Reading from the Bible -- Deuteronomy 7: 1-6 & 20: 10-18. Genocide & Providence

Taking Jericho,
Jean Fouquet, ca. 1455

On this Sunday in New Zealand, I find myself in the desert, just moments after Moses has recited the Ten Commandments and reiterated God’s commitment to the sons of Abraham.  He goes on, outlining what the Lord expects when Israel enters the promised land of Canaan -- and nothing captures better and with fewer words the charred flavor of the Old Testament, the carnivorous spirit of Jehovah, and the license of the chosen people to kill:

When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations -- the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you --  and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally.  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, for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods, and the LORD's anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you.  This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles  and burn their idols in the fire.  For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession. (Deuteronomy 7: 1-6)

This passage, which places divinely inspired genocide at the heart of Judeo-Christianity, should make the words “God is Love” stick in the craw of any self-respecting Believer.

Here’s another for added measure:

As you approach a town to attack it, first offer its people terms for peace.  If they accept your terms … then all the people inside will serve you in forced labor.  But if they refuse … you must attack the town.  When the LORD your God hands it over to you, kill every man in the town.  But you may keep for yourselves all the women, children, livestock, and other plunder.  You may enjoy the spoils of your enemies that the LORD your God has given you.  But these instructions apply only to distant towns, not to the towns of nations nearby.  As for the towns of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as a special possession, destroy every living thing in them.  ….  This will keep the people from of the land from teaching you their detestable customs in the worship of their gods, which would cause you to sin deeply against the LORD your God. (Deuteronomy 20: 10-18)

These are not the kinds of texts that modern Christians are likely to slap onto billboards (for that they are far too long); nor will we expect to find anyone petitioning for their prominent display on the lawns of court houses.  Although such sentiments saturate the Books of Moses, those Christians and Jews who insist that their nations honor traditional religious values prefer not to be reminded of God’s taste for genocide.  Yet, all the same, these scriptures have had a powerful legacy.  Indeed, we can easily draw a line from the tumbling walls of Jericho to the death camps in Auschwitz.

There is no doubt that Jehovah’s war in Canaan would have clearly violated the Geneva Conventions and perpetrated a crime against humanity as brutal as any one could possibly imagine.  God has managed to enlist some of the best lawyers in history, but even they are hard pressed to mount a cogent defense of his lust for blood.  Take John Calvin (1509-1564), for instance, the lawyer-cum-theologian whose schismatic efforts during the Reformation inform some of Christianity’s most important post-Catholic developments.  Calvin understood that God desired to “purge the land of Canaan of the foul and loathsome defilements by which it had long been polluted.”  But he had to concede that:

[The] indiscriminate and promiscuous slaughter [of the Canaanites], making no distinction of age or sex, but including alike women and children, the aged and decrepit, might seem an inhumane massacre....

Yet while we might imagine this "indiscriminate and promiscuous slaughter" to be quite horrendous, we would be wrong.  Again, Calvin: €€

... [It might] seem an inhumane massacre had it not been executed by the command of God. But as he, in whose hands are life and death, had justly doomed those nations to destruction, this puts an end to all discussion.

Indeed, that which by any rational measure is monstrously “inhumane” is justified because it is divine; while this abhorrent genocide may look like an atrocity, the fact that God ordained it means that it was good.  This is not much of a defense and would not have served Joshua (who led the Israelites during their biblical quest for Lebensraum) particularly well at, say, the Nuremberg Trials.

 

Perhaps there’s some comfort to be had from knowing that the genocide perpetrated by God’s chosen people in Canaan never actually occurred --  that it was, in fact, a political fiction.  Yet there are many Faithful who would rather believe in a God with bloody hands and a voracious appetite for death than believe in no God at all.  In defiance of modern archeology, they’re still desperately trying show that when the walls of Jericho came tumbling down, somebody named Joshua may have been in the vicinity -- give or take a few hundred years.

Puritans fighting the
Pequot Indians in the 17th century

But even though the story is a myth, those who nonetheless believe have found it incredibly motivating.  Nowhere more so than in America.  The Puritans in New England, who went to great lengths to determine their place in God’s grand historical narrative, were firmly convinced that they were His new chosen people and that America was given to them by God.  They were also convinced that the vengeful natives were beyond redemption and worthy only of extermination.  In the words of that eminent divine, Cotton Mather (who would also play a major role in the Salem witchcraft trials), the Indians were "nations of wretches" engaged in the "most explicit sort of devil-worship"; they sought "the extinction of a plantation so contrary to [Satan's] interest as that of New-England."  Thus, he concluded, "the infant colonies of New-England, finding themselves necessitated unto the crushing of serpents, while they were but yet in the cradle, unanimously resolved, that with the assistance of Heaven they would root this ‘nest of serpents’ out of this world.”  It is often suggested that the atrocities associated with the Christian faith were the result of human corruption and greed.  But when one tries to understand the genocidal zeal of New England Puritans, all one needs to know is that they studied their Bibles and were sincere in their beliefs.

Corpse of Chief Spotted Elk,
killed in the Wounded Massacre, 1890

Thomas Jefferson, while hardly an orthodox Christian, nonetheless inherited the Puritan vision of America as the Promised Land.  He suggested that the Seal of the United States show "the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night.”  And in his second inaugural address, he called upon the “favor of the Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessities and comforts of life.”  He had a special place in his heart for the biblical tale of God leading his chosen people into Canaan, mapping that tale onto the conquest of America.  And he expressed his willingness to kill every Indian that stood in his way. Writing to General Henry Dearborn, who as Secretary of War also dealt with Indian affairs, Jefferson insisted that:

if we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down until that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi … [I]n war they will kill some of us; we will destroy all of them.

Looking across the Atlantic more than a century after Jefferson’s death from his prison cell in Bavaria, a diminutive corporal admired the fruits of his labor:

[I]n North America the Teutonic element, which has kept its racial stock pure and did not mix it with any other racial stock, has come to dominate the American Continent and will remain master of it as long as that element does not fall a victim to the habit of adulterating its blood.

Nothing testifies more strongly to the success with which Christians in the United States fulfilled their divine mandate than the approving words of Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf.

But America’s mission extended well beyond its Western shores, for the effort to annex the Philippines also drew its justification from heaven.  In 1900, announcing in Congress that “the Philippines are ours forever,” Senator Albert Beveridge pledged not to “renounce our part in the mission of our race … of the civilization of the world.”  God has made “the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples” the “master organizers of the world” destined to “administer government among savage and senile peoples.” Without such power “the world would relapse into barbarism and night.”  He gave thanked “Almighty God that he has marked us as His chosen people … to lead in the regeneration of world.”  In pursuit of God’s plan, American soldiers undertook scorched earth campaigns, destroyed entire villages, engaged in torture and set up concentration camps.  “Our men have been relentless,” wrote an American war correspondent, “[They] have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog ….”  While the biblical genocide in Canaan was clearly a myth, it inspired exterminations that were bloody and real.

Reading the biblical account of the genocide perpetrated by God’s chosen people in the Land of Canaan should make us reconsider whether Hitler, too, was divinely inspired. Hitler says as much in Mein Kampf:

For me and for all genuine National-Socialists there is only one doctrine. PEOPLE AND FATHERLAND.   What we have to fight for is the necessary security for the existence and increase of our race and people, the subsistence of its children and the maintenance of our racial stock unmixed, the freedom and independence of the Fatherland; so that our people may be enabled to fulfill the mission assigned to it by the Creator.

Entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1945

Once again, to make sense of Nazi atrocities and the horrors of Auschwitz, one doesn’t need to banish Hitler from humanity as an evil madman; one needs only to assume the sincerity of his beliefs -- his moral commitment, so to speak (on Hitler's religiosity see note below).   Hitler stands in a long tradition of leaders in the Judeo-Christian West who were willing to exterminate for divine purposes.  And we need to ask ourselves: why should we believe Hitler any less than we believe Joshua?  The irony that Adolf Hitler and Joshua are soul brothers is, of course, palpable.  And the many parallels between the biblical genocide in Canaan and the notorious accomplishments of the Nazis are deeply disturbing.  But while nobody (not even a neo-Nazi) names their boys "Adolf" anymore and all who are civilized shun the Hitler mustache, Judeo-Christians continue to honor Joshua, a Founding Father in the Western tradition of war crimes and crimes against humanity, when they name their baby boys.  “Joshua” is ranked as the third-most popular name given to baby boys in the USA; “Adolf” doesn’t warrant a ranking at all.

Perhaps, when we encounter someone like Zvi Yehuda, a gun-toting Israeli settler on the West Bank of the Jordan, we can dismiss him, however dangerous, as a delusional radical.  “The creator if the universe gave us this land,” he says.  “It is a commandment to live in it and settle it.  Anyone who stands in our way – whether pharaoh or Obama – will be punished by God.”   But what about a president, in this case George W. Bush, who stands before the American people in the wake of 9/11 and says: "Our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world of justice."

Certainly, countries like America have an obligation to the world.  But are we to understand those obligations using the same arrogant religious language that has historically legitimated the abuse of power, wholesale destruction, and mass murder?  Using a language that by its very nature precludes rational discussion?  That by its very nature will inevitably lead to such atrocities again?  While some traditions are well worth preserving, those which have us serving the purposes of a Judeo-Christian God rather than humanity should rightly be condemned.  The Geneva Conventions, which by their very existence affirms humanity and repudiates the Judeo-Christian God, were a step in the right direction.  But it’s time for more.

Note on Hitler's religiosity: Critics of Christianity often point out that Hitler was a Catholic, and, strictly speaking, that may very well be true.  Unlike other Nazi leaders, Hitler never formally left the Church and the Papacy never saw fit to excommunicate him (nor did it ever put Mein Kampf on its list of forbidden books).  Publicly Hitler spoke admiringly of Christianity; privately he had few nice things to say.  But that doesn't mean he wasn't religious.  Goebbels, the Third Reich's Minister of Propaganda, noted in his private diary: "The Fuehrer is deeply religious, but deeply anti-Christian.  He regards Christianity as a symptom of decay."  And in Mein Kampf he makes it very clear that he was on a Mission from God.