Joshua 8: 24-25<\/p>\n
24<\/strong><\/a>When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai in the fields and in the desert where they had chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all the Israelites returned to Ai and killed those who were in it. 25<\/strong><\/a>Twelve thousand men and women fell that day\u2014all the people of Ai.<\/p>\n 1 Samuel 15: 2-3<\/strong><\/p>\n 2<\/strong><\/a>This is what the Lord Almighty says: \u2018I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. 3<\/strong><\/a>Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroya<\/em><\/strong> everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n These two passages of the Bible nearly made me an atheist.\u00a0 Back when I was a Christian Fundamentalist, I just ignored them.\u00a0 When I was an Christian Apologist I tried to explain their literal accuracy while still believing in God\u2019s goodness.\u00a0 Eventually I arrived at the position that they can neither be ignored nor rationally defended as literally true if I still wanted to sleep at night.\u00a0 Thus, I teetered on the precipice of atheism, as I could not marry the Gospel of Jesus Christ with the murder of women and children.<\/p>\n While my faith was on life-support, I happen to pose this moral quandary to a friend of mine (who happens to be a highly heretical pastor).\u00a0 He led me to some research related to this very subject, which, in affect, salvaged my theism (or salvaged my salvation if I were of the Evangelical persuasion).<\/p>\n If you are opposed to approaching the Bible as a book built on the beautiful threads of myth and metaphor, you may want to close your eyes for this part.\u00a0 Then again, if you are reading a blog called Heretic\u2019s Creed<\/em> perhaps you already knew I might wander in this direction.<\/p>\n It turns out there is very little archaeological evidence for a literal conquest of Canaan.*<\/p>\n Per the Biblical account, the Israelites were held captive in Egypt for a substantial period of time, before being led by Moses, on a mass exodus from the clutches of Pharaoh.\u00a0 They wandered in the wilderness for many years, but were eventually led by a dynamic military leader named Joshua, to countless conquests over the various city-states of Canaan (Modern day Israel\/Palestine\/Lebanon).\u00a0 The conquests continued under the administration of several \u201cjudges\u201d who established the foundations of what would become the Kingdom of Israel\/Judah.<\/p>\n Now, without a doubt, the Kingdom of Israel\/Judah was a very real part of history.\u00a0 There are numerous extra-biblical sources and archaeological findings to support this.\u00a0 However, how they came to be is a matter of debate.<\/p>\n The trouble with taking the Biblical account of the conquest of Canaan literally starts with the lack o extra-Biblical literary or historical sources.\u00a0 There is almost no mention of \u201cIsrael\u201d or \u201cIsraelites\u201d until they are well established in Canaan.\u00a0 True, the Merneptah Stele (an Egyptian stone tablet mentioning the Israelites by name) indicates they were large enough to be known by King Merneptah, but that particular piece is dated around 1200BC, well into the \u201cJudges\u201d period.\u00a0 If the Israelites as a people had truly existed in captivity in Egypt (not to mention their supposed dealings with Egypt during the Patriarchal period, particularly the story of Joseph toward the end of Genesis), there would undoubtedly be mention prior to 1200BC.<\/p>\n Additionally, there is the problem of the excavations of the Canaanite city-states supposedly violently conquered by the Israelites.\u00a0 The archaeological record does not bear the typical demarkations of a razed city.\u00a0 Battles of the size described in Joshua and Judges would leave broken weapons, skeletal remains with grievous injuries , burned buildings, etc., which would demonstrate to archaeologists that mass warfare took place.\u00a0 These type of findings have validated the conquests of Alexander, Cyrus, and many others.\u00a0 The evidence found at the Canaanite sites however, would suggest that those cities had a gradual decline, into irrelevance, poverty and ambiguity.\u00a0 This is a very different tale than the one told by the Bible.<\/p>\n If we know that the Israelites were a very real people, who established a Kingdom in Canaan but there is little evidence for their military dominance early on, and virtually no mention of them until 1200 BC, then how did they rise to prominence?\u00a0 Where did they come from?<\/p>\n Many scholars ascribed to the hypothesis that the Israelites didn\u2019t conquer <\/em>the Canaanites.\u00a0 They were <\/em>the Canaanites.\u00a0 Let me explain:\u00a0 There is evidence to support the fact that large groups of people left the Canaanite city states around the time that Israel was having its various \u201cconquests\u201d.\u00a0 It appears likely that groups of disenfranchised Canaanites, for reasons as yet unknown, left in droves and created their own communities.\u00a0 These fledgling groups of ex-Canaanites are the people that became the Israelites.\u00a0 The holy land was taken not by a bloody conquest by one group over another, but instead by a cultural cleaving, which left the infrastructure of the Canaanites crippled.<\/p>\n So the next logical question is this:\u00a0 If God didn\u2019t really tell the Israelites to kill all the Canaanites, why would they say that He did?\u00a0 And, assuming the scholars are correct, doesn\u2019t that mean the Bible is \u201cwrong\u201d and therefore no longer \u201cinfallible\u201d (somer prefer to term \u201cinerrant\u201d instead)?<\/p>\n In response to the first question; no one really knows exactly why the story was written the way it was.\u00a0 But an examination of the culture and writing style of that time period can help bring better understanding to the subject.<\/p>\n In the 12th century BC there were no fact check websites.\u00a0 There weren\u2019t sections in bookstores labeled \u201cFiction\u201d and \u201cNon-Fiction\u201d.\u00a0 There were only oral traditions, and later, scribes to write down what was said.\u00a0 All \u201cwriting\u201d of that day was myth.\u00a0 People were not concerned with what was factual, they were concerned with what was meaningful.\u00a0 The Israelites wanted to have a powerful, memorable, inspiring history that captured the pride they felt at separating themselves from their Canaanite, polytheistic roots.\u00a0 So they spoke as they felt.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t care if people 3000 years later read their work and believed it to be literally true.\u00a0 It captured their spirit, which is what any good mythos does.<\/p>\n The second question is a tough one.\u00a0 If you are a person that feels the Bible has to be literally inerrant to be valuable, then this is probably very upsetting news to you.\u00a0 Without question, parts of the Bible are literally true and supported strongly by archaeological findings.\u00a0 However, there are large portions that appear to be mythological in scope due to their lack of archaeological evidence or their scientific impossibility.\u00a0 But I am strongly of the opinion that something does not have to be factual to be true.<\/p>\n Is The Great Gatsby<\/em> factual?\u00a0 Did Gatsby, Nick and Daisy actually exist?\u00a0 No, obviously.\u00a0 But is their story any less \u201ctrue\u201d?\u00a0 I would say it is one of the truest pieces of literature ever written because it\u2019s themes and insights, about American ideals, about the 1920s, about humans, their dreams, feelings and behaviors, are all, without a doubt, true.\u00a0 I think of many parts of the Bible in the same way.\u00a0 It\u2019s thematic reflections on human beings and their deity are inerrant, and that is infinitely more important than it\u2019s factual reliability.<\/p>\n But supposing the conquest of Canaan really is a myth, one could reasonably ask what we are supposed to learn from a story about a god who tells his followers to kill infants and mothers.\u00a0 I think this particular part of the Bible says much more about the people who wrote it than the deity they worshipped.\u00a0 The theology of humanity is not static.\u00a0 Even within the Bible itself, the authors (or compilers) demonstrate a marked progression from an angry, ethnocentric, jealous god to a loving, patient, creator.\u00a0 The gradual change is not in God\u2019s behavior, but instead in how we perceive his behavior.\u00a0 In another 1000 years we may understand the Bible in a completely new way that allows us greater insight into the nature of the mysterious, beautiful, enigmatic Yahweh.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n *The research I am referencing comes predominately from writings and interviews I have seen with scholars on the subject.\u00a0 Among others, much of this information comes from John Dominic Crossan (New Testament scholar\/author), L. Michael White, Ph.d (University of Texas), Shaye J.D. Cohen, Ph.D (Harvard) and Michael Coogan, Ph.D (Harvard).\u00a0 For an excellent and highly accessible synopsis of some of the research on this subject watch NOVA\u2019s The Bible\u2019s Buried Secrets<\/em>.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Joshua 8: 24-25 24When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai in the fields and in the desert where they had chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all the Israelites … Continue reading