The narrow strip of the Middle East known as the Holy Land to 3 religions is as unholy a patch of real estate as ever existed. Born of bloody conquest, the Biblical state of Israel was in its early stages run by a bunch of brutal warrior kings who claimed they we having conversations with God. That’s never a good prospect for living in peace. As they were conceived, in blood and conquest, so they were destroyed, time and time again. Of course whenever they were conquered and dragged off into slavery, the Israelites figured that they weren’t being religious enough to satisfy the singularly bloodthirsty God that they invented in order to justify their own insatiable bloodthirstiness.
Not to be outdone in the hatred and slaughtering department, 2 other major religions, first Christianity and then Islam, rose up and began slaughtering people on a scale far grander that King David or his greedy son Solomon could have imagined. Indeed, these two religions went global in their savagery, reducing the Jews to a mere footnote in the history of God-inspired slaughter. By the time of the Crusades, the Jewish people had long since been dispersed to all corners of the earth, never really recovering from the brutal Roman conquest and occupation and the destruction of their temple. They were on the sidelines while Islam and Christianity duked it out over their former homeland, but they never forgot their salad days as the biggest and baddest haters and killers in the region.
The centuries went by with Christians retiring from the Crusades and taking their bloody act on the road to the New World, with Islam languishing in poverty and backwardness after centuries of domination of a huge empire called the Caliphate, stretching from Spain through all of North Africa and right into India. Enter the British, who took advantage of Islam’s decline by taking over over the Holy Land mainly to steal oil to fuel their Industrial Revolution. They fought off the Ottomans and many other armies to maintain control of the Middle East, relinquishing these lands only at the dissolution of their empire following World War 2.
So when the British left they hacked up regions of the area into a bunch of nations that seemed logical to them since they weren’t from around there. The reality was a bit different, though, and warfare and tribal genocide has been the order of the day over there ever since. Add the newly reinvented Israel with their Biblical visions of regional might into the mix and Bingo!, all the ingredients for bloody slaughter were back in place in The Holy Land. And since the end of World War 2, that’s what the world has been treated to: more killing in the name of God.
Now the United States, the current Rome/Britain, gets into the mix over there in the nation of Iraq, with the predictable lack of success in bringing any sort of order to the region. While our vastly superior military forces predictably annihilated any armies foolish enough to engage them, the wars over there tend to drag out in guerilla insurgencies with the added twist of suicide bombers. Everybody still hates everybody else, no form of government is acceptable to anybody and we’re wondering what the hell we were thinking when we got involved in this ridiculous section of the planet.
Nearly 5,000 of our sons and daughter are dead, thousands more maimed, and the pinhead of a president who thought it was a good idea to stroll across a patch of quicksand is now industriously trying to clear dry brush from the state of Texas. Which is an appropriate metaphor, since in ten lifetimes he could never clear Texas of dry brush, anymore than he could clear the Middle East of millennia-old hatreds. Our new president has his hands full cleaning up after the Sage Brush Kid and is desperately trying to figure out a graceful exit from the Holy Land. Maybe it got the name the Holy Land from a mistake in translation, and should more likely be called the “Holy Crap, These People Are Insane! Land.” And while curing the insane is still a mystery, it is surely not an effective cure to join them.
Wow, I never read such a sarcastic and one-sided version of the “Holy Lands” history in a long time. To characterize the Israelites God as a “singularly bloodthirsty God” is simply not true. While the Old Testament specifically sanctioned the expulsion of several Canaanite and Hittite nations inhabiting what is now Israel proper, the instructions to the Israelites also forbid them from fighting with other nations such as the Edomites and Ammonites which where distantly related to the Israelites.
It may seem difficult to understand why God asked the Israelites to remove the indigenous population of the future “Holy Land” when we look at these events from a strictly 21st century viewpoint and value system. According to the Bible, way back in the Book of Genesis, God told Abraham that the “Promised land” would go to his future descendants only after the “error of the Amorites comes to completion.” What did that mean? It meant that God was allowing the natives of the land to live out their lives for several hundred more years before their “lease” on the land expired. According to other accounts in the Bible, the natives of the “Promised Land” were stepped in a form of worship that included among other things, child sacrifice and male and female temple prostitution.
When God organized the 12 tribes of Israel into a new nation near Mt. Sinai they were to embrace a higher moral standard that would govern every aspect of their life. Canaanite religion and the worship of Yahweh were two incompatible value systems. If the Israelites where to remain separate in their worship then they could not mix the worship of the graven Baal images with the Universal one God Yahweh, or Jehovah in modern English. Since the “lease” was up for the native inhabitants of the land and Yahweh had tolerated their continued existence despite their perverted religious practices, the time had now come for new “tenants” to move into the land. It’s not as if the Israelites were in any way better racially or genetically that God choose them, it was because God made a promise to Abraham that through “his seed all the nations of the earth would bless themselves”. This promised “seed” would include the descendants of Abraham and eventually would yield the promised Messiah who for Christians found fulfillment in the life of Jesus Christ and for Jews the wait continues to this day for their “Moshiach”.
So the question really is, does God have the right to set standards for right and wrong? Was it wrong for God to single out several nations for destruction? To the modern thinker the answer is yes, that was positively wrong for God or for any people to take such action against another group simply on religious grounds. In our modern pluralistic society, we collectively embrace the notion that all value systems are created equal and should be equally respected. While that sounds like a great idea, we know from practical experience how difficult it can be to respect all value systems. Is it right to respect the value system of certain immigrants to certain European countries that permit them to beat their wives and engage in “honor killings?” Is it being tolerant and broad-minded to allow the practice of female genital mutilation? After all, these are time-honored practices of other cultures so they must be respected and maintained, correct? The answer is obviously no, that’s not correct. In our modern world, value systems are not created equal.
So, without digressing too much, what does this have to do with God commanding the Israelites to exterminate the Canaanites? The answer has to do with which a value system is correct? Which value system had a right to continue and which had a right to be exterminated? Considering the fruitage of the Canaanite value system one wonders why God did not remove them earlier from the land. Interestingly, centuries before the Israelites conquered the Promised Land, Abraham was visited by two angels that were on their way to investigate “the outcry over the lands of Sodom and Gomorrah”. Essentially, the Angels were on a fact-finding mission to see whether or not the city and its neighbors merited being spared the impending divine wrath. Unfortunately for the Canaanites living in Sodom and Gomorrah the investigation proved to have a negative outcome resulting in an adverse judgment of their society. Abraham’s nephew Lot and his family did get out alive, but only barely, and after losing his wife by her being unceremoniously turned into a pillar of salt. Now I know a lot of your readers will think this is a fairy tale, but for people who believe in the Bible, like myself, this story is real history, as unbelievable as the account may be to a modern reader in this skeptical scientific world.
Additionally, since the ancient nation of Israel would be living in a precarious time, a time of kill and be killed, a time before the modern nation state with all of its treaties and rules of engagement, the Israelites had every right to defend their borders. Unlike your characterizations that the Israelites were “bloodthirsty” warriors, their nation had rules that had to be followed even during warfare, such as not raping and pillaging the conquered. They certainly did not have an expansionist empire agenda, as many of the other larger and more powerful states surrounding them did. They had a specific land mandate given to them by God, and that was it. There were no crusades, no armies sent to distant lands to convert the “pagans”, no empire to maintain. Essentially, the Israelites were a fairly non-aggressive, and agrarian society. God did allow them to defend themselves from many invaders who thought that these sheepherders and farmers were easy pickings. The Israelites did have their glory days during the reigns of David and his son Solomon, but even under Solomon’s Reign, their territory was still relatively puny. Even to this day, the modern Jewish state is a relatively small country, inhabiting a landmass much smaller their ancient ancestors.
As a Christian, I believe in Jesus Christ but not in the same Jesus Christ that was later hijacked by opportunist clerics centuries after Christ’s death. Christianity, as a value system, is as meaningful today as it was in the first century. Unfortunately, most so-called Christians do not really follow the teachings of Christ. If they did they would never have engaged in bloody crusades or allowed their bad behavior to be somehow sanctioned by God and Christ. Christ in my opinion is indeed the “Prince of Peace” as Isaiah prophesied. However, how that peace will spread about Earth wide will be quite shocking to everyone who thinks that Jesus is just some 1st cenrtury “peace and love” guru. One only has to read the prophet Daniel in chapter 2 verse 44 of the same book bearing his name to see what the future has in store for humanity. I encourage your readers to look up that verse.