Is God a genocidal maniac?? OT scholar Dr. John Walton is back on the show, this time to decipher the OT’s stories of Israel’s apparent genocidal rampages against the Canaanites and others. Are we worshipping a lunatic? Or are we missing something in these stories? Fun for the whole family!
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I can at least sort of except the whole thing about driving out the nations, but why the children? I mean, children often only believe what the people around them believe, and even if God didn’t say to kill them all, but only those who didn’t submit, why did he include the children in it? Even if they had to remove the people, couldn’t they have at least went around the children? Sure, they’d have a lot of orphans, and I’m not a huge fan of brainwashing, but it would be better for them than killing them. At least would God have let the kids into Heaven. Also, if you agree with the bombings of Hiroshima, than I see how you can accept that, but I personally do not, because many innocent, or at least non-threating people could have got caught up in that bombing, and I doubt anybody ever tried to warn them.
A couple good points – regarding children in the ancient world: We think very differently today in the West. We’re all about the individual. Individual rights, individual responsibility, individual guilt. Our way of thinking isn’t present in big parts of the world even today, and was completely foreign to the ancient world. The ancient world thought in terms of family or tribal rights, responsibility and guilt. In other words, the guilt of the leaders fell on the people they led. The guilt of the fathers fell on the children as well. Rights, responsibilities and guilt were shared communally. One way or the other isn’t necessarily “right” or “wrong,” but we need to recognize when we read the OT that we’re reading through a filter (modern, Western) that would have been completely foreign to the ancient Israelites at the time.
Regarding the bombing of Japan, I believe we did, in fact, drop leaflets warning the civilian population to leave. Not saying the bombings were morally “right,” but, in fact, ending the war at that time without a ground invasion most likely saved tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives.