts a spell, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead.� – Deut 18:9-11

�17 But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the LORD your God has commanded you, 18 so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the LORD your God.� – Deut 20:17-18

I do find it interesting that you dismiss these kinds of verses depicting the inhabitants of the region as “propaganda� suggesting that these reports, “in the interests of intellectual integrity should be taken with a large dose of salt:� But you don’t seem at all interested in taking other accounts you insist are open and shut cases of genocide with that same “large dose of salt.� Indeed, it seems when it comes to the latter claims, they are taken very literally with no allowance for their hyperbolic nature whatsoever. Even though later we see these nations are obviously still in existence (Josh. 23:12–13, Judges 1:21, 27–28, 3:5-7).

You have also said nothing at all about numerous references of “driving out� the Canaanites (e.g., Ex 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) or “dispossessing� them of their land (Num 21:32; Deut 12:2; 19:1). How could they be driven out if they were all dead?

Abraham's attempted sacrifice of Isaac perhaps suggests that it was practiced by at least some folk in Canaan several centuries before Moses' day, stories of which might have been passed down and built upon during the stay in Egypt, but I've been hard-pressed to find any credible sources suggesting archaeological or firm historical evidence of widespread child sacrifice in Canaan in the 2nd millennium BCE. One biblicist site struggles to make its case based purely on the hope that its readers won't realize that Carthage wasn't in Canaan!

That seems to be a mischaracterisation of the article. The author explicitly states the following...

�Although Canaanite civilization was largely driven out of the land of Israel, it emigrated elsewhere, founding colonies along the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, where it thrived for centuries. Most notable among these was the colony of Carthage in modern-day Tunisia.�

Carthage was a Phoenician city, so it's plausible that Jezebel introduced child sacrifice from Sidon into widespread Israelite practice later in its history, opposition to which was included in later versions of the Torah. Isolated instances or brief periods of practice in a particular locality likewise can't be ruled out. But on the whole no, I don't think the dubious propaganda that Canaanites killed some of their children could justify killing all their men, women and children!

Again, I find this kind of argument quite problematic and unbalanced. On the one hand you assert the accounts of child sacrifice are “dubious propaganda� and then on the other hand hold to a literal killing of all the men, women and children.

D) And that’s relevant to the charge of genocide because...

Again, it is genocide because the Israelites freely and specifically chose to annihilate those eight ethnic/national groups; their pride in annihilating those nations contrasts sharply against the regrettable necessity of the civilian (or even enemy combatant) casualties inflicted by the Allies in WW2.

A poll taken in America just a few days after the bombings showed that 85% of Americans approved of the use of atomic bombs on Japan. I’m not so sure the American population felt much regret.

Exactly where in this comparison do you imagine that the numerous Israelite genocides come out looking good?

No amount of justification will make these kinds of acts “come out looking good.� Do you really think the above justifications (A-D) for the Allied bombings make the Allies “look good�? The point, one which you don’t seem to be disputing, is that the acts of the Israelites and Allies were done under the context of total warfare. As such, the criminal charge of genocide seems to be misplaced.

This isn't a courtroom; I'm not laying criminal charges against anyone

I know it’s not a court room. But you are trying to apply a criminal charge. And applying it incorrectly. Which smacks more of an attempt at using the term in a pejorative and emotive sense.

Genocide is a widely used and understood term in the English language.

Irrelevant. The question here is whether it is being applied correctly.

Nor am I saying that the Allied bombings look good; I said quite the opposite. You are the one who raised that comparison, and as far as I can see it's a comparison which serves only to highlight how much more reprehensible the stories of Israelite actions are.

I know you aren’t saying the allies look good. But given the definition of genocide you provided and applied to Moses I can make the case the Allied bombings are also acts of genocide. You’ve had to make quite the Special Plea for Truman and Churchill. And I’m not so sure you’ve been successful.

The morality of the Allied bombings can be and indeed are questioned and debated... so what does that say about stories of the Israelites which are far more reprehensible on every imaginable level?

The morality of the actions is quite irrelevant to my point. Let’s just say it is always immoral for one person to kill another and leave it at that.

My reason for bringing these events up was to challenge the charge of genocide. I’m not so sure genocide is the correct charge here. It’s a highly emotive term coined to describe a relatively recent event, the Holocaust. An event which had some very specific characteristics which seem to be lacking in the wars of the Israelites. Applying a specialized modern criminal term to tribal warfare which took place thousands of years ago seems to be some kind of anachronistic fallacy.

And yet you're very keen to introduce the 19th century concept of "total war" into the discussion.

Fair point. But I used the term “total war� in response to your initial use of “genocide.� Go ahead and withdraw the anachronistic use of genocide and I will be happy to withdraw the anachronistic use of “total war.�

Could you please clarify exactly which specific characteristics you believe were shared by the Holocaust, Rwandan and Bosnian genocides, but not by the Israelite annihilation of the Midianites and seven nations of Canaan?

If you insist but it's irrelevant to my argument.

• 1. The Holocaust, Rwandan and Bosnian genocides occurred in the 20th century under different accepted standards of justification.
  2. Those genocides were characterised by mainly targeting a specific ethnic group or race for no other reason than their ethnicity or race.
  3. Those genocides did not occur under the context of formal and/or total warfare.

When in the context of tribal warfare of the time, the actions of Moses and the Israelites were consistent with how warfare of the time took place.

That's bollocks and I'm pretty sure you know it. Even within the Biblical narrative (Genesis 14) it's shown that a more normal state of affairs was for weaker nations to serve as tributaries to more powerful ones and, even upon rebelling, for the victorious rulers to carry off plunder and slaves... not slaughter every man, woman and child! In the book of Judges it's said that the Israelites were repeatedly subdued by a series of different enemies, but never massacred in the way they were said to have massacred the earlier inhabitants of the land.

You do seem to be undermining your own argument here. You argue the more normal state, even within the Biblical narratives, was to not kill every man, woman, and child. If this was the normal state why wouldn’t you allow this normal state to also apply to Israel’s treatment of the conquered nations? Especially when the accounts quite clearly show these nations were still living as mentioned above?

As far as being consistent with warfare of the time. The Biblical accounts seem to be consistent with other depictions of Ancient Near East conquest accounts.

�And Chemosh said to me, Go take Nebo against Israel, and I went in the night and I fought against it from the break of day till noon, and I took it: and I killed in all seven thousand men, but I did not kill the women and maidens, for I devoted them to Ashtar-Chemosh; and I took from it the vessels of Jehovah, and offered them before Chemosh.� – Moabite Stone

"As for the king of Judah, Hezekiah, who had not submitted to my authority, I besieged and captured forty-six of his fortified cities, along with many smaller towns, taken in battle with my battering rams. ... I took as plunder 200,150 people, both small and great, male and female, along with a great number of animals including horses, mules, donkeys, camels, oxen, and sheep. As for Hezekiah, I shut him up like a caged bird in his royal city of Jerusalem. I then constructed a series of fortresses around him, and I did not allow anyone to come out of the city gates. His towns which I captured I gave to the kings of Ashod, Ekron, and Gaza." – Sennacherib's Annals

�Susa, the great holy city, abode of their gods, seat of their mysteries, I conquered. I entered its palaces, I opened their treasuries where silver and gold, goods and wealth were amassed... I destroyed the ziggurat of Susa. I smashed its shining copper horns. I reduced the temples of Elam to naught; their gods and goddesses I scattered to the winds. The tombs of their ancient and recent kings I devastated, I exposed to the sun, and I carried away their bones toward the land of Ashur. I devastated the provinces of Elam and on their lands I sowed salt.� – Assyrian king Ashurbanipal

It seems the idea total and utter destruction was also consistent with the hyperbolic language of Ancient Near East conquest accounts. Indeed, it’s not even inconsistent with the rhetoric of the Allies calling for Japan’s unconditional surrender in the Potsdam Declaration made only days before the atomic bombs were dropped.

“The full application of our military power, backed by our resolve, will mean the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland...We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.� – Potsdam Declaration, July 26, 1945

Moses and Joshua were exceptionally bloodthirsty even by the standards of their own time.

Debatable.

The standards, I’m afraid, of the time were quite ruthless. Consider the track record of the Assyrians.

�Their men young and old I took prisoners. Of some I cut off their feet and hands; of others I cut off the ears noses and lips; of the young men's ears I made a heap; of the old men's heads I made a minaret. I exposed their heads as a trophy in front of their city. The male children and the female children I burned in flames; the city I destroyed, and consumed with fire.� - Ashurnasirpal II

But even if for the sake of argument we pretended that wasn't the case - that completely wiping out millions of inhabitants of a region was commonplace at the time - how do you imagine that changes anything?

If Moses and the Israelites acted consistently with the conventions of warfare of that era what more can you do aside from argue from outrage grounded in a sense of moral superiority?

Moses still committed genocide, still commanded the slaughter of a comparable number of innocents as did Hitler.

Truman and Churchill ordered the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents.

According to the stories he was still a brutal bronze age warlord who no reasonable modern person should admire, even if he wasn't significantly worse than other brutal bronze age warlords (which he was, in the case of these stories).

That’s irrelevant. The issue isn’t whether we should admire him, the issue is whether or not the charge of genocide is appropriate.

My argument being, given your definition of genocide, it seems to me either Moses, Truman, and Churchill (and by extension the American and British people) are all guilty of genocide or none of them are.

Moses' free and specific decisions to annihilate those eight ethnic/national groups certainly constitutes genocide, eight times over. The argument that it wasn't specifically defined as genocide at the time holds as little merit as arguing that having sex with a five year-old in 1960s America can't be considered child sexual abuse.

That’s not the argument I gave here. My argument was that, given the definition of genocide you provided Moses, Truman, and Churchill (and by extension the American and British people) are all guilty of genocide or none of them are.

I don't accept your accusations of genocide against Truman and Churchill.

Your acceptance is irrelevant. The argument is either valid or is isn’t.

Attempts to create an equivalency between cases of limited (arguably minimal possible) casualities in closing a defensive war and aggressively wiping out entire nations are obviously and utterly irrational.

Not given your definition of genocide it isn’t. By the way, by the time the Americans were ready to drop the atomic bomb, they were no longer on the defensive. They had a decisive upper hand over the Japanese.

[Mithrae]

This isn't a courtroom; I'm not laying criminal charges against anyone

I know it’s not a court room. But you are trying to apply a criminal charge. And applying it incorrectly. Which smacks more of an attempt at using the term in a pejorative and emotive sense.

Genocide is a widely used and understood term in the English language.

Irrelevant. The question here is whether it is being applied correctly.

No, as Willum reminded us in post #12 the question is how well (or poorly) Moses compares with Hitler.

Part of the answer - a part which I consider to be pretty much beyond rational dispute - is that both Hitler and Moses reportedly commissioned genocide on a comparable scale in excess of 6 million victims. Your various responses have been along the lines of

• - If a criminal charge of genocide were laid against Moses it probably wouldn't hold up in a courtroom
  - (...or if it did then...) Churchill and Truman committed genocide too
  - Lots of other people in Moses' era were brutal savages too
  - Moses' people didn't succeed in killing 100% of the people the stories say he commanded them to
  - The victims of the Israelite aggression and slaughter had killed some of their own people
  - The Bosnian, Rwandan and Nazi genocides were significantly different from Moses' actions and commands

From a second and third read of your post I don't see anything that doesn't fall under those broad categories, but let me know if I've missed something. Now while you may or may not object to my characterization of those six points, I think it should be fairly apparent that really only the sixth is at all relevant to either the thread topic generally or the use of the word 'genocide' by Willum and myself.

The first is obviously just a diversion away from the common use and understanding of the word genocide; if we instead used the clumsy phrase "indiscriminate mass slaughter of men, women and innocent little children by their millions" such a would-be recourse to 'criminal charge' technicalities (dubious though it is in any case) would never arise, with no change to the substance of discussion. Your comments above suggest some kind of emotionalism for you in considering the possibility that Moses committed and commissioned genocide - which could perhaps help explain why you're driving that diversion so hard - and yet the more detailed and precise phrase above could potentially be even more emotionally-laden. But since we're here now, do you acknowledge that according to the bible Moses did indeed command indiscriminate mass slaughter of men, women and little children by their millions?

On the second and third points, the real or imagined genocides of Britain, the USA or any of Moses' contemporaries don't change the facts (or reports) of Moses' actions and commands, and so are obviously irrelevant. The fourth point might be relevant if the Israelites had killed ~0% of the victims Moses commanded them to slaughter - he would still be a bloodthirsty brute, but at least a relatively harmless one in that case - but according to the stories that is obviously not the case. On the fifth point, as I've pointed out the scale (if any) of supposed baby-killing by the seven nations of Canaan in Moses' purported timeframe is extremely dubious; Moses and the Israelites obviously weren't intending to save or protect those victims in any case but instead to kill them all rather than just some; and the genocide against the Midianites had nothing to do with baby-killing whatsoever. So while it needed to be addressed - and I'm not sure, was I the one who introduced it? - at this point that's become an irrelevant tangent also.

So that brings the discussion down to the sixth point, which ironically (now that I get 'round to it) you yourself said was irrelevant:

Could you please clarify exactly which specific characteristics you believe were shared by the Holocaust, Rwandan and Bosnian genocides, but not by the Israelite annihilation of the Midianites and seven nations of Canaan?

If you insist but it's irrelevant to my argument.

• 1. The Holocaust, Rwandan and Bosnian genocides occurred in the 20th century under different accepted standards of justification.
  2. Those genocides were characterised by mainly targeting a specific ethnic group or race for no other reason than their ethnicity or race.
  3. Those genocides did not occur under the context of formal and/or total warfare.

1 - While you insist that "the issue isn’t whether we should admire Moses," I'd hazard a pretty confident guess that's exactly the reason for this thread: If each Jew and Christian and Muslim who chanced upon the thread were willing and honest enough to post a quick reply saying that Moses as portrayed in the bible was indeed a bloodthirsty bronze age brute warranting little if any respect - but not as blameworthy as modern genocidaires due to the difference in cultural milieux - I imagine Willum would consider it a job well done Instead I think the only Christian on this forum I've seen say anything along those lines (at least in the past three years and more) is Elijah John. How about you?

2 - That's demonstrably and obviously false; there were long histories of political and/or cultural tension between the Hutus and Tutsis, the Serbs and Croats, the Jews and Christians, as well as similar kinds of baby-killing propaganda (certainly against Jews) as we see in the bible against the Israelites' victims.

3 - There is no record of any kind of formal state of war between the Israelites and their victims, and in some cases (eg. sending 12,000 Israelite soldiers against an estimated Midianite total population well over 100,000) the stories clearly imply or explicitly state that surprise and stealth were a major part of their tactics. Meanwhile the Bosnian genocide did occur in the context of a wider war; Jews in Poland and elsewhere were accessed by the Nazis in a context of warfare; and even German Jews received as much if not more forewarning of coming danger as the people of Canaan did (certainly as of December 1938).

So while the first point is worth bearing in mind insofar as it goes, it doesn't change any of the facts or really address the thread topic. The other two - lacking clear factual basis and to some extent being demonstrably false - are not viable distinctions between recognized modern genocides and the genocides of the bible.



It seems we must conclude that Moses did indeed commit and command at least eight genocides - or indiscriminate mass slaughter of men, women and innocent little children by their millions if that's the term you really prefer - against the Midianites, Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites but arguably (and in my opinion as in post #17) can be cut a little slack compared to modern genocidaires since he was only a bronze age savage, after all. Or, as I noted earlier, we can recognize the probability that the stories are indeed abhorrent but fortunately were mostly or entirely fabricated in later centuries as 'watch out or the bogeyman will get you too' style warnings to keep the Israelites under control of Yahweh's priests.

[Willum]

[Replying to post 19 by Mithrae]

Wow, that depiction of Moses is even far more horrible than I had fully considered.
I may not sleep tonight.

Truly, this Jewish hero can not fail to be one of the worse human beings in history.
Making the Jews greatest villain seem mild by comparison.

I feel icky.