What 'Utterly Destroy' Really Means in the Book of Joshua

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Probably one of the more uncomfortable parts of the Old Testament is when God seemingly commands divine violence against the people of Canaan. When the Israelites come in, in the book of Joshua, this is pretty, like, morally uncomfortable because it seems like there's just like total annihilation, total destruction. They just come in and sweep away the Canaanites. And seemingly it's commanded by God. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. Specifically, there's a chapter in this book, from Wilderness to Monarchy by. By David Calabro, talking about the concept of harem. Not harem, H A R E m, but harem H E R E M. Just to distinguish that. So, Stephen, what is herem? [00:00:42] Speaker B: Well, in fact, those two concepts are related. The harem and a herem. Yeah. So in fact, we get our word aharon from this same word in Hebrew. [00:00:52] Speaker A: Oh, okay. [00:00:53] Speaker B: So, you know, of course, in sort of the classical image of the harem is like, you know, the part of the palace where the king sends all his wives and concubines. The idea is they are prohibited or banned from other members of the palace or the household to go in there. That's what the word means in Hebrew. To ban something, to prohibit something. In a nutshell, you also know. And that we get that through Arabic. We also get through Arabic the concept of something being haram. Absolutely. Haram. Right. The meme you see floating around there these days. So, yes, the idea of something being prohibited or banned, that's what a. With a chet in Hebrew, where it comes from. And those are Arabic cognates to it. So they are related concepts, but they are very, very different. [00:01:31] Speaker A: And so how does this have to do with the conquest that we see in Joshua? And how can it help us, like, make sense of what's going on here? [00:01:39] Speaker B: Yeah, well, let me answer that by saying this, Jasmine. I've got some good news and some bad news when it comes to the Bible's depiction of God commanding the Israelites to go into the land of Canaan. And. And at first glance, it seems kind of wipe out everything under the sun. Right. Which would you like first? The good news or the bad news? Good. [00:01:59] Speaker A: Good news. [00:02:00] Speaker B: Okay. The good news is it almost certainly did not happen the way it's depicted in the pages of the Bible. So the way the book of Joshua describes the conquest of the land of Canaan, there's a very broad consensus among biblical scholars and archeologists of Syria, Palestine that it probably did not happen that way. Meaning it was not just one massive blitzkrieg through the land of Canaan. All at once everything got destroyed where everything was destroyed and all these cities were bur into rubble and all the people were slaughtered all at once. Right. Like I'm being hyperbolic a little bit, but that's kind of the impression you get from the book of Joshua. So that's the good news. The bad news is the Bible wants you to think that's what happened. And specifically the Bible wants you to think that God commanded it to happen that way. Okay. And this is where we have a bit of moral tension, shall we say, to say the least. If you go online and look at atheist critiques of the Bible or the Judeo Christian tradition, almost invariably they will bring up the fact that we have divine commands in the Old Testament from God to go and kill other people. Right. As acts of sacred violence. And the reason why the word herem is being used in Hebrew is the basic idea is you are going to dedicate these people to God. Dedicate them as in destroy them. Right. So that they are no longer accessible. [00:03:13] Speaker A: And that can include sacrifice to God? Kind of, in a sense, yes. [00:03:17] Speaker B: I mean, not necessarily exactly like a human sacrifice. But the idea is you want to remove people and things. Objects can become herem as well. Right. So you can dedicate objects to God. So war, booty, or even you can just. If you go through. And David Calbro does this, if you go through how it's used, Israelites can voluntarily herem their property to God. Right. So they can voluntarily consecrate or dedicate it. Meaning it's no longer used for profane reasons, it's now used for sacred reasons. Where it gets tricky is when it comes to people, because people are supposed to be heremd as well. And that is in the context of warfare, which of course then necessitates killing those people. At least that's kind of ideally how the Bible portrays this is supposed to work. [00:04:01] Speaker A: So one question is, like Samuel, for example, gets consecrated to serve in the temple. Is that herem or is that something different? [00:04:09] Speaker B: There's different terminology they use, but there is some overlap in the concepts. So to consecrate or to dedicate somebody to priestly service. And we don't have to get into the nuances of the vocabulary, but there is different terminology used for that, as opposed to herem something to prohibit it. To prohibit its use, basically. So you're taking it away from the realm of everyday normal use and dedicating it to sacred use by making it herem. So that's kind of the small nuances. [00:04:41] Speaker C: And, yeah, the nuance there is like, it's not technically when it says the teharam, or you got to do it [00:04:49] Speaker B: with a gutter, with a hat. [00:04:50] Speaker C: Neil, get it right now. Yeah, I just went to the dentist. I'm gonna blame it on that. But the point is, like, it technically isn't a command to utterly destroy. That's how it usually gets translated. It's a command to ban or dedicate, consecrate, ban from. But the way, that's only a nuance, that's only a technicality. Because the way people, or the people of Canaan, at least in this context, are being dedicated or banned is by [00:05:19] Speaker A: banning from mortality, by being killed. [00:05:21] Speaker C: Right. And so it's a nuance. It's important to understand. But the end result is still, you know, pretty uncomfortable. [00:05:28] Speaker B: Yeah, it's still death. It is interesting. Calabro, one of the examples, he shows this curse in Malachi, chapter four, right. Lest I smite the world with a curse. Latter Day Saints, we love Malachi 4. [00:05:39] Speaker A: That's where we get like, I will turn the hearts of the children of the fathers, lest the earth be smitten with a curse. [00:05:44] Speaker B: With a curse. And it's with a herem. Right. And so there's some connection there sort of with Latter Day Saint theology, because we@malachi4 all the time. Elijah, priesthood, keys, all that kind of stuff. So we won't get into that. But that's just kind of interesting from Latter Day Saint perspective. The curse that God was going to smite the land with was going to be a herem. Yeah. There's other examples that Calbro gives in the Bible. So herem appears throughout the Pentateuch before we're even, even in Joshua or Judges. So it appears, for example, in Numbers 21, where Israel is going to herem the cities of Canaan to the Lord. Right. So you're starting to get this idea. Deuteronomy 7 is sometimes called, like, the Deuteronomistic view on warfare or Deuteronomistic laws on warfare. The context of it is Moses overlooking the land of Canaan. And in Deuteronomy 7, he says, we're going to devote these seven Canaanite nations. We're going to herem these seven Canaanite nations. Deuteronomy 20 gives some more. It's interesting that in Deuteronomy 20, cities outside the land are allowed to, like, go into a peace negotiation with Israel. They're allowed to negotiate a treaty. But cities or polities in the Land of Canaan. They are told to be here by the Israelites. Right. And that includes killing the men, women and children, taking the goods, all that kind of stuff. This is where we get the language that Israel is told to leave nothing alive that breathes in the land of Canaan. That's there in Deuteronomy 20. [00:07:12] Speaker A: Pretty extreme. [00:07:12] Speaker B: Pretty extreme. Okay. So that's kind of setting us up to why people get really concerned about this, which is in the book of Joshua that narrates this conquest. Right. [00:07:22] Speaker A: And so, I mean, that's all fine and good, but are we just, like, giving a nice religious name to still, like, killing people? [00:07:29] Speaker B: Killing people. [00:07:30] Speaker A: So, like, how does harem show up in the Bible that maybe, like, provides a little bit more color to what's going on here? Like, is it you just mentioned, like, I will destroy everything that breathes. That means that literally they destroyed every living thing, every single time, every city they encountered. Like, what did that actually look like? [00:07:49] Speaker B: Yeah. So Calabro gives us the. There's four specific examples in the book of Joshua. The answer is no, by the way, that it's not this totalitizing language that appears in Deuteronomy when it gets narrated in Joshua. There's four instances O Calabro mentions Joshua six. This is with Jericho, right? Joshua fit the bottle of Jericho, that kind of thing. [00:08:08] Speaker A: Walk around the city, the falls come down. [00:08:10] Speaker B: Exactly. So that's where it appear. And in Jericho 6, the inhabitants and the livestock are killed and the goods from Jericho are dedicated to Yahweh, right, To Jehovah. But then later you go to AI in Joshua 7 and 8, which is funny because the name in Hebrew means the ruin, Right? The heap of ruins, basically. And you find the people are destroyed, but the livestock are kept in that case along with the spoils. [00:08:39] Speaker A: So it's not literally everything that breathes. [00:08:41] Speaker B: Yeah. In that case, the people are killed, but not the livestock. Later in Joshua 10, in the Southern cities, it says that the cities were utterly destroyed, but not the animals or the spoils. And the cities aren't burned the way they are at, like, AI in Jericho. [00:08:55] Speaker C: Right. [00:08:56] Speaker B: And then finally in Hazor, all the people are killed, the livestock and the spoils are kept, and the city is burned. So what Calabro points out is that it's not consistently applied to the different Canaanite cities even in the Bible. It's even in the Bible. It's not. [00:09:10] Speaker A: It's not always the same. [00:09:11] Speaker B: It's not always the same. Right? Now, for a lot of people hearing this like, okay, but it still ultimately results in violence and bad stuff and people dying. So maybe we're just kind of splitting hairs. That's a fine critique, I think. Right. You know, we are kind of splitting hairs here. At the end of the day it still raises those questions, but it is important to just kind of take the text on its own terms, what it's actually depicting. Right. So just despite the totalizing language of like destroy everything. Well, in the archeological record and even in the biblical record, that's not what happened. Right. [00:09:40] Speaker A: So what happens in the archeological record is this total destruction. [00:09:43] Speaker B: What does it tell us, the archeological record? And Neil can also speak to this because I know he's looked into this topic as well. Archeologists doing biblical and syro Palestine archeology have looked at the destruction layers happening. You know, we don't know exactly when the conquest happens, but we can put it maybe roughly around 1200 BC. 1100 BC you know, depending on your chronology. That's kind of our best guess. So we've tried to look at destruction layers at that time, at these cities that are mentioned, Jericho, AI, Hazor. Right. And again, archeologically, there's very broad consensus that the older model that most scholars took at face value, that the Israelites just came in en masse and en masse wiped out all these people and destroyed these cities. That's not tenable with the current archeological evidence. So the famous example of Jericho, no less. Right. There's big debate over so there is destruction in Jericho, but they think it happened way too early for what's being narrated in the book of Joshua. Right? [00:10:39] Speaker C: Yeah. And in fact, both Jericho and AI appear to be ruins by the time they get there. By the time they get there, for all intents and purposes, they're uninhabited by [00:10:48] Speaker A: the time the Israelites arrived. [00:10:49] Speaker B: Well, that's the predominant explanation of the data. Again, you'll get people that will dispute that. But like this is to say, right, it's no longer a clean cut case of like, oh, the Bible says Jericho is there. Well, no, actually there's a lot of nuance. Hazor actually is. Archaeologists do point to Hazor as being destroyed, you know, late Bronze Age, early Iron Age. So around that same time. And it has been burned. There's evidence for it being burned. So you compare it to Hazor as evidence for some kind of violence or conquest. But that doesn't fully explain the biblical data. So you know what I said earlier, the good news is it didn't happen the way the Bible said. Well, that's from archeology. Right. There's still big debate, Neil can tell you. Starting in the 50s or 60s, when scholars were starting to critically reassess the conquest narratives, you had this proliferations of these other theories. You had like the agrarian peasant revolt theory. You had like the gradual infiltration theory. You had all these different theories to explain what's going on. There was this funny kind of like Marxist theory that the workers rose up against their overlords because Marxism was a big deal back then. So it's kind of funny how there's been little consensus to explain all the data other than, well, it just really doesn't look like the way the Bible depicts it. [00:11:57] Speaker C: I mean, yeah, the origins of Israel is a big debate. And, you know, there's so much. There's so many different theories. And honestly, like, even I'm trying to remember, you named two. There was a third one. I can't remember off the top of my head what it is. But even those three different theories, like, none of them have really been found to be totally compelling. There's a reason there's three different theories and you don't have adherence to all of them. The basic idea is no one really knows from archeology, cannot actually answer the question, where did Israel come from at the end of the day? And what really happened as they entered the land or came to control the land in whatever way they did. Right. And obviously this ties into the Exodus, which is a whole separate conversation we'll have to maybe talk about another time. But yeah, there's. [00:12:47] Speaker A: From what I'm hearing you guys saying, so there's clearly a tension between what the Bible is describing and what we're actually seeing on the ground. We're just not seeing the kinds of destruction the Bible's describing. [00:12:56] Speaker B: The extent of the destruction? [00:12:57] Speaker C: Well, yeah, the extent. [00:12:59] Speaker A: So there is some destruction, but not to the same extent or not at the same time. And so scholars have come up with these theories that maybe in order to explain this discrepancy, like, okay, well, maybe the Israelites just kind of migrated in and there wasn't really kind of the destruction that the Bible describes. And the Bible maybe exaggerated what happened or extrapolated or. I mean, you talked about like this peasant revolt. Maybe the people who were already living there, like, rose up. [00:13:22] Speaker C: Yeah, that's kind of the Marxist one. I think it was. Was it Mendenhall who came up with that one? [00:13:28] Speaker B: I think so. I can't remember. Yeah, he name sounds familiar. There was the old school, like a conquest model. Just based on what Joshua says. Then there was like the gradual infiltration model, then there was the agrarian peasant revolt model, and there was like, yeah, one or two others. [00:13:42] Speaker C: There's like the nomads settling model, where it's not really an infiltration. It's like nomads who kind of lived in the area started settling down or something like that. [00:13:51] Speaker A: But up to this point, we don't have like one theory that can really explain all the data. [00:13:55] Speaker C: That's right. [00:13:56] Speaker A: That explains its discrepancy that the Bible says one thing, that there was total destruction. And then the archaeology says, well, that doesn't mean quite what the Bible is describing there. [00:14:05] Speaker B: Right. So you mentioned hyperbole, by the way, an exaggeration. This may now be a good time to mention part of the archeological problem is also the sort of the textual and historical problem, which is. And thanks to scholars like K. Lawson Younger, who has a great book called Ancient Conquest Accounts, a study in ancient Near Eastern and biblical history writing, published back in 1990. So it's a little older. It still holds up very well. [00:14:31] Speaker C: It's still like it's a standard source. [00:14:33] Speaker B: Standard source. Now, on ancient conquest and warfare narratives from Egypt and Mesopotamia, you find out that the language used in Joshua to describe the conquest of Canaan is very similar to the kinds of language used in Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources when they describe warfare accounts. And it typically tends to be very hyperbolic, highly exaggerated, very propagandistic. Right. Our God went out to battle against these people and just demolished them all. We have, like, the Mesha inscription is kind of the poster boy for this kind of language. So the Mesha stele is from Moab King, Mesha of Moab. Right. [00:15:10] Speaker C: It's from like the 9th century BC [00:15:11] Speaker B: 9th century BC so a little after the time of the conquest. But we're still, you know, pretty early. Pretty early. And he describes going to war with the northern kingdom of Israel. He doesn't call it that, but it's essentially the northern kingdom. And in his account, his God Chemosh empowered him to. And he uses actually the word Herem, the Moabite cognate to Herem, the Hebrew word, to do this against his enemies. And he lauds how victorious he was. And he says, like, you know, I destroyed all the people, I spoiled their land, I brought their goods back to the temple of Chemosh and Moab. Well, that's Merneptah in a second. But the point is. So there's Mesha using this exact same language. Well, we clearly know that like he did not single handedly destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel. Right. That happened because they still existed. You mentioned Merneptah. His seed is no more. Right. So the Merneptah stele is another example where this time he's an Egyptian pharaoh who narrates. It's not just the people of Canaan, but Libyans and Nubians, other people that were against him late new kingdom. And he comes out and he says, yes, Israel I have laid to waste. His seed is no more. He uses this totalizing language of like, I've eradicated the people of Israel. Well certainly that didn't happen. Again, this is the standard kind of rhetoric that you employ in conquest accounts. I think that's a very helpful context to explain why the biblical author is using this big language. Exactly. Even though it doesn't match the historical record or the archaeological record in all respects we can account for that. I don't think it's just they were making up this story. There probably is a historical core to it. Most scholars would sort of see that. But it's hyperbole. It's royal propaganda coming from probably the southern kingdom of Judah, the Deuteronomist historian school. Right. And that kind of explains what's going on there. [00:16:53] Speaker C: So. And with the Merneptah stele, actually people have pointed out the irony that that is our earliest evidence for the existence of Israel. It's the first mention of the name Israel in an external non biblical source. And it says that they were destroyed. Right. And so you kind of have this ironic like scholars, you know, it's cited as evidence for the Bible all the time. But what the text of. [00:17:16] Speaker A: They want you to believe that. [00:17:17] Speaker C: They want you to believe that actually Israel doesn't exist anymore. When we're constantly using it as like, look, Israel existed at this time, the very time we're talking about. Right. The time of Joshua, the time of the conquest. [00:17:26] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:17:27] Speaker C: So there is a certain kind of irony there. But yeah. And there's a lot of other ones. I actually was kind of thought it was fun. David Calabro uses this inscription from South Arabia. I've actually read that Hareeb ILU inscription. This is a ruler from. They call him a mukarib, basically a king. But they have another. They also have the word, the Semitic word for king. I don't know. In fact, I think scholars have debated what mukarib even means. But it's like the great king or over king over this whole confederation. But he's the ruler of Saba at the time, or sheba for your, you know, biblical is how it would be referred to in the Bible. And yeah, he has this big long stele. It dates to like the, I think the early 7th century BC where he narrates going out and just destroying all of these other South Arabian peoples. Right. But really what he did is he just conquered them and they became part of the Sabian kingdom. [00:18:24] Speaker B: Yeah, part of the confederation. [00:18:25] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:18:26] Speaker B: So maybe that gives you some details to work with to make sense of the disconnect between the archaeological record and what's depicted in the Bible. Some of the things that Calabro gets into is what exactly is like the, the action of herem, like, what are they actually doing? There's debate about that. Is it like some kind of ritualized sacrifice? Is it some kind of, like, you know, after you've conquered all the people, you line them up and okay, you're going to get killed and you'll be spared. Like, you know, there's debate about that. Calibro basically says we don't know exactly how harem works, like as a real practice that makes sense. Like it typically occurs in the context of siege warfare in the Bible, such as in Joshua, when they're besieging these cities. So is. Is the actual action of harem itself just sieging a city or. You know what I mean? [00:19:12] Speaker A: Or which may or may not result in total annihilation. [00:19:14] Speaker C: Exactly. [00:19:15] Speaker B: Or is it like a deliberate after the fact? Once you've conquered it, then you exterminate, start the herem, which is to kill all the survivors or whatever. So, you know, you can read the article. It's actually online on the RSC website, so you can read it for free. We'll put the link in the description. You can see some of the nuances people have and scholars have on what actually does this process look like? So we don't. We don't fully understand the actual practice. [00:19:37] Speaker A: Right. [00:19:37] Speaker B: We have to appreciate that as well. The Bible gives conflicting accounts. As we just saw. The different cities are handled differently. Despite the hyperbolic language. Even in many scholars have noticed this. You go look at the next book in Judges. So Joshua at the end of Joshua, the Lord says, I have given all of the land for you as an inheritance. Right. Well, wait a second. In the book of Judges, the next book over, there's still Canaanites around and they're still causing all sorts of trouble. And why do we have to have all these Judges come to save us? I thought we conquered all the Canaanites. So even the biblical solicitors themselves there's discrepancy. [00:20:08] Speaker A: So he didn't kill everyone. [00:20:09] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:20:10] Speaker C: Well, not only is there still Canaanites and such in the land, but there's evidence in judges of intermarriage. Right. Already happening with the Israelites and the Canaanites and other surrounding peoples. And so which is ostensibly what the harem was supposed to avoid is like, hey, they're banned. You're not supposed to be doing that. Right. But clearly, whatever really happened historically, these other peoples are still there and there's actually interactions and intermarriage and things like that. And so Israel as what it becomes. Right. Ultimately has a continued heritage with the people of Canaan. Yeah, to a certain extent. [00:20:48] Speaker B: So all of that hand wringing and throat clearing aside about what's the actual practice, I think we have a good sense of that. Right. [00:20:55] Speaker A: There's clearly a lot more context than I think people would understand at the surface level. And there's more like mitigating factors to help suggest that like, the total, complete annihilation of the Canaanites probably was not what actually happened. Right. But I mean, there still was violence. [00:21:12] Speaker B: Yes. And like I said, that's the good news. Now let's talk about the bad news. And this is what gets people understandably upset. I actually do have a lot of sympathy for secular critiques of the Bible on the grounds of, look, man, it's really shocking and really horrifying to see God commanding violence against other people. Right. Especially growing up here in the west, post 9, 11, post the rise of radical Islam and things like that. Right. And terrorism. And you know, we, we understandably get really skittish when we see people claiming our God tells us to go kill all these people. [00:21:44] Speaker A: Right. [00:21:44] Speaker B: So maybe that's what we need to talk about here next. If, if it were just the idea that like, well, the Bible saying they did this, that's one thing, but the Bible says God told them to do it. Right. That's where people kind of get upset. So we can end with our LDS context, but let's run through some of the explanat have given historically readers of [00:22:02] Speaker A: the Bible, because I imagine this is an even greater problem for like, Protestants who believe in, like, sola scriptura. This is the inerrant word of God. And so I'm sure they've come up with like, reasons to how to make sense of this. [00:22:12] Speaker B: Yes, they have. And we don't need to go through all of them. But some of the bigger sort of answers, the broader answers I've given, number one, is basically Divine command theory, you just kind of default on, look, if we believe God is real and he's the ultimate arbiter and sovereign of the universe, then when he does command something, it's justified, okay? [00:22:30] Speaker A: He is the moral authority and he [00:22:32] Speaker B: is the moral authority. So if that's your theological context, then it makes sense, right? We don't need to get into the literally millennia of philosophical debate over like the Euthyphro dilemma and Divine command theory, all the kind of stuff, right? You can't just fall back on. Look, God commanded it and that's good enough, right? So that's one response. Another response I'll sometimes get is to look at the status of the Canaanites themselves. So the Canaanite people and were they basically worthy of death and destruction, right? So the way it gets narrated in some readings of the Bible is the Canaanites were these abjectly wicked and evil people who were sacrificing their children and engaging in all sorts of horrible practices and essentially they had it coming, okay? [00:23:15] Speaker A: Or in order for God to build a covenant people in this new land, like they needed a couple clean slate. [00:23:21] Speaker B: And that's kind of what the Bible says too. You do get some of that from. The idea is like, I'm going to do this because otherwise you'll be enticed away after other gods and breaking the covenant. So there is a foundation for that in the Bible itself. Even though the Bible doesn't go to the extent that modern readers do to kind of make the Canaanites look like abjectly evil. Right. For us as Latter Day Saints. That's interesting because that ties into first Nephi 17, because that's kind of the explanation that Nephi gives here. So if you go to chapter 17, starting in verse 32, Nephi says, after they, meaning the children of Israel had crossed the river Jordan, he did make them mighty. Unto the driving out of the children of the land, yea, unto the scattering them to destruction. And now do ye suppose that the children of this land who were in the land of promise, who were driven out by our fathers, do ye suppose that they were righteous? Behold, I say unto you, nay. Do ye suppose that our fathers would have been more choice than they if they had been righteous? I say unto you, nay. Behold, the Lord esteemeth all flesh in one. He that is righteous is favored of God. But behold, this people, meaning the Canaanites had rejected every word of God and they were ripe in iniquity, and the fullness of the wrath of God was upon them. And the Lord did curse the land. There's that kind of curse. Maybe even herem language Nephi is using did curse the land against them and to bless it unto our fathers. And he goes on, right, so Nephi kind of taps into this a little bit, saying, look, the Canaanites were ripe unto destruction. Here's the tricky thing though, and this is a point that Alex O', Connor, the skeptical atheist YouTuber who has debated Christians and others on the Bible. Alex o' Connor points out, and I think it's a fair point, the Bible never actually depicts prophets going to the Canaanites and like, hey guys, you need to repent, otherwise God's going to destroy you. [00:25:10] Speaker A: He doesn't give him a chance. [00:25:10] Speaker B: He doesn't give him a chance. He just does it. Okay, so without getting too much into the moral calculus there, I see the point to say, wait a second, let's assume the Canaanites were as evil and bad as people say they are. Why wouldn't God send them prophets like Jonah to Nineveh? Yeah, right. Why is it that Israel gets prophets but not the Canaanites? Actually, as a matter of fact, we as Latter Day Saints say that he did send them prophets, which we can talk about in a second here. Okay, so that's another explanation you sometimes get. The Canaanites, they had it coming because they were so evil and wicked. That might explain some of it, but I still see a big problem with that explanation and others as well. And that's the problem of children. So little children are part of the every living thing that breeds right in the land that the, that the Israelites are told to conquer. And the critique is, and I think it's a fair critique to say, how evil do your parents have to be that you as a little kid also get slaughtered with your parents in the conquest. Right. So that is a legitimate question. What do we do with the children? One way perhaps to answer this is to acknowledge the hyperbole in our accounts, the exaggeration, the totalitizing over the top language, and to maybe posit, well, it must not have included children, even though it says it is. Maybe it's hyperbole. Again, you get kind of into the weeds there. Right? Does that make sense? I don't want to say we're doing Alex o' Connor's job for him by getting people to like, hate the Bible. I just want to be honest about, you know, what's at stake here and what are the different positions and what are the different views on this. [00:26:36] Speaker A: And no matter what religious text you're dealing with, there's going to be questions of moral tension. And so I think this is just something that it's worth grappling with and really confronting. [00:26:44] Speaker B: Right. [00:26:45] Speaker A: So for Latter Day Saints, is the conversation a little different? Well, how does our worldview maybe change how we could interpret this? [00:26:52] Speaker B: I think so. I think we as Latter Day Saints, we have some tools in our toolkit, our exegetical toolkit, to make sense of this, perhaps even an advantage we might have in some ways over especially Protestant readers of the Bible. So, number one, let's talk about the status of the Canaanites. That they were abjectly evil and wicked and never got prophets, and that's unfair to them. We actually do have indication that there were prophets among the Canaanites. So nonetheless, being our friend Melchizedek, So in the JST of Genesis chapter 14 and in Alma chapter 13, and in Doctrine and Covenant, section 84, we actually do get indication that Melchizedek, who's a Canaanite, is a righteous dude who was preaching repentance and righteousness to the people of Canaan. Now, granted, that's several centuries before the conquest, but the point still stands. We allow in our scriptural record to say that there could have been prophets among the Canaanites preaching repentance. Preaching repentance, preaching the Gospel the way Melchizedek is. You don't get that in the Bible. However, let's be very clear. That's not a biblical thing. That's a Latter Day Saint thing. So perhaps we can say, look, we do believe that the Canaanites did have a chance to repent, right? But they rejected that chance to repent, much like we would say the Nephites had a chance to repent and they rejected that and they were destroyed. Right? So that's one thing at our arsenal. Number two, I think we just kind of acknowledge that we're not biblical inerrantists as Latter Day Saints. So if we say that the Bible is engaging in hyperbole or it's kind of propaganda from centuries later, maybe the Deuteronomist compiling this history, he injected his own perspective on what he thought was righteous warfare or holy warfare, that makes us uncomfortable. We're just kind of, okay, so he can do that, right? We don't have to defend every word in the Bible just because it's there. We can acknowledge complexities with its transmission, with what it's teaching. And we don't have to be compelled to defend every single last little thing the Bible says. Right? So that's I guess, another possibility. Right. I don't know what you guys think about this, what your perspectives are. I know before we started filming, we had a little talk about this. I kind of fall down on saying this, and then I'll let you guys have a thought. I take the Bible seriously. I take these biblical accounts of the conquest seriously. I don't want to just brush it all off. Is this all just made up or it's not inspired in any way at all? I do believe that God had a hand in leading the children of Israel into the land of Canaan, which was their covenant land, and all that kind of stuff. I'm also just kind of okay with things like ancient Israelite fan fiction and military propaganda kind of getting into the pages of the Bible and how they told the story. I'm okay with ancient Israelite record keepers using the cultural language and means of their time to express this account in ways that made sense to them and work for them in their time in culture and context, but makes us kind of squirmish. And I don't feel the need to defend every last little thing in the Bible. I also like that we do have evidence that the Canaanites had prophets trying to help them preach repentance. Right. And they may have rejected that. It looks like that may help explain kind of Nephi's language here in First Nephi 17. So that's where I kind of land. [00:29:55] Speaker C: I do think that, you know, we talked about some of the context for this, and I do think part of understanding the Bible in its cultural context is understanding what, like what kind of world the people of Israel lived in and had to inhabit and what kind of God they needed or the way they needed God to be within that world and within that context. Right. And we talked about some of these other ancient Near Eastern examples. It's a violent world. It's a world where your gods march out. You know, you have the divine warrior motif. I know Stephen's actually written about this as being reflected in the Book of Mormon as well. Right. You have this idea that God is a divine warrior who's going to protect you. He's going to fight your battles, he's going to destroy your enemies, he's going to go before you. In fact, I think, Is it Exodus 23 where the first mention of the future conquest at that point, and it's the angel of the Lord is going to go out before them and actually do the destructive work himself rather than the people in that context? [00:30:52] Speaker A: I mean, it's hard to Appreciate a world where you don't have UN's, where you don't have the function of government [00:30:58] Speaker B: conventions, things like that. [00:30:59] Speaker A: The function of government being splitting hairs on what tax policy is going to be. But rather the function of government is like conquest, protecting and defending kingdoms. [00:31:07] Speaker C: And if you. In that kind of world, I don't mean to be flippant, but you don't need like a peace and loving hippie Jesus that would not bring comfort to you as an Israelite, that when the Assyrian army, when the Babylonian army, when, when whatever army comes by, you're going to be safe and protected. You need a God that you can believe in is going to protect you and defend you. And I think that's really kind of what these narratives are about is, hey, we have a God. Our God is mighty and he can protect us. Because, look, this is what he did. This is how, you know, he commanded us to do this and we were able to do it. He helped us fight and conquer our enemy. Like, you have to have stories about that to give you this context and confidence and belief that, yeah, I'm going to stick to the Lord, I'm going to stick to Yahweh instead of switching teams and going and worshiping these other gods because they promise, because they're the strong warriors. You know, the whole conflict between Yahweh and BAAL a few centuries later. [00:32:04] Speaker B: Right. [00:32:04] Speaker C: Kind of comes down to a lot of this stuff as well. Right. So I think that's part of this broader context that we have to understand. Those other examples, like the Merneptah stele and the Mesha stele, they're also attributing this stuff to their gods. Right. And so that's just the kind of world you live in. And so I think that's a big part of the picture. I don't know that necessarily makes us [00:32:24] Speaker A: feel Israelites aren't unique in it, though. [00:32:26] Speaker C: Israelites aren't unique and it reflects what, like, the needs of their people. If God was going to establish a covenant people in this time and place, those people needed to believe God could protect them from these other forces out there. [00:32:40] Speaker A: That. [00:32:40] Speaker C: That was fundamental. [00:32:42] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of that goes to help from our perspective to make sense of this. If I do want to throw a bone to our Christian friends, especially our Protestant friends, who feel obliged to defend divine violence in the Bible in all cases, we as Latter Day Saints, we can't get, you know, too uppity here because we also have divine violence happening in the Book of Mormon under divine sanction, not the least being the slaying of Laban, where Nephi specifically, it's the Spirit of the Lord told me to do this. Not the least being in third Nephi, when Jesus comes, and as I like to say, he brings the death star and nukes the Nephites from orbit right before he comes down. [00:33:15] Speaker A: God himself. [00:33:15] Speaker B: God himself comes and does this. And for a lot of time people have wrestled with those questions. This is all to say, you know, we're not here to pick on our Christian friends that may struggle with this. We as Latter Day Saints are kind of in the same boat. We have to acknowledge this reality of our scriptures sometimes depict divine violence or divinely sanctioned violence. In the case of the Bible versus Book of Mormon and even in modern church history, I can think of Zion's camp, it originally had violent intent, which was to go back to Missouri with arms to take back the land that had been stolen from them by the mobs. Right? Like, and they were ready to do it. Right? And it could have gotten pretty hairy if things hadn't cooled down. So, like, we. There are cases in our modern history where we feel we have some kind of divine sanction to engage in violence. All the nuancing we're doing here is just to say we have to be careful in how we approach these texts individually, collectively. We should avoid kind of fundamentalist readings of, well, whenever God says violence is okay, that's okay. So we can do violence right now. You know what I mean? We want to avoid those kinds of extremes. And hopefully what we've said here and what David Calabro offers in his article will give some perspective on how to. [00:34:20] Speaker A: I mean, certainly I think it's important to appreciate the kind of world that Israelites would have lived in, which brings a lot of color to the conversation, and also acknowledge that we're not inerrantists and we don't necessarily have to abide by every single little thing the Bible says. I mean, we certainly don't abide by the law of Moses anymore that says we need to kill adulterers. I mean, we believe that we've been given a new covenant, a new law, and so that we have modern prophets that also guide our morality today and today violence is bad. [00:34:47] Speaker C: Well, and one thing I think is also worth stating is like, even though the scriptural record, both the Old Testament, the New Testament, divine wrath in like, revelation and stuff like that, and. And the Book of Mormon and other restoration scripture, even though there is depictions and descriptions of divine violence or divinely sanctioned violence. I do think it's worth saying at least my belief. I don't know. We didn't vet this one ahead of time, but I do think it's worth saying I don't think violence is God's preferred outcome under any circumstance. You know, his desire is for people to repent, come unto him and avoid punishment, avoid the wrath of God. Right. So we've talked to people who are kind of like really big on the wrath of God and they think God wants to punish these people. And I don't think. I don't see that in our theological tradition. We believe God really wants people to repent and come unto him. And the violent outcomes are things that happen sometimes, but it's not really what he wants. I don't know. That may not be very. [00:35:54] Speaker A: I think that's well spoken. And if you want to dive more into this ancient concept of herem and how it plays out in the context where it narratives in the book of Joshua, check out this book. From Wilderness to Monarchy. Remember, you can study deeply and believe boldly. We'll see you next time, [00:36:18] Speaker C: Sam.