This is sort of an odd question, since I’m Jewish. I was watching a History Channel documentary called Battles B.C. over the weekend, and it detailed how Moses militarized the Hebrews after fleeing from Egypt.
According to the documentary, starting with the Levites as sort of his Praetorian Guard, the highly charismatic Moses trained and equipped every able-bodied male from 20-35 years old and charged Joshua with commanding them. He made his way to the land of Canaan, slaughtering several tribes on the way, including a tribe that took he and his people in when they fled Egypt. Moses ordered that all women and children were to be killed as well. When other Hebrew tribes started to revolt, he ordered the Levites to slaughter his own people to send a message. Moses had created a highly trained and well-equipped army capable of standing up to almost any military force in the Middle East at the time.
This doesn’t sound like the peaceful, oppressed Jewish slaves as suggested in the Torah – more invaders and occupiers. How do modern-day Jews view (and defend) Moses and the Hebrews? Is the anger and violence coming from modern-day Palestine justified?
In my view, I felt the taking of the Promised Land by the Hebrews was a case of saying, “Our God, who you don’t worship, told us that this land is now ours. Get out.” Pretty much your standard conquering, no different than what Europe did to the Americas in the 17th century. As a Jew, I find it extremely hard to defend them.
Not a Jew, but I’ve asked a few, and for those who take those stories as literal history (many don’t), the answer I’ve gotten is that the tribes they allegedly slaughtered were basically terrible, violent people who would have killed the Israelites first if they could have. It’s essentially justified as preemptive self-defense.
You also get the moral relativism argument – “things were different then.”
That it probably never happened. There is no mention whatsoever of the Exodus in Egyptian records, nor is there any archaeological evidence of it, nor of the Hebrew conquest of Canaan. Silberman and Finkelstein posit the Hebrews always lived there, and a national-origins myth was cooked up by refugee Israelite priests in Judah during the reign of King Josiah. This was a time when – contrary to modern sensibilities – conquest was assumed to convey better title to territory than indigenous habitation.
Although I disagree with Brainglutton, I do agree that early Jews exaggerated their military glory considerably. My analysis suggests they were instead a nomadic tribe (although they may have inhabited Canaan before becoming so). They were definitely defeated by the Egyptians in at least one battle, and may well have been taken as slaves for a time. Regardless, they returned to nomadism somehow and, as with all nomads, had to fight to display their ability or be defeated and broken.
But as I noted, I exzpect they exaggerated a lot of their battles. It was common for peoples in the MIddle East to claim they obliterated this or that enemy. I expect that their return to Canaan involved defeating the existing ruling class and claiming the land, not wiping out their predecessors as claimed. That was the usual way, anyhow.
Kill or be killed was certainly the reality for just about any nomadic group of that era.
It is a popular topic for rabbis to go on about in sermons, though, and still causes a good bit of moral anguish in the circles I’ve discussed it with (ie not Orthodox). As with anything Jewish, there’s no decided opinion on ‘what really happened’ or ‘what it really meant’.
Well, the story as your documentary portrays it is pretty much the story as told in the Torah. But BrainGlutton is correct that historical evidence indicates the Biblical account of the Exodus and the conquest of the Land is not factually accurate. Some have surmised that the commandments in Deuteronomy to commit genocide against the native inhabitants of the Land were inserted to make a racist point; IOW, the author of Deuteronomy wanted to blame Israelite society’s ills on the ethnic “others” living among them, and thus invented a commandment to exterminate them which should have been obeyed, but wasn’t.
Traditional Jewish commentators have been…well, not unanimous, but as close as you will ever get with Jews…in stressing that these commandments applied only to those specific peoples in that time and place, and are not to be taken as offering general guidelines for international relations!
I think the fact that documentaries are being made presenting this myth as true reflects the willingness of certain modern Jews to glorify military power and strength, to view the world as a fundamentally dangerous place in which only the clever and violent can escape being enslaved or killed, and to reject any talk about fundamental social change. To the extent that this attitude (which could not be more completely at odds with (my understanding of) the message of Torah) reflects the prevailing attitude of the Jewish people, “the anger and violence coming from modern-day Palestine” is entirely predictable.
Witnessing moment: For anyone interested in a serious exploration ofhow modern liberal Jews deal with the parts of Torah which are repugnant to our modern sensibilities while still remaining faithful to the religious tradition, I highly recommend Rabbi Michael Lerner’s book Jewish Renewal. I can say that it quite literally changed my life when I encountered it seven years ago, and in fact, today I am re-reading it while celebrating the fourth anniversary of my conversion to Judaism.
Biblically, not all tribes in Canaan were subject to the ‘herem’ (ban, or devoted to destruction) but only those which did stuff like child sacrifice & shrine harlotry. Some tribes were allowed to surrender, were defeated militarily & enslaved, were allowed to convert & assimilate, it all depended on the tribe.
My take as a Christian who believes the Biblical account- those tribes that were accursed were totally depraved, had ample time to flee the horde of YHWH-protected Hebrews, and had themselves been part of a once God-honoring society from the time of Abraham (Melchizedek was a priest-king in Canaan) which had apostasized.
SPECULATION FOLLOWS:
I also wonder if Canaanite describes not so much an ethnic group, but a type of person or society which is predatory, and may be rooted in the name Cain.
Eve names Cain (“gotten” or “gained”). Cain becomes a murderer & founds a predatory society which dominates the world till wiped out in the Deluge.
Ham somehow dishonors his father Noah (either by gossip & mockery or perhaps a sexual act) who curses him by renaming him “Canaan” (“another Cain” or “another grabber”). Ham claims the name by sticking it on one of his sons. Canaan’s tribe & his Cushite nephew Nimrod become predatory. Some individuals may be true God-worshippers, but the general society again goes downward.
The covenantal/religious/ritualized crimes that get an Israelite executed in the Torah are practices which show that the Israelite has chosen to become a spiritual Canaanite.
To attempt a more direct and brief answer to the OP:
My “take” is that in the Torah, like in the scriptures of all the other religions, there are parts that were written by humans who were experiencing a high degree of communion with the Force of compassion which created and governs the universe (aka “God”). These are the parts which call us to love our neighbors and to act with trust and generosity toward others.
There are other parts which were written by humans who were experiencing emotions of fear, shame and hatred, likely rooted in past traumatic experiences. These are the parts which call us toward tribalism, obsession with the details of religious ritual, and ultimately genocide.
Much of Deuteronomy, and most of Joshua and Samuel, are rooted in the latter way of thinking. If we simply expunged these negative bits from our scriptures, we would be left with a cotton-candy, feel-good new agey religion that wouldn’t adequately recognize and respect the full spectrum of human emotions. We read these texts with reverence, just as we read the texts we like better; the difference is that we read them as cautionary tales illustrating how not to behave, rather than as wisdom literature telling us how to behave.
To “do” religion is to constantly be critically examining your tradition, trying to figure out where is the voice of God and where is the voice of human psychopathology. Any scripture capable of sustaining a major religion will inevitably be so psychologically complex and internally contradictory as to make this process necessary. The fundamentalists who deny this are fooling themselves; they are engaging in the process just like the liberals, but they are doing it in an oversimplified way, by picking one particular interpretation and defining it as correct.
Well, so much for brevity. Hope that made some sense to somebody.
The words Cain (Qayin) and Canaan (Kana’n) aren’t related. Qayin comes from the word to get or create, Kana’n probably comes from the word meaning “lowland”, vs the land that’s now Syria, which was called Aram (“highland”).
And, according to the story of Noah, Ham is never renamed Canaan…Canaan is a son of Ham.
You are just now realizing that one of the ways in which this God character is portrayed in the Torah is a vicious tribal warmonger and that the story as told is a story of violent conquest? Have you actually read Torah? Or just heard the versions that they told you in religious grade school?
I mean you do also know the story of Uzzah? The poor schmuck was entrusted with helping transport the ark, and when the cart hit a bump and the ark looked as if was going to fall he gently steadied it lest it fall. BAM! One smited Uzzah for daring to touch the ark.
God of Torah is often one meanhearted bastard and his people do some awful things on his command. Thank God its mostly just metaphor is all I can say.
Dang. It’s 2 Samuel 6 and you can enter it in to the passage section. (I thought once i did that and got the passage up it would change the web address but it didn’t - sorry)
The problem here is that we look at these issues from a modern perspective. Basically in those times it was kill or be killed and it’s hard to separate that from their rationale. To them the tribes were hostile and they needed to dominate the holy land to be safe. At least that’s the impression I get from the story.
But where do you get that from? The bible lists four sons of Ham…Cush, Mizraim, Put, and Canaan. Noah’s curse is “Canaan shall be a slave…”. If you’re saying that Noah cursed Ham, then that means all of Ham’s descendants “shall be a slave”, when obviously, that didn’t happen.
Isn’t it more likely that the writers of the bible came up with Noah’s curse of Canaan to justify the enslavement of (most of) the Canaanites? They wouldn’t say “cursed is Ham”, because they never enslaved the Egyptians or Assyrians, and so had no reason to justify that.
This is my take on it. And I do find it hard to sympathize with a culture that does those things. I don’t think the Spanish taking over from the Aztecs was entirely a bad thing, either. Conquest of another civilization may be the lesser of two evils when it makes the conquered civilization stop a practice like human sacrifice or temple prostitution.
If that’s the message we’re supposed to take home from those parts of the Bible, it wouldn’t apply to the current Palestinian situation. They don’t perform human sacrifices or have sacred prostitutes.