I wouldn’t say it’s the mainstream, but there’s wide latitude for interpretation and misinterpretation of the archaeological evidence:
It seems likely that Yahweh also demanded the same sort of child sacrifice, at one point in time, so either there was a more benevolent version of the ritual or the Bible’s demonization of the other tribe’s practices is a bit hypocritical. I think that thought had spurred me to consider the possibility that there was a more benevolent version, but reading through the research again, it looks like I accidentally created a false memory when I did so.
I would say that it’s still plausible that the ancient practice could have been practiced in ways that could be considered “less” horrible. E.g., sacrificing terminally ill or horribly malformed children, sacrificing the children of enemy tribes, unwanted children, etc. But really there’s insufficient evidence to determine one way or the other.
Considering that surplus newborns were (according to ancient Greek legend) abandoned to exposure on the mountainside, it’s not unusual to suppose that sacrifice to the god(s) was an option in some societies.
Abraham does not seem excessively surprised to be told to sacrifice his son. (Incidentally, as a burnt offering)
It is also commanded in Deut 13 that if a city within Israel tolerates the worship of other gods, all its inhabitants (and there are not many cities without babies) are to be killed. And just to make sure the heresy isn’t spread by talking cattle, its cattle are to be killed. And just in case dead cattle can spread heresy, the whole shebang is to be burned.
It’s also worth noting that the nations “G-d singled out as evil” had typically done nothing more evil than having spent the last few centuries living on the land the Israelites wanted. Or at worst, a former king had committed some perceived offense in a previous generation, such as not allowing the millions of Israelite refugees from Egypt free passage through his country. I find it very hard to understand how a baby, or even an adult of a later generation, should be condemned to death for that.
Wow. No. Torah is very, very big on killing. Draconian society, lots of death penalty crimes. It’s confusing, because “murder” is also one of those death penalty crimes. But no, Torah demands death for lots of things.
Now, you want to talk Talmudic interpretation, or early Christianity, it’s different. But in the plain text, Torah is very much in favor of killing, but against killing lightly, on one’s own initiative, or without cause.
Rape, though, nah, Torah is not pro-rape. The OT doesn’t like rape.
Even in the modern world, deliberately killing defenseless adult civilians, let alone babies, is considered a war crime.
[QUOTE=Deut 20]
16However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. 17Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you.
[/QUOTE]
The difference between collateral damage from a bomb, and the formal order to deliberately seek out and kill every man, woman, child, and infant of a certain ethnicity is not what I would call nuance. It was pretty much the difference between us and the Nazis in WWII.
Some posters have drawn more or less veiled analogies to abortion in the US, but I am not aware of any US laws that require an embryo, fetus, or baby to be killed.
So the answer to the OP’s question is yes, there are passages in the Hebrew Bible where the murder of babies is not only condoned, it is commanded. To say that it was an exception for time of war is disingenuous, because Israel was constantly at war, and the process of occupying the “Promised Land” took centuries (I’m assuming for the sake of the OP’s hypothetical that Bible history is accurate). Since some of the named tribes, notably the Jebusites, were never completely exterminated, it could be argued that the commands were technically in effect for the entire existence of the old kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
Suppose the OP had asked if slavery was ever condoned in the US, and several posters answered, “NO, ABSOLUTELY NOT… well, except for black people. And not in all states.”
As for rape, I’ve just skimmed the posts here, but it seems that God is being let off way too easy, even by the atheists here. “Condone” does not mean “approve,” it means “allow,” and even implies “reluctantly allow.” So if silence implies consent, rape seems to have been condoned at all times, not just the examples of war captives.
Correct me if I’m wrong, I can’t find any laws against rape in the Hebrew Bible whose primary purpose is to protect women. There are laws against raping a married or betrothed woman, but the absence of any serious penalty for raping an unattached woman (on the contrary, the rapist gets to marry her, which must have been wonderful news to the 13-year-old girl raped by the 50-year-old man) shows that those laws are for the protection of a man’s family name and line, and not the victim herself.
And of course, there is that wonderful law that if a woman is raped in a town, SHE is stoned to death, because she should have yelled louder.
Offhand, I can think of two examples of a man being upset because his sister is raped, and in both cases, the vengeful brother(s) seemed more like he was using the rape as an excuse to kill whom he had already wanted to kill — Absalom removed someone senior to himself in the line of succession to David’s throne, and Dinah’s brothers used the occasion to loot an entire town, including carrying off the women, presumably to show them how much they despised rape.
At any rate, they are no substitute for a prohibition of rape in general, when there are prohibitions against such minor offenses as eating shellfish. God punished Cain for killing Abel, but he didn’t let that example suffice; he gave an explicit commandment against murder.
This is untrue. In war, combatants take actions that “deliberately kill” defenseless men, women and babies all the time - indeed, the whole notion of “stategic bombing” is predicated on doing just that.
This doesn’t mean that they are all war criminals. Whether they ought to be is of course a different debate.
By your stated standards, the Western Allies in WW2 are far worse “war criminals” than the ancient Biblical Israelites. I’m willing to bet that they killed more “babies” - quite deliberately - during a single year of WW2 than the Israelites killed during their entire history.
Given the goals of strategic bombing in WW2, that’s not a great argument to make. One of those goals was, explicitly, to cause the German morale to break by inflicting massive civilian casualties. In some cases, by deliberately raising firestorms in cities so that they would incinerate every human living there, by dropping bombs designed to cause fires.
Strikes me that the difference is not “baby killing is bad”, since clearly both sides did it, but rather in the goals behind that killing.
Nonsense. You fail to understand what the OT is.
It is a collection of what, even when it was redacted, consisted of a set of historical myths and legends.
When the OT was redacted, the Israelites lived in kingdoms, with a literate priesthood. The legends of the “occupation of the promised land” were just that - legends - of things that took place hundreds of years before, in pre-literate times. they bore as much resemblence to the lives of the Israelites in the day when the Bible was actually redacted, as the stories of King Arthur bear to the lives of the late Medieval romancers who wrote down the legends of the Knights of the Round Table.
The stuff about smiting ancestral enemies who were cursed forever by God for the bad shit that went down in those days was all stuff that happened in a legendary past, when miracles happened. It had nothing to do with how Israelites were actually supposed to behave in actual warfare of the day, any more than real-life Israelite kings actually used blowing trumpets and the power of God to knock down the walls of enemy cities (as also happened according to the same stories, to Jerico). Actual Iron age war was, no doubt, brutal enough, but there is exactly zero evidence that the Israelites ever exterminated anyone (or indeed, that the invasion of an army of ex-slaves from Egypt actually happened).
Goalpost moving. No-one doubts that ancient Israelites (together with nearly everyone else living in the same age) held, by today’s standards, appalling views concerning the rights of women, and this is reflected in the OT. So did (say) Victorians.
You seem to be missing an important point - the bombing during WW II was done during the war. The slaughter commanded by God was to be done after victory was achieved. This is like if we had bombed Dresden after VE day.
The technology of the time meant that it was unlikely for noncombatants to die during battles (maybe some camp followers) but one getting hit by a stray arrow would be no big deal.
That doesn’t matter in this context. The Bible refers to a legendary golden age where the Israelites had power and won victories. But it was clear that the tactics supposedly used in the legends, commanded by God himself, were acceptable or even virtuous.
The question is whether the Bible condones baby-killing, not whether everyone at the time did. It is clear that the Bible does condone it, and in certain circumstances demands it. That the morality of the Bible matches exactly the morality of the people who wrote it, not the advanced morality of a deity, is yet one more good argument for the Bible being totally written by humans and totally uninspired.
That’s a point. Not sure why it is an important point. Particularly as the stories in the Bible concerning this time period are pretty clearly legends, and WW2 pretty clearly actually happened.
No, it pretty clearly doesn’t mean anything of the kind. If it did, modern-day Jews would accept massacres as divinely okay - and they don’t.
If you actually read the Talmud on this point, you would discover that Jewish scholars make the following point: that these actions - massacre of the named “cursed” tribes - were singular events, and not, in fact, a guide to moral activities.
The quote you are responding to here is about rape, not baby-killing.
Again, no. It states that certain “cursed” tribes were massacred, as required by God - in a legendary past.
This is worlds away from ‘Baby-killing is okay in the Bible’.
Yes, agreed in part. The OT is the product of a particular people in particular stages of social development.
The point you are missing is that you don’t take this analysis far enough. You, like others upthread, seem to labour under the impression that the OT is a singular document, written all at one time, and that everything in it is a guide to action.
It isn’t. It was redacted from stories written (or composed) at totally different times. That is why the legendarium of the Book of Judges appears totally different in content and tome from (say) Ecclesiastes. The whole “ordaned killing of the cursed tribes” thing is pretty clearly a story of great antiquity - and no-one, at the time the OT was redacted (and certainly not when the Talmud was written!) serously thought it was “okay” to massacre new “cursed tribes”, any more than they thought seriously that they could re-create the fall of the walls of Jerico.
Says you. If I was on the other side of that bet, I wouldn’t pay.
The Talmudic source cited for this is Berachot 28a.
The Talmud argues that the attacks and exiles of Sancherib, the king of Assyria and destroyer of Samaria, “mixed up the nations” over 2,500 years ago and thus all identity of the biblical nations has been lost. This implies that all commands of exterminating nations were dismissed and that it is not appropriate to label any contemporary peoples as descendants of Amalek (and so suitable for genocidal extermination).
No, I think TS has it right - the prohibition is against socially embarrassing men, not raping women. Heck, even the Ten Commandments has a prohibition against… adultery.
And also -
So basically, it’s his maidservant and his wife, hands off. Unattached women are fair game. Basically…
First come, first served - or rather, serviced. Hallelujah.
It isn’t the consequences we would accept, but it isn’t “fair game” either. Obviously, in this time and place, women had far less in the way of rights, and were considered more as chattels of the patriarchal family - but paying a big fine plus forced marriage one couldn’t escape was still consequences. Terrible for the woman of course, but not great for the man, either - whose ability to form profitable marriage alliances was now permanently messed up, and who would presumably be considerably poorer.
Your view is like saying, as a generality, that Victorians thought rape was “okay”, because one could not be convicted of a crime for raping one’s wife, or because convictions in a whole host of other areas (such as rape by a social superior of an inferior) were rare. It is just factually incorrect (which isn’t to say that past views on the rights of women weren’t horrible, both in the Bible and elsewhere - they were).
In ancient times, “prison” wasn’t a punishment, so punishments for transgressions tended to look (to modern eyes) either absurdly draconian (“death/mutilation”) or absurdly lenient (“a fine”). Combine that with the total lack of any social services and the imperative not to start blood-feuds between patriarchal clans, and you get forced marriages, too.
I have no probs skewering biblcal literalists with the nastiness in the Bible, but at least make them good ones.
You accused me of goalpost moving, and IMO did nothing to back that up. But you’re the one who is answering completely different questions in an effort to avoid the OP’s question.
You are correct when you say that the Talmud takes a gentler view. And you are correct when you say that the stories of the conquest of Canaan are legends.
But that’s irrelevant. You’re fighting the hypothetical. The question is what the Bible says, not what the Talmud says, and not whether the Bible is true.
Would you answer a question about Game of Thrones by tediously explaining that it is not actual history?
Not great for the man? I’d say it’s a sweet deal that some fat old ugly man can stroll around town, pick out some nice young teenager, and force her to marry him just by raping her. You do realize that rape victims are not assigned by lot, right? I mean, it’s a pretty safe assumption that the guy finds her attractive.
There is no prohibition against polygamy, and indeed many of the most famous men in the Bible practiced it, so your “marriage alliances” red herring would be weak even if it were, you know, an actual punishment, rather than a possible consequence. And the 50-shekel fine is only ten times the amount that everyone had to pay the priests to “redeem” their first-born son, so it was hardly an amount to drive someone into debt. Probably a few hundred bucks in today’s money.
Yes. That’s not actually presented as a good thing in Isaiah 13, though. It’s not evidence that the bible approves of these things; rather the contrary.
An instance, in a legend contained in the Bible, that certain tribes were once, long ago, so cursed that killing them down to the last infant was commanded, simply doesn’t demonstrate that “killing babies is Okay … according to the Old Testament”. It just doesn’t. Claiming over and over that it does simply violates logic. It’s like claiming that sacrificing one’s daughter was okay in ancient Greece because it happened in the Iliad.
That was once specific instance, in a legend, and it is clearly confined to that instance. There is absolutely zero indication that “according to the old testament” baby-killing was “okay”.
The exact logical fallacy you are displaying here is “excluding the middle” or “false dilemma”.
Because the consequences are not what you, or I, would want them to be based on our moral understanding of human rights, you are claiming this equals “rape was okay”. Pure black and white thinking.
Are you of the view “rape was okay” in Victorian England as well? Or for that matter, “rape was okay” everywhere in the world, prior to comparatively modern times? Because of course, the same “logic” applies. I can easily poiint out instances in which rape occurred and the “punishment” was light or non-existant.
Fact is, this is a bad example for you, because light as you claim the fine was (and no, I don’t think you actually know the comparative value of a silver shekel in Biblical times - whatever made you base your argument on that?), in this case there was an actual set punishment imposed. Having a punishment imposed is obvious evidence that the conduct in question ws not okay.
