A few weeks ago, as part of Jesus Week at the University of Auckland, Thinking Matters and Evangelical Union hosted an event entitled A Godless Public Square: Do ‘Private’ Christian Beliefs Have a Place in Public Life? This event was a conversation between Theology, Philosophy and Law and featured Matthew Flannagan - Analytic Theologian, Glenn Peoples - Philosopher and Madeleine Flannagan - Legal Scholar. The video is still being edited and will be available soon but for now, this 3-part series comprises the written speeches of each speaker.

Matthew Flannagan – Analytic Theology

Recently, many Christian ethicists have defended the central place of God’s commands in Theological ethics. In this talk I want to discuss one important objection to appeals to God’s commands; this is the claim that, while it is perfectly appropriate for believers to appeal to purported divine commands when regulating their private conduct or the conduct of voluntary religious communities who believe in such commands, it is morally wrong to appeal to theological beliefs of this sort in any discussion of social ethics. When doing Ethics as a public enterprise i.e. engaging in debates over social policy or offering criticism of cultural and social practices, Christian Ethicists are morally bound to only appeal to secular considerations. I will argue that this position, though widely accepted inside and outside of the church, is mistaken.

The Objection
So what is the problem with appealing to divine commands in social ethics? Christian theological convictions ought to impact the whole of life both in the private and public spheres; this is what is meant by the idea of an “undivided life”, where Jesus is Lord of all aspects of our lives.

Yet this consequence of Christian faith conflicts with a pervasive contemporary attitude: the view that that religion is fundamentally a private matter. It is accepted that a Christian is free to utilise theological convictions when they make decisions about their own life but in a pluralistic society it is increasingly deemed inappropriate to bring such convictions into public discussions about morality, law, politics, economics, education, scholarship and so on. The desire to influence society with Christian ideals or to convert others to the faith is viewed by many as an intolerant desire to impose one’s private views onto others.

It is widely accepted that theological convictions can govern churches and the private lives of believers yet we are told that the public square – government, public policy, the courts, the academy, education, business, arts, media, etc – should be secular only.The problem is nicely summarised by Stephen Carter Christian theological convictions ought to impact the whole of life both in the private and public spheres; this is what is meant by the idea of an “undivided life”, where Jesus is Lord of all aspects of our lives.

Yet this consequence of Christian faith conflicts with a pervasive contemporary attitude: the view that that religion is fundamentally a private matter. It is accepted that a Christian is free to utilise theological convictions when they make decisions about their own life but in a pluralistic society it is increasingly deemed inappropriate to bring such convictions into public discussions about morality, law, politics, economics, education, scholarship and so on. The desire to influence society with Christian ideals or to convert others to the faith is viewed by many as an intolerant desire to impose one’s private views onto others.

It is widely accepted that theological convictions can govern churches and the private lives of believers yet we are told that the public square – government, public policy, the courts, the academy, education, business, arts, media, etc – should be secular only.

This event looks at this issue. The conversation will span Theology, Philosophy and Law led by a panel made up of Christian representatives from each discipline along with you the audience:

“One good way to end a conversation – or start an argument – is to tell a group of well educated professionals that you hold a political position (preferably a controversial one such as being against abortion or pornography) because it is required by your understanding of God’s will. In the unlikely event that anyone hangs around to talk with you about it, chances are that you will be challenged on the ground that you are intent on imposing your religious beliefs on other people. And in contemporary political and legal culture, nothing is worse.”[1]

Carter cites the objection that appealing to God’s commands in public moral debate involves imposing one’s religious beliefs onto other people, and points out that such impositions are morally wrong. Note that the objection is not that such divine commands do not exist or that it is irrational to believe that they do. The objection is a specifically moral one. It is morally wrong to appeal to such beliefs; doing so violates a moral obligation people have to not impose their religious beliefs onto others. Something like this moral objection is widely held, both inside and outside the church. In response to this I will make four points.

I

First, unqualified, the claim it is wrong to impose your moral beliefs onto others is problematic. Consider acts such as rape, assault or infanticide. I personally believe each of these practices is wrong for me to engage in and I support the commission of these acts being considered a crime punishable by the state. However, if it were wrong to impose moral beliefs onto others then my position on rape, assault or infanticide would be unacceptable. I would have to leave others free to choose whether they wished to rape, assault or kill children – to do otherwise would be to impose my moral beliefs onto others.

II

So there cannot be an unqualified obligation to not impose one’s beliefs onto other people. This brings me to my second point. Carter’s example is not unqualified. It explicitly mentions religious beliefs about what God wills. Carter alludes to what Richard Rorty dubbed as:

“The happy, Jeffersonian compromise that the Enlightenment reached with the religious. This compromise consists in privatizing religion — keeping it out of … ‘the public square,’ making it seem bad taste to bring religion into discussions of public policy.”[2]

A particularly rigorous elaboration of this stance comes from Robert Audi. Audi argues that one should not advocate any “[policy] restrictions on human conduct unless one has, and is willing to offer an adequate secular reason for this advocacy or support”.[3]  By ‘secular reason’ he meant a reason that “does not depend on the existence of God (such as through a divine command) or on theological considerations (such as a sacred text)”.[4] So qualified, the objection is that religious believers have a moral obligation to not advocate policies or positions that restrict others on the basis of beliefs about God’s commands. In discussions in public they are to appeal to secular premises that do not invoke God, scripture or specific theological authorities.

III

This brings me to my third point; why single religious out beliefs in this way? If there is no general obligation to refrain from imposing one’s beliefs onto others then why are religious beliefs different in this respect? By limiting the moral restriction to religious beliefs and allowing non-theological secular beliefs to play a role in public discourse that religious beliefs do not, Audi’s position shows that “There is an important asymmetry between religious and secular reasons in the following respect: some secular reasons can themselves justify state coercion but no religious reason can.”[5] Audi’s position appears to privilege secular ideologies and doctrines in public debate whilst relegating religious or theological perspectives to the private sphere. But why are theological beliefs singled out in this way? Three lines of argument seem to be common.

1. Wars and Conflict

The first is an appeal to religious wars and violence. It is contended that the only way to keep social peace and prevent the kind of violence that Europe witnessed in the 17^th century is to adopt a moral rule requiring that all political discussions take place on secular terms and that religious reasons be bracketed from such discussions.

However, this assumes that appeals to theological moral beliefs cause wars and appeals to secular reasons protect us against such wars. This is dubious. Christopher Eberle and Terence Cuneo note that the religious wars of the 17^th century were caused not by the appeal to religious reasons per sé but rather by the violation of religious freedom. Moreover, even in the 17^th century, religious persecution was typically justified on secular grounds. In addition, they note that some of the most important defences of religious persecution and defences of religious tolerance, such as those proposed by John Locke and Pierre Bayle, appealed to explicitly theological grounds.[6]

Nicholas Wolterstorff makes a similar point, he notes that much of “the slaughter, torture, and generalised brutality of our century has mainly been conducted in the name of one or another secular cause–nationalism of many sorts, communism, fascism, patriotisms of various kinds, economic hegemony.”[7] He also stated that “many of the social movements in the modern world that have moved societies in the direction of liberal democracy have been deeply and explicitly religious in their orientation.”[8] He cites examples such as the abolitionist and civil rights movements and various other resistance movements as examples.

The point is that secular and theological reasons are on par in this respect. Particular types of religious reasons in particular political contexts can lead to wars and abuse, whereas appealing to other types of religious reasons in other contexts can be beneficent. Similarly, certain types of secular reasons can be dangerous in particular contexts and other types of secular reasons are not. To single religious reasons out as being ‘too dangerous to be aired in public’ and insisting on a default to secular reasons seems ad hoc and unjustified.

2. Division

Similar things can be said about the objection that appeal to theological premises will be divisive. Robert Adam’s notes  “nothing in the history of modern secular moral theory gives us reason to expect that general agreement on a single comprehensive moral theory will ever be achieved or that, if achieved, it would long endure in a climate of free inquiry. His conclusion is that “the development and advocacy of a religious ethical theory, therefore, does not destroy a realistic possibility of agreement that would otherwise exist”.[9]

3. Pluralism

The main reason offered for excluding theological premises from public debate is that not everyone accepts the truth of such premises. Any policy decisions based on a purported divine law would be binding upon these people in spite of the fact they do not accept theological doctrines or that they do not accept these theological doctrines.

Michael Tooley states, “For it is surely true that it is inappropriate, at least in a pluralistic society, to appeal to specific theological beliefs … in support of legislation that will be binding upon everyone.”[10] Audi argues, “as advocates for laws and public policies, then, and especially for those that are coercive, virtuous citizens will seek grounds of a kind that any rational adult citizen can endorse as sufficient for the purpose.”[11] [Emphasis added]

One obvious problem with this line of argument is that exactly the same thing can be said about many secular, non-theological, beliefs. Phillip Quinn articulates this point,

“…If the fact that religious reasons cannot be shared by all in a religiously pluralistic society suffices to warrant any exclusion of religious reasons for advocating or supporting restrictive laws or policies, then much else ought in fairness also to be excluded on the same grounds.”[12]

Quinn notes correctly that secular moral theories such as Utilitarianism or Kantianism, Intuitionism, Socialism, Libertarianism, can all be reasonably rejected in a philosophically-pluralistic society.

“Indeed, it would seem that the appeal to any comprehensive ethical theory, including all known secular ethical theories, should be disallowed on the grounds that every such theory can be reasonably rejected by some citizens in a pluralistic democracy. And if justification of restrictive laws or policies can be conducted only in terms of moral considerations no citizen of a pluralistic democracy can reasonably reject, then in a pluralistic democracy such as ours very few restrictive laws or policies would be morally justified, a conclusion that would, I suspect, be welcome only to anarchists.”[13]

If we are to exclude appeals to theological beliefs because not all reasonable people accept such beliefs then we should be consistent and exclude from public discussion appeals to all secular moral, political, philosophical, beliefs about which reasonable people do not agree. This would gut public discussion of any substantive content.

IV

My final point is that suppose a religious person does, as Carter mentions, take a “controversial political position … because it is required by their understanding of God’s will”? The objection Carter mentions is a specifically moral one, the objection is not that such divine commands do not exist, or that it is irrational to believe that they do.

On the face of it, this seems very odd. The objection entails that a person can be morally obligated to act contrary to what he rationally and correctly believes God’s will requires of him. A person who believes that a rational, all knowing, perfectly just and loving person requires a certain action of him is morally obligated to not take that action in public.

Normally when one assesses a moral question one should take into account all the relevant information – not just some of it. If it is true that God has issued certain commands, and this is relevant to the question, then it would be prima facie irrational to not take these factors into account.

The Christian believes her theological beliefs are true, and the objector does not contest this. Further the objection is not that her belief in such commands is irrational or subject to philosophical difficulties. The objector contends that, even if the Christian’s beliefs are true, and rationally believed, she is morally obligated to ignore them in such discussions.

This entails that when doing social ethics believers are morally required to act in accord with beliefs they rationally believe to be false. The objector appears to suggest that, in a pluralistic society, believers can hold certain beliefs as true in private but in public they must deny these beliefs; even though these beliefs may be both true and rationally held. This would seem to force believers to live a divided life where their intellectual and religious commitments are incoherently compromised. I contend that there is no good reason for thinking believers are under any moral obligation to do this.

If God truly is sovereign then his commands govern the whole of life, both private and public; believers should strive to live an undivided life of loyalty to him. The fact that other people do not share this commitment does not entail that it is wrong for them to follow it.

Part II of A Godless Public Square: Do ‘Private’ Christian Beliefs Have a Place in Public Life? features Glenn Peoples’ talk from the perspective of Philosophy.

In my Atlanta paper I argued that Nicholas Wolterstorff’s reading of the Canaanite conquest accounts in Joshua can also be applied to the account of Saul exterminating the Amalekites in 1 Sam 15.

First, the so-called ‘genocide accounts’ in 1 Sam 15 are part of a broader context that includes the rest of Samuel and also other canonical books, such as 2 Samuel and the book of Chronicles. When one reads the whole sequence, one observes that while 1 Samuel 15 describes Saul, at God’s command, exterminating the Amalekites, later passages in Samuel and Chronicles proceed on the assumption this never literally happened.

The key passage is God’s command to Samuel, “strike [nakah] Amalek [the Amalekites] and utterly destroy [haram] all that he has, and do not spare [hamal] him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”[1] The text goes on to explicitly state that the Amalekites were all wiped out:

“So Saul defeated [nakah] the Amalekites, from Havilah as you go to Shur, which is east of Egypt. He captured Agag the king of the Amalekites alive, and utterly destroyed [haram] all the people with the edge of the sword. But Saul and the people spared [hamal] Agag and the best of the sheep, the oxen, the fatlings, the lambs, and all that was good, and were not willing to destroy them utterly; but everything despised and worthless, that they utterly destroyed.” [2]

A few verses later (15:33) the text records that Agag, the sole survivor, was executed. So, read literally, this passage states that all the Amalekites were killed and all their livestock were either destroyed or taken as plunder to be sacrificed to God at Gilgal.[3]

Now the language of “defeated” (or struck), “utterly destroyed”, the reference to “sparing” and to livestock parallels the language of the command in 15:3. Given this, it seems implausible that we should interpret the command in verse 3 as literal but the fulfilment, just 4 verses later, as hyperbolic; the text requires that the command and fulfilment be read in the same sense.

That said, when one reads this passage as part of as a single narrative a literal reading appears untenable; the proceeding text states quite emphatically that the Amalekites were not, in fact, literally wiped out. In 1 Samuel 27:8-9 David invaded a territory full of Amalekites:

“Now David and his men went up and raided the Geshurites, the Girzites and the Amalekites. (From ancient times these peoples had lived in the land extending to Shur and Egypt.) Whenever David attacked an area, he did not leave a man or woman alive, but took sheep and cattle, donkeys and camels, and clothes. Then he returned to Achish.”

Not only does this text affirm that the Amalekites still existed but the reference to Egypt and Shur states that they existed in the very same area that Saul ‘utterly destroyed every single one of them’ in in the previous passages. Moreover, David took sheep and cattle as plunder; again, livestock was another of the things Saul was said to have already eradicated.

After the text has told us that Saul “utterly destroyed all the people”, including King Agag, and despite the text telling us that when David attacked an area (the very same areas as Saul) he did “not leave a man or woman alive”, three chapters later we read that a sizeable Amalekite army attacked Ziklag![4] David apparently pursued this army and fought a long battle with them and 400 Amalekites fled on horseback!![5] Where are all these Amalekites coming from?

These are not the only examples. In 2 Samuel 1:8 an Amalekite took credit for killing Saul –but didn’t Saul “utterly destroy all the people”? In 1 Chronicles 4:43 Amalekites were still around in battle-ready numbers during the reign of Hezekiah who reigned after Saul and David.

Read literally, the narrative affirms both that the Amalekites were and were not totally wiped out. This apparent contradiction in the Samuel narrative is not subtle. Those who put these books into a single narrative would have been well aware of the obvious contradictions mentioned above. These editors were not mindless or stupid. If we read 1 Samuel 15 in the broader context of the rest of Samuel and also alongside other canonical books, such as 2 Samuel and the book of Chronicles then the text cannot be sensibly claiming that 1 Samuel 15, 1 Samuel 27, 1 Samuel 30 and 1 Chronicles 4 are all literally true accounts of battles with the Amalekites.

Further, while David’s battle texts appear to be relatively matter of fact records, 1 Samuel 15 appears to be highly hyperbolic and contains obvious rhetorical exaggeration. Saul’s army was said to be 210,000 men, which would make it larger than any army known at this time in antiquity. Moreover, we are told that Saul struck the Amalekites from Havila to Shur. Shur is on the edge of Egypt, Havila is in Saudi Arabia. This is an absurdly large battle field. “It’s impossible to imagine the battle actually traversed the enormous distance from Arabia almost to Egypt”[6] Daniel Fouts notes that exaggerated numbers are common forms of hyperbole in Ancient Near Eastern battle accounts.^[7]

1 Samuel 15’s use of the language of “utterly destroying” [haram] populations “with the sword”, is the same phraseology as that is repeatedly used hyperbolically in Joshua. This language also appears to have been used hyperbolically in 1 Chronicles 4. 1 Chronicles 4:41 states “they attacked” [nakah] and “destroyed them utterly” [haram] but only a few verses later we read that the survivors fled to Amalek where they were later all “destroyed” [nakah] a second time.[8] Likewise, the language of killing all inhabitants with the sword is also used hyperbolically in Judges, “after Judah puts Jerusalem to the sword … its occupants are still living there ‘to this day’ (Judg. 1:8, 21)”[9] Similar language is used hyperbolically in the prophetic writings; Paul Copan argues,

“[T]he biblical language of the Canaanites’ destruction is identical to that of Judah’s destruction in the Babylonian exile—clearly not utter annihilation or even genocide… God said he would “lay waste the towns of Judah so no one can live there” (Jer. 9:11 NIV).  Indeed, God said, “I will completely destroy them and make them an object of horror and scorn, and an everlasting ruin” (Jer. 25:9 NIV).  God “threatened to stretch out My hand against you and destroy you” (Jer. 15:6; cp. Ezek. 5:16)—to bring “disaster” against Judah (Jer. 6:19).  The biblical text, supported by archaeological discovery, suggests that while Judah’s political and religious structures were ruined and that Judahites died in the conflict, the “urban elite” were deported to Babylon while many “poor of the land” remained behind. Clearly, Judah’s being “completely destroyed” and made an “everlasting ruin” (Jer. 25:9) was a significant literary exaggeration.”[10]

Compare for example the language of God’s command to “not spare” the Amalekites, to “put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” with the account of Judah’s defeat to the Babylonians in 2 Chronicles 36:16-17:

“But they mocked God’s messengers, despised his words and scoffed at his prophets until the wrath of the Lord was aroused against his people and there was no remedy. He brought up against them the king of the Babylonians, who killed their young men with the sword in the sanctuary, and did not spare young men or young women, the elderly or the infirm. God gave them all into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar.”

This was written to a post-exilic audience who knew full well that not every one of them had been killed. They, as the descendents of the survivors, knew that Judah had been exiled and was later restored under Cyrus; a fact pointed out only a few verses later.[11]

So we see in 1 Samuel that the author(s) juxtaposed several accounts. One tells us that Saul wiped out all the Amalekites at God’s command using obvious rhetorical exaggeration and language known to be hyperbolic and the other, presented in fairly realistic terms, tells us that the Amalekites continued to live in the land as a military threat. Assuming the author was an intelligent person, we are at least owed an argument as to why the literal reading should be preferred in this context.

Craig suggests an argument: “Samuel’s rebuke of Saul in I Sam. 15.10-16” suggests Saul is condemned by Samuel for not “following God’s instructions”. Now, as I noted above, the text tells us that Saul did carry out God’s instruction to kill all the Amalekites; it was livestock, not humans, which were initially spared. Saul is rebuked for taking sheep as spoil. Nevertheless, one could argue that in Samuel’s amplification of his rebuke of Saul he is rebuked for not taking the command literally; see the immediately proceeding verses:

“Samuel said, “Is it not true, though you were little in your own eyes, you were made the head of the tribes of Israel? And the LORD anointed you king over Israel, and the LORD sent you on a mission, and said, ‘Go and utterly destroy the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them until they are exterminated.’ Why then did you not obey the voice of the LORD, but rushed upon the spoil and did what was evil in the sight of the LORD?””[12]

Craig appears to be arguing against a hyperbolic reading of 1 Samuel on the grounds that such a reading appears to contradict part of the Samuel narrative; he seems to be suggesting that a literal reading coheres better with this part. I would argue that the crucial issue is whether the hyperbolic interpretation is more plausible than the literal one.

Even if Craig is correct about Samuel’s rebuke, it does not follow that a literal reading is more plausible than a hyperbolic one. As argued above, a literal reading creates incoherencies in the narrative; it puts the whole account of 1 Samuel 15 in contradiction with the rest of the 1 Samuel narrative – particularly 1 Samuel 27-30. It also puts the account in contradiction with the account of Saul’s death in 2 Samuel 1 and the narrative of 1 Chronicles 4.

It is hard to believe the author(s) of the final form was meticulously careful to avoid making a minor incoherence in 1 Samuel 15:17-19 and yet was oblivious to the multiple obvious contradictions I have highlighted above. Taking 1 Samuel 15 as a highly hyperbolic account reads as a much more coherent narrative.

It is far more plausible to think that the author was willing to allow some minor inconsistencies in one part of a narrative that is not supposed to be taken as literally true in its details anyway rather than that he intended a highly contradictory literal reading. I think the conclusion one should draw is that the Holy War narratives appear to be highly hyperbolic accounts of victory that the author, elsewhere in the text, quite candidly affirms are not literally true accounts.

“The topic of God’s command to destroy the Canaanites was the subject of a very interesting exchange at the Evangelical Philosophical Society session last November at the Society of Biblical Literature Convention in Atlanta. Matt Flannagan defended the view put forward by Paul Copan in his Is God a Moral Monster? that such commands represent hyperbole typical of Ancient Near Eastern accounts of military conquests. Obviously, if Paul is right about this, then the whole problem just evaporates. But this answer doesn’t seem to me to do justice to the biblical text, which seems to say that if the Israeli soldiers were to encounter Canaanite women and children, they should kill them (cf. Samuel’s rebuke of Saul in I Sam. 15.10-16).”

Craig raises an important issue. In God and the Genocide of the Canaanites I, II and III I defended Nicholas Wolterstorff’s take on the Canaanite massacre in “Reading Joshua”.[1] Wolterstorff argued that the book of Joshua is a highly figurative, hagiographic and hyperbolic account of Israel’s early skirmishes and it is not intended to be taken literally in its details. My adaptation of Wolterstorff’s argument consists of three points.

First, taken as a single narrative, and taken literally, Joshua 1-11 gives a contradictory account of events to that narrated by Judges and also to that narrated by the later chapters of Joshua itself.

Second, those who put these books into a single narrative would have been well aware of the obvious contradictions mentioned above. These editors were not mindless or stupid, particularly if we hold that God spoke through them.

Third, while Judges reads more like “down-to-earth”[2] history, a careful reading of Joshua shows it to be full of ritualistic, stylised accounts and formulaic language. I supported this third point with research into Ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts. Studies show such accounts are hyperbolic, hagiographic, figurative and follow a common transmission code. Comparisons between these accounts and the early chapters of Joshua suggest Joshua was written according to the same literary conventions and transmission code. I suggest these three points, taken together, provide compelling reasons for thinking that one should interpret the text as a hyperbolic, hagiographic and figurative account of what occurred; it was not meant to be taken as literally true in all its details.

Craig’s objection to my position (and that of Paul Copan’s whose position is very close to mine) is a reference to 1 Samuel 15. Craig referred specifically to verses 10-16, where Samuel rebuked Saul “because [Saul] has turned away from [God] and has not carried out [God’s] instructions.”[3] The instructions in question were given in verse 3; God commanded Saul, “Now go and strike [nakah] Amalek [the Amelekites] and utterly destroy [haram] all that he has, and do not spare [hamal] him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”[4] Craig suggests this “seems to say that if the Israeli soldiers were to encounter Canaanite women and children, they should kill them”. I think Craig pushes an important objection here.

Before, responding it is important to note that Craig’s own position on the Canaanite issue, the one that the Questioner referred to, Question 16: Slaughter of the Canaanites, is actually largely in agreement with the argument I gave in Atlanta.

Craig, like me, accepts a divine command theory of ethics whereby an act is obligatory if, and only if, a loving and just God commands it. We also agree that the critic’s appeal to the Canaanites is, contrary to what is often alleged, at best an argument against scriptural infallibility, it is not an argument against a divine command theory of ethics per sé. Craig and I also agree on the implications of a divine command theory for this question. We agree that given that the wrongness of an action consists in its being forbidden by God, and given that God does not issue commands to himself, it follows that he has no duties; and hence, God is under no obligation to not kill anyone and has a right to do what he likes.

We also agree that this response is insufficient, because even if God has no duties the question still arises as to whether one can coherently claim that a loving and just person could command such activities and this is the real issue in the objection. Can one coherently suggest that a perfectly rational, fully informed, just and loving person would command killing non-combatants in a particular conflict?

Further, although we offer different reasons for our conclusions, we also agree that this claim is not incoherent. In at Atlanta I offered the following example:

Many ethicists contend that while the claim its wrong to kill innocent people  is correct as a general rule, it can be overridden in rare circumstances of “supreme emergency”,[5] when the alternative to killing non-combatants is to tolerate significantly greater evils,  and the consequences of refraining from killing are significantly bad. Whatever one thinks of this position, it cannot be dismissed as conceptually incoherent. If a proponent of an absolutist position on killing non-combatants examined the arguments and concluded that in rare circumstances of supreme emergency, killing non-combatants was not wrong, then it is implausible to suggest their concept of goodness was so radically at odds with prior beliefs that “good and evil would trade places” and that their position consisted of mere word games. This position may be false but it’s not obviously incoherent.[6]

So, like Craig, I am willing to grant that it is conceptually and epistemically possible for a just and loving person to allow rare exceptions to rules against killing if there is some greater good involved. In fact, something like this view is widely accepted in contemporary ethics; threshold deontology, act utilitarianism, rule-utilitarianism, situation ethics, rossian deontology all accept this conclusion. I do not think one can dismiss it as obviously incoherent.

Where Craig and I appear to disagree, then, is over whether Wolterstorff’s (and Copan’s) argument can be applied to 1 Sam 15. In Atlanta I argued, albeit briefly, that it can. Copan and I make this case more fully in our forthcoming chapter in “The Ethics of “Holy War” for Christian Morality and Theology” in Old Testament ‘Holy War’ and Christian Morality: Perspectives and Prospects (IVP Academic).

In my next post, Response to William Lane Craig’s Question 225: “The ‘Slaughter’ of the Canaanites Re-visited” Part II, I will spell out in more detail why I think each of Wolterstorff’s three premises apply to 1 Sam 15.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks reinvigorated a fear that has lain dormant in the western psyche since at least the 17^th century. This fear is encapsulated in an objection to belief in God known as the argument from historical atrocities. Many critics of religion refer to the religious wars that tore Europe apart during the 17^th century, citing events such as the Inquisition and Crusades — although lately the Taliban have been the image of choice.

Recently, whilst debating the viability of religious morality at the University of Notre Dame, best-selling author Sam Harris repeatedly cited the Taliban as a representative example of theological ethics. One need not read far into the literature of contemporary free thinkers to uncover this line of argument. Consider Jim Peron of the Institute for Liberal Values:

“To admit religion into the “public arena” is “dangerous.” And long term the results will be just as bloody and violent as they were in the past. … To put religion into that sector is to ignore centuries of history and return to the conflict-ridden, bloody world of the Dark Ages.”

Peron went on to refer to common motifs of the Inquisition: “crazy Puritans”, Servetus’ execution in Calvin’s Geneva and so on. Similar themes abound in the writings of Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens. The citation of historical cases is not in itself an argument so it is hard to discern the exact objection here. It appears to consist of two claims. Firstly, that some people who believe in God have committed atrocities against other people. Secondly, that if people who hold a belief commit atrocities then that belief is either false or should be avoided by liberal-minded people.

Historians Ronald Numbers and David Lindberg point to recent research having discredited the portrayal of the early Middle Ages as “the Dark Ages” brought about by Christianity. Similarly, research into Inquisition archives reveal that while such tribunals did exist, many popular beliefs are based on embellishment, exaggeration and propaganda rather than a sober assessment of facts. The picture of the Inquisition that emerges from these studies is significantly more benign than has popularly been thought. Similarly, historian Leland Ryken’s studies on the Puritans have questioned many of the popular stereotypes Peron referred to.

Take Peron’s allusion to the execution of Servetus. In his study on the life of Calvin, Oxford Theologian Alister McGrath argues that Calvin’s role in Servetus’ execution has been greatly exaggerated and contends that such heresy prosecutions were not typical in Geneva contrary to the image popularly peddled by rationalists. McGrath has also relentlessly exposed several cases of outright distortion and myth perpetuated about the so-called “dictator” of Geneva. This is not to say that atrocities did not occur, nor that such atrocities should be justified, but it is important to be accurate and fair. The evidence suggests that much of what people believe today about religious history is based on discredited 19^th century rationalist propaganda stereotypes and consequent cultural prejudice.

Perhaps more interesting is the second claim. While this claim is seldom made explicit, something like it is necessary if the existence of atrocities entails that belief in God is false or that religious belief and practice should be avoided.

Philosopher Glenn Peoples provides several counter examples to this claim. The belief that the atom could be split is one that has been used to kill thousands of people yet that belief is true and it is an important scientific discovery. The belief that theft is wrong has, in the past, led to the lynching of thieves. Does this show that theft is not really wrong and we should not oppose it?

Other examples illustrate the absurdity of this claim. The “reign of terror” during the French Revolution was justified by appeals to liberty, equality, fraternity and the rights of humankind; one victim of the guillotine famously remarked, “Oh, Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name”. Millions have been slaughtered by appeals to the greater good of society or the liberation of the oppressed classes and it is well known that people have defended wars on the basis of justice and social peace. Should we therefore avoid liberty, equality, opposing oppression, seeking justice and social peace?

A third problem with the “argument from atrocities” is that an analogous argument can be used against atheism and secular philosophies. Millions have lost their lives in wars fought in the name of secular ideologies such as Communism — wars far more brutal and total than those that occurred during the Middle Ages. Millions have been killed in socialist states in show-trials every bit as hysterical and rigged as any witch trials were. And, as some medievalists have noted, with irony, the Committee for Public Safety in Enlightenment France was, in numerous respects, much worse than the Inquisition. If the fact that Christians engaged in historical atrocities entails belief in God is false or that religious belief is to be avoided then parity of reasoning entails atheism is false and that secular belief systems should be avoided.

At this point the sceptic will start to make qualifications. One rejoinder is that whilst atheists like Pol Pot, Mao and Stalin committed atrocities, these were not done in the name of atheism or due to their atheist beliefs. Religious atrocities, however, were committed because of religious beliefs.

However, such rejoinders fail. As Peoples explained, Stalin and Pol Pot persecuted religious groups precisely because they were atheists and saw religion as socially pernicious — the very thing people who press the historical atrocities argument are trying to contend. Richard Wurmbrand, a victim of communist persecution in Romania, stated that “communist torturers often said there is no God, no hereafter, no life after death, we can do what we wish.” The fact that atheism was not the motivation for these actions seems to be news to those who actually witnessed them.

So, many atrocities were committed on the basis of atheism. The purported rejoinder also fails due to the fact that many atrocities cited by religious critics were not committed for religious reasons but for secular ones. Christopher Eberle and Terence Cuneo noted in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy that the religious wars of the 17th Century were caused not by the appeal to religious reasons, per se, but rather by the violation of religious freedom. They noted further that even in the 17th Century religious persecution was typically justified on secular grounds,

“When such rights have been violated, the justifications offered, even by religious believers, appeal to alleged requirements for social order, such as the need for uniformity of belief on basic normative issues. One theological apologist for religious repression, for example, writes this: ‘The king punishes heretics as enemies, as extremely wicked rebels, who endanger the peace of the kingdom, which cannot be maintained without the unity of the faith. That is why they are burnt in Spain.”

Medievalist Régine Pernoud argued that heretics were burnt or tortured during the 12^th Century due to the revival of Roman Law, which allowed torture to gain a confession and burning as punishment for treason. The torture and burning of heretics had as much to do with ancient Roman legal customs as it did with biblical exegesis. In fact, the Inquisition used torture more sparingly, passed death sentences more rarely and had more humane prisons than most secular courts of the same time. This suggests inquisitors actually moderated already accepted harsh Roman practices. Now, this does not justify such practices but it does question the thesis that religious reasons were the driving motivation for them or the thesis that they would not have occurred if a more secular context had prevailed. In a similar vein the Crusades were originally called to protect pilgrims from attack, to recover annexed territory and to protect the eastern Roman Empire from invasion — all secular reasons that could have been utilised to justify war quite independently of any religious rationale. Was World War II not fought to recover annexed territory, protect innocent people and protect Europe from invasion? How many millions were killed for that?

When these qualifications fail it is contended that not all atheists support these practices. This is true. It is also true that not all religious people support the practices cited by these sceptics. In fact, historically, some of the most important criticisms of religious persecution and defences of religious tolerance, such as those proposed by John Locke and Pierre Bayle, appealed to explicitly theological grounds.

Yale Philosophy Professor, Nicholas Wolterstorff, notes that “many of the social movements in the modern world that have moved societies in the direction of liberal democracy have been deeply and explicitly religious in their orientation.” Wolterstorff cites examples such as the abolitionist, civil rights and other resistance movements as examples.

So the appeal to historical atrocities, on examination, seems often based on a fairly selective analysis of the evidence. The Bin Ladens and Hitlers of this world are clearly dangerous but so too are the Stalins, Pol Pots and secular groups like the Tamil Tigers who pioneered the practice of suicide bombing before Al-Qaeda came on the scene. People fight and kill for a number of reasons; sometimes these are religious, more often they are secular – sometimes both. When people care deeply about something, sometimes they will kill to protect it. Religion is not an exception.

Bin Laden is dead; however, as commentators incessantly tell us, the legacy of religious terror he represents will continue. What also will continue are the prejudices of some secular groups who use his example to stereotype and smear all religions as dangerous and fanatical. It is far easier to kill a terrorist than it is to kill irrational prejudice but at least one can expose it for the shallow line of thought that it is.

I write a monthly column for Investigate Magazine entitled “Contra Mundum.” This blog post was published in the June 2011 issue and is reproduced here with permission. Contra Mundum is Latin for ‘against the world;’ the phrase is usually attributed to Athanasius who was exiled for defending Christian orthodoxy.

Letters to the editor should be sent to:
editorial@investigatemagazine.DELETE.com

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My article was a revised version of a paper I presented in Atlanta in November last year (my God and the Genocide of the Canaanites series gives a good overview of my position). Around the same time I presented this paper, Thom Stark, posted a critical review of Douglas S. Earl’s book The Joshua Delusion? Rethinking Genocide in the Bible. As a review, much of it was addressed to the specifics of Earl’s book. However, in the introduction Stark offered a critique of Wolterstorff’s position and made reference to my defence of it.

He offered three lines of argument; two against the conclusion Wolterstorff and I offered and one against Wolterstorff’s argument itself. Since then several people have asked me my thoughts on his critique. In this post I will look at his critique of Wolterstorff’s argument, which I defended and adapted in my article.

Before one can criticise an argument it is important to be clear as to what it is. As I note in my forthcoming article (and in the post I linked to above) Wolterstorff’s argument consists of three points and a basic assumption. The assumption is that “Joshua as we have it today was intended as a component in the larger sequence consisting of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, I and II Samuel, and I and II Kings”.[3] On the basis of this assumption Wolterstorff contends “…  I propose that we interpret the Book of Joshua as a component within this larger sequence – in particular, that we interpret it as preceded by Deuteronomy and succeeded by Judges.”[4] In taking this approach, Wolterstorff engages in a more canonical approach to the text; he focuses on the meaning of the final form as part of a canonical sequence.

The three premises are as follows. First, the so called genocide accounts in Joshua 1-11 are part of a broader context which includes both the rest of Joshua but also other canonical books, such as the book of Judges. When one reads the whole sequence one observes that while early passages in Joshua describe Israel exterminating the inhabitants, later passages in Joshua and Judges proceed on the assumption this never literally happened.[5] Taken literally these accounts of the conquest contradict each other.

Second, this contrast is fairly obvious. Whoever “edited the final version of these writings into one sequence” was not “mindless” and would have noticed  “the tensions and contradictions – surface or real”;  therefore, they cannot have intended to affirm both as literally true.[6]

Third, while Judges appears relatively “down to earth”, a careful reading of Joshua shows it to “be full of ritualistic, stylised, accounts, formulaic language”. This final point suggests that Joshua is the non-literal figurative one and Judges is the more literal account.

In support of this I set out Lawson Younger’s study of ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts in Part II of my God and the Genocide of the Canaanites. Younger’s study shows:

(a) Such accounts are a common transmission code. They hyperbolically describe victories in terms of gods raining meteors or hailstones down on the foe, battles taking place in one day, the numbers of armies and enemy causalities being rhetorically exaggerated and, most importantly, victories are often described hyperbolically in terms of total conquest, complete annihilation, destruction of the enemy, killing everyone and leaving no survivors.

(b) Comparisons between these accounts and the early chapters of Joshua suggest Joshua is written according to this  transmission code.

I also added:

(c) There is precedent from both within the book of Joshua and also within the biblical canon for accounts and language of this sort being used figuratively and hyperbolically.

Stark contends this argument is “wholly untenable”. It is unclear, however, exactly what premises he rejects. Stark says nothing about the starting assumption. Similarly, he seems to clearly grant the first premise; he accepts that, taken literally, the first half of Joshua contradicts the second half and the book of Judges. Stark also appears to grant the third premise or at least some of my supporting argument for it; in an earlier blog post on the topic entitled “The Flannagan Delusion” (which is no longer online) he stated that Lawson Younger  ”has shown definitively that the conquest narratives follow a basic ancient conquest script, replete with exaggerations, [and] hyperbole”.
In his review Stark defends Younger’s contention that Joshua is such an account against Earl’s criticisms. He also grants that the gods destroying the enemy with a meteor or hailstones is a common “literary motif” and is “exaggerated”.

As best I can tell, Stark takes issue with Wolterstorff’s second premise. He summarises it as,

“The hyperbolists say that, since the author wasn’t stupid, the contradictions indicate that the language of total destruction is not to be taken literally. If it says in one part of the book that an entire population was killed, but that population is still alive later on, then it is clear that the earlier statement was hyperbolic in nature, not to be taken literally.

In response he argues,

“Earl argues that the book of Joshua is composite in nature. The first half of the book, chapters 1-12, was written by the Deuteronomistic historian, but chapters 13-22 were written by the Priestly writer. Chapter 23 returns again to the concerns of the Deuteronomistic historian, and according to Earl, chapter 24 (the final chapter) represents a more generic summary.

If Earl is correct that Joshua is two-part composite, that sufficiently explains the contradictions between the summaries of military victories. The latter half of Joshua does not contradict the former in order to provide a cue to read the earlier statements as hyperbolic; they are contradictory because they represent two different sources with two different agendas.”

Stark suggests Wolterstorff’s second premise is undermined by the fact that the final form of Joshua combines or draws upon two different sources. The authors of these sources had different agendas and contradict each other. This explains the contradictions without suggesting the author mindlessly wrote an obviously contradictory narrative. Each author wrote a coherent narrative, it is just that their narratives contradict the account of the other author, but none of them blatantly contradicted themselves.

I think this response is a non-starter based on a failure to grasp Wolterstorff’s point. As I note in my paper, Wolterstorff  argues for the second premise as follows:

Those whose occupation it is to try to determine the origins of these writings will suggest that the editors had contradictory records, oral traditions, and so forth to work with.  No doubt this is correct.  But those who edited the final version of these writings into one sequence were not mindless; they could see, as well as you and I can see, the tensions and contradictions – surface or real – that I have pointed to. So what is going on?[7]

Nothing in this comment is undermined by noting that Joshua is a composite document and that the redactors of the final form drew on different and contradictory sources. Wolterstorff, in fact, grants that this may have been the case. His point is that the redactors of the final version choose to put both these sources side by side as part of a single book within a series. And these redactors were not, mindless or stupid, and so the redactors of the final version could not have intended to affirm both accounts of the conquest as literally true. Even if the authors of the redactors’ sources, were internally consistent and disagreed only with each other, this is beside the point. Wolterstorff  is not talking about the authors of the sources; he is talking about the redactors who combined different sources into a single narrative sequence. These redactors would be contradicting themselves if they intended both accounts to be literally true.

To actually address Wolterstorff’s second premise Stark needs to argue that the final redactors did put both these sections together in an obviously contradictory narrative intending to affirm both as literally true. The redactors were either stupid or they missed the blatantly obvious contradictions in front of them.

This is an extremely uncharitable contention.  Wolterstorff notes the phrase “he killed all the inhabitants with the edge of the sword” occured at least 15 times in Joshua 6-11 in close succession. This point is “hammered home with emphasis.” This is then followed in the next chapter by the claim that Joshua had not conquered the land and then in the next five chapters it is stressed repeatedly that the land was not yet conquered and the inhabitants still existed in large numbers. This was followed by the opening chapters of Judges, which affirm eight times in a single chapter that the Israelites had failed to conquer the land or the cities, and had failed to drive the inhabitants out. It finishes with the angel of the Lord at Bokim rebuking them for failing to do so (Judges 2:1-5). These are not subtle contrasts. They are, in Wolterstorff’s words, “flamboyant”. It is unlikely that an intelligent redactor would have missed something this blatant.[8]

But apart from being implausible, Stark can only make this argument by engaging in special pleading because throughout his review he works on the assumption that the author of a literary unit does not author an obviously contradictory narrative. Consider one example: Stark notes that in Judges 20-21 the  Israelites “proceeded to massacre every last woman and child in the land of Benjamin”. Stark argues this language cannot be hyperbolic because,

[In] the second half of the story. The Israelites decided to show mercy on the tribe of Benjamin, not desiring to blot them out forever. The problem they face, however, is that there are only a few hundred remaining men (the soldiers who escaped), who no longer have wives and children. Why? Because the slaughters were not exaggerated.”

Stark here argues that if one reads the first half of the story hyperbolically it will contradict what is said in the second half, and so for this reason one cannot read it hyperbolically. Note this inference utilises the same line of argument Wolterstorff does; it assumes that an author does not  juxtapose an account or battle in the second half of a narrative when it obviously contradicts what  they have said in the first half.

Similar, points can be made about many of Stark’s other arguments in the review. In several places he criticises readings of the text proposed by “Apologists” on the ground that their readings involve attributing to the author a position that contradicts what that author says elsewhere in the context. These arguments all assume the authors of a literary unit do not write obviously and blatantly contradictory things.

Seeing Stark endorses this assumption himself, it is hard to see how he can reject it when it is used by someone else. Stark appears to accept a hermeneutical principle when it leads to a literal reading of the text he accepts and then abandons it when the same principle leads to a conclusion he rejects.  Like I said earlier, this is special pleading.

In a recent Conference at Notre Dame Alvin Plantinga suggested that the commands to wipe out the Canaanites, recorded in the book of Deuteronomy, might be hyperbolic; they should be understood more like how we understand a person who states, in the context of a boxing match, “knock his block off, hand him his head”, or in a football game where a person states that the team should “kill the opposition” or boasts that “we totally slaughtered them.”[1] Understood this way, the commands in Deuteronomy meant “something like attack them, defeat them, drive them out; not literally kill every man, woman, child donkey and the like”.[2]

In two previous posts I have explored and defended Nicholas Wolterstorff’s argument for this conclusion. In God and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part I: Wolterstorff’s Argument for the Hagiographic Hyperbolic Interpretation, I elaborated on, appropriated and expanded Nicholas Wolterstorff’s case for understanding Joshua as a hagiographic, stylised and highly hyperbolic account of Israel’s early skirmishes. In Part II: Ancient Near Eastern Conquest Accounts, I argued that studies into Ancient Near Eastern historiography give considerable support to his conclusion. Joshua appears to follow the same rhetoric, literary conventions and motifs of other ancient Near East conquest accounts and one feature of such accounts is to narrate victories hyperbolically in terms of killing all people, leaving no survivors and so forth. This suggests the description of Joshua putting every inhabitant to the sword, totally destroying all and leaving no survivors, is not to be taken literally. In this last post in this series I want to look at some implications of accepting this.

I think two implications can be drawn from this conclusion. First,

On the assumption that Deuteronomy and Joshua are parts of the same sequence of books, this interpretation of Joshua forces a back-interpretation of Deuteronomy. If “struck down all the inhabitants with the edge of the sword” is a literary convention when used to describe Joshua’s exploits, then it is likewise a literary convention when similar words are used by Moses in his instructions to Israel in general and to Joshua in particular.[3]

I think Wolterstorff is correct here, this interpretation of Joshua does force a back-interpretation of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 7:2 states “when Yahweh your God has given them up before you and you have struck them, you shall utterly destroy them”. Similarly, Deuteronomy 20:16-17 states “anything that breathes you shall not keep alive, but you shall utterly destroy them”. In Joshua 10 one sees the formulaic language of “and Yahweh gave [the city]” and they “struck it by the mouth of the sword, and its king he hath destroyed” until there were “no survivors”. The chapter is summarised with the phrase “So Joshua struck all the land, … He destroyed all that breathed”. The similar phraseology is evident.[4]

Moreover, the book of Joshua clearly, explicitly and repeatedly identifies what Joshua did in these chapters with the command that Moses had given regarding the Canaanites in Deuteronomy.[5] If the language of “striking all the people by the sword”, “leaving no survivors”, “totally destroying”, “striking all the inhabitants with the edge of the sword”, and so on, is hyperbolic (as the evidence suggests it is) then the command cannot have been intended to be taken literally.

This understanding of the commands in Deuteronomy also solves some other interpretative problems. Here I will mention briefly three.

First, what God commanded regarding the Canaanites differs in various canonical books. As noted above, in Judges when the angel of the Lord refers back to the original command it is stated in terms of not making treaties with them, destroying their shrines and driving them out; it is not stated in terms of literally exterminating them. Similarly, in the earlier book of Exodus the command is given in terms of not allowing the Canaanites to live in the land, again, not in terms of extermination. This is significant. “Deuteronomy” in Greek means “second law”. Throughout Deuteronomy, Moses repeats laws already laid down in the book of Exodus, sometimes expanding on them. The Decalogue, for example, which was delivered on Sinai in Exodus 20, is repeated again in Deuteronomy 5. The laws about releasing an ebed (and indentured servant) in Exodus 21:1 are repeated and expanded on in Deuteronomy 15:12-18. Similarly, Deuteronomy 22:28-29 is a repetition of a law spelled out in Exodus 22:15.[6] The same occurs with the law under discussion. Deuteronomy 7 repeats the same promises and commands laid down in Exodus 23:20-32; however, in Deuteronomy, the language of “destroy them” replaces the “do not let them live in your land” in Exodus. Wolterstorff’s interpretation explains this.

Second the word herem, which is translated “destroy” in Deuteronomy 7:2, has the primary meaning of the irrevocable giving-over or devotion of something to Yhwh and hence implies renunciation. The term has also developed a secondary secular meaning of “to destroy”;[7] but, a literal reading of “destroy” here does not fit the context well. The command to “destroy” the Canaanites occurs alongside several other commands, “Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons”.[8] However, this seems odd. Killing is not an obvious antithesis to marrying or making a covenant; moreover, the text goes on to elaborate the command in terms of smashing idols and driving them out in a similar vein to Judges. For this reason Christopher Wright argues herem should be translated as “renounce” and is a command to shun the Canaanites.[9] This reading clashes with the parallel verse where “In Deuteronomy 20:17 herem is used epexegetically to verse 16, ‘you shall not leave alive anything that breathes’”.[10] However, taking the word as ‘destroy’ and understanding it hyperbolically makes sense of this.[11]

Some object that a hyperbolic interpretation does not fit the context, which draws a contrast between sparing “the women, the children, the livestock” in verse 14 and totally destroying them in verse 16 “do not leave alive anything that breathes”. This is mistaken; first the emphasis in verse 14 is not on sparing non-combatants but rather on the permissibility of marrying the women of conquered enemies, adopting their children and using their cattle. Second, the contrast is not between verses 14 and 16, but between verse 16 and the whole set of instructions regarding nations that are far away in verses 10-15. These verses command Israel to seek to make peace treaties first and if they go to war and kill combatants they can marry the women, adopt children and keep the live stock. In other words, as much as possible they are to seek peaceful co-existence with these nations. A command to go to war and drive them out expressed hyperbolically as ‘totally destroy them, leave nothing alive that breathes’ would stand in contrast to this. A final point on this is that the crucial issue is whether the hyperbolic interpretation is more plausible than a literal one, even if a literal interpretation fits Deuteronomy 20 better. Above I have argued that a literal interpretation puts Joshua 6-11 at odds with Judges and the later chapters of Joshua. It would be odd to reject a hyperbolic interpretation because one passage in Deuteronomy 20 does not cohere with it and instead embrace a literal interpretation which creates an even greater incoherence in the text.

Finally, the hyperbolic reading addresses another apparent contradiction in the text noted by many readers of the Pentateuch. While Deuteronomy 7:2 and 20:16-17 command Israel to “utterly destroy” the Canaanites and to “not leave alive anything that breathes”, numerous other texts claim the Canaanites are to be “driven out”, “dispossessed”, “thrust out”, etc; in fact, often the “drive out” language is juxtaposed with the language of “destroy”. Taken literally these pictures are inconsistent. If I stated that I had driven an intruder from my house one would not assume the intruder was dead in my lounge. Similarly, if I said I had killed an intruder, one would not normally think this meant the intruder had fled. The Hebrew confirms this; the language of driving out and casting out is used elsewhere to refer to Adam and Eve being driven from Eden, Cain being driven into the wilderness, David driven out by Saul. All are cases where the meaning precludes something being literally destroyed.[12]

Moreover, when the “drive out” language is used of Canaan it often is used in a context where it does not literally mean destroyed but rather, dispossessed. In Leviticus 18:26-28[13] the Canaanites are said to have been driven out in the same way Israel will be driven out if they violate the Covenant.

Finally, the language of destroying whole nations is in several places in the book of Deuteronomy used in a rhetorical or hyperbolic sense where it refers to “driving out” the nation in question or dispossessing them; it does not mean exterminating them. Hence, Wolterstorff’s suggestion has ample precedent from within the text itself.[14]

A second implication of Wolterstorff’s position is that Joshua does not assert that Israel engaged in divinely-authorised genocide.

[W]hen a high-school basket ball player says his team slaughtered the other team last night he’s not asserting, literally now, that they slaughter the other team. What is he asserting? Not easy to tell. That they scored a decisive victory? Maybe, but suppose they barely eked out a win? Was he lying? Maybe not. Maybe he was speaking with a wink of the eye hyperbole. High school kids do.[15]

In the same way, when one realises that Joshua is hagiographic and highly hyperbolic in its narration of what occurred, the best one can conclude from the accounts of killing everyone that breathed is that,

Israel scored a decisive victory and once you recognise the presence of hyperbole it is not even clear how decisive the victories were. Joshua did not conquer all the cities in the land nor did he slaughter all the inhabitants in the cities he did conquer. The book of Joshua does not say that he did.[16]

Canonical factors force the same conclusion. I noted above that in Judges and Exodus the command is expressed in terms of avoiding treaties and driving the Canaanites out. In Joshua and Deuteronomy the command is expressed in the language of “utterly destroying them”. The conclusion we have reached is that the latter is figurative language and the former is literal. If this is the case then the command was to drive them out and it was not to literally exterminate them.

[1] Alvin Plantinga “Comments on Evan Fales’ Satanic Verses: Moral Chaos in Holy Writ” a paper presented to “My Ways Are Not Your Ways: The Character of the God of the Hebrew Bible” Conference at the centre for Philosophy of Religion, University of Notre Dame, Friday 11 September 2009 at <http://www.nd.edu/~cprelig/conferences/documents/HBprogram_006.pdf> accessed 5 Jan 2010.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Nicholas Wolterstorff “Reading Joshua” in Michael Bergmann, Michael J Murray and Michael C Rea (Eds) Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) 252-253. 252.
[4] All scripture references in this paragraph are from the Hebrew Greek Interlinear Bible.
[5] “So Joshua subdued the whole region, including the hill country, the Negev, the western foothills and the mountain slopes, together with all their kings. He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the LORD, the God of Israel, had commanded. (Joshua 10:40 NIV) [Emphasis added] Similarly we see,

“Everyone in it they put to the sword. They totally destroyed them, not sparing anything that breathed, and he burned up Hazor itself. Joshua took all these royal cities and their kings and put them to the sword. He totally destroyed them, as Moses the servant of the LORD had commanded.” (Joshua 11:11-12 NIV) [Emphasis added]

Also,

“So that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy, as the LORD had commanded Moses (Joshua 11:20b NIV) [Emphasis added]

As the LORD commanded his servant Moses, so Moses commanded Joshua, and Joshua did it; he left nothing undone of all that the LORD commanded Moses.” (Joshua 11:15 NIV) [Emphasis added]

[6] Gordon Wenham “Bethulah: A Girl of Marriageable Age” Vetus Testamentum 22 (1972) 326-348.
[7] J P U Lilley “Understanding the Herem” Tyndale Bulletin 44 (1993) 1:11.
[8] Deuteronomy 7:2-4.
[9] Christopher J H Wright Deuteronomy (New International Biblical Commentary) (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1996) 109.
[10] Lilley, supra n7, 174.
[11] Other commentators such as Duane L Christensen and J McConville suggest “destroy” is being used in a figurative sense. McConville, for example, states “the concept of complete annihilation of the nations is always a kind of ideal, symbolizing the need for radical loyalty to Yahweh on the part of Israel.” J. G. McConville, Deuteronomy, Apollos Old Testament Commentary, ed. D.W. Baker and G.J. Wenham (Downers Grove/Leicester: InterVarsity Press, 2002) 161.
[12] I owe this point to conversations with Paul Copan.
[13] “But you must keep my decrees and my laws. The native-born and the aliens living among you must not do any of these detestable things,²⁷ for all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you, and the land became defiled.²⁸ And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you.”
[14] Deuteronomy 2:10-12, 20-22, 4:26-30, 28:63.
[15] Nicholas Wolterstorff “Reply to Antony” in Michael Bergmann, Michael J Murray and Michael C Rea (Eds) Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) 263.
[16] Nicholas Wolterstorff “Reading Joshua” presented to “My Ways Are Not Your Ways: The Character of the God of the Hebrew Bible” Conference at the centre for Philosophy of Religion, University of Notre Dame, Saturday 12 September 2009 at accessed 19 December 2009; this paragraph was in the paper presented at the conference but was omitted from the published version.

RELATED POSTS:
God and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part I: Wolterstorff’s Argument for the Hagiographic Hyperbolic Interpretation
God and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part II: Ancient Near Eastern Conquest Accounts
Download Matt’s EPS Talk “God and the Genocide of the Canaanites” (& other EPS talks)
Sunday Study: Joshua and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part I
Sunday Study: Joshua and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part II
Did God Command Genocide in the Old Testament?

In my previous post, God and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part I: Wolterstorff’s Argument for the Hagiographic Hyperbolic Interpretation, I expounded and adapted Nicholas Wolterstorff’s argument for a hagiographic hyperbolic reading of the book of Joshua. Wolterstorff’s argument has, I think, considerable force. Judges and Joshua cannot both be taken literally as their accounts are at odds; given the internal evidence Wolterstorff cites it is reasonable to contend that Joshua is the one that is non-literal. Wolterstorff, however, limits his case to what I call internal evidence, evidence from within the text itself. I think there is some interesting external evidence, evidence of how particular terms and language were used in other Ancient Near Eastern histories of conquests and battles, which could be added to Wolterstorff’s argument to make it significantly more plausible. Here I will cite three lines of such evidence.

The first is that comparisons between the book of Joshua and other Ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts from the same period demonstrate some important stylistic parallels. Various studies have documented these similarities. Commenting on the structure of the campaigns mentioned in Joshua 9-12, Kitchen notes;

This kind of report profile is familiar to readers of ancient Near Eastern military reports, not least in the second millennium. Most striking is the example of the campaign annals of Tuthmosis III of Egypt in his years 22-42 (ca. 1458-1438). … [T]he pharaoh there gives a very full account of his initial victory at Megiddo, by contrast with the far more summary and stylized reports of the ensuing sixteen subsequent campaigns. Just like Joshua against up to seven kings in south Canaan and four-plus up north.[1] [Emphasis added]

Kitchen adds,

The Ten Year Annals of the Hittite king Mursil II (later fourteenth century) are also instructive. Exactly like the “prefaces” in the two Joshua war reports (10:1-4; 11:1-5), detailing hostility by a number of foreign rulers against Joshua and Israel as the reason for the wars, so in his annals Mursil II gives us a long “preface” on the hostility of neighbouring rulers and people groups that lead to his campaigns.[2] [Emphasis added]

Kitchen adds other examples. He observes that the same formulaic style found in Joshua is also used in the Amarna letters EA 185 and EA 186.[3]Similarly, before his major campaigns,

Joshua is commissioned by YHWH not to fear (cf. 5:13-15; 10:8; 11:6). So also by Ptah and Amun were Merenptah in Egypt and Tuthmosis IV long before him: and likewise Mursil II of the Hittites by his gods (10T-Year Annals, etc.), all in the second millennium besides such kings as Assurbanipal of Assyria down to the seventh century.[4]

Similar studies have been done by Van Seters[5] and James Hoffmeier.[6] However, the most comprehensive is that done by J Lawson Younger.

Younger notes similarities in the preface, structure and even the way the treaty with the Gibeonites is recorded between Joshua and various Ancient Near Eastern accounts.[7] Joshua follows this convention in describing numerous battles occurring in a single day or within a single campaign.[8] Ancient Near Eastern accounts also, like Joshua, repeatedly make reference to the enemy “melting with fear”.[9] Even the way post-battle pursuits are set out and described have parallels with pursuits in Ancient Near Eastern literature.[10] I could mention more examples; the point is that “when the composition and rhetoric of the Joshua narratives in chapters 9-12 are compared to the conventions of writing about conquests in Egyptian, Hittite, Akkadian, Moabite, and Aramaic texts, they are revealed to be very similar”.[11]

Second, Younger notes such accounts are “highly figurative”[12] and narrate military events via a common transmission code.  The literary motif of divine intervention is an example. Both The 10 Year Annals of Mursilli and Sargon’s Letter to the God record a divine intervention where the God sends hailstones on the enemy.[13] Tuthmosis III has a similar story regarding a meteor.[14] Younger notes these accounts are extremely similar to parallel accounts in Joshua 10. Similarly, Younger notes in many Ancient Near Eastern texts “one can discern a literary technique whereby the deity is implored to maintain daylight long enough for there to be a victory”[15] which has obvious parallels to Josh 10:13-14.  Similarly, Richard Hess notes that Hittite conquest accounts describe the gods knocking down the walls of an enemy city in a manner similar to that described in the battle of Jericho.[16] The fact that similar events are narrated in multiple different accounts suggests they are “notable ingredient of the transmission code for conquest accounts”;[17] that is, part of the common hyperbolic rhetoric of warfare rather than descriptions of what actually occurred.

Third, part of this “transmission code” is that victories are narrated in a stereotyped exaggerated hyperbolic fashion in terms of total conquest, complete annihilation and destruction of the enemy, killing everyone, leaving no survivors, etc. Kenneth Kitchen notes,

[T]he type of rhetoric in question was a regular feature of military reports in the second and first millennia, as others have made very clear. … In the later fifteenth century Tuthmosis III could boast “the numerous army of Mitanni, was overthrown within the hour, annihilated totally, like those (now) non-existent” –- whereas, in fact, the forces of Mitanni lived to fight many another day, in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries. Some centuries later, about 840/830, Mesha king of Moab could boast that “Israel has utterly perished for always” – a rather premature judgment at that date, by over a century! And so on, ad libitum. It is in this frame of reference that the Joshua rhetoric must also be understood.[18]

Younger notes numerous other examples. Merenptah’s Stele describes a skirmish with Israel as follows, “Yanoam is nonexistent; Israel is wasted, his seed is not”.[19] Here a skirmish in which Egypt prevailed is described hyperbolically in terms of the total annihilation of Israel. Sennacherib uses similar hyperbole, “The soldiers of Hirimme, dangerous enemies, I cut down with the sword; and not one escaped”.[20] Mursilli II records making “Mt.Asharpaya empty (of humanity)” and the “mountains of Tarikarimu empty (of humanity)”.[21] Mesha (whom Kitchen cites as stating “Israel has utterly perished for always”) describes victories in terms of him fighting against a town, taking it and then killing all the inhabitants of the town.[22] Similarly, The Bulletin of Ramses II, an historical narrative of Egyptian military campaigns into Syria, narrates Egypt’s considerably less-than-decisive victory at the battle of Kadesh with the following rhetoric,

His majesty slew the entire force of the wretched foe from Hatti, together with his great chiefs and all his brothers, as well as all the chiefs of all the countries that had come with him, their infantry and their chariotry falling on their faces one upon the other. His majesty slaughtered and slew them in their places; … He took no note of the millions of foreigners; he regarded them aschaff. [23] [Emphasis original]

Numerous other examples could be provided. The hyperbolic use of language similar to that in Joshua is strikingly evident.[24] It is equally evident that histories of this sort are highly stylised and often use this exaggeration for what could be called hagiographic purposes to commend the kings as faithful servants of the gods rather than as literal descriptions of what occurred.[25] They constitute “monumental hyperbole.”[26]

In addition, both Kitchen and Younger note that such hyperbolic language is used in several places within the book of Joshua itself. In Joshua 10:20, for example, it states Joshua and the sons of Israel had “finished destroying” and “completely destroyed” their enemies. Immediately, however, the text, affirms that the “survivors went to fortified cities.” In this context, the language of total destruction is clearly hyperbolic.  Similarly, the account of the battle of Ai is clearly hyperbolic. After Joshua’s troops feign a retreat the text states that “all the men of Ai” are pressed to chase them. “Not a man remained in Ai or Bethel who did not go after Israel. They left the city open and went in pursuit of Israel.” Joshua lures the pursuers into a trap “so that they were caught in the middle, with Israelites on both sides. Israel cut them down, leaving them neither survivors nor fugitives” Then it immediately goes on to assert “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” they went to the city of Ai and killed all the men in it. Apparently all the men of Ai were killed three times in the battle and in each case they appear alive again. A final example is suggested by Goldingay, in the first chapter of Judges he notes that after Judah puts Jerusalem to the sword, its occupants are still living there ‘to this day’.

A similar phenomenon occurs in the case of Midian,[27] the Amalekites[28] and the Babylonian invasion[29].  In each case a battle is narrated in totalistic terms of complete destruction of all the people and later narration goes on to matter-of-factly assume it did not literally occur. The fact that this occurs on multiple occasions in different books rapidly diminishes the probability that these features are co-incidental or careless errors. Why is that almost every time a narration of “genocide” occurs, it is followed by an account which presupposes it did not? These facts significantly increase the possibility that this is deliberate literary construction by the authors.

Four things are evident; first, that taken as a single narrative and taken literally, Joshua 1-11 gives a contradictory account of events to that narrated by Judges and also to that narrated by the later chapters of Joshua itself. Second is that “those who edited the final version of these writings into one sequence were not mindless” particularly if God speaks through them. Third, while Judges reads as “down to earth history” a careful reading of Joshua reveals it to be full of ritualistic, stylised, accounts, formulaic language. This third point is supported by research into Ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts. Such studies show (a) such accounts are highly  hyperbolic, hagiographic, figurative and follow a common transmission code (b) comparisons between these accounts and the early chapters of Joshua suggest Joshua is written according to the same literary conventions and  transmission code (c) part of this transmission code is to hyperbolically portray a victory in absolute terms of totally destroying the enemy or in terms of miraculous divine intervention; “such statements are rhetoric indicative of military victory”,[30] not literal descriptions of what occurred.  Fourth, this hyperbolic way of describing victories is attested in several places elsewhere in Scripture.

I think these four points, taken together, provide compelling reasons for thinking that one should interpret the text as a highly figurative and hyperbolic account of what occurred. In light of these factors it seems sensible to conclude that the accounts of battles in Joshua 6-11 are not meant to be taken literally.

In Part III I look at two implications of the hagiographic hyperbolic account.

[1] Kenneth Kitchen On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids MI: Erdmans Publishing Co, 2003) 170.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid 172.
[4] Ibid, 174-175.
[5] J Van Seters “Joshua’s Campaign of Canaan and Near Eastern Historiography” 2 Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament (1990) 1-12.
[6] James K Hoffmier “The Structure of Joshua 1—11 and the Annals of Thutmose III” in A R Millard, J K Hoffmeier, D W Baker (eds) Faith Tradition and History: Old Testament Historiography and its Ancient Near Eastern context (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1994) 165-181.
[7] K Lawson Younger Jr Ancient Conquest Accounts: A Study in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History Writing (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990) 200-204.
[8] Ibid 216.
[9] Ibid 258-260.
[10] Ibid 220-225.
[11] Ziony Zevit The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches (London and New York: Continuum, 2001) 114.
[12] K Lawson Younger Jr “Judges 1 in its Near Eastern Literary Context” in A R Millard, J K Hoffmeier, D W Baker (eds) Faith Tradition and History: Old Testament Historiography and its Ancient near Eastern context (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1994) 207.
[13] Younger, supra n 24, 208-211.
[14] Ibid 217.
[15] Ibid  219, for further  discussion of the relationship between Joshua’s long day and other ANE texts see John Walton “Joshua 10:12-15 and Mesopotamian Celestial Omen Texts” in A R Millard, J K Hoffmeier, D W Baker (eds) Faith Tradition and History: Old Testament Historiography and its Ancient near Eastern context (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1994) 181-190.
[16] Richard Hess “West Semitic Texts and the Book of Joshua” Bulletin for Biblical Research 7 (1997) 68.
[17] Younger, supra n 24, 211.
[18] Kitchen On the Reliability of the Old Testament 174.
[19] Younger, supra n 24, 227.
[20] Ibid 228.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid 227.
[23] Ibid 245.
[24] In addition, both Kitchen and Younger note that such hyperbolic language is used in several places within the book of Joshua itself. In Joshua 10:20, for example, it states Joshua and the sons of Israel had “finished destroying” and “completely destroyed” their enemies. Immediately, however, the text, affirms that the “survivors went to fortified cities.” In this context, the language of total destruction is clearly hyperbolic. Similarly, the account of the battle of Ai is clearly hyperbolic. After Joshua’s troops feign a retreat the text states that “all the men of Ai” are pressed to chase them. “Not a man remained in Ai or Bethel who did not go after Israel. They left the city open and went in pursuit of Israel.” Joshua lures the pursuers into a trap “so that they were caught in the middle, with Israelites on both sides. Israel cut them down, leaving them neither survivors nor fugitives” Then it immediately goes on to assert “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” they went to the city of Ai and killed all the men in it.
[25] Thomas Thompson examines several different ANE conquest accounts of this type and notes they have a hagiographic function. See his “A Testimony of the Good King: Reading the Mesha Stele” in  Lester L Grabbe (Ed) Ahabs Agonistes: The Rise and Fall of the Omri Dynasty (New York: T&T Clark, 2007).
[26] John Goldingay “City and Nation” Old Testament Theology vol. 3 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009) 570. Goldingay goes on to give yet another example from within the Bible itself “While Joshua does speak of Israel’s utterly destroying the Canaanites, even these accounts can give a misleading impression: peoples that have been annihilated have no trouble reappearing later in the story; after Judah puts Jerusalem to the sword, its occupants are still living there ‘to this day’ (Judg. 1:8, 21).”
[27] Compare Numbers 31 with Judges 6 and 7.
[28] Compare 1 Sam 15 with 1 Sam 28:8 and 1 Sam  30.
[29] Compare 2 Chronicles 36:17 with 36:20 and 2 Chronicles 36:18 with 36:19
[30] K Lawson Younger “Joshua” in John H Walton, Victor H Matthews,  Mark W Chavalas (eds) The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament (Downers Grove Il: Intervarsity Press) 227.

RELATED POSTS:
God and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part I: Wolterstorff’s Argument for the Hagiographic Hyperbolic Interpretation
God and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part III: Two Implications of the Hagiographic Hyperbolic Account
Sunday Study: Joshua and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part I
Sunday Study: Joshua and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part II
Did God Command Genocide in the Old Testament?

One of the most perplexing issues facing Christian believers is a series of jarring texts in the Old Testament. After liberating Israel from slavery in Egypt, the Israelites arrived on the edge of the Promised Land. The book of Deuteronomy records that God then commanded Israel to “destroy totally” the people occupying these regions (the Canaanites); the Israelites were to “leave alive nothing that breathes”. The book of Joshua records the carrying out of this command. In the sixth chapter it states “they devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys”. In the tenth and eleventh chapters it states that Joshua “left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the LORD, the God of Israel, had commanded.” The text mentions city after city where Joshua, at God’s command, puts every inhabitant “to the sword”  “totally destroyed the inhabitants” and “left no survivors.”

If one takes these passages literally they record the divinely-authorised commission of genocide. But genocide surely is morally wrong. In the light of this, critics of Christian theism often ask a rhetorical question; how could a good and loving God command the extermination of the Canaanites?

One response which goes back to the patristic era is to suggest that the strict, literal reading on which this rhetorical question is based is mistaken. Recently, several, protestant scholars have suggested a hyperbolic reading of the relevant passages.[1] Perhaps the most detailed is that proposed by Nicholas Wolterstorff. Wolterstorff suggests,

“[T]hat the Book of Joshua has to be read as a theologically-oriented narration, stylized and hyperbolic at important points, of Israel’s early skirmishes in the Promised Land, with the story of these battles being framed by descriptions of two great ritualized events.  The story as a whole celebrates Joshua as the great leader of his people, faithful to Yahweh, worthy successor of Moses.  If we strip the word “hagiography” of its negative connotations, we can call it a hagiographic account of Joshua’s exploits.”[2]

In this series I will defend Wolterstorff’s position. In this post I will sketch, adapt and defend Wolterstorff’s argument. In Part II, I will argue that external evidence from comparative studies in Ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts gives considerable support to Wolterstorff’s position. Finally in Part III I will look at two implications of this position.

Wolterstorff’s Argument
Wolterstorff’s contention is that “a careful reading of the text in its literary context makes it implausible to interpret it as claiming that Yahweh ordered extermination”. It is important to note what he means by context. Here, it is clear that Wolterstorff is advocating a canonical approach. He notes that,

“Joshua as we have it today was intended as a component in the larger sequence consisting of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, I and II Samuel, and I and II Kings…  I propose that we interpret the Book of Joshua as a component within this larger sequence – in particular, that we interpret it as preceded by Deuteronomy and succeeded by Judges.”[3]

Joshua comes after Deuteronomy and before Judges. Wolterstorff points out that these books should be read as a single narrative. When one does this, however, several issues are apparent. Joshua 6-11 summarises several battles and concludes with “So Joshua took the entire land, just as the LORD had directed Moses, and he gave it as an inheritance to Israel according to their tribal divisions.  Then the land had rest from war”[4] (Joshua 11:16-23). Judges, however, opens with a battle that occurs after Joshua’s death; it states,

“After the death of Joshua, the Israelites inquired of the Lord, “Who shall go up first for us against the Canaanites, to fight against them?”  The Lord said, “Judah shall go up.  I hereby give the land into his hand.”  Judah said to his brother Simeon, “Come up with me into the territory allotted to me, that we may fight against the Canaanites; then I too will go with you into the territory allotted to you.  So Simeon went with him.  Then Judah went up and the Lord gave the Canaanites and the Perizzites into their hand; and they defeated ten thousand of them at Bezek.” [Judges 1: 1-4]

Taken literally, Joshua states Joshua conquered the whole land and Judges states that much of the land was unconquered.

Similarly, Joshua affirms he exterminated all the Canaanites in this region. Repeatedly it states that Joshua left “no survivors” and “destroyed everything that breathed” in “the entire land”, “put all the inhabitants to the sword”. Alongside these general claims the text identifies several specific places and cities where Joshua exterminated everyone and left no survivors. These include Hebron (Josh. 10:40), Debir (Josh. 10:38), the hill country and the Negev and the western foothills (Josh. 10:40). In the first chapter of Judges, however, we are told that the Canaanites lived in the Negev (1:9), in the hill country (Judg. 1:9), in Debir (Judg. 1:11), in Hebron (Judg. 1:10) and in the western foothills (Judg. 1:9). Moreover, they did so in such numbers and strength that they had to be driven out by force. These are the same cities that Joshua 10 tells us Joshua had annihilated and left no survivors in.[5]

Similarly, Joshua 11:23 states that “Joshua took the entire land” and then “gave it as an inheritance to Israel according to their tribal divisions”. Consequently, the conquered region is the same land that is later divided between the Israelite tribes. When the text turns to giving an account of these tribal divisions only a chapter later the allotments begin with God telling Joshua, “You are very old, and there are still very large areas of land to be taken over” (Josh 13:1). Moreover, when one examines the allotment given to Judah we see Caleb asking permission to drive the Anakites (Josh14: 11) from the hill countries and we also hear how Caleb has to defeat Anakites living in Hebron and, after this, marches against the people “living in Debir” (Josh 15:13-19). Similarly, it is evident with several of the other allotments that the people have yet to drive out Canaanites entrenched in the area and that the Israelites were not always successful in doing so.

We read, for example, that the Ephraimites and Manassites “did not dislodge the Canaanites living in Gezer; to this day the Canaanites live among the people of Ephraim” (Josh 16:10). Similarly, in Chapter 17 it states “Yet the Manassites were not able to occupy these towns, for the Canaanites were determined to live in that region. However, when the Israelites grew stronger, they subjected the Canaanites to forced labor but did not drive them out completely” (Joshua 17:12-13). We hear that “Danites had difficulty taking possession of their territory, so they went up and attacked Leshem, took it, put it to the sword and occupied it. They settled in Leshem and named it Dan after their forefather” (Joshua 19:47). Here we see the same land said to be subdued and conquered by Joshua in battles where he exterminated and left alive nothing that breathed; this land is yet to be occupied by the tribes of Israel and is occupied by Canaanites, often heavily armed and deeply entrenched (17:17-18).

Kenneth Kitchen notes that a careful reading of the earlier chapters makes it clear that Israel did not actually conquer the areas mentioned at all. Kitchen notes that after crossing the Jordan the Israelites set up camp in Gilgal “on the east border of Jericho” (Joshua 4:19). He notes that after every battle in the next six chapters the text explicitly states that they returned to Gilgal,

“The conflict with Canaanite city-state rulers in the southern part of Canaan is worth close examination. After the battle for Gibeon, we see the Hebrews advancing upon six towns in order, attacking and capturing them, killing their local kings and such inhabitants that had not gotten clear, and moving on, not holding on to those places. Twice over (10:15, 43), it is clearly stated that their strike force returned to base camp at Gilgal.  So there was no sweeping take over and occupation of this region at this point. And no total destruction of the towns attacked.”[6]

Kitchen goes on to note,

“What happened in the south was repeated up north. Hazor was both leader and famed center for the north Canaanite kinglets. Thus as in the south the Hebrew strike force defeated the opposition; captured their towns, killed rulers and less mobile inhabitants, symbolically burned Hazor and Hazor only to emphasis its end to its local supremacy. Again Israel did not attempt to immediately hold on to Galilee: they remained based at Gilgal (14:6).”[7]

Kitchen notes that the first “real indication of a move in occupation beyond Gilgal comes in 18:4.” This is after the first allotment of “lands to be occupied are made” and as we saw above the Israelites did not find occupying these allotments easy. He concludes, “these campaigns were essentially disabling raids: they were not territorial conquests with instant Hebrew occupation. The text is very clear about this.”[8]

Finally, the account of what God commanded differs in the two narratives. Joshua states “He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the LORD, the God of Israel, had commanded (Josh 10:40) and “exterminating them without mercy, as the LORD had commanded Moses (Josh 11:20b ). However, when the command is retroactively referred to in Judges 2:1, no mention of genocide or annihilation is made; instead we hear of how God had promised to drive them out and had commanded the Israelites to not to make treaties with them and to destroy their shrines. This silence is significant in the context. If God had commanded genocide then it is odd that only the failure to make treaties was mentioned.

Therefore taken as a single narrative and taken literally, Joshua 1-11 gives a different account of events to that narrated by Judges and also to that narrated by the later chapters of Joshua itself.

Wolterstorff raises a further point,

“Those whose occupation it is to try to determine the origins of these writings will suggest that the editors had contradictory records, oral traditions, and so forth to work with.  No doubt this is correct.  But those who edited the final version of these writings into one sequence were not mindless; they could see, as well as you and I can see, the tensions and contradictions – surface or real – that I have pointed to. So what is going on?”[9]

Wolterstorff’s point is that, regardless of what sources or strata of tradition are alleged behind the final form of Joshua, the redactors who put these books into a single narrative would have been well aware of the obvious contradictions mentioned above. Moreover, these redactors were not mindless or stupid. They obviously would not want to affirm that both accounts were a true literal description of what occurred. Yet they chose to put next to Joshua in the canon a book which began with a narration at odds with a literal reading of the early chapters of Joshua and they chose to juxtapose the picture of Joshua 1-11 with the later chapters I mentioned above. The redactor cannot therefore be asserting that both accounts are literally true.

I think Wolterstorff is correct here. However, his position could be substantially strengthened on theological grounds. In Divine Discourse Wolterstorff provides an interesting and rigorous analysis of the notion that Scripture is the word of God. Central to his analysis is that “an eminently plausible construal of the process, whereby these books found their way into a single canonical text, would be that by way of that process of canonization God was authorizing these books as together constituting a single volume of divine discourse.” [10]

This understanding of Scripture provides the theological justification for reading the text as a single series and hence determining what the author of early chapters of Joshua teaches by examining what is affirmed in Judges and later passages of Joshua.[11] Moreover, if the primary author of Scripture is God, then obviously the primary author of the final canon text is an intelligent person who is unlikely to have deliberately (or accidentally) authored an obviously -contradictory narrative. Hence, even if the contradictions were not obvious to the redactors, and I think Wolterstorff is correct that these apparent contradictions would have been,[12] they would be evident to God. Seeing the process whereby the redactors incorporated these books into a “single canonical text” constitutes God authorising them, this process cannot have involved  the redactors affirming as literally true two contradictory accounts.

It may be contended that an appeal to divine authorship in this way begs the question, however, I think this is mistaken. As I understand the objection, the sceptic who claims that God commanded genocide is offering a reductio ad absurdum; he or she starts by assuming that whatever God commands is right and that Scripture is the word of God, and then derives from these assumptions the absurd conclusion that genocide is not wrong. The question then is whether, granting these assumptions, such a conclusion does, in fact, follow. If Scripture is a unified divine discourse, the sceptic’s conclusion need not follow, for another assumption of the sceptic – that all accounts were intended to be taken as literal – is not evidently true.[13]

Therefore the picture of total annihilation of the Canaanites and complete conquest of their land, and the picture put forward in Judges cannot both be taken as literal descriptions of what actually happened.

At this point Wolterstorff raises a further issue about the type of literature Joshua appears to be. He notes that the early chapters of Judges, by and large, read like “down- to- earth history”. However, “Anyone who reads the Book of Joshua in one sitting cannot fail to be struck by certain stylistic features in the narrative.  One is “the highly- ritualized character of some of the major events described”.[14]

“The book is framed by its opening narration of the ritualized crossing of the Jordan and by its closing narration of the equally- ritualized ceremony of blessing and cursing that took place at Shechem; and the conquest narrative begins with the ritualized destruction of Jericho.”[15]

A related ritualistic feature is the “the mysterious sacral category of being devoted to destruction.”[16] Most significant is the use of formulaic language,

“Anyone who reads the Book of Joshua in one sitting cannot fail to be struck by the prominent employment of formulaic phrasings. … Far more important is the formulaic clause, “struck down all the inhabitants with the edge of the sword.”

The first time one reads that Joshua struck down all the inhabitants of a city with the edge of the sword, namely, in the story of the conquest of Jericho (6:21), one makes nothing of it.  But the phrasing – or close variants thereon — gets repeated, seven times in close succession in chapter 10, two more times in chapter 11, and several times in other chapters.  The repetition makes it unmistakable that we are dealing here with a formulaic literary convention.”[17]

Thus Joshua itself appears to be full of ritualistic, stylised, formulaic language. It therefore looks like something other than a mere literal description of what occurred. In light of these facts Wolterstorff argues that Judges should be taken literally whereas Joshua is hagiographic history; a highly-stylised, exaggerated account of what occurred, designed to teach theological and moral points rather than to describe in detail what actually happened. Wolterstorff provides the example of North American morality tales of the noble puritan or Washington crossing the Delaware. These are idealised, exaggerated accounts of the past designed to teach a moral lesson, not accurate accounts of what actually occurred.

In Part II I look at Ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts.

[1] Alvin Plantinga “Comments on Evan Fales’ Satanic Verses: Moral Chaos in Holy Writ” a paper presented to “My Ways Are Not Your Ways: The Character of the God of the Hebrew Bible” Conference at the centre for Philosophy of Religion, University of Notre Dame, Friday 11 September 2009; Paul Copan “Yahweh Wars and the Canaanites:  Divinely Mandated Genocide or Corporate Capital Punishment” Philosophia Christi 11/1 (2009)  and Chapter 16 of Is God a Moral Monster: Making Sense of the Old Testament (Baker Books: forthcoming 2011); Christopher Wright The God I Don’t Understand: Reflections on Tough Questions of Faith Grand Rapids MI: Zondervan, 2008) 87-88; In his latest discussion on the issue, William Lane Craig states “I’ve come to appreciate that the object of God’s command to the Israelis was not the slaughter of the Canaanites, as is often imagined. The command rather was primarily to drive them out of the land. The judgement upon these Canaanite kingdoms was to dispossess them of their land and thus destroy them as kingdoms.” See Divine Command Morality and Voluntarism at http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7911 accessed at 29 October 2010.
[2] Nicholas Wolterstorff “Reading Joshua” a paper presented to “My Ways Are Not Your Ways: The Character of the God of the Hebrew Bible” Conference at the centre for Philosophy of Religion, University of Notre Dame, Saturday 12 September 2009.
[3] Nicholas Wolterstorff “Reading Joshua” Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham in  Michael Bergmann, Michael J Murray and Michael C Rea (Eds) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010 forthcoming).
[4] All Scripture quotations are from the NIV unless otherwise stated. At certain points I will quote from other translations when I think they capture the literal wording more accurately in a manner that is important for my argument.
[5] In addition to these general claims about exterminating populations, Joshua 11:21-22 states “Joshua came and wiped out the Anakim from the hill country, from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, and from all the hill country of Judah.” This happens after Joshua is already said to have killed the inhabitants in these areas in Josh 10:30-40. Josh 11:21 states that no Anakites were left living in Israeli territory after this campaign. In Judges 1:21 the text explicitly states that Anakites are in Hebron.
[6] Kenneth Kitchen On the Reliability of the Old  Testament (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003) 162.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Wolterstorff, Supra n 3.
[10] Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 295; see also “Unity behind the Canon” in Christine Helmer and Christof Landmesser (Eds) One Scripture or Many? The Canon from Biblical, Theological, and Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) 217-232.
[11] Plantinga notes “an assumption of the enterprise is that the principal author of the Bible—the entire Bible—is God himself (according to Calvin, God the Holy Spirit). Of course each of the books of the Bible has a human author or authors as well; still, the principal author is God. This impels us to treat the whole more like a unified communication than a miscellany of ancient books. Scripture isn’t so much a library of independent books as itself a book with many subdivisions but a central theme: the message of the gospel. By virtue of this unity, furthermore (by virtue of the fact that there is just one principal author), it is possible to “interpret Scripture with Scripture.” If a given passage from one of Paul’s epistles is puzzling, it is perfectly proper to try to come to clarity as to what God’s teaching is in this passage by appealing not only to what Paul himself says elsewhere in other epistles but also to what is taught elsewhere in Scripture (for example, the Gospel of John)” Alvin Plantinga Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) 385.
[12] Wolterstorff notes that the phrase “he killed all the inhabitants with the edge of the sword” occurs at least 12 times in Joshua 6-11 in close succession. Judges on the other hand affirms 7 times in close succession that the Israelites failed to drive the Canaanites out, finishing with the Angel of Bokim rebuking them for failing to do so. Similarly in Josh 13-18 it is hammered repeatedly that the land is not yet conquered. Hence these are not subtle contrasts. They are in Wolterstorff’s words “flamboyant” so it’s unlikely an intelligent redactor would have missed this.
[13] I am grateful to Zachary Ardern for helping me to develop this point.
[14] Wolterstorff, Supra n 2.
[15] Ibid. The ritualised nature of the narration is also stressed by Duane Christensen, Deuteronomy 1:1-21:9 (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2001).
[16] Wolterstroff, supra n 2; the phrase “devoted to destruction” (herem in Hebrew). That reference to the herem serves a figurative or rhetorical function is also noted by Christopher Wright “Now we need to know that Israel’s practice of herem was not itself unique. Texts from other nations at the time show that total destruction was practised, or at any rate proudly claimed, elsewhere. But we must also recognise that the language of warfare had a total rhetoric that liked to make universal and absolute claims about total victory and wiping out the enemy. Such rhetoric often exceeded reality on the ground….” in The God I Don’t Understand: Reflections on Tough Questions of Faith Grand Rapids MI: Zondervan, 2008) 87-88. At the other end of the spectrum minimalist scholar Thomas  L Thomson writing on the use of herem in the Mesha stele notes  the “use of the ban at both Ataroth and Nebo are clearly part of the totalitarian rhetoric of holy war rather than historical considerations.”  “Mesha and Questions of Historicity” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament Vol. 22, No. 2, 249.
[17] Wolterstorff, supra n 2.

RELATED POSTS:
God and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part II: Ancient Near Eastern Conquest Accounts
God and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part III: Two Implications of the Hagiographic Hyperbolic Account
Sunday Study: Joshua and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part I
Sunday Study: Joshua and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part II
Did God Command Genocide in the Old Testament?

“One good way to end a conversation – or start an argument – is to tell a group of well educated professionals that you hold a political position (preferably a controversial one such as being against abortion or pornography) because it is required by your understanding of God’s will. In the unlikely event that anyone hangs around to talk with you about it, chances are that you will be challenged on the ground that you are intent on imposing your religious beliefs on other people. And in contemporary political and legal culture, nothing is worse.”[1]

Carter is referring to the separationist understanding of religion and public life, the idea that in a contemporary pluralistic society significant restraint must be put on the political role of religious reasons. This restraint is negative; when a functionary deliberates over a proposed policy it is not justified for that functionary to decide to support or oppose that policy on grounds derived from religion. A corollary of this is that citizens should not try to influence public policy by appealing to religious reasons. Separationists argue that the public policy of a pluralistic society must be able to be justified by a plausible secular justification in order for it to be just to all. Religious beliefs, while utilised and followed in private, should be kept separate from public policy debates, the administration of public institutions and the deliberation of public functionaries.

Dominant advocates of this view include philosophers John Rawls, Robert Audi, Gerald Gaus and Jürgen Habermas. In “Religion as a Conversation-Stopper” Richard Rorty described separationism as:

“the happy, Jeffersonian compromise that the Enlightenment reached with the religious. This compromise consists in privatizing religion — keeping it out of … “the public square,” making it seem bad taste to bring religion into discussions of public policy.”[2]

Advocates for religious restraint typically claim that it need not be codified. It is simply a moral requirement which applies to all citizens regardless of their role within society — some form of censure rather than legal stricture is what is suggested. This is what Rorty means when he refers to it being “bad taste” to bring religion into the public square. Notwithstanding the separationists stated intention, in my thesis I will argue that this call for religious restraint is not simply theoretical philosophy, which is present in society only by way of self-imposed moral restraint or the sort of peer-pressure Carter’s quote alluded to. I will argue that the norm of religious restraint is increasingly present in our public policy and jurisprudence.

Rorty alluded to Jefferson’s famous “Wall of Separation Letter” where Jefferson set out his understanding as to how the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause should be interpreted. Tellingly, this suggests a link between the separationist philosophy and the way the religious freedom components of Bills of Rights are interpreted. These components address the very same questions I opened with; how should religion fit into a just pluralistic society? The purported answers are commonly given in slogans, “freedom of religion”, “free exercise”, “freedom to manifest one’s religion” and statements declaring the separation of church and state, opposing Establishment and so on. I say ‘slogans’ because such clauses are typically light on detail; fleshing out what they mean and how they are to apply at a practical levels, to specific cases falls to the commentators, the lawyers who propose particular interpretations in their submissions and ultimately the judiciary. The resulting body of jurisprudence reflects the perspectives of the dominant views in society.

Consider the US Supreme Court’s three leading Establishment Clause precedents: Lemon, Endorsement and Coercion. The first of the three parts of the Lemon Test requires public policy to have a valid secular purpose, a non-religious rationale must be offered for all state actions. The Endorsement Test prohibits the state from “endorsing” religion over irreligion. The Coercion Test provides that the state must not coerce religious practice; not only must it not be required, but in Lee v Weisman the application was shifted to what Justice Scalia, in his dissent, termed a “test of psychological coercion”. The US Supreme Court essentially took the view that being one of few (or the only one) to opt out of a religious practice in a public setting was considered a form of state coercion by peer pressure. I will argue that in each of the dominant Establishment tests, a requirement for the state to place a restraint on religion or for religion to be kept from public life can be seen. This stricture affects public policy and is essentially separationism in codified form.

Despite its current orthodoxy, separationism has its critics, particularly in philosophy and law. These critics collectively hold that although separationism claims to operate impartially, it, in fact, gives public hegemony to secular perspectives. Critics argue that the call for religious restraint is unjust for religious citizens as it requires conformity to secularism and thus privileges secularism over religion. Philip Quinn observes;

These principles impose burdens on religious people that [the separationist] nowhere suggests imposing on nonreligious people. … [The separationist] does not propose that nonreligious people must be sufficiently motivated by adequate religious reason for their advocacy or support of restrictive laws or policies. The lack of symmetry is striking.[3]

Christopher Eberle, Terence Cuneo agree there is a clear asymmetry in the way religious beliefs are treated by the state compared with secular beliefs. They question why religious believers, who participate in public, are required to bracket beliefs they hold as both true, important and relevant to the issue; Stephen Carter labels this “[t]he separation of church and self.”[4] Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that separationism violates the equal freedom component of a pluralistic democratic society, “Using their religious convictions in making their decisions and conducting their debates on political issues is part of what constitutes conducting their lives as they see fit.”[5][Emphasis added] Philip Devine point out that “Freedom of religion is not only the freedom to advocate religious (or irreligious) ideas; it is the freedom to form, sustain, participate in, and transmit, forms of community life”.[6] Yet separationists maintain that some form of religious restraint is not only in accord with the notion of liberal democracy but essential to it. As Rorty put it, “we shall not be able to keep a democratic political community going unless the religious believers remain willing to trade privatization for a guarantee of religious liberty.”[7]

The dominant tests seek to apply a reading of Jefferson’s “Wall of Separation Letter”; but in an article in First Things entitled “Establishing Free Exercise,” Vincent Phillip Muñoz argues that James Madison, the author of the First Amendment and a noted authority on the subject, did not intend this;

“When editing the religious freedom amendment to Virginia’s state Bill of Rights, Madison proposed the following:

‘That religion or the duty we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, being under the direction of reason and conviction only, not violence or compulsion, all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of it accord[in]g to the dictates of conscience; and therefore that no man or class of men ought, on account of religion to be invested with peculiar emoluments or privileges, nor subjected to any penalties or disabilities.’

Madison interpreted “free exercise” to mean no privileges and no penalties on account of religion.”[8][Emphasis added]

Munoz argues that Madison’s “no privileges, no penalties” test could unify “the no-establishment and free exercise provisions into a coherent whole that recognizes the legitimate concerns of both sides of the debate while, at the same time, respecting our nation’s founding heritage.”[9]

“no privileges, no penalties” would not require forays into students’ psychological feelings. Judges would not need to inquire if school children feel like “insiders” or “outsiders,” or if a child might perceive the state to be “endorsing” religion, which are necessarily subjective judgments. Courts would only need to ask if, on account of religion, religious citizens as such were granted a material benefit or if nonreligious citizens were subject to a penalty like a fine or imprisonment. For Newdow, the relevant question is: Was Michael Newdow’s daughter subject to some form of disciplinary action because she would not say the Pledge? Since she was not, the Pledge stands.”[10]

The “no privileges, no penalties” test upholds freedom of religion and separation of church and state by essentially permitting religion to have a place in public life as long as those who engage in public religious conduct do not gain a privilege for doing so and those who do not wish to participate are both free to opt out and are not penalised for doing so. Interestingly, the New Zealand jurisdiction’s approach, within the limited cases to date – where as long as one can ‘opt out’ of a religious practice there is no coercion, has some affinity or parallel with a “no privileges, no penalties” approach. Munoz’s appropriation of Madison has the potential to be a just way forward in both the debate within philosophy and in law. It does not have the privatising effect on religion that the dominant tests do, neither does it have the asymmetry.

I have this week been accepted into the University of Auckland’s LLM program. In 2011 I will start my studies towards a Masters of Law by thesis-only. This blog post is part of the proposal I have submitted to write it on – it may change as my supervisors and I work things out but this is the gist of what is in my head. I’d love to hear your thoughts – it will help get me thinking on where I am going with this!

RELATED POSTS:
Contra Mundum: Secularism and Public Life
Religious Restraint and Public Policy: Part I
Religious Restraint and Public Policy: Part II
Religious Restraint and Public Policy: Part III
Religious Restraint and Public Policy: Part IV
Religious Restraint and Public Policy: Part V
Religious Restraint and Public Policy: Part VI

[1] Stephen Carter The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialise Religious Devotion (1993) 23-24.
[2] Richard Rorty “Religion as a Conversation-Stopper” (1994) 3:1 Common Knowledge 1, 2.
[3] Philip Quinn “Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate” (2000) 60:2 Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 487 (book review).
[4] Carter, above n 1, 1.
[5] Nicholas Wolterstorff “The Role of Religion in Decision and Discussion of Political Issues” in Nicholas Wolterstorff & Robert Audi (eds) Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate (1997) 77.
[6] Philip Devine We: A Study in Social and Political Philosophy, Ch 10 accessed 10 December 2010.
[7] Rorty, above n 2, 3.
[8] Vincent Phillip Muñoz “Establishing Free Exercise” First Things (January 2004) 139-142, 141.
[9] Ibid 139.
[10] Ibid 142.

DR CHRIS TUCKER’S INTRODUCTION

Published here with permission

Dr. Matthew Flannagan is quickly becoming a respected scholar on issues related to the philosophy of religion, ethics, and theology.  His articles and book chapters cover such weighty topics as, whether the Bible condones genocide, the ethics of holy war, abortion and tonight’s topic, the relationship of God and morality.  The importance of Dr. Flannagan’s work has led to many speaking engagements all over New Zealand and also in the United States.  Two of these speaking engagements were public debates, including one against Dr Bill Cooke, an erstwhile President of the New Zealand Association of Rational Humanists.  Dr Flannagan received his PhD in Theology from the University of Otago.  From the University of Waikato, he received his Master’s in Philosophy with First Class Honours.  You can follow Dr Flannagan’s work at mandm.org.nz, the blog that he co-authors with his wife, Madeleine Flannagan.  When he is not working, he enjoys spending time outdoors with his wife and four children. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Matthew Flannagan

DR MATTHEW FLANNAGAN’S OPENING STATEMENT

Is it defensible to ground right and wrong in the commands of God? In this debate I will defend an affirmative answer to this question. I will defend the position that moral rightness and wrongness consist in agreement and disagreement, respectively, with Gods commands¹- this is what Philosophers call a divine command theory. In defending this thesis I will do two things. First I will argue the standard arguments against a divine command theory fail. Second I will argue that Ray’s attempts to refute this theory fail. God is the source of morality.

1. Standard Arguments Against a Divine Command Theory

Divine command theories are frequently said to suffer a debilitating problem, they make morality arbitrary – anything at all could be deemed ‘right’ as long as God commanded it, even torturing other people for fun. This objection assumes that it is possible that God could command atrocious things like torturing people for fun. This assumption, however, seems very dubious. We need to remember that we are not talking about right or wrong as being based on the commands of just anyone, we are talking about God defined by Ray as “omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.”

So, as the terms are defined, the claim that it is possible for God to command people to torture others for fun is true only if it is possible for a morally perfect person to command such an atrocious thing. But this is unlikely. The very reason critics cite examples such as torturing people for fun is because these actions are paradigms of conduct that no morally good person could ever entertain or endorse.

A predictable rejoinder to this response is that if some action is wrong because God prohibits it then God cannot be said to be good in any meaningful sense. The claim ‘God is good’ turns into no more than the claim that God obeys his own commands, if this is so, can God be said to have any duties at all?

The suggestion that if God has no duties then he cannot be said to be good in any meaningful sense, has a grain of truth to it. If we are going to understand God’s goodness in terms of God having duties that he consistently fulfils then a divine command theory cannot account for God’s goodness. However, why must the phrase ‘God is good’ be understood in terms of God having duties? I do not see why it should?

Many theologians and philosophers have suggested an alternative, God’s goodness should be understood in terms of God having certain character traits. To claim God is good is to claim that he is truthful, benevolent, loving, gracious, merciful, that he is opposed to certain actions such as murder, rape, torturing people for fun and so on. Now, even if God does not have duties, it does not follow that he cannot have character traits such as these. It is true that God is not under any obligation to love others or to tell the truth or what have you, but that does not mean he cannot love others or tell the truth. God does not have to have a duty to do something in order to do it.

So the standard criticisms of a divine command theory fail.

2. Raymond Bradley’s Moral Argument

Ray attempts a different tack. Ray argues the divine command theorist is committed to five inconsistent propositions:

1. What God proposes for our belief–including beliefs about what we ought to do–is what we ought to believe or do.

2. In his holy scripture God proposes for our belief that he has caused, committed, condoned, or laid down commands for us to obey, every one of the four types of crimes of types A, B, C, and D.

3. It is morally wrong to cause, commit, condone, or command any of the crimes of types A, B, C, D.

4. God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.

5. A morally perfect being would not do anything that is morally wrong.

In response to this I will make three lines of criticism.

I

The first line of criticism is that even if Ray’s argument is sound it does not show that a divine command theory is false. Ray has argued that the Bible presents an indefensible picture of God. However, the question of biblical infallibility is not the topic of our debate tonight. While many divine command theorists believe in biblical infallibility, some do not. A divine command theorist could, for example, claim that the wrongness of an action is determined by God but we know what is right and wrong from our conscience and not from a written revelation. The Philosopher Philip Quinn suggested a theory like this.² Alternatively he or she could accept some other revelation such as the Talmud or the Koran. So strictly speaking, Ray’s argument does not address the moot of the debate tonight. One could accept everything Ray says about the Bible and still defensibly embrace a divine command theory, the claim that God is the source of morality is untouched.

II

This brings me to my second line of criticism. Ray’s third proposition [3] is formulated as:

3. It is morally wrong to cause, commit, condone, or command any of the crimes of types A, B, C, D.

This claim is ambiguous; there are two ways it could be interpreted. The first is:

[3a] It is morally wrong for human beings to cause, commit, condone or command any of the crimes of types A, B, C, D.

or Ray could mean:

[3b] It is morally wrong for any person (including God) to cause, commit, condone or command any of the crimes of types A, B, C, D.

To be valid Ray’s argument needs to be interpreted in terms of [3b]. Ray argues that God, engages in wrongdoing when he causes, commits, commands and condones A B C and D. There are two problems with this interpretation.

First, Ray’s argument does not justify this conclusion. Ray states “to deny (3) would be to … ally oneself with moral monsters like Ghenghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot.” This is false: Genghis Khan, Hitler and Stalin are human beings to condemn them we only need to accept [3a] not [3b].

Second, Ray’s argument is circular, [3b] assumes that God has duties; however, on my view the wrongness of an action consists in its being forbidden by God. Given that God does not issue commands to himself it follows that he has no duties. To propose [3b] Ray has to assume that my view is unjustified, which is what he is supposed to be proving. He is reasoning in a circle.

III

My third line of criticism concerns Ray’s second proposition,

2. In his holy scripture God proposes for our belief that he has caused, committed, condoned, or laid down commands for us to obey, every one of the four types of crimes of types A, B, C, and D.

Actually none of the passages Ray cites contain commands to us. He cites some of God’s actions and he cites some commands God gave to Israel and to Joshua but one cannot directly infer from these that these are commands issued to us.

We have to keep in mind that the Bible is a collection of Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) texts. It was written centuries ago in three different languages, none of which were English. The cultural methods of written communication back then differ significantly from what we are used to when we pick up the latest ‘new atheist’ book at Whitcoulls. Further, the Bible is made up of various books written in various literary genres. To interpret it correctly one needs to take what it says in context – as a whole – and in accord with the literary conventions governing ancient texts translated from foreign languages. Ray fails to do this,

Instead he uses a selective, out of context, and excessively literalistic interpretation of these passages.

let me cite some examples.

1. The Slaughter of the Canaanites

The first is the slaughter the Canaanites. Ray claims God “orders the slaughter, without compassion, of hundreds of thousands of women, children, and suckling babes.” Ray here alludes to the book of Joshua’s record of the conquest of the Canaanites. Critics, like Ray, are quick to point out that this text states Joshua “totally destroyed all who breathed”, left “no survivors” in “the entire land”, went through the land “exterminating them without mercy” at God’s command.

What they do not note is that the text proceeds after this to state that the Canaanites were, in fact, not literally wiped out. Over and over the text affirms that the land was still occupied by the Canaanites, who remained heavily armed and deeply entrenched in the very same regions and the very same cities that Joshua was said to have “destroyed all who breathed” and left “no survivors” in. In light of this, it is unlikely that the author intended the language in question to be taken literally.³

This conclusion is confirmed by research into Ancient Near-Eastern history writing. In a comprehensive comparative study of Ancient Near-Eastern historiography. Old Testament scholar, K Lawson Younger concludes that the Old Testament uses the same literary conventions as other Ancient Near-Eastern conquest accounts. He also establishes that within this genre the rhetoric of total conquest, complete annihilation, destruction of the enemy, killing everyone, leaving no survivors, and so on are frequently used as hyperbole⁴: the language functions like a person watching David Tua in a boxing match, yells, “Knock his block off! Hand him his head! Take him out!” or hopes that the All Blacks will “annihilate the Springboks” or “totally slaughter the Wallabies.”⁵ Now, sports fans do not actually want David Tua to decapitate his opponent or the All Blacks to become mass murderers. Understood in a non-literal sense, the phrases probably meant something like, attack them, defeat them, drive them out; not literally kill every man, woman, child, donkey, etc.

2. Capital Punishment.

My second example is Ray’s reference to at least 34 offences for which God prescribes the death penalty. (Actually there are only 15 such offences). Ray contends that these passages constitute literal commands to the courts to execute people. This is dubious. The Torah is is written according to the literary and rhetorical conventions of Ancient Near-Eastern legal writing. J J Finkelstein notes that capital sanctions in such texts,

[W]ere not meant to be complied with literally even when they were first drawn up, [But rather they] serve an admonitory function. If one would be bold enough to restate Hammurabi’s 230 as a direct admonition it might run to this effect: “woe to the contractor who undertakes construction and in his greed cuts corners”.6

One of the leading experts on Ancient Near-Eastern legal texts Raymond Westbrook states they “reflect the scribal compilers’ concern for perfect symmetry and delicious irony rather than the pragmatic experience of the law courts.”⁷ The method used was “to set out principles by the use of often extreme examples.”⁸ In Ancient Near-Eastern legal practice a person who committed a serious crime would be legally considered to have forfeited their life or limb – this, however, did not mean that they were executed or mutilated. Instead they could ransom their life or limb by making a monetary payment decided by the courts “the death sentence is mostly hyperbole,” a literary device designed to under underscore the seriousness of the crime.9

A careful reading of the Torah confirms this. The clearest example occurs in Numbers 35. After laying out clearly and repeatedly that a person who kills in pre-meditation “shall surely be put to death” the text goes on to state “Do not accept a ransom for the life of a murderer, who deserves to die. He must surely be put to death… .” Unless there was an assumed practice of “ransoming” the lives of those under a capital sentence, this comment seems superfluous. Old Testament scholar Joe Sprinkle notes, “The availability of ransom seems to have been so prevalent that when biblical law wants to exclude it, as in the case of intentional murder, it must specifically prohibit it.”10

3. Hell

My third example is Ray’s discussion of hell. Ray cites the book of Revelation’s reference to “the lake of fire” where “they will be tormented with burning sulphur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb, and the smoke of their torment ascendeth for ever and ever”. He maintains this text teaches God will torture people forever merely for not having the right religious beliefs.

This is dubious, Revelation is apocalyptic literature. Apocalyptic literature is highly metaphorical and uses stock symbols drawn from the Old Testament. If one looks at how the symbols Ray refers to are actually used in the Old Testament, they do not support Ray’s conclusion. The imagery of sulphur being poured upon people and smoke rising is regularly used in the Old Testament to symbolise the destruction of various nations.(Deut 29:23; Job 18:15-17; Ps 11:6; Isa 30:33, Isa 34-8-11). Similarly the “lake of fire” is drawn from Daniel, where it symbolises the destruction of various world empires. In Rev 18, a few chapters later, the destruction of a city, named Babylon (probably a reference to Rome or Jerusalem) is symbolised by the city being tormented by fire and onlookers watch the rising smoke. The message is that Babylon has been judged and destroyed, not that it continues to be tortured forever.

The same is true of Ray’s references to the Gospels; the phrase the “weeping and gnashing of teeth” occurs many times in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, and in almost every instance signifies hatred or rage and envy at God or the righteous – not the agony of pain and torture.(Job 16:9; Ps 35:16, Psalm 112:10, 36:16, 37:12; Lam. 2:16, Acts 7:54) In one instance, in fact, it states “they will gnash their teeth and waste away.” Similarly, the phrase “unquenchable fire” is used nine times in the Old Testament. There it refers not to a fire that tortures but one that consumes what it devours because it is never put out. (see Isa 1:31, 34:10, 11; Jer 4:4, 7:20, 17:27, 21:12; Ezek 20:47, 48; Amos 5:6).

Ray cites from the King James version of 2 Thessalonians 1:7-8, “the Lord Jesus Christ shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God.” He, however, snips the end off the quote, the full text states,

God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.

In context the reference to fire clearly means destruction and not torture.

Ray’s claim that the Bible teaches that people will be condemned ‘merely for having the wrong religion’ is equally dubious. An in context examination of the passages he cites show that the basis of judgement is a person’s actions not merely their beliefs.

Conclusion

First, even if Ray’s case is sound, at best it only amounts to an attack of the doctrine of biblical infallibility, the denial of which is perfectly compatible with a divine command theory of ethics.

Second, his argument for proposition (3) commits the fallacy of equivocation and assumes the very thing the argument is trying to prove.

Finally, Ray’s argument for (2) consists of citing a series of passages, often selectively, out of context and without regard for literary genre or literary conventions that are found within the texts itself.This might might be a sure-fire way to make the best-seller list at Whitcoulls but it is obviously not the way any serious biblical scholar should read a text.

Divine command theorists are not committed to all of the five inconsistent propositions he refers to and so are not required, on pain of contradiction, to deny that God is the source of morality.

1. Robert M Adams “Moral Arguments for Theism” in Robert Adams The Virtue of Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) 145.
2. Philip Quinn “Divine Command Theory” in Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory ed Hugh La Follette (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing House, 2000) 67.
3. See Nicholas Wolterstorff’s “Reading Joshua” in Divine Evil ? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham eds Micheal Rea, Michael Murray and Michael Bergmann (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) forthcoming.
4. K Lawson Younger Jr Ancient Conquest Accounts: A Study in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History Writing (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990).
5. This example is adapted from Alvin Plantinga “Reply to Fales” and Nicholas Wolterstorff “Reading Joshua” in Divine Evil ? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham eds Micheal Rea, Michael Murray and Michael Bergmann (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) forthcoming.
6. J. J. Finkelstein The Ox that Gored (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1981) 35.
7. Raymond Westbrook, “The Character of Ancient Near Eastern Law,” in A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law, Vol. 1, ed. Raymond Westbrook (Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003) 74.
8. Ibid.
9. Walter Kaiser, “Gods Promise Plan and his Gracious Law,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 35:3 (1992) 293. Joe M Sprinkle “The Interpretation of Exodus 21:22-25 (Lex Talonis) and Abortion,” Westminster Theological Journal 55 (1993) 238.
10. Joe M Sprinkle “The Interpretation of Exodus 21:22-25 (Lex Talonis) and Abortion,” Westminster Theological Journal 55 (1993) 238.

Please note that this series is not a transcript of the debate. Each post in this series is effectively a very close approximation of what was said on the night and has been put together from the papers and notes each speaker prepared and spoke from plus any additions each recalled making.

RELATED POSTS:
Video: Bradley v Flannagan “Is God the Source of Morality?
The Podcast: Bradley v Flannagan
Joint Communique: Bradley v Flannagan Debate
Raymond Bradley’s Opening Statement: Bradley v Flannagan Debate
Bradley’s Reply to Matt: Bradley v Flannagan Debate
Flannagan’s Reply to Ray: Bradley v Flannagan Debate
Glenn Peoples’ Review: Bradley v Flannagan Debate

William Lane Craig, Raymond Bradley and the Problem of Hell Part One
William Lane Craig, Raymond Bradley and the Problem of Hell. Part Two.
Sunday Study: Joshua and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part I
Sunday Study: Joshua and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part II
Capital Punishment in the Old Testament: 1
Capital Punishment in the Old Testament: 2