A distasteful thought occurred to me as I was contemplating the book of Joshua; a question, really: How is what Germany did in WW2 substantively different from what Israel did in the book of Joshua?
I know – I’m going strait to hell for even typing this. We all know that Hitler was evil – diseased of mind and malignant of spirit, Satan’s representative on earth. Joshua, on the other hand, was God’s special guy. He communed with God in special ways, and studied at the feat of Moses.
Let’s set aside value judgement and, for a moment, ignore all of that. Let us pretend that the supernatural is in no way involved in any human endeavor and look simply at the actions of the people in question.
Hitler: If we take his writings in Mein Kampf at face value, Hitler was trying to further the cause of his people – his nation in the ethnos sense, the Germans. To this end, he waged war to acquire land that he felt rightly belonged to his people, and ruthlessly exterminated those that he felt posed a threat to the German culture, religion, or bloodline.
Joshua: If we take the book of Joshua at face value (ignoring the supernatural ascriptions), Joshua was trying to further the cause of his people – his nation in the ethnos sense, the Israelites. To this end, he waged war to acquire land that he felt rightly belonged to his people, and ruthlessly exterminated those that he felt posed a threat to the Jewish culture, religion, or bloodline.
Hmmmmm…..
I feel dirty. Someone argue.
A couple of quotes from Mein Kampf:
"Common blood belongs in a common Reich."
wow - in the chapter: "Nation and Race", he literally ascribes his purging actions to the will of god. - -
"The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief always the following:
- Lowering of the level of the higher race;
- Physical and intellectual regression and hence the beginning of a slowly but surely progressing sickness.
To bring about such a development is, then, nothing else but to sin against the will of the eternal creator."
1 comment:
Excellent! These are exactly the questions that need to be asked if we are to have a faith with integrity.
My hunches, for what they're worth, are that:
1) we do not yet understand the OT's approach well enough to know how much of these stories are metaphorical, and, how much of them represents God's view vs. a culturally-influenced perception of the author.
2) while this sounds like an attack on the truth of the Bible, it is, rather, a confrontation of the difference in perception of truth between our age and the writer's - and they are hugely different. We see truth as dependent upon verifiable facts. Most people of history (I think it could be said) saw truth as dependent upon meaning, instead.
3) I think this also increases the distance between the NT and the OT. Jesus is our example of what God is like; certainly, what God in human form is like. And there is little resemblance between the God of this genocide and Jesus (to whom the outsider is especially treasured).
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