After 40 years in the desert, the people of Israel arrived at last at the promised land. Moses died, and their new leader was called Joshua. The city of Jericho barred its gates against the Israelites. No-one could come in, and no-one could go out.
God spoke to Joshua, and told him to march with all his soldiers and seven priests, right around the walls of Jericho. The priests were to walk in front with the Ark of the Covenant (the beautiful box that the Israelites had made to carry the tablets with the 10 Commandments on). They were to carry rams’ horn trumpets.
God told Joshua to march around the city once a day for six days. Then, on the seventh day, Joshua, the soldiers and the priests were to march seven times around the city. Then the priests were to blow their rams’ horn trumpets and all the people of Israel were to shout a mighty shout.
The people of Israel did as God commanded.
On the seventh day, when the trumpets sounded and the people shouted, the walls of the city fell down and the people of Israel took the city.
Toad is enjoying this saunter through The Good Book. He seems to remember that God told the Jews not to touch the Ark. But one day, it looked as if it might fall down, so someone put out a hand to steady it. And God struck them dead. Is this right? I’m sure it is because I remember it being one of the first inclinations I got that religion was, questionable, at least.
And above, when the Israelites ‘took’ Jerico, what happened to the Jericans therein?
The incident with the Ark is recorded twice: 2 Samuel 6:3-8 and 1 Chronicles 13:6-12
God had given Israel rules for carrying the Ark. It was not to be touched; it was to be covered; the carrying poles were only to be touched by Levites.
David and all of Israel consented to ignoring those rules – which were for their own protection. They put the Ark, uncovered, in an ox cart. Definitely a sin against the Health and Safety in Employment Act, and the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act (or whatever the equivalents are in your neck of the woods).
They all sinned, but fortunately only one man died. We are not told what happened to him next, but God would have sorted it. He meant well, which would be counted in his favour, of course.
Goodness, you’re an apologetics machine tonight!
http://www.childrensermons.com/sermons/jericho.htm
I think the above might help. Or maybe not. It cunningly doesn’t mention it outright, but Toad suspects the inhabitants were massacred.
That’s the stuff to give the kids! What a video game it would make!
Yes, Toad has diligently checked and is able to give Joyful the sad news – news to her no doubt – that the naughty old Jews did in fact slaughter every man woman (including, no doubt pregnant ones) child and beast in the joint, with the honorable exception of a traitor to her own people and her family.
Toad is sure the omission of this is simple ignorance on Joyful’s part, and by no means, ‘wilfull blindness!’
The more Toad reads Joyful’s joyful justifications of the horrors of history, the more impressed he gets!
Kind of you to point that out, Toad. No, it wasn’t ignorance. It was definitely wilfull blindness.
In response to the erudite Toad:
It strikes me that the atheist / agnostic critic of the Old Testament generally has a rather joyfully optimistic, indeed naive view of human nature and history.
What would we expect the interaction between God and humanity to be like? Given human nature I would expect a rather messy affair struck through with human vices.
Were the bible to present a greeting card picture view of history (which is what the non-theist critic seems to feel entitled to) I’d smell a rat.
But the messiness of reality I can accept
“But the messiness of reality I can accept,”
Says Mr Badger.
To paraphrase Carlyle, (Oh come on, it can’t hurt to paraphrase him a little – he’s dead!) in a slightly different context- “By God, you’d better!”
I suppose Toad is accusing Joyful of a little sly ‘editing’ by omission here. Why not! He’s done worse!
And, of course, there are folk who don’t ‘expect the interaction between God and humanity’ to be like much of anything.
🙂
“I suppose Toad is accusing Joyful of a little sly ‘editing’ by omission here. Why not! He’s done worse!”
The charge will stick I believe, but we might mention mitigating circumstances: she is of course writing history for the very young. And of course (I won’t mention Wittgenstein’s ladder) that rightly involves omission. Every 10 year old should know the general outline of the Second World War, no 10 year old should know the full litany of horrors that I’m sure all readers of this blog can call to mind.
“And, of course, there are folk who don’t ‘expect the interaction between God and humanity’ to be like much of anything.”
Well yes, though that may be a bit to the let of the point. We can’t criticise the bible for failing to live up to our expectations in the very same breath as claiming that we should expect nothing from it anyway.
*left of the point
.
Toad has never expected the Bible to live up to his expectations.
It certainly never fails to live down to them, though.
Well put, this blog has had a Dawkins for a while, now it seems there is a Hitchens.
Also remember that the inhabitants of Jericho were ‘only natives at the time’
….the army of Israel marched around Jericho as God commanded while the priests blew the horns. They may have been tired of covering the same ground over and over again each day, but they obeyed God exactly. As Christians, we may tire of dealing with the same problem over and over again, but we can trust God to help us. …..
Bit of a stretch? Perhaps. Awful
I wrote this for very small children; when I first wrote it, the oldest was six (now ten and a half), and (since my daughters are still producing offspring at intervals) the youngest at the moment is three months old.
As the older ones graduate onto the uncut version, the questions are getting tougher. Mind you, it doesn’t much worry them that lots of people get killed (gruesome beasts, children).
…Mind you, it doesn’t much worry them that lots of people get killed (gruesome beasts, children)….
There is an irony in the fact that we often spare them the details they’d enjoy the most
There’s a poem about that – it talks about the sanitising of nursery rhymes and finishes with the lines:
If you wish to please the little children dear
Why not go out and be eaten by a bear?
Brilliant 🙂
Yesterday was the feast day of the Immaculate Conception, which ties in a bit with the discussion above.
The doctrine teaches that Our Lady was given the grace of redemption at the time of her conception, so that she was – from the very start of her life – without original sin. Now this didn’t mean that she couldn’t sin. Eve was also without original sin. But it did mean that she wasn’t ruled by her instincts and her appetites.
That dealt with the nature side of things. However, she was to be born and to grow up in a family. So what about nurture?
What we see in the Old Testament – what I’m exploring with this series of children’s stories – is the slow preparation of a place, a time, a culture, and a family in which a person born without concupiscence could retain that grace and could find a loyal protector.
And, of course, fertile ground in the hearts and minds of the many of her country-people, for the words of her Son to take root.
So in medical terms, the operation required disinfecting the area first. Or, to put it in gardening terms, first the soil had to be turned and the weeds pulled out.
From our perspective, this is a tough call. Some people argue that the idea God ordered massacres was just an interpretation made by the Israelites, a rough, tough bunch of warrior nomads slowly developing a theology. But I think that’s a cop-out. It’s pretty clear from the number of times the Israelites were seduced into local worship practices that the pagan neighbours would have been a serious threat to the plan.
Remember that the law stated clearly that anyone who lived by the Jewish law was to be treated well. “And if a stranger sojourn with you in your land, you shall not vex him. (34) The stranger who dwells with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I (am) Yahweh your Almighty.”
So it wasn’t about killing people because they were Canaanites. It was about killing people because they were a serious danger to the survival of Israel as the nation of the promise. And without the nation of the promise, there would be no redemption.
God can sort it, though. As I’ve said before, death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to people. I think we can take it that all the children, at least, went straight to Heaven.
…Yesterday was the feast day of the Immaculate Conception, which ties in a bit with the discussion above….
Actually it was the day before yesterday 😉
You’ve really bitten the bullet in that comment, maybe you’re exactly right. I certainly agree that the Christian view of death changes the perspective for these narratives. Food for thought at least.
Oops. Lost a day there somewhere. Of course it was the day before yesterday.
“Mind you, it doesn’t much worry them that lots of people get killed (gruesome beasts, children).”
Says Joyful.
Little better than toads, really.
Toad would have thought that the ‘problem’ if there is one, is not the slaughter, which, as Joyful points out is always acceptable – but the fact that God seems to actively encourage it, to bless it, in fact.
One has to suppose the only ‘point’ to His making a city full of Jericans in the first place was to provide suitable victims for the His Chosen People to murder in large numbers.
That also seemes (to Toad) to be the sole function of the Philistines. No doubt, we shall get to them in due course.
“God can sort it, though.”
Toad has actually seen Tee shirts and bumper stickers in the States, endorsing Joyful’s somewhat fatalistic sentiment;
“Kill them all. Let God sort it out!”
…They proclaim.
Well, it’s a point of view.
Live, and let live, and all that.
(If Toad was still in the Land of Liberty, he could have got Joyful one for Christmas. (A tee shirt, that is, not a point of view.)
They’re several thousand years late, Toad.
Jesus has already been incarnated in the world. If my speculations about the reasons God ‘actively encourages’ the massacre of whole towns full of people are right, those reasons have not applied since long before His birth. So I’ll pass on the tee shirt, thanks.
And, of course, the ‘kill them all’ is an overstatement. The fact that Israel and Judea were still full of other tribes even at the time of David shows that they didn’t ‘kill them all’.
I take it your comment about the function of the Jerichans and the Philistines was jocular. They were, of course, like all the rest of us, created to know God and to love Him.
“The fact that Israel and Judea were still full of other tribes even at the time of David shows that they didn’t ‘kill them all’.”
Says Joyful.
No, but they had a pretty good old college try, thinks Toad.
He’s inclined to suggest it might have been better in today’s world if the Jews had succeeded back then.
Yes he’s being jocular. But, seriously, if you feel the need to bowdlerise your tales, what’s the point?
Tell as it is, or leave it alone, thinks Toad.
You do it your way with your four year olds, and I’ll do it my way with mine, Toad.
And this adult audience has taken the opportunity to explore the nasty bits I left out for my infant audience. So nothing’s lost.
Though – in concentrating on how violent the Israelites are – we’ve managed to miss Tamar and Dinah. A slip there, surely?
“If my speculations about the reasons God ‘actively encourages’ the massacre of whole towns full of people are right, those reasons have not applied since long before His birth. “
Well, Joyful, ever since Jesus came and went, ‘whole towns’ full of people have been massacred, – some in His Holy Name, others in the name of Mohammed, others in the name of Jehovah, long after his birth.
Maybe God approved, maybe not.
Certainly, the slaughterers had no doubt that He did. Who’s to say they were wrong?
Some of us (not Toad, though, he’s not quite that old!) still remember Saint Bartholomew’s Day.
(Upset Voltaire all his life thereafter, though.)
Still, it was not much of a ‘massacre’ only at least 5,000 or, at most, 30,000.
Small beer compared to the 20th Century. Franco managed at least 100,000 ‘Reds.’
(And Toad agrees – before you all start making noises even bats can’t hear – even that is smaller beer than Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot and Co.
But Stalin, whatever he did, didn’t do it In God’s name. Far from it.
That’s the difference. We don’t have to make up excuses for him.)
Toad, Stalin did it in the name of the State, which was his own personal god, so little difference there. Did the State demand it of him? Did the future of the Aryan Superrace, which Hitler worshipped, demand that he massacre? Did the wellbeing of the American soldier justify the US President’s decision to kill women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
They all certainly thought so. But though these causes were worshipped like gods, and took sacrifices like gods, people insist on seeing them as somehow different to the people who have killed for religious causes. Why is that?
Public revelation ended with the death of the last apostle. Blaming God for everything bad done in His name (while simultaneously refusing to give Him credit for everything good done in his name) is not logical.
I’m certainly not justifying the murders done by people in the name of God, and you know that I’m not. I am seeking to understand the clear word of scripture that says God ordered certain massacres during a specific and limited period of Israel’s history. Is it true is the first question. And if so why is the second.
Saying ‘I don’t like it’ is not a sufficient answer.
Joyful, you miss the point – Toad’s point, at least.
Toad doesn’t blame God for anything.
So, he doesn’t give Him credit for anything, either.
Only fair.
Toad, you’re my favourite agnostic Catholic.
My favourite agnostic Catholic was a priest who taught me sixth form English. An odd man, great teacher.
“Saying ‘I don’t like it’ is not a sufficient answer.”
Says Joyful.
Toad absolutely agrees. Many times he has been told by, or read about, religious believers who say, “I can’t accept that there is nothing after death. I just don’t want to. I don’t like the idea of it.”
Well, tough luck, says Toad. Maybe there is something, maybe not. But whatever is, is – whether you like it or not. George Bernard Shaw, whom Toad generally admires considerably, did not like the idea of Natural Selection, so he refused to believe it. Said it was ‘too horrible.’ Well, tough luck, George. And there are plenty like him.
“…we’ve managed to miss Tamar and Dinah. “
Couple of gerbils?
I’m with C.S Leiws on this. The existence of God is very appealing, but the idea of eternal life is a little disconcerting at first. As an atheist the idea of oblivion never worried me. It doesn’t seem any worse than the the time before one was born. Certainly for this theist fear of (my own) death is not of any significance.
It is not the position of the Catholic Church that the slaughtering of innocents at Jericho, or other instances of the cherem/ban, were ever the will of God.
A note in the New American Bible, the official translation adopted by the U.S. Catholic Bishops has this to say:
In “The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible”, the Pontifical Biblical Commission had this to say:
Toad is perfectly correct to characterise the cherem/ban as an abomination.
God Bless
When Moses died, I have often wondered what would have happened to the children of Israel had Joshua not taken courage to lead them into the promised land. I would say they would have ventured back into Egypt.
The Bible says Joshua destroyed the wall of Jericho around 1400 BCE but Archaeological evidence shows that an earthquake destroyed the wall in 2300 BCE. The city was also thoroughly destroyed by a fire and then abandoned in 1600 BCE. Jericho was not inhabited again until 700 BCE. There was no wall to tumble down or citizens to destroy at Jericho within centuries of when the Bible says Joshua was there.
The Bible doesn’t have dates in it, Talismancer. It says Joshua was there, but not when. Biblical historians have been arguing about how to date events since there was a Bible. And, of course, archaeologist have been arguing since the 1970s about the interpretation of what Garstang, Kenyon, and later researchers found at Jericho.
That said, readng the narrative as literal history is missing the point, in my view.