Miller:
Till:
Looks like an ordered annihilation? We have already seen in
this section of
Part One that, as the story was written in the Bible, it was an
"ordered annihilation"
and cannot be called anything else without just adamantly refusing to
accept what the Bible
plainly said. As I go through this part of Mr. Miller's article, point
by point, please
notice that he continues to rely on question begging and special
pleading to present his
God-can-do-no-wrong approach to the problem of Yahwistic massacres in
the Bible. His argument
seems to be that since "God" commanded other ethnic exterminations
besides the Canaanites,
the latter must have been morally right. This is clearly a non sequitur.
Miller:
This is what the LORD Almighty says: `I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. 3 Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.'" (I Sam 15.2f)
The situation is thus:
Till:
No, the situation is that Yahweh allegedly told Saul to go destroy totally
the
Amalekites and to include children and infants in the destruction.
There is just no way
to whitewash what this passage plainly says, but as we will quickly
see, Mr. Miller tries
to clean it up and put a pretty face on it.
Miller:
Till:
There are biblical claims that the Amalekites attacked the Israelites
on their way out of
Egypt
(Ex.
17:8-16) and then
later after they had entered Canaan
(Judges
3:13-14;
Judges
7:12), but these
encounters had happened some 400 years before Yahweh commanded Saul to
destroy totally
the Amalekites. The passage that Mr. Miller quoted above states very
plainly that the reason
for Yahweh's command to destroy the Amalekites was to punish them for
their attack on the
Israelites some 430 years earlier on their way out of Egypt. I will say
more about this later
as I go through Mr. Miller's attempt to rationalize the Amalekite
massacre, but for now, I
just want to emphasize that he simply cannot prove by the Bible that
the Amalekites were
the "predatory, raiding" group that he claimed above.
Before I leave this point, I will say that even if the Amalekites were "predatory" and "raiding," that would have made them no different from the Israelites. As noted earlier, on their way toward Canaan, the Israelites ravaged Midian and brought back "all of their cattle, all of their flocks, and all of their goods" and then killed all of the male children and nonvirgin females but kept the virgin girls alive for themselves (Num. 31:9-18), and in their blitzkrieg through Canaan, they killed entire civilian populations and left nothing alive to breathe [as noted here in Part One]. If Mr. Miller wants to see other examples, I can accommodate him. In reply to these examples, however, I suppose he will claim that such actions were not immoral as long as the Israelites did them, but if the Amalekites did them, that was sufficient to kill them all. If this is the route he takes, he will again be engaging in special pleading.
Till:
That is what the Bible claims, but the fact that the Amalekites were
presumably "distant
cousins" of Israel would not make what Miller says immediately below
necessarily so.
Miller:
Till:
Even as the biblical story of Jacob and Esau was written, there is no
indication at all that
Esau knew about the land promise. Jacob was on his way to Paddanaram
when Yahweh renewed
the land promise given earlier to Abraham
(Gen.
28:10-15), and
Esau wasn't with Jacob at the time of the renewal. There is no biblical
record that I am
aware of that Esau was ever told of this promise, as if it would make
any difference if he
had been, because there would be no way at all to prove that because
Esau knew of the land
promise some 550 years before the time of king Saul, the Amalekite
descendants of Esau would
have known of a distant land promise that his god had made to Jacob.
When an inerrantist has to stretch this far to find a "point," you can tell that he is desperate for a point.
Miller:
Till:
Where should I begin here? Well, first, as I just
pointed out, there is no way to determine
that they knew about "the promises of God" as Mr. Miller is claiming
here. Second, he says
that Israel wouldn't have threatened the Amalekites "had they believed
the promises of God,"
but if these stories about the Amalekites are true, they would have had
reason to wonder about
2.5
to 3
million Israelites trekking up from Egypt toward their southern
border. According to
the tale of the spies whom Moses sent ahead to get the lay of the land,
they were in the
wilderness of Paran at the time
(Num.
12:16), which was
west of the Gulf of Aqaba and south of Amalekite territory. Moses told
the spies to go up to
Canaan "by way of the South" and then to "go up into the hill country"
(Num.
13:17-18). This
route to Canaan would have taken the spies into Amalekite territory. We
can know that going
this route would have taken the spies into Amalekite territory, because
their report to Moses
said that "Amalek dwells in the land of the south"
(Num.
13:29). Further
proof that this would have been Amalekite territory is seen in action
that the people took
after Yahweh had sent a plague upon them for rebelling at the report of
the spies.
Numbers 14:36 So the men Moses had sent to explore the land, who returned and made the whole community grumble against him by spreading a bad report about it--37 these men responsible for spreading the bad report about the land were struck down and died of a plague before Yahweh. 38 Of the men who went to explore the land, only Joshua son of Nun and Caleb son of Jephunneh survived. 39 When Moses reported this to all the Israelites, they mourned bitterly. 40 Early the next morning they went up toward the high hill country. "We have sinned," they said. "We will go up to the place Yahweh promised." 41 But Moses said, "Why are you disobeying the Lord's command? This will not succeed! 42 Do not go up, because Yahweh is not with you. You will be defeated by your enemies, 43 for the Amalekites and Canaanites will face you there. Because you have turned away from Yahweh, he will not be with you and you will fall by the sword." 44 Nevertheless, in their presumption they went up toward the high hill country, though neither Moses nor the ark of the Lord's covenant moved from the camp. 45 Then the Amalekites and Canaanites who lived in that hill country came down and attacked them and beat them down all the way to Hormah.
Mr. Miller has tried to paint the Israelites as goody-goodies personified, but as the Bible related the story just referred to, the Israelites tried to go through Amalekite territory in apparently large numbers, and they were pushed back by Amalekites and Canaanites, who, in effect, were only protecting their land from foreign invaders. I suppose Mr. Miller thinks that the Amalekites should have known of "God's" promise to give the Israelites the land, and so the Amalekites should have just stood aside and let their "distant cousins" come in and take their land, but that isn't the way nations react when they are threatened by outsiders encroaching on their territory. Just this week, the governor of New Mexico declared a state of emergency because of conditions on the Mexico/New Mexico border being created by intruders from the south. The right of people to protect their national territory has been recognized for centuries, and so the Amalekites were doing nothing that any modern country today would not do. The Israelite thrust northward into Amalekite territory could easily explain why "Amalek came and fought with Israel in Rephidim" (Ex. 17:8-16), although this battle seems to have happened earlier than the one referred to above. Regardless of that probability, a horde of 2.5 to 3 million approaching their territory from the south would have given the Amalekites cause to launch a preemptive strike to turn them back. Mr. Miller can't argue that the Israelites were too far away at this time for the Amalekites to know that they were moving toward their territory, because the fact that the battle took place (if it did) would prove that the Amalekites had to know where the Israelites were. Besides, after the Israelites had crossed the Red Sea, they sang a hymn to Yahweh whose lyrics claimed that word of their crossing had already reached the people of Philistia, Edom, Moab, and Canaan, which were all farther away than Amalekite territory.
Exodus 15:13 In Your loving kindness You have led the people whom You have redeemed; In Your strength You have guided them to Your holy habitation. 14 The peoples have heard, they tremble; Anguish has gripped the inhabitants of Philistia. 15 Then the chiefs of Edom were dismayed; The leaders of Moab, trembling grips them; All the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away. 16 Terror and dread fall upon them; By the greatness of Your arm they are motionless as stone; Until Your people pass over, O Yahweh, Until the people pass over whom You have purchased.
This hymnn was sung after the Israelites had crossed the Red Sea, so don't ask me how nations like Philistia--which actually didn't exist at that time--Edom, Moab, and Canaan could have heard about this event before Moses "led Israel onward from the Red Sea" (Ex. 15:22). That's a problem that biblical inerrantists will have to explain. My point here is that if nations on beyond Amalekite territory had somehow heard immediately about the Israelite crossing of the Red Sea, there is no reason why the Amalekites couldn't have also heard about it. At any rate, if the Amalekites "came" to Rephidim and fought the Israelites, they had to know that they were there.
Mr. Miller is trying to make the Amalekites more barbarous than most tribes of that time, but there is no biblical support for this view. He is simply trying to defend the execution of a centuries-long Israelite grudge against the Amalekites. After the battle at Rephidim, as this story was told, Yahweh declared the grudge.
Exodus 17:14 Then Yahweh said to Moses, "Write this on a scroll as something to be remembered and make sure that Joshua hears it, because I will completely blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven." 15 Moses built an altar and called it Yahweh is my Banner. 16 He said, "For hands were lifted up to the throne of Yahweh. Yahweh will be at war against the Amalekites from generation to generation."
Just before the Israelites entered Canaan, Moses reminded them of the grudge that Yahweh had pronounced on the Amalekites.
Deuteronomy 25:19 When Yahweh your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!
There is the reason for Yahweh's command to exterminate the Amalekites. Mr. Miller has tried to paint them as "predators" and "raiders" so vexing to the Israelites that Yahweh had no choice but to order their extermination, but this is a spin that Mr. Miller is trying to put onto the situation in order to take attention from the moral repugnance of the atrocity that took place. If the Bible is inerrant, as Mr. Miller seems to believe, then he must accept the reason that the Bible gives for the issuance of the command to eradicate the Amalekites. Here it is again, which I am quoting this time from the Jewish Publication Society's version to show that even Jews recognize the reason why this command was given. As you read it, please notice the bold-print emphasis.
1 Samuel 15:1 Samuel said to Saul, "I am the one [Yahweh] sent to anoint you king over His people Israel. Therefore, listen to [Yahweh's] command! 2 Thus said [Yahweh] of hosts: I am exacting the penalty for what Amalek did to Israel, for the assault he made upon them on the road, on their way out of Egypt. Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to them. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camel and asses!"
Mr. Miller and every other biblical inerrantist on earth can read this passage until doomsday, and they will find no reason why Yahweh gave the command to exterminate the Amalekites except the one emphasized in bold print: Yahweh was finally carrying out the grudge he pronounced in the passages quoted before this. He was "exacting the penalty for what Amalek did to Israel on their way out of Egypt."
That this was clearly the reason for the command is also shown in the next two verses, where Saul gave the Kenites safe passage out of Amalekite territory, because their ancestors had shown kindness to the Israelites on their way to Canaan.
4 So Saul summoned the men and mustered them at Telaim--two hundred thousand foot soldiers and ten thousand men from Judah. 5 Saul went to the city of Amalek and set an ambush in the ravine. 6 Then he said to the Kenites, "Go away, leave the Amalekites so that I do not destroy you along with them; for you showed kindness to all the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt." So the Kenites moved away from the Amalekites.
That is clear enough, isn't it? Saul spared the Kenites, because their ancestors had shown kindness to the Israelites after they had come out of Egypt, but the Amalekites hadn't, and so Yahweh gave the orders to exterminate them. No reason for the command can be found anywhere but in this passage, and the reason given here was to extract punishment for something the Amalekite ancestors had done some 400 years earlier.
Although Mr. Miller didn't do so, some biblical inerrantists have defended Yahweh's reason for the massacre on the grounds that the Amalekite attack on the Israelites recorded in Exodus 17 had been made on the rear of the horde, where the weak and feeble ones were straggling behind. Some of my comments now, as well as those above, anticipate some of Mr. Miller's rationalizations further along, but when I come to them, I can reply by referring readers back to this section.
Deuteronomy 25:17 Remember what the Amalekites did to you along the way when you came out of Egypt. 18 When you were weary and worn out, they met you on your journey and cut off all who were lagging behind; they had no fear of God.
To this, I can only say, "So what?" This incident had happened around 430 years before Saul was commanded to go destroy totally the Amalekites of his time. Is it morally right to hold people responsible for something their ancestors had done centuries earlier? This is the kind of thinking that results in centuries-old ethic grudges in places like Bosnia and the Near East, which we hear about so often in the news. If we went back in time 430 years, we would be in the year 1575, which would be just 83 years after the discovery of the "new world" and 31 years before the first permanent colony was established at Jamestown. An account by Robert Beverely described an Indian attack on the colony on March 22, 1622, which killed 347 colonial settlers. The attack was deceptive in that the Indians, who had been on friendly terms with the colony, came into Jamestown as friends, as they often had, and then turned on colonists. Here is Beverely's description of the attack.
The very morning of the massacre they [the Indians] came freely and unarmed among them, eating with them and behaving themselves with the same freedom and friendship as formerly till the very minute they were to put their plot in execution. Then they fell to work all at once everywhere, knocking the English unawares on the head, some with their hatchets, which they call tomahawks, others with the hoes and axes of the English themselves, shooting at those who escaped the reach of their hands, sparing neither age nor sex but destroying man, woman, and child according to their cruel way of leaving none behind to bear resentment. But whatever was not done by surprise that day was left undone, and many that made early resistance escaped.
I doubt that any ethnically identifiable descendants of the Powhatan tribe exist today, but let's suppose they did exist on some reservation like the present-day descendants of other tribes. What would public reaction be if the president of the United States should say that he was going to exact the penalty for what the Powhatan tribe had done at Jamestown in 1622 and then sent army troops onto their reservation to destroy totally all of them, including women, children, and infants, along with any livestock they might have? Do you suppose there would be any public outrage if such a deed as this were done? The Nazi holocaust happened just some 50-60 years ago, but what would world reaction be if the Israelis, who almost certainly have atomic weapons, should send a fleet of bombers into Germany to nuke them on the pretense of "extracting penalty" for what had been done to Jews during the Nazi era? Do you suppose there would be any cries of outrage around the world?
At times, I get the impression as I am going through Mr. Miller's article that he is laying down a smokescreen by talking about "predators" and "raiders" to try to hide from his readers what the Bible really says about the Amalekite massacre, but if this is his intention, I urge readers to look through the smoke. For pity's sake, the Bible plainly says that "God" gave a command to destroy completely the Amalekites of Saul's day for something that their ancestors had done 430 years earlier. There is just no way to whitewash this incident and make it morally acceptable.
Miller:
Till:
I replied to this rationalization above. When its borders are
threatened, a nation can be
expected to take military action, but let's just suppose that this
wasn't the reason for the
Amalekite attack on Israel at Rephidim. Let's suppose that it had been
done for no other
reason except sheer maliciousness. How would that justify massacring
their descendants,
including children and infants--430 years later?
Are the people who offer this "explanation" for the Amalekite massacre really serious? Do they really believe that a moral wrong committed by people today would be a justifiable reason for massacring their descendants 430 years later?
Miller:
Deuteronomy 25.17-19 Remember what the Amalekites did to you along the way when you came out of Egypt. 18 When you were weary and worn out, they met you on your journey and cut off all who were lagging behind; they had no fear of God. 19 When the LORD your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!
Till:
I quoted this same text earlier, so I need say no more than what I said
then, and immediately
above, how would a dastardly Amalekite attack on the Israelites on
their way to Canaan justify
killing 430 years later all of their descendants, who had had nothing
to do with that attack
on Israel?
Miller:
Till:
I also quoted this passage above and commented on it there. It does
nothing at all to help
Mr. Miller's case, because it merely confirms that the reason for
Yahweh's command to wipe
out the Amalekites was to extract punishment for what their ancestors
had done 430 years
earlier. I would ask Mr. Miller to tell us if he really thinks that
killing people for what
their ancestors had done centuries earlier would be morally right.
Miller:
This action would have also served to give the people of Amalek plenty
of notice (i.e.,
time to 'move away' themselves), and the impending attack by
Saul--especially with the troop
counts reported!--would hardly have been a surprise.
Till:
Well, who has ever said that the attack was a surprise? As the passage
quoted earlier claims,
Saul mustered 210,000 soldiers for the attack
(1 Sam.
15:4). I can't
conceive of an army this big coming into a territory without the people
living there being
aware of it, but the issue is not whether the Amalekites were surprised
or whether Saul gave
them a warning of the attack. The issue is whether it was morally right
for even a god to
order the extermination of a people for something that their ancestors
had done four centuries
earlier. The rest is just part of the smokescreen that Mr. Miller is
laying down as he gropes
to find some kind of justification for the Amalekite massacre.
Miller:
Some of them would likely have fled--we know all of them were
not killed, since they
'lived to fight/raid again' in David's time
(I Sam
27,30) and even
in Hezekiah's time (200-300 years later!,
1 Chr
4:43).
Till:
All that Mr. Miller has done here is call attention to one of the
oddities of the Bible. It
seems that when nations were completely eradicated, they didn't always
stay eradicated. I have
already quoted above the text
(Num.
31:1-18), which
told of an invasion of Midian in which the Israelites killed "all the
men"
(vs:7-8),
brought the
women and children back as captives
(v:9),
and killed all of the
males and the nonvirgin females
(v:16-18).
One would
think that after all of this, the Midianite nation would have been
pretty well done in, but
even though this national massacre had happened close to the end of the
Israelite wilderness
wanderings, we find that Midianites were still alive and kicking in the
time of the judges.
Yahweh, in fact, used them to enslave the Israelites for seven years as
punishment for their
having done "that which was evil in the sight of Yahweh"
(Judges
6:1-6), so if the
Midianites were able to enslave
2.5 to 3
million Israelites, they did indeed make an unusually fast recover
from the devastating
massacre in Numbers 31. Gideon later led a force of 300 against an
Amalekite/Midianite army
that "lay all along the valley like locusts for multitude"
(Judges
7:6-7,12). Of
course, most of the soldiers in this army were undoubedtly Amalekites,
because it doesn't seem
likely that any Midianites who survived the massacre in Numbers 31
could have reproduced in
numbers great enough to muster enough fighting men to fit the
description of the army that
Gideon's 300 men faced in the passage just cited.
The Canaanites in Hazor were rather resilient too. Joshua defeated them early in his campaign in Canaan and killed their king Jabin (Josh. 11:1,10), but Jabin somehow led a Canaanite army in a later battle in Judges 4:1-3, 23-24). As the links will show, Jabin was killed in this battle too.
I could give other examples, but these are sufficient to show that people and nations sometimes didn't stay dead when they were killed in the Bible. Those interested in seeing more details about the rebounding of nations that the Hebrews presumably wiped out should read "Those Resilient Heathens," which will show that all that Mr. Miller has done above is identify the Amalekites as another example of exterminated nations that somehow made amazing comebacks.
If these are inerrant statements in an inerrant Bible, then the Amalekite nation was eradicated on that day, but the scriptures that Mr. Miller quoted show that somehow the Amalekites made a comeback to fight Israelites another day. Mr. Miller tries to make this problem into just a matter of some Amalekites having escaped, but if this happened, why didn't the inspired writer say so instead of claiming that Saul had "utterly destroyed them." One of the passages that Mr. Miller cited above states that in a battle with David from "twilight till evening the next day," all of the "resurrected" Amalekites were killed except "four hundred young men, who rode upon camels and fled" (1 Sam. 30:17). Now that is the way that any self-respecting writer inspired by an omniscient, omnipotent deity should report incidents. If some escaped in a battle, just say so. Don't say that they were "utterly destroyed" if they weren't.
Miller:
Kaiser notes in EBC:
Exodus
17.8:
Till:
This link connects readers to an endnote, which identifies the source
of the quotation below
as from The Expositor's Bible Commentary. That it was published
by Zondervan books
should tell readers to expect the quotation from it (below) to express
a bias for biblical
accuracy.
Miller [quoting Kaiser]:
Amalek's assault on Israel drew the anger of God on two counts: (1) they failed to recognize the hand and plan of God in Israel's life and destiny (even the farther-removed Canaanites of Jericho had been given plenty to think about when they heard about the Exodus--Josh 2.10); and (2) the first targets of their warfare were the sick, aged, and tired of Israel who lagged behind the line of march (Deut 25:17-19).
Till:
Well, I see that Kaiser also knows how to beg questions. He assumes
that the Bible is right
in saying that "the hand and plan of God [was] in Israel's life and
destiny," but how does he
know that this was true. Extrabiblical writings like
the Moabite Stone
and
inscriptions
on
pavement stones at the temple of Urta in Nimrud state very clear
beliefs of non-Hebraic
kings that their gods favored them and led them to victory over their
enemies, one of which,
in the case of the Moabite king Mesha was Israel. An inscription on
the
gate of Istar in Babylon said that Nebuchadnezzar had been
appointed king "by the will of
Marduk." In other words, belief that kings and nations had been favored
by gods to receive
special favors was about as commonplace as dirt in those days, so I am
curious to know why
Mr. Miller believes that biblical references that, in effect, claimed
that "the hand of God
[was] in Israel's life and destiny" are true, but extrabiblical
inscriptions about favors
bestowed by the gods on other people are not. Mr. Miller seems to
believe that if he keeps
referring to what the Bible says about the special divine favor that
the god Yahweh had given
to the Israelites, that will be sufficient to prove that they were.
This is question begging gone
to seed.
Kaiser said in the quotation above that even the people in Jericho had been "given plenty to think about when they heard about the Exodus." I have two comments to make about this: (1) The position that Kaiser and Miller seem to be taking about the Yahwistic massacres is that if the victims of the massacres knew that the Israelites were coming, they had no one to blame but themselves if they were later killed, but they have failed to give any kind of logical reason to support that position. According to this logic, all of the people who have been killed by American military action in Iraq have no one to blame but themselves, because they knew weeks in advance that the invasion was coming. This kind of thinking doesn't seem to recognize that fleeing isn't always practical or even possible. After all, if people are entrenched in a land and have invested their lives in building houses and farming land and tending herds, they would be reluctant to leave without making an effort to hang on to what they have. (2) Kaiser, like Mr. Miller, is assuming biblical inerrancy, but there is plenty of good evidence to suggest that the battle of Jericho never happened, because it had already been destroyed by the time of the alleged Israelite entry into Canaan. Those who want to see the evidence of this should read "The Walls of Jericho" by Brett Palmer, which is a detailed rebuttal of Robert Turkel's “Evidence of Jericho,” an article in which Turkel tried to defend the historicity of the biblical account.
As for Kaiser's second point quoted above, I have already shown that even if the Amalekites did, in fact, attack the Israelites on their way out of Egypt, they were not the same Amalekites that Yahweh allegedly ordered exterminated. The latter would have been descendants of the Amalekites who lauched the attack, and these descendants lived over 400 years after that attack, so whether "the sick, aged, and tired of Israel who lagged behind the line of march" were the targets of that Amalekite attack is irrelevant. Mr. Miller may think that he helped his case by bringing the Amalekites into his defense of Yahwistic massacres, but instead he has irreparably damaged his case. No longer can he just argue that Yahweh was morally entitled to order the Israelites to exterminate the Canaanites of that time in order to gain possession of their land, he must now show logical reasons why it would have been morally right for Yahweh to command the total destruction of a people for something that their ancestors had done four centuries earlier.
To argue that this was a morally correct action would be parallel to saying that killing descendants of the Powhatan Indians for the Jamestown massacre in 1622 would also be morally right.
Miller:
But Amalek continues to repeatedly oppress, terrorize, and
vandalize Israel for between
200 and 400 more years!
Till:
And what is Mr. Miller's proof of this? He can't even cite biblical
claims that the
Amalekites had terrorized the Israelites for 400 years. I cited above
the passages that
mention troubles that the Israelites had with Amalekites, and from the
reference in
Judges
10:12 where
Yahweh speaking--which he did routinely in those days--referred to
having saved the Israelites
out of the hand of the Sadonians, Maonites, and Amalekites when the
Israelites cried out to
him until the command in
1
Samuel 15:2 for Saul
to destroy totally the Amalekites, there was no biblical reference to
the Amalekites, much
less any reference to oppression, terror, or vandalism that they
inflicted on the Israelites.
For about a 200-year span, then, there was no biblical reference to the
Amalekites. How, then,
does Mr. Miller know that the Amalekites had continued to "oppress,
terrorize, and vandalize
Israel for between 200 and 400 more years."
I will tell you what I think happened here. What Mr. Miller said above has been repeated by fundamentalist preachers over and over and over. I heard it myself as a young preacher, trusted the older preachers who had said it, and so I passed it along without bothering to see if there was biblical confirmation of the claim. I suspect that this is what Mr. Miller has done. He heard it, he trusted those he heard it from, and so he uncritically passed it along, but the truth is that there are no records, biblical or extrabiblical, to confirm Mr. Miller's claim. I am sure that discerning readers will understand that Mr. Miller didn't quote or cite any biblical, or extrabiblical, texts to support his claim that the Amalekites oppressed, terrorized, and vandalized the Israelites for 200 to 400 years, because there are none. With as much respect to him as I can muster, I just have to say that I wonder about the intellectual integrity of biblical "apologists" who make claims like this that have no evidence to support them.
If I am wrong, I will apologize to Mr. Miller when he presents corroborative evidence that the Amalekites had continued to "oppress, terrorize, and vandalize Israel for between 200 and 400 more years." Meanwhile, I hope that readers of Mr. Miller's website will learn from this to be a bit more critical of articles obviously intended to establish inerrancy in the Bible, especially when they just recycle "explanations" that have been responded to over and over.
Mr. Miller:
And yet, Amalekites were freely accepted as immigrants to Israel during
this period.
Till:
They were? Just where did Mr. Miller get this? He is claiming to know
that Israel "freely
accepted Amalekites as immigrants," even though the Bible makes no
mention of Amalekites from
the early period of the judges until the reign of Saul. There is a
reference in
1
Chronicles 4:43 to a
raid that the "sons of Simeon" lauched against "the remnant of the
Amalekites" that had
escaped and dwelt on mount Seir "until that day." This raid occurred in
the time of Hezekiah,
so it would have happened well after the time of Saul. Besides, mount
Seir was located in
Moab, so the presence there of a "remnant of the Amalekites" would in
no way prove that
they had been "freely accepted as immigrants to Israel."
Miller:
Let's note again that (1) they had plenty of access to 'truth' (at least
400 years
since Jacob and Land-promise),
Till:
I hate to sound like a broken record, but Mr. Miller is begging
questions again. How does
he know that what the Bible presents about Jacob and the land promise
was the "truth" rather
than just the Israelite version of the common belief of the times that
tribes and nations had
been specially chosen of their "god(s)"? Even if we assume that the
Israelite version of this common
belief was the "truth," how would Mr. Miller know that the Amalekites
had had access to it
for 400 years? Judaism was not an evangelical religion, so it didn't
send out preachers and
missionaries to tell others that of all the gods and religions of that
time, theirs were the
true ones.
Miller:
plus enough information about the miraculous Exodus to know where/when
to attack Israel;
Till:
Yes, as noted above, the theme of the "Song of Miriam" was that nations
to the north, like
Edom, Moab, Canaan, and the nonexisting Philistia, had already heard
about the Israelite
crossing before Moses led them "onward from the Red Sea"
(Ex.
15:22), so if one can
believe in instantaneous transmission of information over long
distances in a time when there
were no rapid communication systems, he may as well believe that the
Amalekites had also heard
about the exodus. Whatever the Amalekites had heard, however, and no
matter what they may have
done to the Israelites in the alleged attack on their rear guard, that
is irrelevant, because
the Amalekites whom Saul was ordered to exterminate lived about 430
years later. By what
logic did Mr. Miller determine that the Amalekites contemporary to Saul
should have been
killed for something their ancestors had done centuries earlier?
Believing that the
Amalekites should all have been massacred in Saul's time for something
their distant ancestors
had done doesn't tax Mr. Miller's sense of justice?
Miller:
(2) even their war conduct was cruel by current standards(!);
Till:
I realize that Mr. Miller is trying to put an acceptable spin on the
Amalekite massacre, but
he is now doing nothing but stringing together unsustainable
assertions. As previously noted,
the Israelites burned the Canaanite cities they conquered and left
nothing alive in them to
breathe. What did the Amalekites do in their attack on the Israelites
that was crueler than
this? In the inscription on the
Moabite Stone, Mesha
said that he went to
Nebo by night "and fought against it from break of dawn till noon" and
that he "took it and
slew all, seven thousand men, boys, and women, and girls." How
was the Amalekite attack on
the Israelites crueler than the massacre described here? In the
inscriptions on the pavement
stones in the temple to Urta in Nimrud, the Assyrian king Assurnasirpal
gave a very gruesome
description of his treatment of prisoners taken in battle.
At that time, I received tribute of the land of Isala--cattle, flocks, and wine. To the mountain of Kashirari I crossed, to Kinabu, the fortified city of Hulai I drew near. With the masses of my troops and by my furious battle onset I stormed, I captured the city; 600 of their warriors I put to the sword; 3,000 captives I burned with fire; I did not leave a single one among them alive to serve as hostage. Hulai, their governor, I captured alive. Their corpses I formed into pillars; their young men and maidens I burned in the fire. Hulai, their governor, I flayed, his skin I spread upon the wall of the city of Damdamusa; the city I destroyed, I devastated with fire (Crane Brinton, A History of Western Morals, Harcourt, Brace, & Co., p. 48).
In what way was the Amalekite attack on the Israelites crueler than what Assurnasirpal claimed that he did to captives taken in battle?
Besides the Canaanite and Amalekite massacres already referred to several times, the Bible mentions other atrocities that were surely as barbaric and cruel as anything the Amalekites could have done in their attack on the Israelites.
I see nothing in the account of the Amalekite attack on Israel, already quoted above, to indicate that the Amalekite conduct of war was crueler than "current standards." Indeed, there is an indication that their standards were noticeably more humane than Israel's. Those elusive Amalekites, who kept coming up after they had been totally destroyed, once showed a much higher standard of humaneness than was shown in the examples noted above.
1 Samuel 30:1 Then it happened when David and his men came to Ziklag on the third day, that the Amalekites had made a raid on the Negev and on Ziklag, and had overthrown Ziklag and burned it with fire; 2 and they took captive the women and all who were in it, both small and great, without killing anyone, and carried them off and went their way. 3 When David and his men came to the city, behold, it was burned with fire, and their wives and their sons and their daughters had been taken captive.
The Israelite method of warfare was to leave no one alive to breathe, but in this account of the Amalekite raid on Ziklag, they killed no one but took the population captive instead. It seems rather obvious whose "standards" of warfare were more noble, if war can in any sense be considered noble. As I said above, Mr. Miller is struggling to put a prettier face on Saul's massacre of the Amalekites, and in so doing, he is making assertions that have no basis in biblical records. Does Mr. Miller believe that Mesha's claimed capture of Nebo and his subsequent slaughter of 7,000 men, boys, women, and girls in it was a judgment of the god Chemosh against this city? The inscription on the Moabite Stone certainly indicates that it was. Does Mr. Miller believe that Assurnasirpal's massacre of 600 warriors and 3000 captives in the city of Hulai was a judgment against that city by his gods? The inscriptions on the pavement stones of the temple of Urta in Nimrud claim that Assurnasirpal was "chosen of Sin [moon god], favorite of Anu, beloved of Adad, mighty one among the gods." What is Mr. Miller's rationale for accepting everything that the Bible says about Yahweh's executing "judgment" on the enemies of Israel but rejecting parallel claims that neighboring nations made about their gods?
The answer to this question is simple: Mr. Miller has been engaged in special pleading throughout his article that I am answering.
Miller:
(3) the semi-annihilation was a judgment;
Till:
The "semi-annihilation"? As we have noticed Yahweh ordered a complete, total
annihilation and was thoroughly ticked off when Saul kept just one of
the Amalekites alive.
As for Miller's claim that this was a "judgment," that is another case
of question begging
on his part. He assumes that because the Bible says that Yahweh was
"exacting a penalty" for
the attack on Israel over 400 years ealier, this was a correct
statement. He apparently
doesn't even consider the possibility that this was nothing more than
an Israelite belief
that their god Yahweh was leading them in war, just as Mesha believed
that Chemosh led him
in war and as Assurnasirpal believed that the gods were leading him.
Miller:
(4) God was willing to spare the innocent people--and specifically gave
them the opportunity
to move away;
Till:
Oh, really? I guess that was why Yahweh's command to Saul explicitly
said that he was to
destroy the Amalekites totally and spare them not and expressly
included children and
infants in the command. Miller is apparently arguing that Yahweh
ordered Saul to destroy
totally the Amalekites, but then he graciously found a way to
let some of them
escape. Of course, he has no evidence to support that speculation.
Miller:
(5) children living in the households of stubbornly-hostile parents
(who refused to flee or
join Israel earlier) died swiftly in the one-day event (instead of
being killed--as homeless
orphans--by a combination of starvation, wild beasts, exposure,
disease, and other raiders;
or instead of being captured and sold as foreign slaves by neighboring
tribes, for the older
ones perhaps?)--they are victims of their fathers' terrorist and
oppressive habits toward
Israel;
Till:
I have been trying to be civil to Mr. Miller, but that is hard to do
when I read comments like
this, which he keeps repeating in justification of every massacre that
he brings into the
discussion. In the first place, how can Miller know that the Amalekite
children died
"swiftly"? Where does the biblical text indicate that the children died
"swiftly"?
Verse 9
in the biblical
account of this massacre said that Saul "utterly destroyed all of the
people with the
edge of the sword." I can't imagine that in every case of a child
or baby who was run
through or hacked with swords, the deaths were "swift." This is nothing
more than an attempt
by Miller to make a grudge killing more palatable, and it deserves
nothing more than our
contempt.
Miller:
(6) the innocent members of the community (Kenites) and any
change-of-heart Amalekites who
fled are delivered (along with their children of the household).
Till:
Here again are some wild guesses for which Mr. Miller has no supporting
evidence. Where does
the biblical text say anything about Amalekites who had changes of
heart and fled? Where
does it say that "the children of [their] households" were delivered
with them? These are
simply wild speculations. Because Amalekites were mentioned later,
Miller assumes that they
escaped because they had changes of heart and fled, with their
children, but that is a non
sequitur if I ever saw one. If we assume that this massacre really
happened, why would it
not have been possible that these were Amalekites who happened to be
away from the region
when Saul came into their territory to massacre them? Miller, of
course, wants to whitewash
this atrocity as best he can, and so he has Yahweh mercifully
"delivering" those--and their
children--who had changes of heart. I guess that is his way of saying,
"Isn't Yahweh a really
nice guy?" His speculations, however, fail to address the huge problems
in this story:
(1) Why would Yahweh have ordered Saul in the first place to go
massacre an entire nation of
people for something that their ancestors had done 430 years earlier?
(2) Why would Yahweh
have "delivered" only the children of parents who changed their hearts
and fled? Why wouldn't
an omniscient, omnipotent deity have known how to spare all of the
innocent children?
In all that he has said and speculated in his comments about the Amalekites, Mr. Miller has said nothing to solve the moral problem involved in this story.
Miller:
[This brief summary above was objected to by a passionate writer, who
asked
Shouldn't
the butchering of
Amalekite children be considered war crimes? (Feb 19/2000, Part
one:159k),
Till:
And rightly so! Rational people should object to it. Why should
reasonable people accept
conduct in a deity, whom they have never seen, that they would condemn
in neighbors and
nations? If, for example, the United States should undertake to kill
everyone in Iraq,
including children, and babies in order to remove them as a threat to
our national security,
would Mr. Miller find that decision morally right?
If he says, "Well, God decided to destroy the Amalekites totally, and that would have been different from the United States deciding to destroy completely its enemies," he will be engaging in question begging again by assuming that "God" really did order the extermination of the Amalekites. In all that he has said, Mr. Miller has not presented any logical reason why we should think that it was morally right to exterminate the Amalekites. His line of reasoning has been what I said at the beginning of my reply that it would be. He begs the question of biblical accuracy and then argues that if the Bible says that God ordered the massacre of the Canaanites and Amalekites, then God ordered the massacre of the Canaanites and Amalekites, so these massacres have to have been morally right, because God can do no wrong. That kind of argumentation is so fallacious that I need not say any more about it than I already have.
Miller:
and centers mostly on the emotionally difficult problem of the killing
of the children (of
Amalekites, but it would extend generally to the Canaanites and others
as well).]
Till:
What else should it center on? As for extending it to Canaanites "and
others" too, it
certainly should be, because as we have noticed already, Yahweh
commanded the Israelites to
utterly destroy the Canaanites and to leave none of them alive to
breathe. That would have
meant the destruction of children too, so I will alter slightly
Miller's statement above and
call this a morally difficult problem of the killing of the
children rather than an
emotionally difficult one. If Mr. Miller does not find this a morally
difficult problem,
then he is allowing his allegiance to the ideology of biblical
inerrancy to suppress his
common sense.
Miller:
In the book of Jonah, we have an 'averted annihilation'.
The word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai: 2 "Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me."
Till:
I will cut Mr. Miller's "anti-example" off at the pass. As he did
above, he assumes below
that whatever the Bible says must be historically accurate, and so he
proceeds on the
assumption that all claims in the book of Jonah are inerrant,
including, I assume, the tale
of the "great fish" that swallowed Jonah. As I continue to reply to his
assertions, I will
show good reasons why we should suspect that the book of Jonah is not
historically accurate.
Miller:
Jonah obeyed the word of the LORD and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very important city--a visit required three days. 4 On the first day, Jonah started into the city. He proclaimed: "Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned."
Till:
As usual, the NIV, which Mr. Miller quotes from, has
tried to translate away
a problem that casts doubt on Miller's belief that the Bible is
inerrant. Verse 2, quoted
above, says that Nineveh was an "important city" and that "a visit
required three days."
This could mean that in order to see everything, one would have to
spend three days there,
but the generally recognized meaning is that it was a city that
required three days to pass
through it. This meaning was made clearer in other translations.
KJV: Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days' journey.
NKJV: Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, a three-day journey in extent
ASV: Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city, of three days' journey
NASV: Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, a three days' walk.
NRSV: Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days' walk across.
Jewish Publication Society: Nineveh was an enormously large city a three days' walk across.
I could quote others, but these are sufficient to show that the verse most probably meant that Nineveh was a large city--not an important one--which took three days to walk across. That this was the probable meaning was made clear even as the NIV continued into the next verses, which say that "Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's walk" and "cried out, 'Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!'" If Jonah went a day's walk into the city, he would have needed two more days to walk the rest of the way through it, according to the biblical claim of its size, but a day's journey in the Bible was about 20 to 25 miles, so if Jonah went a "day's walk" into the city, he would have passed through its actual three-mile width (documented below) and found himself preaching to sand in the countryside. If the Nineveh of Jonah's time really was an enormous city of a "three days' walk," its diameter would have been somewhere between 60 to 75 miles. That would have made it bigger in area than present-day Los Angeles, St. Louis, Denver, and Chicago.
This claim is not consistent with archaeological diggings at the site of ancient Nineveh. In "A Very Great city," Dave Matson discussed Jonah 3:3 in the light of those archaeological discoveries, which have found that Nineveh was only three miles across at it widest point. It appears, then, that the description of Nineveh's size is just another example of biblical exaggeration, but I don't expect Mr. Miller to accept this as a biblical discrepancy. Anyone who could justify the mass slaughters of children, as Mr. Miller did in his article, will easily accept some of the quibbles that inerrantists have postulated to "explain" the exaggeration of Nineveh's size. One quibble is that the three-day journey in Jonah 3:3 really meant that this was the size of the region or territory that Nineveh was in. This website article about the archaeology of ancient Nineveh proposed that very "solution" to the problem.
The city itself, with the walls around it, was 3 miles long and 1.5 miles wide. It is interesting that the prophet Jonah described the "great city" of Nineveh as a "3 days journey" across, obviously referring to the whole territory as does other parts of the Bible. He must have passed through several cities at the time.
Those who present this "explanation" of the problem ignore completely that the biblical text says that "Nineveh was an enormously large city"; it says nothing here about a region or territory. The city was enormously large. If the writer was referring to a territory instead of just the city of Nineveh, why would he have said that it was "enormously large"? That could have been said of many regions or territories at that time. Further indication that a city and not a region or territory was meant in the writer's narration of this tale is seen in 4:5, which says that after Jonah had been displeased to learn that Yahweh was going to spare the Ninevites, he "left the city and "found a place east of the city, where he made a booth and sat under its shade." When Yahweh later addressed Jonah's anger over the dying of the gourd vine that had shaded the booth, he said that if Jonah was entitled to be angry over the gourd how much more should Yahweh have regard for "Nineveh, that great city (4:11), and at the very beginning of this book when Yahweh called Jonah to go to Nineveh, he said to him, "Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me" (1:2). Everything in this "story" indicates that the "enormously large" Nineveh was a city and not a territory or region, but the description of its size, as noted above, does not agree with the archaeological excavations of the city.
I have taken the time to discuss this discrepancy in order to ask a question: if the text of Jonah was inaccurate in the matter of its size, how can we know that it wasn't inaccurate in other matters too? This is an important point to keep in mind, because we will see that in discussing his "anti-example," Mr. Miller continued to beg the question of biblical accuracy [inerrancy].
Miller:
5 The Ninevites believed God. They declared a fast, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. 6 When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust. 7 Then he issued a proclamation in Nineveh: "By the decree of the king and his nobles: Do not let any man or beast, herd or flock, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. 8 But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. 9 Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish."
Till:
I really don't understand how otherwise sensible people can't see
obvious myth or legend in
what they are reading. If Mr. Miller had read this is some document
like the Moabite Stone
or the temple inscriptions at Nimrud, he would have immediately
realized that these are at
best exaggerations. After all, how likely would it have been that a
stranger could have
walked into the city of Nineveh and proclaimed, "Just forty days more,
and Nineveh will be
overthrown," and all of the people--not some of them
but all of
them--"from the greatest to the least" would have "believed God" (v:5)?
God in this
passage was, of course, Yahweh, but Nineveh was located well out of the
region where Yahweh
was worshiped, and the gods worshiped there, as noted in the link to
Assurnasirpal's temple
inscriptions, were Sin, Anu, Adad, Istar, and many others. How likely
is it that the
Ninevites would have immediately repented in sackcloth and dust over
what some foreign prophet
was preaching about a foreign god? When a storm struck the ship, which
Jonah had taken to
flee "from the presence of Yahweh"
(1:3)
the men aboard became
frightened, and the shipmaster demanded that he call upon his "god" to
keep them from
perishing (v:6).
That these
were not worshipers of Yahweh was shown when Jonah said to them that he
was a Hebrew who
"fear[ed] Yahweh, the God of heaven, who made the sea and dry land"
(v:9).
Upon hearing this,
the men became "exceeding afraid"
(v:10),
as if people
hearing about a new god would immediately come to believe in him. This,
however, is what
the spinner of this tale would have us believe. Jonah went a day's
journey into Nineveh
and said, "Just forty days more, and Nineveh will be overthrown." Jonah
didn't even mention
Yahweh, but, just like that, the Ninevites immediately repented in
sackcloth, and their
king issued a decree ordering everyone, including man and beast, to
fast so that "God" might
turn from his fierce anger and spare them. This tale has myth written
all over, but biblical
inerrantists like Mr. Miller just won't even consider the possibility
that this story didn't
happen just as it is found in the Bible.
That this story wasn't written as history should become evident to anyone who takes the time to study its background. The central character Jonah was identified as "the son of Ammatai" (1:1), but it so happens that Jonah the son of Ammatai was mentioned elsewhere in the Bible in a context that enables us to date the time that he lived.
2 Kings 14:23 In the fifteenth year of King Amaziah son of Joash of Judah, King Jeroboam son of Joash of Israel began to reign in Samaria; he reigned forty-one years. 24 He did what was evil in the sight of Yahweh; he did not depart from all the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat, which he caused Israel to sin. 25 He restored the border of Israel from Lebo-hamath as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of Yahweh, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet, who was from Gath-hepher.
So this passage claims that Jonah had predicted the restoration of Israel's borders by king Jeroboam II. This would mean that Jonah was a predecessor of Jeroboam II, who reigned in the 8th century BC [from 786 to 746], but Nineveh did not become the capital of Assyria until Sennacherib's reign (705-681 BC). He moved the capital of Assyria from Dar Sharrukin to Nineveh around 700 BC and built a palace there, but the passage quoted above by Mr. Miller referred to "the king of Nineveh" (3:6), who, after news of Jonah's message reached him, "rose from his throne," laid his robe aside, covered himself with sackcloth, sat in dust, and issued his decree to fast. Nineveh, however, did not become the capital of Assyria until at least 46 years after the death of Jeroboam II. If Jeroboam II had restored the borders of Israel, it would be unlikely that he had done this in the very last year of his reign, so if Jeroboam II had achieved the restoration of the borders of Israel, he would surely have done this earlier in this reign. If, then, Jonah was a predecessor of Jeroboam II, old enough to be a prophet who predicted Jeroboam's crowning achievement, and if Nineveh wasn't the capital of Assyria until 46 years after the end of the reign of Jeroboam II, Jonah must have been a pretty old guy when Yahweh sent him to Nineveh. No wonder the "great fish" vomited Jonah out on dry land. He would have been too old and tough to digest.
Another indication of fiction in the book of Jonah is its failure to identify the "king of Nineveh" by name. If Jonah was still living after Nineveh was made the capital of Assyria, then Sennacherib was surely the king when Yahweh sent Jonah there, because it would be even more unlikely that Jonah would have been still living 19 years later when Sennacherib's reign ended with his assassination (2 Kings 19:36-37), but Sennacherib was an important Assyrian king, who was mentioned by name in 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles 32, and Isaiah 36-37, so it seems rather unlikely that the writer of Jonah would not have identified the "king of Nineveh" by name if he had been Sennacherib.
Although none of this is admittedly conclusive, it is sufficient to cast doubt on the historicity of Jonah, which Mr. Miller has obviously assumed throughout his discussion of this "anti-example." If inerrantists would bother to read commentaries that were not published in Grand Rapids, Michigan, they would see that there is a mainstream consensus that Jonah is a work of fiction that was probably written postexilically to express a more universalist view of Yahweh than the Hebrew chauvinist view of him presented in the Pentateuch, Joshua, and the books of Samuel and Kings, where he was depicted as a vindictive deity who would order the destruction of non-Hebraic people at the drop of a hat and would even be willing to drop the hat as an excuse to wipe them out. Very likely, the postexilic author of Jonah wanted to soften the earlier view of brutality in Israel's god.
Miller:
Notice that the 'questionable behavior' included "violence"--vs. 8.]
Till:
Notice that Mr. Miller is still begging the question of biblical
accuracy [inerrancy], but
what I said immediately above casts serious doubts on that view.
Miller:
When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.
Till:
Yes, the story makes this claim, but keep in mind what I noted above:
this book was
very likely metaphorical or parabolic in its intent, so that a
postexilic writer could present
Yahweh as a kinder, gentler deity than he was in earlier times when he
ordered harsh
annihilations of non-Hebraic people. That theme was stated when Jonah
realized that "God" had
decided to spare the Ninevites after their citywide fast and repentance.
Jonah 4:1 But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. 2 He prayed to Yahweh, "O Yahweh, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. 3 Now, O Yahweh, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live."
If Jonah knew that Yahweh was a gracious and compassionate God, who was slow to anger and abounded in love and relented from sending calamity, he must not have been very familiar with Hebrew history, because Mr. Miller's own examples that I have been discussing show that the god Yahweh was the opposite of how Jonah described him here. This passage should be interpreted in light of the writer's probable desire to present a better picture of Yahweh than how he was depicted in earlier Hebrew literature. Ezekiel, for example, depicted Yahweh quite differently even in the time of the exile, when Ezekiel was allegedly a captive in Babylon (Ezek. 1:1-3).
Ezekiel 14:12 The word of Yahweh came to me: 13 "Son of man, if a country sins against me by being unfaithful and I stretch out my hand against it to cut off its food supply and send famine upon it and kill its men and their animals, 14 even if these three men--Noah, Daniel and Job--were in it, they could save only themselves by their righteousness, declares the Sovereign Yahweh. 15 Or if I send wild beasts through that country and they leave it childless and it becomes desolate so that no one can pass through it because of the beasts, 16 as surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Yahweh, even if these three men were in it, they could not save their own sons or daughters. They alone would be saved, but the land would be desolate. 17 Or if I bring a sword against that country and say, 'Let the sword pass throughout the land,' and I kill its men and their animals, 18 as surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Yahweh, even if these three men were in it, they could not save their own sons or daughters. They alone would be saved. 19 Or if I send a plague into that land and pour out my wrath upon it through bloodshed, killing its men and their animals, 20 as surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Yahweh, even if Noah, Daniel and Job were in it, they could save neither son nor daughter. They would save only themselves by their righteousness. 21 For this is what the Sovereign Yahweh says: How much worse will it be when I send against Jerusalem my four dreadful judgments--sword and famine and wild beasts and plague--to kill its men and their animals!"
This passage accurately described the temperament of the god Yahweh in the biblical examples that Mr. Miller has been trying to defend, but Jonah's description of Yahweh as a gracious, compassionate god, who was slow to anger and who abounded in love and relented in sending calamity, was a postexilic view of this god. The probability, then, that the book of Jonah is unhistorical in its content makes it too questionable for Mr. Miller to use as what he calls an "anti-example" that puts a more favorable spin on Yahweh's character.
Miller:
Till:
General opinion about the 120,000 in Neneveh who didn't know their
right hand from their left
is that these were children, so this is another text that screams
exaggeration to those who
aren't slavishly bound to a biblical inerrancy belief. If there were
120,000 children in
Nineveh who were too young to know their right hand from their left,
there would have been
many times that more who were older children and adults. How likely is
it that so many
people could have lived in a city only 3 by 1.5 miles (as noted above)
in a time when
high-rise buildings couldn't be constructed?
We are probably talking about fiction here, but Mr. Miller quotes this book as if nothing in it should be questioned.
Miller:
So, in this "anti-Example" you have a people, confronted with
truth/warning, who respond and
avert the annihilation.
Till:
All Mr. Miller needs to do now is give us reasonable evidence that the
book of Jonah is
historically accurate. I have given several reasons above why Jonah is
probably fictionalized,
but maybe Mr. Miller can explain those reasons away. Earlier I showed
that elements of
obvious mythology are imbedded in the Bible, but maybe Mr. Miller can
explain why we should
believe that a book with problems like these is inerrant. We will just
have to wait to see.
Miller:
There is an obvious pattern here:
Till:
This is another example of question begging. Beyond the claim of
biblical writers, who lived
in a time when people generally believed in vindictive gods and thought
that disasters and
calamities were judgments of the gods, what is Mr. Miller's evidence
that the annihilations
he has cited were "judgments" of "God"?
Miller:
Till:
There is no need for me to keep talking about Mr. Miller's repeated
assumptions of inerrancy
in a book very prone to exaggeration, so whether the "cruelty and
violence" of the cultures
that Yahweh "judged" were as extensive, extreme, and widespread as he
keeps claiming is
something that he will have to prove, and he cannot do that without
more engagement in special
pleading and question begging.
I will, however, comment on his claim that Yahweh's "judgments" were for extreme and widespread "cruelty and violence," and I will make that comment in the form of a question. Were the cruelty and violence of those cultures that Yahweh "judged" more extreme than the cruelty of Yahweh in drowning every innocent child in the world and in ordering that all of the children in Canaan and Amalek be killed? I really do wish that he would address that issue.
Till:
So Mr. Miller has asserted, but where is his proof that he gave the
Canaanites and Amalekites
"long periods" to change? Where does the Bible say that Yahweh did
anything for Canaan and
Amalek like what he allegedly did for the Ninevites? Whom did he send
to warn them? Where is
the biblical text that indicates that he did? Where is the
extrabiblical evidence that he
did? I cited above a scripture that indicated the opposite of what Mr.
Miller is here
claiming, and for his benefit, I will quote it again.
Joshua 11:20 For it was Yahweh himself who hardened their hearts to wage war against Israel, so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy, as Yahweh had commanded Moses.
That certainly doesn't sound as if Yahweh gave the Canaanites a "long period" to "change outcomes." It flatly says that Yahweh hardened their hearts so that he could totally destroy them and exterminate them without mercy, so instead of sending prophets to warn the Canaanites, Yahweh himself intervened directly to harden their hearts so that he would have an excuse to destroy them.
Miller:
Till:
What "way out" did Yahweh give to the innocent adults in Canaan? I read
where Yahweh
hardened their hearts so that he could "totally destroy" them and
"exterminate them without
mercy," but I have read nothing about "ways out" that he gave them.
Miller:
Till:
And so innocent childre had to share in the fortunes of the parents who
were "evil." If that
is Mr. Miller's idea of mercy and justice, I am glad that my standards
are higher than his.
Miller:
Till:
Yes, indeed, "righteous Lot" escaped through divine intervention so
that he could get drunk
and impregnate his daughters up in the mountains. Noah and seven other
members of his family
"escaped," but the rest of the entire world, including whatever
innocent children and babies
were living then, drowned ("swiftly," of course). That is Mr. Miller's
idea of love,
mercy, and justice? Just what would a god have to do not to be
loving, merciful, and
just? I really can't imagine.
Miller:
Till:
Do you think that a person on trial for premeditated murder would get
much sympathy if he
said to the court, "But I killed only a very, very few"? Killing the
entire world, except for
Noah's family, would certainly make up for the times when Yahweh didn't
kill anybody, but I am
curious to know something. Just how many "cases" like the ones Mr.
Miller has talked about
above would have to be in the Bible before he would be so appalled that
he would reject the
claim that the Bible is "the word of God"?
Miller:
Very definitely.
The biblical text gives us several indications that this campaign is such a judgment:
Gen 15.13 Then the LORD said to him, "Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. 14 But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. 15 You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a good old age. 16 In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure."
Notice that Abraham cannot have the land until the 'sin of the Amorites' reaches some 'maximum threshold'. [sic]
Till:
I wonder why Yahweh had to withhold the land until then. Did he want to
give the Amorites
several more centuries to practice their alleged wickedness, so that he
would then have a
really good excuse to wipe them off the face of the earth? In the
meantime, I guess Yahweh
was willing to let the victims of Amorite "evil" suffer. That Mr.
Miller believes such
nonsense as this is historically accurate speaks volumes about the
questionable reliability
of his comments on biblical issues.
Miller:
This certainly looks like a judgment by God on the peoples of
the Land.
Till:
But did it really happen? Did a god named Yahweh actually drop in
routinely to chat with
Abraham, and did he on one occasion say what Mr. Miller quoted above?
How do we know? What
evidence does Mr. Miller have to corroborate this tale? The fact that
"appearances" of the
god Yahweh occurred throughout the Old Testament and then for some
reason stopped should be
enough to convince any reasonable person that such stories as these are
as mythological as
the fantastic tales in the literature of other cultures of that time. I
am sure that Mr.
Miller doesn't believe that king Mesha of Moab had the conversations
with the god Chemosh
claimed in the inscription on the Moabite Stone, yet he accepts without
question whatever the
Bible claims that Yahweh and Abraham or Yahweh and Jacob or Yahweh and
Moses allegedly
chatted about.
Miller:
Also, notice that the evil treatment by Egypt of the Israelites
(enslavement and mistreatment)
are not 'evil enough' to warrant annihilation--only
"punishment". We might therefore
expect the 'sin of the Amorites' to be more extreme than that of Egypt.
Till:
Notice too that Mr. Miller is still begging the question of biblical
inerrancy. Mr. Miller
would be more likely to impress critical readers of the Bible if he
would offer evidence that
the passages that he quotes are historically reliable. Instead of doing
that, however, he
simply quotes and expects his readers to accept the quotations without
question. I am going
to ask him, however, to give us reasonable proof that the incident in
the quotation above is
historically accurate. If Mr. Miller were in a discussion with a
Muslim, would he accept
without question Qur'anic quotations that the Muslim might present in
proof of whatever
Muslim belief he is defending? I doubt it, yet he seems to think that
it is sufficient for
him to quote the Bible in support of the Christian beliefs he is
defending.
Now as for the Amorite/Egyptian comparison, Mr. Miller seems to think that the benevolent character of his god Yahweh is seen in Yahweh's decision to just "punish" the Egyptians instead of annihilating them, but he failed to mention that one of the "punishments" of the Egyptians was the death of every firstborn in Egypt (Ex. 12:29), and as if killing all of the firstborn humans wasn't enough "punishment," Yahweh even threw in the firstborn of all of the cattle for good measure. (It is really hard for me not to love this god.) In "God Is Pro-Life?" I pointed out that, if the bible is to be believed, the population of Israel at the time of the exodus was somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million. If Egypt was able to enslave this many people, then surely its population would have been much larger. In that kind of population, there would have been many hundreds of "firstborn," and no doubt many of them would have been children and babies. Mr. Miller will often conveniently forget the children, but I am going to keep him reminded of them. Maybe he will try to give us a logical reason why we should see mercy, love, and kindness in a deity who rather routinely killed children.
Oh, I forgot; the children always died "swiftly," didn't they? How careless of me not to remember!
Miller:
Till:
Mr. Miller quoted here three separate passages. I
am going to reply to each one immediately after it is quoted, and then
add some general comments after all three have been answered. These
passages--and especially the first one--will give readers excellent
examples of how
biblical "apologists" will quote out of context to try to find some way
to support whatever
case they are trying to make. To show how Mr. Miller did that above, I
am going to quote
the broader context in which his one verse appeared. Please notice the
parts that I
emphasize in bold print and the catalog of Israel's sins that Moses
ranted about in this
speech.
Deuteronomy 9:3 But be assured today that Yahweh your God is the one who goes across ahead of you like a devouring fire. He will destroy them; he will subdue them before you. And you will drive them out and annihilate them quickly, as Yahweh has promised you. 4 After Yahweh your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself, "Yahweh has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness." No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that Yahweh is going to drive them out before you. 5 It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but on account of the wickedness of these nations, Yahweh your God will drive them out before you, to accomplish what he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. 6 Understand, then, that it is not because of your righteousness that Yahweh your God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people. 7 Remember this and never forget how you provoked Yahweh your God to anger in the desert. From the day you left Egypt until you arrived here, you have been rebellious against Yahweh. 8 At Horeb you aroused the Lord's wrath so that he was angry enough to destroy you. 9 When I went up on the mountain to receive the tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant that Yahweh had made with you, I stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights; I ate no bread and drank no water. 10 Yahweh gave me two stone tablets inscribed by the finger of God. On them were all the commandments Yahweh proclaimed to you on the mountain out of the fire, on the day of the assembly. 11 At the end of the forty days and forty nights, Yahweh gave me the two stone tablets, the tablets of the covenant. 12 Then Yahweh told me, "Go down from here at once, because your people whom you brought out of Egypt have become corrupt. They have turned away quickly from what I commanded them and have made a cast idol for themselves." 13 And Yahweh said to me, "I have seen this people, and they are a stiff-necked people indeed! 14 Let me alone, so that I may destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven. And I will make you into a nation stronger and more numerous than they." 15 So I turned and went down from the mountain while it was ablaze with fire. And the two tablets of the covenant were in my hands. 16 When I looked, I saw that you had sinned against Yahweh your God; you had made for yourselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. You had turned aside quickly from the way that Yahweh had commanded you. 17 So I took the two tablets and threw them out of my hands, breaking them to pieces before your eyes. 18 Then once again I fell prostrate before Yahweh for forty days and forty nights; I ate no bread and drank no water, because of all the sin you had committed, doing what was evil in the Lord's sight and so provoking him to anger. 19 I feared the anger and wrath of Yahweh, for he was angry enough with you to destroy you. But again Yahweh listened to me. 20 And Yahweh was angry enough with Aaron to destroy him, but at that time I prayed for Aaron too. 21 Also I took that sinful thing of yours, the calf you had made, and burned it in the fire. Then I crushed it and ground it to powder as fine as dust and threw the dust into a stream that flowed down the mountain. 22 You also made Yahweh angry at Taberah, at Massah and at Kibroth Hattaavah. 23 And when Yahweh sent you out from Kadesh Barnea, he said, "Go up and take possession of the land I have given you." But you rebelled against the command of Yahweh your God. You did not trust him or obey him. 24 You have been rebellious against Yahweh ever since I have known you. 25 I lay prostrate before Yahweh those forty days and forty nights because Yahweh had said he would destroy you. 26 I prayed to Yahweh and said, "O Sovereign Yahweh, do not destroy your people, your own inheritance that you redeemed by your great power and brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand. 27 Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Overlook the stubbornness of this people, their wickedness and their sin. 28 Otherwise, the country from which you brought us will say, 'Because Yahweh was not able to take them into the land he had promised them, and because he hated them, he brought them out to put them to death in the desert.' 29 But they are your people, your inheritance that you brought out by your great power and your outstretched arm."
I discussed briefly above why we should question the historical accuracy of the book of Jonah, and in this passage just quoted, we have some even better reasons to doubt its historicity. Verse 9 claims that Moses spent 40 days and 40 nights on Mt. Sinai chatting with Yahweh, during which time he "ate no bread and drank no water," after which he came down from the mountain with the the stone tablets on which Yahweh had engraved the 10 commandments. Upon arriving in the Israelite camp, he found them worshiping a golden calf that Aaron had molded for them. Moses cast the tablets down, broke them, crushed the idol into power, and threw it into a stream. He then went back upon the mountain and spent 40 more days and nights there without eating bread or drinking water. The text doesn't say here or in the original account of the story (Ex. 32-34) whether Moses "ate bread and drank water" before he went back upon the mountain, but the original story indicates that he didn't return to the mountain for perhaps a day or two, so maybe he gorged himself on food and water before he went back to fast for another 40 days and nights. That a man could go without food and water for 40 days and survive is too unlikely to be believable. That a man could go without food and water for 40 days, spend a day or two eating and drinking water, and then go fast for another 40 days goes way beyond credibility. When Mr. Miller goes for 40 days and 40 nights without eating or drinking water, then takes food and water for a day or two, and then goes 40 more days and nights without eating or drinking water and lives to tell about it, I will believe that this fasting story was possible.
That is just one part of the passage above that casts serious doubts on its historicity. The way that Moses presented the Israelites as a people who had been rebellious against Yahweh from the day they had come out of Egypt also taxes the imagination. What Moses said certainly agrees with the accounts of Israelite complaining, bellyaching, and rebelling that run through the books of Exodus and Numbers, but it is rather difficult to believe that a people would continually rebel against a god who was going before them in a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night (Ex. 13:21; Ex. 14:19,24; Ex. 33:9-10; Num. 14:14), who had parted the Red Sea so that they could cross on dry land (Ex. 14:21-27), who sent down manna from heaven for them to eat (Ex. 16:15), and performed in their presence many more wonders than I could mention here. This was a god who punished swiftly and immediately anyone who crossed him, as in the cases of those whom the earth had swallowed up for joining Korah in his rebellion against Moses (Num. 16:31-34), those who were killed by fire for complaining about having no food (Num. 11:1-3), those who were killed by plagues for different kinds of rebellion (Num. 11:33-35), etc., etc. etc. There are just too many examples to cite them all, but one would think that a people who had witnessed such things as these on a daily basis would have toed the line and said, "Whoa, we had better not tick this god off, or we will be history." That these people, under the circumstances described above, would have been as rebellious as Moses presented them in the passage quoted above is a bit hard to believe.
What is even more difficult to believe is the claim that Moses had to talk Yahweh out of destroying the Israelites in moments of anger, as if a mere human would be able to see things more clearly than an omniscient, omnipotent deity, yet that is what Moses claimed in his speech in reference to Yahweh's anger when the people were found worshiping the golden calf (Ex. 32:9-14) and his anger when the people rebelled upon hearing the report of the spies who had been sent into Canaan (Num. 14:11-20). These texts presented Yahweh as a nincompoop, who didn't have the good sense to realize the things that Moses was able to see. To discuss this further would take too much time, but those who want to pursue this subject and my comments in the paragraph above can read "How Likely Is It?" where I discussed all of these points in more detail. That anyone could think that any of this is actual history taxes the credulity of any rational person.
I have taken the time to say all of this so that readers will understand why I so frequently point out that Mr. Miller is arguing his case on the assumption that the Bible is inerrant when there are plenty of reasons to think that it isn't, but mainly why I quoted the broader context of the one verse he quoted was to notice how many times Moses said in this speech that the Israelites were "stiff-necked," "rebellious," and "sinful." Moses told them twice that Yahweh wasn't giving the land [of Canaan] to them because of their righteousness, because they were "stiff-necked" but because of a promise he had made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The long list of offenses against Yahweh that Moses then reeled off makes one wonder how the Amorities (and other nations in Canaan) could have been any worse than the Israelites were. I mentioned above the advantages that the Israelites had enjoyed for 40 years in that they had the god Yahweh traveling in their midst and performing all sorts of wonders for them to see, yet they were as Moses described, i. e., rebellious against Yahweh from the day that they had come out of Egypt; hence, a 40-year period of having Yahweh traveling with them and living among them didn't make them a "righteous nation," for Moses specifically said that they weren't. I wonder how many times Yahweh appeared to the Amorites to give them manna, send quails among them for food, find water for them in rocks, and such like. If he had favored them in this way, would they have turned out better than the Israelites did?
My point is that, if the Bible is to be believed, Yahweh took the land of Canaan from the Amorites and the other nations there because of their "wickedness" and gave it to the Israelites, who turned out to be just as bad as the nations they replaced. The Old Testament is full of tales of Israelites who "did that which was evil in Yahweh's sight," and their "evil" became so bad that Yahweh at times sent them into foreign captivity.
Mr. Miller conveniently left out these biblical claims about the morality of the Israelites.
Miller:
Till:
Deuteronomy 18:9 When you enter the land Yahweh your God is giving you, do not learn to imitate the detestable ways of the nations there. 10 Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, 11 or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. 12 Anyone who does these things is detestable to Yahweh, and because of these detestable practices Yahweh your God will drive out those nations before you.
When Josiah began his reformation after the book of the law had been "found" during renovations of the temple, he "got rid of the mediums and spiritists, the household gods, the idols and all the other detestable things seen in Judah and Jerusalem" (2 Kings 23:24). The reference to "all the other detestable things seen in Judah and Jerusalem" suggests that these were commonplace practices. A statement prior to this indicates that idolatry had been commonplace.
2 Kings 23:11 He [Josiah] removed from the entrance to the temple of Yahweh the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun. They were in the court near the room of an official named Nathan-Melech. Josiah then burned the chariots dedicated to the sun. 12 He pulled down the altars the kings of Judah had erected on the roof near the upper room of Ahaz, and the altars Manasseh had built in the two courts of the temple of Yahweh. He removed them from there, smashed them to pieces and threw the rubble into the Kidron Valley. 13 The king also desecrated the high places that were east of Jerusalem on the south of the Hill of Corruption--the ones Solomon king of Israel had built for Ashtoreth the vile goddess of the Sidonians, for Chemosh the vile god of Moab, and for Molech the detestable god of the people of Ammon. 14 Josiah smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles and covered the sites with human bones. 15 Even the altar at Bethel, the high place made by Jeroboam son of Nebat, who had caused Israel to sin--even that altar and high place he demolished. He burned the high place and ground it to powder, and burned the Asherah pole also.
The description given here indicates that idolatry, even the worship of "vile" gods like Chemosh, Molech, and Ashtoreth was widespread at this time. Inerrantists will say, "Well, yes, religious corruption and pagan worship was widespread at this time, but this was close to the end of Yahweh's patience when he sent the people of Judah into Babylonian captivity as punishment for their sins," but this rationalization conveniently overlooks that verse 13 (above) says that king Solomon had erected these "high places," and Solomon reigned over 300 years before the time of Josiah. For the sake of argument, let's just suppose that at least most of the idolatry of the Israelites was practiced late in their history. Even if that were true--and it isn't--one has to wonder why an omniscient, omnipotent deity would not have known that his "chosen ones" would turn out to be just as bad as the Amorites (and other Canaanites) whom he exterminated so that the Israelites could have their land. The Bible itself, however, admits that the evil of the Israelites at times exceeded that of the Amorites.
1 Kings 21:26 25 (There was never a man like Ahab, who sold himself to do evil in the eyes of Yahweh, urged on by Jezebel his wife. 26 He behaved in the vilest manner by going after idols, like the Amorites Yahweh drove out before Israel.)
2 Kings 21:1 Manasseh was twelve years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem fifty-five years. His mother's name was Hephzibah. 2 He did evil in the eyes of Yahweh, following the detestable practices of the nations Yahweh had driven out before the Israelites. 3 He rebuilt the high places his father Hezekiah had destroyed; he also erected altars to Baal and made an Asherah pole, as Ahab king of Israel had done. He bowed down to all the starry hosts and worshiped them. 4 He built altars in the temple of Yahweh, of which Yahweh had said, "In Jerusalem I will put my Name." 5 In both courts of the temple of Yahweh, he built altars to all the starry hosts. 6 He sacrificed his own son in the fire, practiced sorcery and divination, and consulted mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the eyes of Yahweh, provoking him to anger. 7 He took the carved Asherah pole he had made and put it in the temple, of which Yahweh had said to David and to his son Solomon, "In this temple and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, I will put my Name forever. 8 I will not again make the feet of the Israelites wander from the land I gave their forefathers, if only they will be careful to do everything I commanded them and will keep the whole Law that my servant Moses gave them." 9 But the people did not listen. Manasseh led them astray, so that they did more evil than the nations Yahweh had destroyed before the Israelites. 10 Yahweh said through his servants the prophets: 11 "Manasseh king of Judah has committed these detestable sins. He has done more evil than the Amorites who preceded him and has led Judah into sin with his idols."
Mr. Miller would have us believe that the Amorites were so wicked that Yahweh had no choice but to exterminate them and give their land to the Israelites, but passages like those I have just quoted show that the Israelites themselves became just as and even more wicked than the Amorites whom Yahweh had driven out of Canaan. I will ask again why the omniscient, omnipotent Yahweh didn't know that his chosen ones would turn out this way.
There are just too many passages like these to quote them all, so I will give just a summary list.
As many times as the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel raged against child sacrifices, this must have been a widespread practice among the Israelites. Ezekiel, in fact, accused the Israelites of having practiced child sacrifices long enough to refer to those who had done it earlier as "your fathers."
Ezekiel 20:30 "Therefore say to the house of Israel: 'This is what the Sovereign Yahweh says: Will you defile yourselves the way your fathers did and lust after their vile images? 31 When you offer your gifts--the sacrifice of your sons in the fire--you continue to defile yourselves with all your idols to this day. Am I to let you inquire of me, O house of Israel? As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Yahweh, I will not let you inquire of me.
In saying that the Israelites of his time continued to defile themselves to this day, "the way [their] fathers did," when they sacrificed their sons in the fire, Ezekiel was implying that this had been a long-standing practice among them, yet Yahweh presumably chose a people like this to exterminate the people who been previously living in Canaan. Where is the morality or logic in this?
There are just too many examples of Israelite idolatry and religious corruption to notice them all, but these are sufficient to show that the "chosen ones" of Yahweh became just as religiously corrupt as the Amorites and other Canaanite nations whom Yahweh had ordered the Israelites to massacre so that they could have their land. I have to ask again why an omniscient, omnipotent deity would have ordered the slaughter of the Canaanite nations so that a bunch of "stiff-necked, rebellious" Israelites could have their land. Didn't the omniscient one know that the "wickedness" of the Israelites would equal and sometimes exceed that of the Amorites?
Miller:
Till:
There is no need to reinvent the wheel here. The various passages that
I quoted above show
that the Israelites did defile themselves like the nations that Yahweh
had "vomited out of"
the land. Why didn't Yahweh know that his "chosen ones" would turn out
to be just as bad
as the ones that he "vomited out"?
Miller:
So this annihilation was a judgment...
Till:
And this assertion, which Mr. Miller has now repeated several times,
begs the question of
biblical accuracy [inerrancy]. How does he know that the annihilation
of the Canaanites was
"a judgment" and not just a case of barbaric conquest of one nation
over others--if indeed
these conquests actually happened--which were commonplce at that time?
If Mr. Miller has
any kind of real evidence to support his claim that the annihilation of
the Canaanites was
"a judgment," I would really like to see it.
At this point, Mr. Miller switched to the subjects of
who the Amorites and Canaanites
were and why Yahweh wanted Israel to exterminate them, so I will reply
to that section of his
article in Part Three.
