Miller:
(B)ut what was so 'bad' about the Canaanites(and Amorites)? Which
brings us to the next
point...
Till:
Notice that Mr. Miller continues his question-begging ways by assuming
that "God" wanted
Israel to exterminate the Amorites. He doesn't even consider the
possibility that this was
simply what the Israelites thought, just as Mesha of Moab had thought
that Chemosh wanted
him to massacre the Israelites in
Nob and as Assurnasirpal
thought that his gods wanted him to massacre the people of
Hulai. It just
seems not to occur to Mr. Miller that what biblical writers said about
their god Yahweh
leading them to victory over their enemies was just a commonplace
belief of a time when all
nations thought that their gods were with them in time of war. The fact
that many people
in this country believe that "God" is on our side in times of war shows
that not much has
changed over the centuries.
Miller:
What do we know about the Amorites, and the Canaanites (often used
interchangeably)? What
data do we have from the sources (archeology, classical writers, ANE
literary remains,
biblical passages)?
Till:
As you read Mr. Miller's quotations from these sources, notice that
none of them attempt to
show by logical argumentation that it was morally right for one nation
invading another to
kill children and babies, and that is a major issue in dispute.
Miller:
By the latter part of the Early Bronze Age Ebla (Tell Mardikh) in northwestern Syria had become a city-state of 260,000 people, with lesser "vassal" cities forming a far-reaching empire. It was the center of a vast commercial network, and records of its enterprises contain the earliest mention of such biblical cities as Salim, Megiddo, Gaza, Hazor, Lachish, and Joppa. An indication of the city's sophisticated planning is the audience court of the royal palace, which both architecturally and functionally mediates the space between the quarters with private residences and those with administrative offices (ISBE, s.v. "City", [sic] p. 707).
Till:
The link here is to The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia,
which was published
by Eerdsman... in Grand Rapids, Michigan, of course.
Miller:
Till:
Nations rise and fall. They always have and probably always will. This
was especially true
in the time when Ebla dominated the region of Syria where it was
located. We will see that
Mr. Miller tries to blame those nasty old Amorites for the fall of this
kingdom--even though
the sources he quoted were reluctant to say so--but we will also see
that other factors,
especially dramatic climate changes, fueled the tribal migrations and
abandonment of previously
populated areas and that the
Akkadians
rather then the Amorites
moved into the area where Ebla had been located, but even if the
Amorites had caused Ebla's
demise, how would that have made the Amorites any more "evil" and
debased than other ethnic
groups of that general period, which also intruded on the territories
of other nations? We
saw in
Part One and
Part Two that Israel
"utterly destroyed" the Canaanite nations and many times left "no one
alive to breathe" in
the cities they captured. Does that mean that Israel was morally
depraved, or does it mean
(if any of this happened) that Israel was just another nation typical
of those times?
Miller:
"Sudden and violent destruction occurred throughout much of the ancient world ca. 2300-2100 B.C. Palestinian civilization returned to the village level, with many E.B. sites abandoned and others left unfortified, a situation that continued through the early stages of the Middle Bronze period (until ca. 1950 B.C.). While many factors may have been involved, especially significant were Egyptian raids and mass population movements, at the center of which were the Amorites."(A.C. Myers, ISBE, op. Cit.)
Till:
This link was also to The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia.
I was glad to
see that Myers recognized that "many factors" could have been involved
in the decline of
Ebla, as the falling of kingdoms almost always is, so the Amorites were
not to be totally
blamed for the decline of this kingdom. Myers, for example, recognized
that "sudden and
violent destruction" happened "throughout much of the ancient world,"
and surely Miller cannot
attribute such widespread upheavals in ancient societies to the
Amorites alone, because, as
we will see, these upheavals happened in places into which no Amorites
migrated. We will see
that the Amorite role in the upheavals was not as important as the
other "factors" mentioned
by Myers, but let's suppose that the Amorites alone were responsible
for the conquest and
overthrow of Ebla. Why would that make them any more "evil" and
depraved than other nations
of the time that overran neighboring kingdoms? The Israelites overran
the Canaanite nations
and caused their complete decline--so the Bible claims--so does that
mean that the Israelites
were "evil" and depraved? I think we are going to see that Mr. Miller
has difficulty
recognizing non sequiturs.
Miller:
And again, K. N. Schoville
(POTW:164):
Till:
This is a link to Peoples of the Old Testament World, which was
published where? That's
right, at Baker House in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Books published by the
companies in this
city almost always show a decided bias for biblical inerrancy. Before
anyone accuses me of
arguing guilt by association, I will repeat something I have said many
times in my replies to
biblical inerrantists: The truth or falsity of propositions is
always independent of
their sources. I recognize, then, that it is entirely possible for
reliable information to be
in books published in Grand Rapids, and I, in fact, have no doubt that
much reliable
information can be found in books published there.
Nevertheless, it is obviously true that many sources will slant their materials to make them supportive of propositions that the publishers/authors are committed to. Baptist publishing companies will slant their books to support Baptist doctrines, Mormon publishing companies will slant theirs to support Mormon doctrines, and so on. Hence, that is a good reason to be suspicious of claims published by companies known to have such biases. Robert Turkel seems to be an admirer of Mr. Miller, because he will often link his readers to Miller's articles. In this part of the land-promise debate, he clearly recognized that known biases of a source will make its reliability questionable.
This certainly serves to lay out our opponent's thematic intent, but only those who have never heard his name would ever suppose that he would take any other general position than that there is no real evidence of prophecy fulfillment.
He made this comment in reference to my claim that no real evidence for genuine prophecy fulfillment can be found, but in making the statement, he recognized that known biases of a source will affect a reader's willingness to accept its claims, and that is certainly a legitimate reaction to evidences offered in support of propositions. As a former preacher, I am familiar with the theological philosophy of the publishing houses in Grand Rapids, Michigan, because I had many of their books in my personal library and, in fact, still have some of them. Therefore, to adapt Turkel's comment quoted above, I can say without fear of successful contradiction that I know that books published in Grand Rapids, Michigan, are unlikely "to take any other general position than that" the Bible is the "inspired word of God." As we will see, the authors whom Miller quoted above and below--at least in the sections that Miller quoted--downplayed "other factors" involved in the "sudden and violent" changes in the Middle East, when Ebla and other kingdoms declined, and credited too much of the change to Amorite intrusions.
Nevertheless, Mr. Miller's source deserves a hearing, so let's look at what Schoville had to say about the Amorites.
Miller [quoting Schoville]
The urbanization of Canaan in the Early Bronze Age II (ca. 2900-2700), illustrated by sites such as Arad and Ai, declined during the Early Bronze Age III, which ended about 2300. Walled cities were destroyed or abandoned, and urban culture gave way to a pastoral, village way of life over the next two centuries, Early Bronze Age IV (about 2300-2000). The reasons for such drastic changes are unclear, but three possible causes may be suggested: (1) Egyptian military action, (2) changing environmental factors including overpopulation, or (3) an invading horde of Amorites. The Amorites would have destroyed the urban centers and established the variant lifestyle characteristic of the period until urbanization flowered in the subsequent Middle Bronze Age II."[There were probably two invasions by Amorite peoples--the one we are discussing here is the earlier, non-urbanized [sic] Amurru--cf. ISBE:s.v. "Canaan", p. 588]
Till:
This is another link to The International Standard Bible
Encyclopedia, so Mr. Miller
seems a bit dependent on books published in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As
we go along, I have
been identifying reasons to question biblical inerrancy, so before I
comment on the general
thrust of Schoville's quotation above, I will address a problem that
his quotation raises.
Almost as an incidental comment, he referred to Ai as an example of
"(w)alled cities that were
destroyed or abandoned during Early Bronze Age IV," which he dated at
"about 2300-2000
[BC]," yet
Joshua
8:1-29 claims
that the Israelites destroyed Ai after the sacking of Jericho, and this
would have happened
some 40 years after the exodus, which the Bible dates at about 1446 BC.
Work on the temple
began in the 4th year of Solomon's reign, 480 years after the
Israelites left Egypt
(1 Kings
6:1). The 4th
year of Solomon's reign would have been 966 BC, so 480 years before
that would have been
1446 BC. Since the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for 40 years,
the conquest of
Canaan wouldn't have begun till around 1404 BC. Ai was the second city
that Joshua's forces
destroyed, so according to biblical chronology, that would have been
somewhere around
1404 BC, but that doesn't agree with what Schoville said above, and
what he said is consistent
with archaelogical excavations in the area of Ai. In
"Archaeology
and
Biblical Inerrancy," I discussed this problem, as it was discovered
by someone who prior
to his excavation of Ai had been a believer in the accuracy of the
biblical record. For the
convenience of readers, I will quote below the relevant part of that
article.
Joseph Callaway, a conservative Southern Baptist and professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, spent nine years excavating the ruins of ancient Ai and afterwards reported that what he found there contradicted the biblical record.
The evidence from Ai was mainly negative. There was a great walled city there beginning about 3000 BC, more than 1,800 years before Israel's emergence in Canaan. But this city was destroyed about 2400 BC, after which the site was abandoned.
Despite extensive excavation, no evidence of a Late Bronze Age (1500-1200 BC) Canaanite city was found. In short, there was no Canaanite city here for Joshua to conquer (Biblical Archaeology Review, "Joseph A. Callaway: 1920-1988," November/December 1988, p. 24, emphasis added).
This same article quoted what Callaway had earlier said when announcing the results of his nine-year excavation of Ai.
Archaeology has wiped out the historical credibility of the conquest of Ai as reported in Joshua 7-8. The Joint Expedition to Ai worked nine seasons between 1964 and 1976... only to eliminate the historical underpinning of the Ai account in the Bible (Ibid., p. 24).
I wrote this article, so, of course, it can be accused of bias, so I recommend that readers consult other sources to see that archaeology has discredited the biblical claim that the Israelites destroyed Ai early in their invasion of Canaan. In an article about the book of Joshua, Wikipedia made this observation about the alleged conquest of Ai.
The archaeological records of these cities [Lasich and Hazor] show that a destructive invasion by the Israelites occurred at the end of the Late Bronze Age. The excavation of Ai yielded evidence that disagreed with Ai's destruction in the Book of Joshua. Ai appears to have been abandoned in the Early Bronze Age and not reoccupied until after the Israelite invasion. It has been suggested that the destruction of Ai was added to the Book of Joshua as an etiological myth, explaining the visible ruins of the Early Bronze Age city (emphasis added).
Those who have access to archives of Biblical Archaeology Review can check the March/April 1985 issue for "The Problem of Ai" and "Was My Excavation of Ai Worthwhile?" which is Callaway's own account of his work at Ai. An article by W. W. Winter "Is et Tell Ai?" discusses the problem and some "solutions" to it. The article is worth reading to see the extremes that inerrantists will go to in order to preserve their belief in biblical inerrancy. I could give other references, but these are sufficient to show that archaeological excavations at the site of ancient Ai have cast serious suspicion on the historicity of the biblical account. As we continue, we will see Mr. Miller often appealing to the Bible as his only proof of certain assertions, so readers should keep in mind that whenever he does this, he is appealing to a source whose historicity, at least in some matters, is questionable.
As for the main thrust of the Schoville quotation above, he said that the reasons for the "drastic changes" in Canaan during Early Bronze Age IV were "unclear" but went on to list "changing environmental factors" as a possible reason for the changes. If Mr. Miller had done a little research into environmental factors of that period, he would have found that Schoville was on to something. Dramatic climate changes were occurring worldwide about the same time that the "drastic changes" in Canaan, mentioned by Schoville, were happening, and the Amorites could hardly be blamed for all of those changes. The excerpt below from a report by The International Conference on Climate and Culture at 3000 BC shows that these worldwide changes had devastating effects on North Africa and the Mesopotamian region.Around 3000 BC, great changes befell climate and culture throughout the world. In the Pacific Basin, El Nino started up after a long hiatus, shifting from a permanent, stable condition to an irregular cycle that periodically throws climate into chaos. As a result, environmental conditions in the region became much less predictable from year to year, with “anomalous” droughts in Australia, floods in Peru, and other effects of El Nino fluctuation occurring more frequently. In the Northern Hemisphere, warmer temperatures of the preceding 3,000 years cooled down to about what they are now; new evidence suggests that the Southern Hemisphere experienced a similar change in temperature. Desertification increased in Mesopotamia and Northern Africa (emphasis added).
A section of From 10,000BC to 2000BC in Lost Worlds described more specifically the devastating effects that these changes had on North Africa--and Egypt in particular--and the area of the Middle East where the Israelites eventually settled. The information is self-explanatory and requires no comments from me.
In "Sea Level Changes Document 20,000-Year Mideast Rainfall Cycles," Science Watch (January 1994, Page 48), Ruth E. Steele further discussed dramatic changes that the shifting climate brought to this region.2200BC-2000BC-3000BC: A problem of global climatic change: Regarding an SBS documentary screened in Australia on Ancient Apocalypse on 17 March 2002, on the Egypt of 5000 years ago. The Sphinx already exists at Giza, the Old Kingdom flourishes. Changelessness is the theme for the daily life of average Egyptians, but about 2200BC the Old Kingdom collapses. Egypt enters a dark age for 200 years. This era has mystified Egyptologists, there are no explanations for the chaos, etc. Why? Was a fall due to death of a Pharaoh, and a following battle for power? No, it was not due to political unrest. We find a little-known tomb, with "an astonishing story to tell"... the tomb of a local governor of an area just after the collapse of the Old Kingdom, an outstanding tomb which tells a story of famines, suffering of ordinary people, a poignant account of famine-horrors, giving succinct reports such as: the land is like "a starved grasshopper". Despair and atrocities are committed in Southern Egypt. People ate their children, and what is written on the tomb walls is not folk tales, not mythology, it is an account, a proper report.
But can any corroborative evidence be found? Recent new archaeological evidence from Egypt's far north reveals an extent of suffering on the Nile delta. One researcher is Donald Redford (US), who finds group-burials under reed matting, with tightly-packed bodies, nearly 9000 bodies, supine or on their side. But there are few grave goods found. The conclusion is that these people were very poor, but they all dated at the same period of death, from a community reduced to extreme poverty. Across Egypt, society, art religion are all breaking down, literally everything of the Old Kingdom is breaking down. This devastation was apocalyptic, could it have had to do with the environment? Was it a really sudden event? The Nile dominates, of course, as with anything to do with Egypt. A researcher--is this tantamount to heresy in history?--finds variations in the behaviour of the Nile. It is not a steady river, and one in five floods anyway is a bad flood. Is such any clue to the collapse of the Old Kingdom, as a small drop in a flood can be a disaster, as Napoleon found when he came to Egypt and conquered it after a bad flood, as the country was weakened. Could the Nile possibly have faltered for as long as 200 years? Was something bigger involved? What other natural features could be examined? A botanist examines various sites, including a desert zone once quite-populated. Evidence includes small cairns of stones from campfire areas. Traces of acacia tree, which no longer grows in the area, and charcoal of acacia, which grew with underground water. Thousands of pieces of such charcoal in the area are logged, dating to about 5000BC, indicating a dry savannah with trees, where people could live over long stretches of time. It seems that North Africa dries and becomes desert. Sand causes devastation, so do dust storms. (Poetry exists about such concerns). Dates about desertification don't quite fit a new theory, as this is all a gradual trend, over millenia, and nothing to do with the collapse of the Old Kingdom.
A breakthrough for researchers comes from the hills of nearby Israel, in caves, forming a record of past climatic behaviour, from limestone stalactites and stalagmites. A record of ancient rainwaters, and ancient rain has two different types of oxygen; light for wetter periods and heavy oxygen for dry periods. Use is made of a mass spectrometer to find ratios of light and heavy oxygen. One sample is found, 4200 years-old, fitting the period circa 2200BC. Something unusual; an important change in the amount of rainfall, a 20 per cent drop, and a sudden and significant climate change; the largest climatic event noticeable, even though Israel and Egypt have different climate systems.
It is now necessary to know if the Israeli weather pattern is local or broader. Evidence is found from the glaciers of Iceland, where Gerard Bond, a geologist, examines ice near Greenland. He finds icebergs streaked with black ash from volcanic activity, dumped on glaciers, which become icebergs in North Atlantic, and dropped their ash to the ocean bottom. Bond has collected cores of ocean-bottom mud back 10,000 years, and in his searches for volcanic ash has found it in strange places, very much south, off Ireland. It also seems that then, icebergs were bigger, from colder areas; there is a pattern to mini-ice-ages, and every 1500 years a distinct cold period occurs, lasting "a couple of hundred years". Could this have affected Egypt? One such cycle would have been affecting Egypt about 2200BC (emphasis added)....
Dr. Harvey Weiss is Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology in the Departments of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. From 1968 to 1973 he excavated at and directed a variety of prehistoric and early historic archaeological sites in western Iran, including Hajji Firuz, Godin Tepe, Hasanlu and Qabr Sheykheyn. In 1978 he initiated the Yale Tell Leilan Project in northeastern Syria, which aimed at elucidating important developmental patterns in the agricultural practices of northern Mesopotamia. In the early 1980s and through the 90s, Dr. Weiss's attention moved to the forces that determined rain-fed agriculture in early historic West Asia. In 1993 he and his colleagues published the hypothesis and confirmatory data for a major and abrupt climate change that affected the region from the Aegean to the Indus at ca. 2200 BC. Since 1993, this climate change has become the focus of considerable research attention among scholars in the paleoclimatic and archaeological research communities and beyond. Dr. Weiss's most recent studies have appeared in a range of publications including Science, The Sciences, Orient Express, The Dictionary of Art, and The Encyclopedia of the Ancient Near East. His research on climate change was published in numerous edited volumes, including most recently, Confronting Natural Disaster: Engaging the Past to Understand the Future (2000) and was the subject of his co-edited volume Third Millennium B.C.: Climate Change and Old World Collapse (1997) [emphasis added].
Observant visitors see the evidence all around them that the Middle East was not always so arid as it is today. Mighty canyons carved by raging rivers stand austere and bone-dry today. Bones of jungle predators and great grazing beasts of the grasslands lie buried in clay laid down by lakes and streams in lands where the infrequent raindrops now vanish instantly into windblown sand. Shifting winds uncover abundant stone-age tools in waterless deserts. And in many parts of the Middle East great mounds of man-made rubble attest to vanished cities where not even nomads pass today.
Middle Easterners ponder the forces that halved the population of Iraq, birthplace of the world's first cities more than 5,000 years ago, and of Syria, the breadbasket of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago. Today, these forces are widening the swath of Sahara sand that separates the grasslands of Central Africa from the fertile coastal strip of North Africa. Is the contemporary highly visible desertification of the Middle East and Africa manmade, or an irresistible force of nature?
At the end of the article, she referred to the "Kuwait River," which flowed through Saudi Arabia for 6,000 years reaching a width of three miles in some places. The "moist period," feeding the river, ended about 5000 years ago, and that would be about the time that Mr. Miller blames those nasty old Amorites for the decline of Ebla.
There is far too much information about the dramatic climate changes in the Middle East at this time to document it all, but readers should keep in mind that Mr. Miller's zeal to paint the Amorities as wicked, evil barbarians who deserved what they got from the Israelites has allowed him to overlook clear indications that the fall of civilizations like those at Ebla and Sumer were due to far more than his oversimplification that put the blame on the ancient Amorites.
Miller:
Till:
And the Israelites weren't? I would like to see Mr. Miller document the
picture he is trying
to paint of the Amorites and show us verifiable evidence that they were
more brutal and cruel
than the Israelites were depicted in their own literature.
Miller:
Till:
At this point so much needs to be replied to in Mr. Miller's sources
that I am going to split
the quotations to comment as the need arises. His next quotation below
is from Myth and
Mystery: An Introduction to the Pagan Religions of the Biblical
World by Jack
Finegan, which, of course, is another Grand Rapids work, published by
Baker House.
Miller [quoting Finegan]:
The Semitic Amorites are the best known: in Mesopotamian sources they are the mar-tu (Sumerian) and amurru (Akkadian), both of which words mean "west," and they are referred to as desert people who "know not grain."
Till:
Here Finegan made both the Sumerians and the Akkadians Amorites, but
that is news to me. The
Sumerians were not Semites as were the Akkadians and the Amorites, who
came into the area
later. Of these Sumerians, Eerdmans Bible Dictionary says that
they were
"non-Semitic."
The Ubaid culture, of Semitic Iranian origin, flourished from 4300-3500 [BC] and spread into Northern Mesopotamia as well. It was succeeded in the South by the Uruk culture of the non-Semitic Sumerians, who introduced pictographic writing and irrigation.
Even another Grand Rapids source, then, disagrees with Mr. Finegan's claim about the origin of the Sumerians. Notice that the quotation from Eerdmans says that the Sumerian culture came up from the South instead of the west. This agrees with other sources that discuss the origin of the Sumerians.
Among the earliest civilizations were the diverse peoples living in the fertile valleys lying between the Tigris and Euphrates valley, or Mesopotamia, which in Greek means, "between the rivers." In the south of this region, in an area now in Kuwait and northern Saudi Arabia, a mysterious group of people, speaking a language unrelated to any other human language we know of, began to live in cities, which were ruled by some sort of monarch, and began to write. These were the Sumerians, and around 3000 BC they began to form large city-states in southern Mesopotamia that controlled areas of several hundred square miles. The names of these cities speak from a distant and foggy past: Ur, Lagash, Eridu. These Sumerians were constantly at war with one another and other peoples, for water was a scarce and valuable resource.
A Wikipedia article on the Sumerians presents corroborating information and confirms that Sumerians were a separate people from the Amorites, who eventually moved in to replace them. Amorites were a Semitic people, who spoke a Semitic language, but as the information above shows, the origin of the Sumerians is rather nebulous, and the language they spoke was non-Semitic and, in fact, unrelated to any known language. From the beginning of the statement that Mr. Miller quoted above, then, Finegan got off on the wrong foot. He said, for example, that the Sumerians were referred to as a "desert people, who know not grain," but if the Sumerians didn't know about grain they quickly learned, because they constructed an irrigation system that made their culture flourish in what is now Southern Iraq and Iran.
As for Finegan's claim that the word mar-tu meant "Amorite," my research tells me that mar-tu-ki was a Sumerian word that meant "nomad of the western desert," and it was a word that the Sumerians used to describe the Amorities, but I have found no indication that this was a word that others applied to the Sumerians. As for amarru, my research shows that this was an Akkadian word that meant the same thing as the Sumerian word mar-tu-ki, so this was a word that the Akkadians applied to the Amorites, which would indicate that, although they were Semites, the Akkadians didn't consider themselves Amorites. The Amorites, then, will have to be exonerated of blame in the fall of Ebla, because it was actually conquered by Akkadians under their king Naram Sin, the grandson of Sargon, in 2250 BC, and after being rebuilt and annexed into the Aleppo kingdom, it was conquered and destroyed again by the Hittites in 1600 BC, never to regain its former power and influence. It seems, then, that the Amorites weren't involved in the demise of Ebla, so in this matter, Mr. Miller will have to find some other rationalization for Yahweh's command to destroy the Amorites.
Miller [quoting Finegan]:
In the third millennium B.C. the conquests of Sargon of Akkad (2371-2316) extended to "the upper sea," meaning that he must have marched west to the Mediterranean.
Till:
Readers should keep in mind that Akkadians were not Amorites. They were
a Semitic people, but
so were Edomites, Moabites, Assyrians, and even the despised
Amalekites. Semitic was
more of a linguistic than an ethnic term, and just because an ethnic
group spoke a Semitic
language does not mean that they were necessarily ethnically close.
That aside, I can't see why the extent of Akkadian or Amorite influence would in any way prove that they were any more morally depraved than other ethnic groups of the time. We are talking about an era when cataclysmic conditions made mass migrations necessary for survival. Whenever that happens, conflicts between ethnic groups will inevitably arise. In such times of conflict, there will always be winners and losers, but winning doesn't necessarily indicate moral depravity.
Miller [quoting Finegan]
In the second millennium the Amorites established their First Dynasty in Babylon in which Hammurabi (1792-1750) was the most famous king; contemporary with that dynasty there were Amorite kings in Mari on the Middle Euphrates.
Till:
In what he said here, Finegan clearly disputed Miller's apparent belief
that Sumerians and
Akkadians were Amorites, for if the first Amorite dynasty was
established in Babylon, this
would exclude the Sumerians and Akkadians from being Amorites, because
both of these had
established long-standing kingdoms in the Mesopotamian area. If
Sumerian and Akkadians were
Amorites, their "first dynasty" would not have been the Amorite kingdom
in Babylon.
Finegan also identified, correctly, Hammurabi as the most famous king of the Amorites in Babylon, and this is inconsistent with Miller's apparent effort to paint the Amorites as destructive barbarians, whose primary achievements were oppression, terrorism, and vandalism. Under Hammurabi, the Amorites organized separate city-states into a larger kingdom under a centralized control, and Hammurabi, of course, issued the famous code of laws, from which the Israelites apparently borrowed some of the precepts in the law of Moses. In this respect, the Amorites have had far-reaching legal and social influence, because wherever the Bible has gone principles that were first recorded by Amorites have also gone.
Miller [quoting Finegan]:
At Jericho and other sites in Canaan cultural changes toward the end of the third millennium suggest the influx of new nomadic tribal people, probably Amorites. According to Ezekiel 16:3 Jerusalem was founded by a combination of Amorites and Hittites. Under Moses the Israelites found the Amorites in the hill country around Kadesh-barnea (Deut. 1:19-20), then conquered two Amorite kings, Sihon and Og, in Transjordan (Deut. 4:46-47). Joshua in turn overcame the Amorite kings of the five cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, and Eglon (Josh. 10:5).
Till:
I emphasized Jerusalem in bold print for a
special reason. The
apparent purpose of
all of Mr. Miller's quotations from Grand-Rapids books was to depict
the Amorites as wicked,
evil barbarians, who deserved Yahweh's "judgment" upon them, but by
pointing out that the
inhabitants of Jerusalem, who were known as Jebusites, were also
Amorites, Mr. Miller has
put himself into somewhat of a predicament, because Jebusites were one
of the seven nations in
Canaan that Yahweh ordered the Israelites to destroy totally.
Deuteronomy 7:1 When Yahweh your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations--the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you--and when Yahweh your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.
That the Jebusites inhabited Jerusalem and its environs was claimed in Joshua 15:63, Judges 1:21, and 2 Samuel 5:6. The passage in Ezekiel that Finegan cited above also claimed that the inhabitants of Jerusalem were of Amorite origin. Let's look at the larger context of the passage.
Ezekiel 16:1 The word of Yahweh came to me: 2 "Son of man, confront Jerusalem with her detestable practices 3 and say, 'This is what the Sovereign Yahweh says to Jerusalem: Your ancestry and birth were in the land of the Canaanites; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. 4 On the day you were born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to make you clean, nor were you rubbed with salt or wrapped in cloths. 5 No one looked on you with pity or had compassion enough to do any of these things for you. Rather, you were thrown out into the open field, for on the day you were born you were despised.
The significance of this lies in the fact that Melchizedek, the "priest of God Most High" and "King of righteousness" (Heb. 7:1-2), who met Abraham when he was returning from the slaughter of the kings (Gen. 14:18-21), was the king of Salem, which was thought to be the name of Jerusalem at that time. If not, this mysterious Melchizedek would have been an Amorite anyway, if the Bible is correct in saying that the people living in this region were descendants of Amorites. There is, therefore, something incongruous about the praise heaped on Melchizedek in Genesis 14 and the scorn that was expressed about the Amorites in Genesis 15:16, which Mr. Miller has used as a proof text for his theory that the Amorites were so wicked and evil that Yahweh just had to order their destruction. In chapter 14, one of their kings was praised for his righteousness and became a figure or type of Jesus Christ, but in the very next chapter, the Amorites were treated with scorn. Something just isn't quite right here.
Miller [still quoting Finegan]:
In time Amorites and Canaanites were no doubt so mingled as to be indistinguishable, and the name Amorite was used as a general term for the inhabitants of the land, which could equally well be called the land of the Amorites (Josh. 24:15) or the land of the Canaanites." (Finegan, MM:121-122)
Till:
And this does what to prove that the Amorites were so reprobate that
they deserved to be
wiped off the face of the earth? I will ask Mr. Miller again to give us
evidence to show
that the Amorites were any more "wicked" or "evil" than the other
ethnic groups of that time
and region.
By the way, the link above was to The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia again so, we are back in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Miller:
Till:
And this does what to prove that the "Canaanite peoples" were so wicked
and depraved that
Yahweh just had to order their extermination? Is Miller arguing that
other people of that
time did not "build war-culture cities"? Most independent city-states
of that time were
walled and fortified, because such was necessary to defend them against
invasions. The
Israelites fortified their cities.
2 Chronicles 8:3 Solomon then went to Hamath Zobah and captured it. 4 He also built up Tadmor in the desert and all the store cities he had built in Hamath. 5 He rebuilt Upper Beth Horon and Lower Beth Horon as fortified cities, with walls and with gates and bars....
2 Chronicles 11:5 Rehoboam lived in Jerusalem and built up towns for defense in Judah: Bethlehem, Etam, Tekoa, 7 Beth Zur, Soco, Adullam, 8 Gath, Mareshah, Ziph, 9 Adoraim, Lachish, Azekah, 10 Zorah, Aijalon and Hebron. These were fortified cities in Judah and Benjamin. 11 He strengthened their defenses and put commanders in them, with supplies of food, olive oil and wine. 12 He put shields and spears in all the cities, and made them very strong. So Judah and Benjamin were his.... 23 He acted wisely, dispersing some of his sons throughout the districts of Judah and Benjamin, and to all the fortified cities.
2 Chronicles 14:6 He [Asa] built up the fortified cities of Judah, since the land was at peace. No one was at war with him during those years, for Yahweh gave him rest. 7 "Let us build up these towns," he said to Judah, "and put walls around them, with towers, gates and bars. The land is still ours, because we have sought Yahweh our God; we sought him and he has given us rest on every side." So they built and prospered. 8 Asa had an army of three hundred thousand men from Judah, equipped with large shields and with spears, and two hundred and eighty thousand from Benjamin, armed with small shields and with bows. All these were brave fighting men.
Building fortified cities, with walls, towers, gates, and bars, was just a necessity of the times if the people living there wished to survive, so Mr. Miller needs to explain why it was so wicked and evil of the Canaanites to do this to their cities but not wrong of the Israelites to do the same to the cities they had captured from the Canaanites. The fact that the Israelites captured the cities of Canaan--or so the Bible claims--shows that they Canaanites were right to use their "brilliant engineer[ing]" skills to fortify their cities.
Miller:
Till:
Miller's first link here was to Finegan's book again, another Grand
Rapids publication, and
we have already seen that his information wasn't always reliable.
As for the Amorite "destruction on an international scale," doing such destruction was nothing new. It was simply a reality of the times in which global upheavals were causing people to migrate to where they could escape the ravages of droughts and floods. Survival is always a powerful motivation, and the ethnocentric attitudes of that time led people to put more emphasis on their own survival than on that of the people living in areas into which they were migrating. As we noticed above, the Sumerians established independent city-states in Southern Mesopotamia, which were frequently warring with each other, because water was a scarce commodity. Because of an exaggerated belief in some imminent threat, our own nation at this time is wreaking havoc on the very region once controlled by Amorites. We can only imagine how much greater such fears would have been in the barbaric biblical times when the perceived threats were not on the other side of an ocean but maybe just across a river or in an adjoining territory.
As for the "destruction on an international scale" of which Mr. Miller accused the Amorites, what about the international scale of Israelite destruction? I would urge Mr. Miller to think just a moment about what the Bible claims. The Israelites were in Egypt, where according to the Bible their ancestors had gone of their own free will, but they left that country and invaded Canaan with the avowed intention of killing everyone there and leaving "nothing alive to breathe." What did the Canaanites do on an "international scale" that would exceed the international destruction of the Israelites?
Miller will no doubt argue that it was the will of "God" that this be done, but if he does take this route, he will again be engaging in question begging and special pleading. Besides the fact that the Bible says so, what real evidence does he have that "God" was leading the Israelites in their path of destruction across Canaan? He can't just say, "Well, the Bible says it, so it must be right," because that would be begging the question of biblical accuracy [inerrancy]. In addition to the initial routing of the Canaanite nations, Israel continued its "destruction on an international scale." Besides Saul's raid on the Amalekites, who lived outside of what was once the land of Canaan, the Israelites attacked the Syrians and Ammonites (2 Sam. 10:9-19), and a string of David's victories against Moab, Syria, and Edom are listed in 2 Samuel 8. Israel was almost perpetually at war, so Mr. Miller needs to explain why destruction and war were all right if Israel did them but wrong if the Amorites did them.
Miller:
Till:
Before we look at the "better polytheism" of Ebla, I will remind
readers that Ebla was
destroyed by the Akkadians when Naram Sin was their king. As I pointed
out above, Ebla never
regained its former power, so the Amorites could hardly be blamed for
destroying what Mr.
Miller refers to as "better polytheism." If any blame is to be affixed
for the destruction
of a "better polytheism," Mr. Miller will have to lay that blame on the
Akkadians. Needless to
say, I find it rather ironic that a monotheistic apologist would speak
of "better polytheism,"
but, of course, Mr. Miller is bending over backwards to try to find
some way to justify the
Yahwistic massacres in the Old Testament.
Miller [quoting Pettinato]:
The second innovation is represented by the Eblaite conception of the divine. In spite of widespread polytheism, it seemed to be coupled with henotheism and an abstract idea of God. Above all, the principal god, Dagan, was raised to a role of superiority that touched upon uniqueness."
Their religious praxis was likewise somewhat refined--relative to the other ANE nations--but somehow got 'changed' into the rather debased practices which we will below see were done in the Canaan of Israelite times. What influenced this cultural shift in praxis?
Till:
The author of the book that Miller quoted above was Giovanni Pettinato
of the University
of Rome, who is an epigrapher working on translating the tablets
discovered in the library of
Ebla, so he would certainly be an authority whose opinion would be
worth serious consideration.
Unfortunately, however, Mr. Miller has given to us only a brief
quotation from Pettinato,
which is entirely too abstract to tell us anything concrete about
Eblaite religion that Mr.
Miller seems to believe the Amorites were responsible for "debasing."
Miller believes that,
even though, as I noted above, the Amorites did not destroy Ebla. That
was done by the
Akkadians when Naram Sin was their king. In
"EBLA:
Its Impact on
Bible Records," Clifford Wilson, an archaeologist at Monash
University in Australia,
reviewed the discoveries at Ebla and mentioned at length the work of
Pettinato. He made a
reference to what Pettinato was perhaps referring to in the brief
quotation above. In
referring to the names of Eblaite gods, Pettinato found that Ya
was one of the names,
and Wilson, who exhibits clear tendency to read too much into what had
been found on the
tablets, attempts to make this a reference to Yahweh. Pettinato saw
this only as "a new
development in West Semitic religious concepts," but Wilson preferred
to think that "(i)t
would be more correct to see it as renewed acknowledgment of Yahweh."
Wilson was not the first to read Yahweh into the texts of some of the tablets found at Ebla. I remember reading an article, whose title and source I no longer recall, about the discovery of the Eblaite library after it was first found in 1975, and biblical maximists immediately jumped to find Yahweh in Ya, the name of one of the gods of the Eblaites, but that opinion is not shared by all. Let's suppose, however, that Ya was indeed a shortened form of Yahweh that was used in Ebla. Since Yahwism has survived until the present time, how can the Amorites be blamed for having "debased" the Eblaite religion--especially when the Amorites were not the ones who destroyed Ebla--if the worship of Yahweh was continued after Ebla ceased to exist?
As for Pettinato's belief that the Eblaite god Dagan was elevated to "a role of superiority that touched upon uniqueness," I have to ask what the relevance of this is. This god was not unique to Ebla, because Dagan was the god of crop fertility in western Semitic cultures.
At Ebla (Tell Mardikh), from at least 2300 BCE, Dagan was the head of the city pantheon comprising some 200 deities and bore the titles BE-DINGIR-DINGIR 'Lord of the gods' and Bekalam 'Lord of the land'. His consort was known only as Belatu 'Lady'. Both were worshipped in a large temple complex called E-Mul 'House of the Star'. One entire quarter of Ebla and one of its gates were named after Dagan. Dagan is called ti-lu ma-tim 'dew of the land' and Be-ka-na-na, possibly 'Lord of Canaan'. He [was] called lord of many cities: of Tuttul, Irim, Ma-Ne, Zarad, Uguash, Siwad, and Sipishu.
So the pantheon of Elba had 200 deities in it, and Miller is apparently arguing that the Amorites--who weren't responsible for the downfall of Ebla in the first place--deserved to be exterminated for somehow "debasing"--apparently without conquering Ebla--the "superior" role that the Eblaites had accorded their god Dagan. As noted in the quotation above, Dagan was the chief of the Eblaite deities, and from this, Miller, through Pettinato, is claiming that they practiced henotheism, which is the worship of only one god while acknowledging the existence of others. I guess we are supposed to believe that the Eblaites maintained a pantheon of some 200 deities, because they worshiped only Dagan. How much sense does that make?
For the sake of argument, let's suppose that the Eblaites were henotheistic. So what? Is Miller arguing from this, that the Amorites--who were not the people who destroyed Ebla--deserved to be exterminated around 1440 BC because their ancestors had destroyed a "superior polytheism" of the Eblaites some 800 years earlier? Perhaps so. After all, he is defending the Yahwistic massacre of the Amalekites for something their ancestors had done 400 years earlier. I thought that the Israelite slaughter of the Amalekites for something done 400 years earlier by their ancestors was bad enough, but now Mr. Miller is apparently arguing that it was morally right to destroy the Amorites in Israel's sweep through Canaan, because their ancestors had destroyed a "better polytheism" in Ebla 800 years earlier. One wonders where his cut-off point would be for punishing ethnic groups for atrocities committed by their ancestors.
This, folks, is an example of the extremes that inerrantists will resort to in order to defend their untenable belief in biblical inerrancy. In this case, apparently, they will argue that the Yahwistic slaughter of the Canaanites were morally right, because a branch of their ethnic group destroyed a "superiod" polytheism eight centuries before Yahweh ordered the massacres, but keep in mind that the Amorites didn't destroy Ebla. That was done by Akkadians.
Before leaving this point, I must point out that the destruction of Ebla--by the Akkadians--did not end the worship of the god Dagan. He was mentioned in the Bible as Dagon (Judges 16:23-30) and was worshiped throughout territory occupied by the Amorites. He was, for example, one of the leading deities in the Amorite city of Mari, so instead of destroying the worship of Dagan (Dagon), the Amorites contributed to its preservation. At any rate, I really don't get Miller's point here. The Old Testament raved against idolatry and obviously condemned the worship of Dagon. A quaint little tale in (1 Samuel 5 claims that when the Philistines captured the ark of the covenant in battle, they put it into their temple of Dagon, where it caused the statue (idol) of Dagon to topple face down onto the ground. When the idol was set upright again, the Philistines found it face down the next day. This led them to return the ark to the Israelites.
In the passage linked to above (Judges 16:23-30), Samson pulled down the supporting columns and caused the temple of Dagon to collapse on a houseful of worshipers, so the Israelites obviously didn't have much use for the god Dagon (Dagan). Mr. Miller, however, apparently wants us to believe that Yahweh was morally right to order the extermination of the Amorites, because they had destroyed the worship of Dagan in Ebla. I will say again that this is an example of how far biblical inerrantists will go to defend the Bible.Miller [quoting another source]:
Nevertheless, the vicissitudes in political fortunes, after the collapse of the Early Bronze Age civilization in Canaan, were accompanied by the settlement of new peoples (Amorites, Hurrians, and others). These new settlers brought about innovations and changes to the culture of Canaan." (EBLA2:89)
Till:
And bringing "innovations and changes" into a culture is wrong? Did the
Israelites bring any
innovations and changes into Canaan after they conquered it?
Miller:
Till:
And the Israelites were not into "international violence"? Leaving one
country and invading
another one with the intention of "leaving no one alive to breathe" was
not "international
violence"? I am trying to pressure Mr. Miller to explain to us why
conduct that was morally
wrong in Amorites and other Canaanites would have been morally right
for Israelites.
Miller;
You must not worship the LORD your God in their way, because in worshipping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the LORD hates..
Notice that the problem is not so much the 'other gods', but the religious rituals that are so bad.
Till:
We have already seen that the Israelites also did "detestable" things,
such as
sacrificing their
children to the god Molech, and as we go through Mr. Miller's list
of "detestable
rituals" below, we will see again that the Israelites also practiced
some of those
rituals.
Miller:
So, what data do we have about their practices. Let's start with the
biblical data, and check
it against any archeological and extra-biblical [sic] literary
data.
Till:
As we go through the "biblical data" that Mr. Miller cites, please
notice that he continues to
beg the question of biblical inerrancy, so another reminder of likely
errancy in the Bible
seems appropriate before we look at Miller's special pleading below. I
showed the
probablility of myth in the Genesis-6 reference to
"sons of God" who
married the daughters of men, and in the case of the
book of Jonah that
there are several reasons to suspect that it is a work of fiction or
metaphorical in purpose
rather than a historical work. Earlier in
this rebuttal article,
I presented archaeological evidence that the claim of Joshua's
destruction of the city of Ai
is unhistorical, so now I will present another reason why reasonable
people will be suspicious
of the fundamentalist claim that the Bible is inerrant. This reason
pertains to scriptures
that I have already quoted in
this section of
Part Two to show that child sacrifices were apparently commonplace in
Israel. The
problem appears in three of the passages that I previously cited in
Jeremiah without quoting.
As I quote them now, notice the expressions that I emphasize in bold
print.
Jeremiah 7:30 "'The people of Judah have done evil in my eyes, declares Yahweh. They have set up their detestable idols in the house that bears my Name and have defiled it. 31 They have built the high places of Topheth in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to burn their sons and daughters in the fire--something I did not command, nor did it enter my mind.
Jeremiah 9:4 For they [the people of Jerusalem] have forsaken me and made this a place of foreign gods; they have burned sacrifices in it to gods that neither they nor their fathers nor the kings of Judah ever knew, and they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. 5 They have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as offerings to Baal--something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind.
Jeremiah 32:34 34 They [the people of Judah] set up their abominable idols in the house that bears my Name and defiled it. 35 They built high places for Baal in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to sacrifice their sons and daughters to Molech, though I never commanded, nor did it enter my mind, that they should do such a detestable thing and so make Judah sin.
So three times Yahweh said through the prophet Jeremiah that it just hadn't entered his mind that the Israelites would sacrifice their sons and daughters to Molech, but this is not at all consistent with the biblical claim that Yahweh knows everything (1 John 3:20; Ps. 147:5; Job 37:16; Isaiah 46:9-10; Isaiah 48:3-7). There are many more passages that I could cite, but these are sufficient to show that biblical writers believed that Yahweh knew everything. The last two cited above claim that Yahweh also knew what was going to come to pass.
Isaiah 46:9 9 Remember the former things, those of long ago; I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me. 10 I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say: My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.
Isaiah 48:1 "Listen to this, O house of Jacob, you who are called by the name of Israel and come from the line of Judah, you who take oaths in the name of Yahweh and invoke the God of Israel--but not in truth or righteousness--2 you who call yourselves citizens of the holy city and rely on the God of Israel—Yahweh Almighty is his name: 3 I foretold the former things long ago, my mouth announced them and I made them known; then suddenly I acted, and they came to pass.
So if God knows everything and knows what is going to happen in the future, how could it not have entered his mind that the Israelites would offer their children as burnt offerings to the god Molech? This is just one more reason to suspect that the Bible is not the inerrant "word of God," as most fundamentalists think and as Mr. Miller seems to believe. Keep this in mind as we go through his catalog of "detestable rituals" that the Canaanites practiced, because he will rely heavily on begging the question of biblical accuracy.
I will reserve comment until Mr. Miller has taken us through the catalog of "sins" prohibited in Leviticus 18.
Miller:
Leviticus 18:1 The LORD said to Moses, 2 "Speak to the Israelites and say to them: `I am the LORD your God. 3 You must not do as they do in Egypt, where you used to live, and you must not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you. Do not follow their practices. 4 You must obey my laws and be careful to follow my decrees. I am the LORD your God. 5 Keep my decrees and laws, for the man who obeys them will live by them. I am the LORD.
6 "`No one is to approach any close relative to have sexual relations. I am the LORD.
7 "`Do not dishonor your father by having sexual relations with your mother. She is your mother; do not have relations with her.
8 "`Do not have sexual relations with your father's wife; that would dishonor your father.
9 "`Do not have sexual relations with your sister, either your father's daughter or your mother's daughter, whether she was born in the same home or elsewhere.
10 "`Do not have sexual relations with your son's daughter or your daughter's daughter; that would dishonor you.
11 "`Do not have sexual relations with the daughter of your father's wife, born to your father; she is your sister.
12 "`Do not have sexual relations with your father's sister; she is your father's close relative.
13 "`Do not have sexual relations with your mother's sister, because she is your mother's close relative.
14 "`Do not dishonor your father's brother by approaching his wife to have sexual relations; she is your aunt.
15 "`Do not have sexual relations with your daughter-in-law. She is your son's wife; do not have relations with her.
16 "`Do not have sexual relations with your brother's wife; that would dishonor your brother.
17 "`Do not have sexual relations with both a woman and her daughter. Do not have sexual relations with either her son's daughter or her daughter's daughter; they are her close relatives. That is wickedness.
18 "`Do not take your wife's sister as a rival wife and have sexual relations with her while your wife is living.
19 "`Do not approach a woman to have sexual relations during the uncleanness of her monthly period.
20 "`Do not have sexual relations with your neighbor's wife and defile yourself with her.
21 "`Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech, for you must not profane the name of your God. I am the LORD.
22 "`Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable.
23 "`Do not have sexual relations with an animal and defile yourself with it. A woman must not present herself to an animal to have sexual relations with it; that is a perversion.
24 "`Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled. 25 Even the land was defiled; so I punished it for its sin, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. 26 But you must keep my decrees and my laws. The native-born and the aliens living among you must not do any of these detestable things, 27 for all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you, and the land became defiled. 28 And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you. 29 "`Everyone who does any of these detestable things--such persons must be cut off from their people. 30 Keep my requirements and do not follow any of the detestable customs that were practiced before you came and do not defile yourselves with them. I am the LORD your God.'" (repeated in Lev 20)
Till:
Many of these laws pertained to incest, and just about every incestuous
relationship was
anticipated except the father/daughter one. The restriction in verse 6
forbidding sexual
relations with "any close relative" would have covered fathers and
daughters, of course, but
I have to wonder why the Levitical writer, who specifically mentioned
just about every other
incestuous relation, didn't also specifically forbid what is probably
the most common
incestuous relationship of all, one that is fairly commonplace in
modern society, i. e.,
sexual relations between father and daughter. I can't help thinking
about "righteous Lot"
(2 Peter
2:7) and his
daughters (Gen.
19:3-38),
mentioned earlier. Could this suggest that such relationships were
fairly common in Hebrew
culture and folklore?
At any rate, Mr. Miller's apparent purpose in cataloging these "detestable practices" was to suggest that these were things that those nasty old Canaanites did, which left Yahweh with no choice but to order their extermination. We have seen, however, that the same "detestable practices" were also present in Israelite society. Verse 21, for example, prohibited sacrificing one's children to Molech, but we just noticed above that several biblical passages indicate that such sacrifices were fairly commonplace in the Israelite culture. Even though Abraham didn't complete the sacrifice of his son Isaac (Gen. 19:1-19), just the fact that it is in the sacred literature of the Hebrews indicates that this was a practice that they did not find shocking. In "A Legacy of Human Sacrifice?" I discussed the probable contribution that Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac and the later story of Jephthah's sacrifice of his daughter to fulfill a foolish vow to Yahweh (Judges 11:30-39) made to the evolution of the Christian doctrine of the vicarious atonement of Jesus. Both Abraham and Jephthah were listed as "heroes of faith" in (Heb. 11:17,32), so if human sacrifice was considered so "detestable" in biblical times, how did these two find their way into a list of "heroes of faith" like Noah, Enoch, Sarah, Joseph, Moses, and others? The article just linked to brought a response from a biblicist in Scotland to which I replied in the same issue of The Skeptical Review. Those who read these three articles should be able to see that the Old Testament did leave a legacy of human sacrifices, which ultimately culminated in the notion that God required the sacrifice of his own son as a condition to forgiving the "sins" of his creation. As my articles just linked to suggest, the doctrine of the vicarious atonement could not have evolved in a culture that found repugnance in human sacrifices. That this doctrine did develop in a religion that has its roots in Judaism is a rather clear indication that a legacy of human sacrifices was ingrained in this society, and as I have noted above, even biblical writers themselves made several references to the practice.
This poses a problem for Mr. Miller's attempt to defend the Canaanite massacres on the grounds that these people practiced human sacrifices, because it makes no logical sense at all to argue that "God" ordered the extermination of people who sacrificed children as burnt offerings so that he could replace them with people who sacrificed children as burnt offerings.
Some of these alleged "detestable practices" were merely superstitions of the time. Verse 20, for example, prohibited sexual relations during a woman's "monthly period," but Mr. Miller can give no reason why this would have been a detestable practice beyond the fact that it was included in the long list of no-nos in Leviticus 18. Would Mr. Miller say that this is a sinful practice if it is done today? If so, let's see his evidence that it was beyond the mere fact that the Bible says that it was.
Verse 22 prohibited homosexuality, but the latest research, although not yet conclusive, indicates that this is a hormonal/biological matter over which those who are attracted to the same sex have no choice. If that is true, I wonder what biblicists will say when the research establishes as scientific fact that homosexuality is not a matter of choice any more than one has a choice in other biological characteristics, such as race, hair and eye color, height, etc. Will Bible believers still continue to rant and rave against homosexuality and clamor for constitutional amendments to restrict it? Probably so, because science has already established the reality of biological evolution, but that has not stopped biblicists from ranting against it. I predict that time will show that those who rave against homosexuality on religious grounds will prove to be the modern counterparts of those who opposed Galileo's discovery that the earth is not the center of the solar system.
If we assume, however, that homosexuality is a "detestable practice," which homosexuals engage in as a matter of choice, that would be of little help to Mr. Miller's effort to defend the Yahwishtic massacres on the grounds that the Canaanites were wicked, evil people who did such awful things as practice homosexuality, because this was present in Hebrew society too. Reminiscent of the story of the men of Sodom who demanded that the angels visiting Lot be sent out to them (Gen. 19:1-11), there is a quaint little yarn in Judges 19 about a group of homosexuals in Gibeon who made the same demand of a man hosting a Levite and his concubine, who had stopped for the night. Like Lot, the host offered the men his virgin daughter (which must not have been a detestable practice, since "righteous Lot" did the same thing), but that didn't satisfy them. The upshot was that the Levite threw his concubine to the men, who... well, ravished her to death. The next day, the Levite took his dead concubine home, cut her body, "limb by limb" (v:29), into twelve pieces and sent the pieces to the various tribes in Israel. This provoked a civil war between the tribe of Benjamin, in whose territory the incident had happened, and the other tribes of Israel (Judges 20), which ended with the virtual extermination of the entire tribe of Benjamin, which was faced with the prospect of extinction, since only 600 men had survived, by fleeing from the battle (Judges 21:1-6). Not to worry, however, because the very tribes of Israel that had massacred the Benjamites devised a plan to kidnap wives for the Benjamites who had fled from the battle scene (Judges 21:6-24), so I guess that kidnapping women and forcing them into marriages was not a "detestable" practice.
Does Mr. Miller know that stories like this one are in the Bible? If so, how can he justify with a straight face the massacre of the Canaanites on the grounds that they were so depraved and immoral that Yahweh had to order their extermination?
Miller [quoting more texts that prohibited human
sacrifices]:
Leviticus 20:1 The LORD said to Moses, 2 "Say to the Israelites: `Any Israelite or any alien living in Israel who gives any of his children to Molech must be put to death. The people of the community are to stone him. 3 I will set my face against that man and I will cut him off from his people; for by giving his children to Molech, he has defiled my sanctuary and profaned my holy name. 4 If the people of the community close their eyes when that man gives one of his children to Molech and they fail to put him to death, 5 I will set my face against that man and his family and will cut off from their people both him and all who follow him in prostituting themselves to Molech.
Deuteronomy 12:31 You must not worship the LORD your God in their way, because in worshipping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the LORD hates. They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods.
Deuteronomy 18:10 Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire....
Psalm 106:38 They shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan, and the land was desecrated by their blood. (about Israel!)
Till:
I have shown above, repeatedly, that the Israelites also
practiced child sacrificing,
so this entire aspect of "detestable practices" that Mr. Miller has
tried to lay onto the
Amorites amounts to an approval of Yahweh's plan to exterminate people
who sacrificed some
of their children to the god Molech so that he could replace them with
people who sacrificed
some of their children to the god Molech. Miller certainly gets
my agreement that this
ancient barbaric practice was "destestable," but he needs to show us
that child sacrifices
were more "detestable" when done by Amorites than when done by
Israelites. He can't do that,
of course, because his whole purpose in all that he has said about the
detestable Amorites
was to offer a rationale for their eradication that the gullible would
uncritically accept,
and many of the gullible won't know the Bible well enough to say, "Hey,
wait a minute, the
Israelites did some of those detestable things too."
Miller [still quoting proof texts]:
1 Kings 14:24 There were even male shrine prostitutes in the land; the people engaged in all the detestable practices of the nations the LORD had driven out before the Israelites. (cf. also Deut 23.17--No Israelite man or woman is to become a shrine prostitute.)
Till:
This passage is describing "detestable" practices by the people of
Judah as the two verses
preceding the one quoted above clearly show.
1 Kings 14:22 Judah did evil in the eyes of Yahweh. By the sins they committed they stirred up his jealous anger more than their fathers had done. 23 They also set up for themselves high places, sacred stones and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every spreading tree.
Mr. Miller is using the "detestable" practices of the Amorites and other Canaanites to justify Yahweh's orders to exterminate them, but his time would be better spent trying to formulate a logical explanation for why his god Yahweh would have commanded the destruction of Canaanites who engaged in "detestable" practices so that he could replace them in the land of Canaan with another people who engaged in the same detestable practices. If Mr. Miller can see any logic in this, he should share it with us. Surely, he won't claim that Yahweh didn't know that that Israelites would turn out as badly as they did, because that would mean that Yahweh was not omniscient.
Miller:
So, the list of Canaanite "religious" practices included:
Till:
With the exception of bestiality, we have noticed that the Israelites
at times engaged in all
of these "detestable practices," and we can conclude by implication
that even this was a moral
problem in Israel. Mr. Miller quoted above the list of "sins" in
Leviticus 18,
which prohibited
"sexual relations with an animal"
(v:23),
but doesn't it make
sense to think that this was restricted, as were all of the other
"detestable practices" in
this passage, because it was something that was being done? Why, for
example, would a society
have a law against stealing if stealing were completely unknown in the
society?
Although there are no direct references to beastialty, there are some implications of it.
Genesis 2:18 Yahweh God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him." 19 Now Yahweh God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found. 21 So Yahweh God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then Yahweh God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. 23 The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman, ' for she was taken out of man."
Now how could Adam have determined that there was no suitable helper [helpmate KJV] in all of the animals that Yahweh presented to him unless Adam had... uh... well, "experimented" with them? The mere suggestion of that will probably be offensive to some readers, but I think it is a legitimate question, and I will show later that some commentators in the Talmud thought the same thing. Regardless of what this text may have meant, however, I can think of at least one place where beastiality was metaphorically referred to to compare Israel's immorality figuratively to two sisters named Oholah and Oholibah. After a lengthy description of their sexual promiscuity, Ezekiel applied a bestial metaphor to Oholibah.
Ezekiel 23:12 She too lusted after the Assyrians--governors and commanders, warriors in full dress, mounted horsemen, all handsome young men. 13 I saw that she too defiled herself; both of them went the same way. 14 "But she carried her prostitution still further. She saw men portrayed on a wall, figures of Chaldeans portrayed in red, 15 with belts around their waists and flowing turbans on their heads; all of them looked like Babylonian chariot officers, natives of Chaldea. 16 As soon as she saw them, she lusted after them and sent messengers to them in Chaldea. 17 Then the Babylonians came to her, to the bed of love, and in their lust they defiled her. After she had been defiled by them, she turned away from them in disgust. 18 When she carried on her prostitution openly and exposed her nakedness, I turned away from her in disgust, just as I had turned away from her sister. 19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses."
I wonder where Ezekiel would have gotten the idea for this metaphor unless bestiality was known to exist at that time.
For the sake of argument, let's just assume that bestiality didn't actually exist in Israel. Would that mean that this one "detestable practice" was sufficient to tip the scales to cause Yahweh to order the destruction of the Canaanites? Did he, in other words, say, "Well, both the Canaanites and the Israelites practice child sacrifices, incest, homosexuality, and cultic prostitution, but the Israelites don't engage in bestiality and the Canaanites do, so I am going to order the extermination of the Canaanites so that the nonbestial Israelites can occupy the land"?
Unless Mr. Miller is arguing that the Canaanites deserved to be exterminated because they were wicked, I really don't understand what the point is of all of his biblical and extrabiblical evidence that the Canaanites engaged in all sorts of "wickedness," but if this is his argument, he should keep in mind that exterminating the Canaanites would have also entailed killing Canaanite children too. As previously noted, Yahweh said that the seven nations in Canaan were "greater and mightier" than the Israelites (Deut. 7:1-2). Did this mean that these seven nations individually were greater and mightier than the Israelites, are did it mean that collectively, they were greater and mightier? Either way would mean that many thousands of the Canaanites were children when Yahweh gave the command to wipe them out and leave "no one alive to breathe" (Deut. 20:16-17; Josh. 10:40; Josh. 11:14-15), because the Israelite population at that time numbered 2.5 to 3 million, so if the seven nations were just greater and mightier collectively than this, there would surely have been 400,000 to 500,000 Canaanite children at the time. As noted earlier, Yahweh told Jonah that there were 120,000 children in Nineveh alone, so an estimate of 400 to 500 thousand children in seven nations collectively greater and mightier than the Israelites' three million would certainly be reasonable. "Moses" claimed that children have "no knowledge of good or evil" (Deut. 1:39), so readers should keep in mind that Mr. Miller is trying to rationalize the massacre of hundreds of thousands of innocent children, who didn't know the difference in good and evil.
As I have been replying to Mr. Miller's rationalizations of the Canaanite massacres, I couldn't help wondering if he maintains a pro-life position in the present controversy over abortion.
Miller:
Till:
It doesn't matter if extrabiblical data supports the biblical material,
because if the Bible,
which Mr. Miller believes is inerrant, says that the Israelites engaged
in the same
"detestable" practices as the Canaanites, that leaves Miller with the
problem of explaining
the morality of ordering the extermination of entire nations of people
because of their
detestable practices so that they could be replaced with another ethnic
group that engaged in
the same detestable practices. It also leaves him with the problem of
explaining the
morality of ordering the massacres of hundreds of thousands of innocent
children, because if
the Bible is inerrant, they certainly did not knowingly engage in the
"detestable practices"
that Mr. Miller has been talking about.
Miller:
Sadly, Yes.
Let's look at some of the scholarly descriptions of the data:
Its origin (human sacrifice) must be sought, evidently, in Canaanite culture (in the broad sense). Punic and Neo-Punic inscriptions contain the expressions mlk 'mr (transcribed mokhomor in Latin) and mlk 'dm. Very probably, these phrases mean respectively 'offerings of lamb' and 'offering of man', and refer to the sacrifice of an infant, or of a lamb as substitute. This interpretation is supported by a find in the sanctuary of Tanit at Carthage, where archaeologists have discovered urns containing burnt bones of lambs and goats, and, more often, of children. There is, too, a famous text of Diodorus Siculus (Biblioth. Hist. XX 14): in 310 B.C., when a disaster was threatening Carthage, the inhabitants of the town decided it was due to the anger of Kronos, to whom they had formerly sacrificed their finest children: instead, they had begun to offer sickly children, or children they had bought. Thereupon, they sacrificed two hundred children from the noblest families. There was a bronze statue of Kronos with outstretched arms, and the child was placed on its hands and rolled into the furnace. Whether the details be true or false, the story is evidence of a custom to which other classical authors also allude.
These inscriptions and texts are of late date, but the molk offering is mentioned in two steles from Malta belonging to the seventh or the sixth century B.C. The sacrificial term has not so far been found in inscriptions from Phoenicia proper, but child-sacrifice was practised there: a fragment of Philo of Byblos cited in Eusebius (Praep. Evang. I 10) says that the Phoenicians had an ancient custom--'they offered their dearest children in a way full of mystery' when danger threatened the nation. Porphyry (De abstin. II 56) says that the Phoenician History written by Sanchuniaton and translated by Philo of Byblos was full of stories about child-sacrifices offered to Kronos in times of calamity. These texts furnish the connecting-link with the story told by Diodorus Siculus, and we may mention also the reference to the king of Moab's offering his son as a holocaust when his capital was under siege (2 K 3 : 27).
The sacrifice of children, then, by burning them to death probably made its way into Israel from Phoenicia (note: the main transmitter of Canaanite culture) during a period of religious syncretism. The Bible mentions only two specific instances, and they are motivated by the same exceptional circumstances as the Phoenician sacrifices: Achaz 'made his son pass through the fire' (2 K I6: 3) during the Syro-Ephraimite War, and Manasseh did the same (2 K 2I: 6) when confronted with some Assyrian threat which is not mentioned in the Books of Kings but which may be alluded to in 2 Ch 33:11f. Yet the custom must have been fairly wide- spread to have deserved the condemnations uttered by Deuteronomy, Leviticus and the Prophets. Though Phoenician texts properly so called do not mention the word, it is possible (we say no more) that the sacrifice was called molk in Phoenicia, as in Carthage, and that it came into Israel under this name." (AI:445-446).
Till:
I saw no need to interrupt this lengthy quotation, because there can be
little doubt that child
sacrifices were commonplace in ancient, superstitious times. Mr.
Miller's source (Roland de
Vaux), however, didn't tell the complete story, at least not in the
part of his book that Mr.
Miller quoted, because human sacrifices were practiced all around the
world, in places far
removed from the ancient Near East. In many ancient societies,
such
as the Grecian, Celtic, and Nordic cultures, animal sacrifices were
far more common than
human ones, but the latter were sometimes practiced. Mesoamerican
cultures like the
Aztecs,
however, practiced mainly human sacrifices in their religious rituals
out of a belief that
the world had previously been destroyed four times, and so to delay its
fifth destruction,
they should sacrifice human hearts to their god Huitzilopochtli. They
maintained a state of
constant warfare with surrounding tribes so that they could take
prisoners to be sacrificed
to their god. Myans in Mesoamerica also practiced
human
sacrifices to
their gods as did the
Incas
in South
America. Mr. Miller apparently wants his readers to think that human
sacrifices
was a "detestable practice" unique to the ancient Near East, but that
was not at all the case.
Anyone who researches the subject will find that the Mesoamerican
cultures routinely offered
human sacrifices to their gods, so if Yahweh had wanted to eradicate
this practice, he should
have ordered Moses to construct ships to take the Israelites into
Mesoamerica to eradicate the
Aztecs, Mayas, and other ethnic groups of that region. In other words,
Mr. Miller gains
nothing by quoting sources that tell of the practice of human
sacrifices in Canaan, because
this was admittedly a religious practice of the time. What Miller needs
to do more than
post sources that report a well known historical fact is to give us a
logical explanation for
why Yahweh would have ordered the eradication of Canaanite tribes who
practiced human
sacrifices so that he could replace them with Israelites who also
practiced human sacrifices.
Miller:
Archeological evidence is firm and growing. Child sacrifice burial
grounds are called
tophet in the literature, and they occur throughout Palestine
and the Phoenician
empire. Ahlstrom mentions sites "at 'Atlit, Tell el-Far'a (S) and Tell
el 'Ajjul in
Palestine" (HAP:688,
n.2).
He gives a description of one monument depicting child sacrifice
(HAP:op.
cit.):
The archaeological excavations at Punic Pozo Moro in Spain show a monument with a ritual scene with a god (with an animal head) on a throne and a table in front of him. He holds with one hand a pig lying on its back and in the other hand he has a bowl with the head and the feet of a little child (?) sticking up. He holds this bowl in front of his mouth. To the right there is another bowl, and a god with an animal head (horse?) holding a knife in his right hand above the bowl ready to slaughter the child.
Till:
I will split this quotation to ask, with admitted cynicism, why Yahweh
didn't send the
Israelites in the other direction, across North Africa and across the
Strait of Gibraltar
into Spain, so that they could have exterminated the people living
there and then themselves
become the ones who offered child sacrifices. In other words, I am
trying to get Mr. Miller
to see that he accomplishes nothing when he says, "Well, those wicked
Canaanites practice
human sacrifice," if the Old Testament admits that the Israelites did
the same thing. What
was so morally right about Yahweh's ordering the extermination of the
human-sacrificing
Canaanites if he was going to repopulate their land with
human-sacrificing Israelites?
Of course, I won't let Mr. Miller forget that in ordering the extermination of everything that breathed in the Canaanite nations, Yahweh was ordering the killing of children who at the times of their deaths did not know the difference in good and evil. Instead of seeing all of the quotations from Mr. Miller's sources, who are telling us nothing that we did not know to be probable historical facts, I would like to see from him a logical argument that would prove the morality of killing innocent children because of what their parents and other adults may have been guilty of.
Miller [continuing Alhstrom's quotation]:
The scene (in a neo-Hittite style) shows both animal and child sacrifices as food for the gods."
Till:
Yes, and the various biblical passages that I quoted above show that
human sacrifices by the
Israelites was by no means a rarity, so Mr. Miller confronts the same
question again. Why
would the omniscient, omnipotent Yahweh have ordered the extermination
of the Canaanites so
that he could repopulate their land with another ethnic group that
engaged in the same
"detestable practices"?
More important than that, why would a perfectly holy and moral god have ordered the massacre of hundreds of thousands of children for things that their parents and other adults in their society had done? Mr. Miller seems to want to forget all about the children, but I am not going to let him forget them.
Miller:
New sites recently found include Gezer, Tyre, and numerous 'high
places'
(POTW:171,
Is 57.5-7).
These child sacrifices were practiced not only during religious ceremonies (as most of the above were), but also during times of crisis (esp. warfare) and as dedication offerings at the building of cities/houses (i.e. "foundation sacrifices"; cf. AI:442). So Stern (ZPEB, s.v. "war, warfare" p. 895):
Till:
I wonder if anyone else has noticed what Mr. Miller seems to be
arguing. No matter how
widespread the practice of child sacrifices was in ancient Canaanite,
we necessarily know
that they were not sacrificing all of their children, for if
they had been, the
Canaanites would have died out. Hence, Miller seems to be arguing that
since the Canaanite
societies were sacrificing some of their children, Yahweh
ordered the Israelites to
massacre all of the Canaanite children.
Doesn't anybody besides me ever notice this kind of twisted reasoning?
Miller [pointlessly continuing to cite sources about a historical fact that no one denies]:
Further, to secure God's aid, the troops would make sacrifices prior to battle--sometimes even human sacrifices... This custom seems also to have been taken from earlier Canaanite traditions, for in many Egyp. reliefs from the late kingdom, depicting the capture of towns in Pal., the besieged are shown throwing their children from the walls in seeking the gods' favor."
Notice that unlike so many other aberrant practices (e.g. sorcery) of the Canaanites, this was not widely shared by the other ANE cultures--it was a rarity.
Till:
I think that Mr. Miller needs to research human sacrifices a bit more.
If he does, he will
find, as I indicated above, that humans were sacrificed worldwide. As
for seeking the favor
of their gods by throwing children from the walls of their towns, Mr.
Miller should also study
the Bible a bit more. If he did, he would see biblical incidents like
the time when a famine
struck the land, and the Israelites, like the cultures around them,
thought that this
adversity was caused by the anger of their god Yahweh. The following
passage will explain
what they did to seek the favor of Yahweh.
2 Samuel 21:1 During the reign of David, there was a famine for three successive years; so David sought the face of Yahweh. Yahweh said, "It is on account of Saul and his blood-stained house; it is because he put the Gibeonites to death." 2 The king summoned the Gibeonites and spoke to them. (Now the Gibeonites were not a part of Israel but were survivors of the Amorites; the Israelites had sworn to spare them, but Saul in his zeal for Israel and Judah had tried to annihilate them.) 3 David asked the Gibeonites, "What shall I do for you? How shall I make amends so that you will bless the Lord's inheritance?" 4 The Gibeonites answered him, "We have no right to demand silver or gold from Saul or his family, nor do we have the right to put anyone in Israel to death." "What do you want me to do for you?" David asked. 5 They answered the king, "As for the man who destroyed us and plotted against us so that we have been decimated and have no place anywhere in Israel, 6 let seven of his male descendants be given to us to be killed and exposed before Yahweh at Gibeah of Saul--the Lord's chosen one." So the king said, "I will give them to you." 7 The king spared Mephibosheth son of Jonathan, the son of Saul, because of the oath before Yahweh between David and Jonathan son of Saul. 8 But the king took Armoni and Mephibosheth, the two sons of Aiah's daughter Rizpah, whom she had borne to Saul, together with the five sons of Saul's daughter Merab, whom she had borne to Adriel son of Barzillai the Meholathite. 9 He handed them over to the Gibeonites, who killed and exposed them on a hill before Yahweh. All seven of them fell together; they were put to death during the first days of the harvest, just as the barley harvest was beginning. 10 Rizpah daughter of Aiah took sackcloth and spread it out for herself on a rock. From the beginning of the harvest till the rain poured down from the heavens on the bodies, she did not let the birds of the air touch them by day or the wild animals by night.
This didn't involve throwing children from city walls, but it was a form of human sacrific that was fully as "detestable" as the human sacrifices of the Amorites that Mr. Miller has been deploring at length now. Such things as these no doubt happened in ancient Near Eastern cultures, and they resulted from an idiotic belief that when calamities happen, the gods are angry and have to be appeased. Of course, I suspect that Mr. Miller will go to whatever lengths are necessary to "explain" that what David did on the occasion described above was morally right. I suppose "detestable" things like this had to be done by the Canaanites in order to arouse Mr. Miller's indignation.
Miller:
This evil was specifically Canaanite/Amorite. [Pushback:"
"But, hey,
what about
Abraham?!--Didn't God order him to sacrifice his kid? Isn't
this a little
inconsistent, pal?!"]
Till:
The link here is to an article by Miller in which he examined the story
of Yahweh's command
for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac
(Gen.
22:1-19)
and--surprise! surprise!--found nothing wrong with it or inconsistent
with the Bible's later
condemnation of human sacrifices. Since Mr. Miller answered the
hypothetical question above
by linking to one of his articles, I will remind readers that I earlier
linked to
one
of my own
articles in which I had presented an entirely different take on the
story that Miller
finds nothing wrong with. Another biblical story of human sacrifice
tells of
Jephthah's sacrifice
of his own daughter to keep a foolish vow that he had made to
Yahweh. In this case, it
wasn't a matter of beginning to make the sacrifice and then being
stopped by Yahweh. As this
tale was told, Jephthah actually completed the sacrifice of his
daughter or else the Bible
doesn't mean what it plainly says. The details are in the article just
linked to, so I will
let readers decide whether to read it. Those who do and have no
inerrancy axes to grind
will see that it clearly says that Jephthah "did to her [his daughter]
according to his vow
which he had vowed," and what he had vowed was to sacrifice to Yahweh
the first thing that
came out of the door of his house to meet him upon his return.
Unfortunately, the first
thing that came out to meet him was his daughter.
Now here is a curious thing about this fellow Jephthah. He committed an act that was so detestable" that Miller says that Yahweh just had to exterminate the Canaanites for doing it, yet Jephthah was listed with the "heroes of faith" in Hebrews 11:32, along with such notables as Noah, Abraham, Moses, etc. I have no doubt that Mr. Miller will follow the general course taken by biblical inerrantists and claim that Jephthah didn't sacrifice his daughter but only "sacrificed her virginity" by committing her to live a life of perpetual virginity, but those who read the story should have no problems seeing that the story clearly says that Jephthah did to his daughter according to his vow. The mere presence of this story in the Bible indicates that human sacrifice wasn't considered nearly as repugnant as Mr. Miller seems to think that it was.
At this point, Mr. Miller turned to incest among the Canaanites as a justification for Yahweh's orders to exterminate them, so I will wind down my reply to his attempt to paint them as dispicable practitioners of child sacrifices by pointing out something that is known to everyone who has ever bothered to research the ancient Near Eastern belief in what the Hebrews referred to as cherem. The idea communicated by this word was an ANE belief in "devoting" things or putting things "under ban" to the gods, and so when cities and towns were captured in war, the belief was applied to everything taken in battle. All of the people captured, including children and babies, and their livestock were "devoted" or "put under ban" to be killed and their possessions burned, except for precious metals like gold and silver, of course, and these were to be given to Yahweh, which was just another way of saying that the coffers in the tabernacle—and later the temple—were filled with the spoils of war.
Application of this belief can be seen in the instructions that Joshua gave to his troops before the people shouted to make the walls of Jericho collapse [snicker, snicker] after having been encompassed for seven days by the Israelites.
Joshua 6:16 The seventh time around, when the priests sounded the trumpet blast, Joshua commanded the people, "Shout! For Yahweh has given you the city! 17 The city and all that is in it are to be devoted to Yahweh. Only Rahab the prostitute and all who are with her in her house shall be spared, because she hid the spies we sent. 18 But keep away from the devoted things, so that you will not bring about your own destruction by taking any of them. Otherwise you will make the camp of Israel liable to destruction and bring trouble on it. 19 All the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron are sacred to Yahweh and must go into his treasury."
The very next chapter tells of the Israelite failure to take the city of Ai because of Achan's violation of Joshua's command about the "devoted things" during the sacking of Jericho.
Joshua 7:1 But the Israelites acted unfaithfully in regard to the devoted things; Achan son of Carmi, the son of Zimri, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took some of them. So Yahweh's anger burned against Israel.
The Keil and Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament is popular with many conservative Bible believers, so I will let their comments on Achan's trespass serve to explain how the ANE belief in "devoted things" was applied in time of war.
Because the Lord had given Jericho into the hands of the Israelites, they were to consecrate it to Him as a ban (cherem), i. e., as a holy thing belonging to Jehovah, which was not to be touched by man, as being the first-fruits of the land of Canaan. (On cherem, see the remarks at Lev 27:28-29.) Rahab alone was excepted from this ban, along with all that belonged to her, because she had hidden the spies. The inhabitants of an idolatrous town laid under the ban were to be put to death, together with their cattle, and all the property in the town to be burned, as Moses himself had enjoined on the basis of the law in Lev 27:29. The only exceptions were metals, gold, silver, and the vessels of brass and iron; these were to be brought into the treasury of the Lord, i. e., the treasury of the tabernacle, as being holy to the Lord (v. 19; vid., Num 31:54). Whoever took to himself anything that had been laid under the ban, exposed himself to the ban, not only because he had brought an abomination into his house, as Moses observes in Deut 7:25, in relation to the gold and silver of idols, but because he had wickedly invaded the rights of the Lord, by appropriating that which had been laid under the ban, and had wantonly violated the ban itself.
The rest of chapter seven in the book of Joshua tells about the determination of Achan's guilt and then the killing of his entire family and all of his livestock and the burning of his possessions. This was a barbaric ancient belief rooted in primitive superstition, but it was not peculiar to the Israelites. The inscription on the Moabite Stone tells of king Mesha's application of the same belief when he killed 7,000 inhabitants after capturing the Israelite city of Nebo. Inscriptions on pavement stones in the temple of Urta in Nimrud tell of the application of this belief after Assurnasirpal captured the city of Hulai and killed 3,000 captives. He claimed that he did not "leave a single one among them alive to serve as hostage." I don't think that even Turkel and Mr. Miller would claim that Mesha and Assurnasirpal had acted morally in these postwar massacres, yet they will defend the Israelites for committing parallel actions. Those who can look at the ANE practice of cherem without emotional attachments to a belief that the Bible is "the word of God" will easily recognize that we are talking about nothing more than a widespread ancient superstition, which, in effect, amounted to a form of human sacrifice. Captives in war, in the case of the Israelites, were thought to have been "devoted" to Yahweh, and so the act of killing them was an act of offering them as sacrifices to the god that had led them to victory.
The quotation above from the commentary by Keil and Delitzsch referred to Leviticus 27:28-29, which is a passage worth looking at to show stubborn holdouts that a form of human sacrifice was clearly practiced by the Hebrews when they killed humans who had been "devoted" or put "under ban."
Leviticus 27:28 But nothing that a man owns and devotes to Yahweh--whether man or animal or family land--may be sold or redeemed; everything so devoted is most holy to Yahweh. 29 No person devoted to destruction may be ransomed; he must be put to death.
Mr. Miller cited above a source that told of people in besieged cities throwing children off city walls to try to win the favor of their gods, but if the Israelites had laid siege to such a city, after capturing it, they would have killed in tribute to Yahweh both the children and the ones who had been throwing them from the city walls. Basically, what is the difference? The people in the city thought that they were seeking the favor of their gods by sacrificing their children; the Israelites thought that they were pleasing their god Yahweh by killing all of the captives in the city. The real tragedy in all this rests in the horrible reality that humans were once ignorant enough to believe in such stupidity.
As a final word here, I will remind readers of what Mr. Miller is essentially arguing: The Canaanites were sacrificing some of their children, so Yahweh commanded the Israelites to invade Canaan so that they could kill all of the Canaanite children. If Mr. Miller has a logical point in anything he has said in the matter of human sacrifices in Canaan, I have not been able to see it.
Miller:
Incest was likewise not an acceptable ANE practice. For example, the famous Laws of Hammurabi contain several sections on this issue (Para 154-158; LCMAM:110-111) as do the Hittite law codes (laws 189-191; LCMAM:236).
Till:
Well, I wouldn't say that the
Code of Hammurabi
contained "several
sections" about incest. I had read the code before and could remember
only a couple of
restrictions against incest, so I read the entire code again and found
only these three, the
last of which would not necessarily have been incest unless the
father's "chief wife" was his
mother.
154: If a man be guilty of incest with his daughter, he shall be driven from the place (exiled).
157: If any one be guilty of incest with his mother after his father, both shall be burned.
158: If any one be surprised after his father with his chief wife, who has borne children, he shall be driven out of his father's house.
The only laws against incest in the Code of Hammurabi, then, appear to be prohibition of incest between parents and offspring with the most severe penalty attached to mother/son incest, so if Mr. Miller's source actually said that "several sections" of the code contained laws against incest, maybe this will alert him to check the claims of his sources before he passes them along.
At any rate, the Bible obviously contained explict laws against incest, which, of course, had to have been practiced extensively after the creation [snicker, snicker] of Adam and Eve, whose sons and daughters would have had to marry each other. Then there is the matter of Abraham's claiming that Sarah was his half-sister (Gen. 20:12), so would that be a case of just half-incest, which would have been morally acceptable? If so, the writer of Leviticus 18, which Miller quoted above, was apparently unaware of it.
Leviticus 18:9 Do not have sexual relations with your sister, either your father's daughter or your mother's daughter, whether she was born in the same home or elsewhere.
According to the text cited above, Abraham told Abimelech that Sarah was his sister, the "daughter of [his] father but not the daughter of [his] mother," so it appears that this marriage would have violated Leviticus 18:9. Does this mean that such marriages were all right at one time but then later wrong? If so, then morality must not be objective, as most biblical inerrantists believe, but I am sure that Mr. Miller will find some way to show that even though morality is objective, Abraham's marriage to his father's daughter was morally acceptable.
Of course, I have already cited the case of the incest between "righteous Lot" and his daughters (Gen. 19:30-38), but what about the case of Amram and Jochebed, the parents of Moses and Aaron? Amram was the son of Kohath, who was the son of Levi (Ex. 6:16-18), and Jochebed was the sister of Kohath (Ex. 6:20; Num. 26:59), so this means that the mother of Moses and Aaron was the sister of her husband's father, which was plainly forbidden in Leviticus 18:12.
"'Do not have sexual relations with your father's sister; she is your father's close relative.
Many biblical inerrantists will argue that Jochebed wasn't Amram's actual sister but a sister only in the sense that she was a Levite. Although Numbers 26:59 says that Jochebed was a "daughter of Levi" who had been born to him in Egypt, these inerrantists will argue that she was a daughter of Levi only in the sense that she was a descendant of Levi. In other words, whenever they are confronted with a biblical discrepancy, inerrantists will always find some far-fetched way to explain it. According to Jewish tradition, however, which both Turkel and Miller claim was "reliable," Jochebed was the actual daughter of Levi. In an apocryphal work called Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, each of the sons of Jacob gave their testaments. In Levi's, he said this in the 11th and 12th chapters.
I was twenty-eight when I took a wife; her name was Melcha. She conceived and gave birth to a son, and I gave him the name Gersom, because we were sojourners in the land. And I saw that, as concerns him, he would not be in the first rank. And Kohath was born in the thirty-fifth year of my life, before sunrise. And in a vision I saw him standing in the heights, in the midst of the congregation. That is why I called him Kohath, that is the Ruler of Majesty and Reconciliation. And she bore me a third son, Merari, in the fortieth year of my life, and since his mother bore him with great pain, I called him Merari; that is bitterness. Jochebed was born in Egypt in the sixty-fourth year of my life, for by that time I had a great reputation in the midst of my brothers.
And Gersom took a wife who bore him Lomni and Semei. The sons of Kohath were Amram, Isaachar, Hebron, Ozeel. And the sons of Merari were Mooli and Moses. And in my ninety-fourth year Amram took Jochebed my daughter, as his wife, because he and my daughter had been born on the same day... (quoted from The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, editor James H. Charlesworth, vol. 1, Doubleday, p. 792).
Readers can go to this section of "How Long Were the Children of Israel in Egypt?" to see a more detailed discussion of Jewish traditions that said that Jochebed was the actual daughter of Levi and therefore a sister of Amram's father Kohath. Hence, Amram and Jochebed were involved in an incestuous nephew/aunt relationship, which was clearly prohibited in Leviticus 18:12. As I said of Abraham's and Sarah's incestuous marriage, however, I am sure that Mr. Miller will have a way to explain that Amram's and Jochebed's incest was morally acceptable, because I have yet to see any article by Mr. Miller in which he said, "Yep, this is definitely a discrepancy."
There are many other examples of incest among the descendants of Abraham. Lot was the son of Haran (Gen. 11:27), and Milcah was the daughter of Haran (Gen. 11:29), so Lot and Milcah were brother and sister. Abraham, Nahor, and Haran were brothers, because they were all the sons of Terah (Gen. 11:26). Hence, Milcah, the daughter of Haran, was Nahor's niece. Nahor married Milcah (Gen. 11:29), who, as just noticed, was the daughter of Nahor's brother, so Milcah married her uncle. Leviticus 18:6, which Miller quoted above, however, says, "No one is to approach a close relative to have sexual relations." Would a man's niece, his brother's daughter, not be a "close relative"? Well, the answer to that question is in Leviticus 18:12-14.
12 "'Do not have sexual relations with your father's sister; she is your father's close relative. 13 "'Do not have sexual relations with your mother's sister, because she is your mother's close relative. 14 "'Do not dishonor your father's brother by approaching his wife to have sexual relations; she is your aunt.
The sister of one's father or mother would be an aunt, an incestuous restriction that apparently didn't apply to Amram and Jochebed, so if a male should not have incestuous relationships with an aunt--unless he was someone important like Amram, of course--wouldn't it be safe to assume that a female should not have had sexual relations with an uncle? If not, why not? Perhaps Mr. Miller will argue that there were two different biblical standards, one for males and another for females.
The case of Milcah gets even more complicated, because she became the grandmother of Rebekah, who married Abraham's son Isaac.
Genesis 22:20 Some time later Abraham was told, "Milcah is also a mother; she has borne sons to your brother Nahor: 21 Uz the firstborn, Buz his brother, Kemuel (the father of Aram), 22 Kesed, Hazo, Pildash, Jidlaph and Bethuel." 23 Bethuel became the father of Rebekah.
Since Abraham and Nahor were brothers, Bethuel would have been Abraham's nephew, so if Bethuel was Rebekah's father, then she was Abraham's great-niece. Thus when Isaac married Rebekah, he was marrying his first cousin once removed (a relation sometimes referred to as second cousins). Rebekah later had a brother named Laban (Gen. 24:29), who was the father of Leah and Rachel (Gen. 29:16), so when Rebekah's son Jacob married both Leah and Rachel (Gen. 29:21-28), he was marrying the daughters of his uncle, who would have been his first cousins, so there was so much inbreeding in Abraham's descendants, that it is difficult to understand why those descendants would have prohibited sexual relations with "close relatives" as firmly as they did in Leviticus 18.
The fact is that these laws against incest may not have even been known by the Israelites before the writing of the postexilic Levitical code. I can't take the time here to discuss the reasons why it would be incredibly naive to believe that Leviticus was written by Moses during the wilderness wanderings, but we find imbedded in other Old Testament books clear indications that the Levitical law code had developed over centuries. David and Bathsheba, for example, committed adultery, so according to Levitical law, they were to be executed: "If a man commits adultery with another man's wife--with the wife of his neighbor--both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death" (Lev. 20:10). We know from the story of their escapades in 2 Samuel 11-12, however, that they were not put to death. Yahweh instead killed the baby that was born of their adulterous relationship (2 Sam. 12:15-18). Now this may have been just a case of rank having its privileges, but it could also have been that the law quoted above from Leviticus 20:10 wasn't known at that time. We have been talking about the biblical prohibition of incest, but if there was a clearly stated law against a brother/sister sexual relationship in the time of David, his daughter Tamar seemed not to know it. Tamar was said to be a "beautiful woman" (2 Sam. 13:1), and her half-brother Amnon fell in love with her. On the advice of a friend, Amnon feigned illness and asked his father David to send Tamar to care for him. When Tamar brought food to Amnon, he grabbed her and asked her to "lie" with him. Tamar's response indicated that if there was a law against a man's having sexual relations with "his sister, his father's daughter" (Lev. 18:9), she didn't know it, because after pleading at length with her brother not force her, she said to him, "Please speak to the king; he will not keep me from being married to you" (v:13). It seems, then, that if these Levitical laws against incest existed in the time of David, they weren't known to the general public.
Anyway, with a history of incest in Israel's history like that described above, I find it rather ironic that Mr. Miller would cite incest as one of the reasons why Yahweh was justified in ordering the extermination of the Canaanite nations, for if incest were a legitimately moral excuse for exterminating an ethnic group, Yahweh should have killed Abraham and his descendants long before the time of the exodus, but let's look at Mr. Miller's "data" on Canaanite incest.
Miller:
The only external data about Canaanite practice we have here (you can
imagine how difficult
it would be to leave archeological traces of this around!) comes from
the religious myths and
'role models' of their gods.
Till:
As just noticed, however, we have examples of notable biblical
characters, who violated some
of the very incestuous restrictions named in Leviticus 18, so what rule
of logic has Mr.
Miller used to conclude that Hebrew incest wasn't so bad but Canaanite
incest made them
deserve ethnic extermination?
Miller:
[It must be remembered that the religious rituals of ancient cultures
were generally
'reenactments' of divine activities. For example, when a religious myth
would have one god
impregnating another--producing "spring"--the humans would "re-enact"
this with the cultic
prostitutes.]
For example, in the Ugaritic corpus (Canaanite), there is the story of an incestuous El:
The second myth is often called 'The Birth of the Good and Gracious God.' It opens with a banquet at which wine flows freely. The text is divided into sections, the tenth being the last and most crucial. El is about to create two women who will become either his wives or daughters, depending on his ability to impregnate them. He creates these females and seduces them, and they both become pregnant. One bears a child called Dawn (Shahar), and the other a child called Dusk (Shalim). Later, El makes love to these same women and they produce seven sons between them. These sons are 'the good and gracious gods.' They are destined to be gods of fertility, and are first suckled at the breasts of 'the Lady' (Asherah, wife of El?)." (NIEBF: 130).
With such deities to emulate, there is little wonder that God described this Canaanite practice as being very, very real.
Till:
It is time for another cynical comment. With the Israelites' having the
god Yahweh, who
killed anywhere from one person (as in the case of David's and
Bathsheba's son) to thousands
(in the case of the plagues inflicted on the Israelites during the
wilderness wanderings) and
even most of the entire world (as in the case of the Genesis flood),
there is little wonder
that the Israelites would have massacred on the massive scales
discussed earlier.
Genesis 35:11 And God said to him, "I am God [El] Almighty; be fruitful and increase in number. A nation and a community of nations will come from you, and kings will come from your body."
Genesis 46:3 "I am God [El], the God of your father," he said. "Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for I will make you into a great nation there."
Numbers 12:13 So Moses cried out to Yahweh, "O God [El], please heal her [Miriam]!"
Numbers 16:22 But Moses and Aaron fell facedown and cried out, "O God [El], God of the spirits of all mankind, will you be angry with the entire assembly when only one man sins?"
If the Canaanite god El was so morally despicable, Mr. Miller should explain why the Israelites appropriated his name to use it in reference to their god Yahweh. As for Mr. Miller's claim that incest must have been practiced by the Canaanites because it was referred to in their mythology, I can use the same "logic" to prove that Hebrew women copulated with snakes. In Hebrew Myths, Robert Graves and Raphael Patai related the myth of Eve and Samael (Satan disguised as a snake). When Samael saw Adam and Eve copulating, he jealously waited until Adam fell asleep, and then he seduced Eve, who conceived Cain as a result of their union (Anchor Books by Doubleday, 1964, p. 85.) Allusions to this myth are in the Babylonian Talmud, where it tells women who encounter snakes how to determine if the serpents desire intercourse with them.
If a woman saw a snake and does not know if the snake desires her, she should take off her clothing and throw them before him. If he curls up in her clothes he desires her. How can she save herself from the snake's desire for intercourse? She should have sex with her husband in front of the snake; this will disgust the snake. There are those who say, though, that if she has sex in front of the snake it will increase the snake's desire for her, and that therefore she must take some of her hair and fingernails and throw them at the snake, saying, "I am a niddah" (Shabbat 110a).
Niddah in Hebrew meant filth, so the passage goes on to explain that if the snake still desires intercourse with her, the woman should tell him that she is menstruating, which in Jewish society made a woman "unclean" (Lev. 15:19-28). Myths about snakes copulating with women were commonplace in other cultures, but the presence of this myth in Hebrew society would, according to Mr. Miller's logic, mean that this was an actual bestial practice among the Hebrews. So much for Mr. Miller's appeals to mythology in order to paint the Canaanites as a morally depraved society in which incest abounded!
Miller:
Here we have the same situation as above--it is forbidden in other ANE codes (e.g. Hittite laws 187-188; LCMAM:236), but shows up in the Canaanite mythology, with Baal as the role model this time.
Baal is generally pictured in human form, and is often accompanied by a bull or rides upon a bull. (He is sometimes pictured as a bull as well, but this is in drawings, not in literary texts.) In one Ugaritic text, Baal, on his way to the underworld, has sexual relations with a young heifer (NIEBF:129; ANET:p139):
[See also the summary statement in ISBE: s.v. "Crimes", where it is linked to "certain pagan rites and mythology"]Puissant Baal complies.
He desires a calf-cow in Dubr;
A heifer in Shihlmemat-field;
Lies with her times seventy-seven,
[...]...times eighty-eight.
Till:
Mr. Miller said that Baal was "generally pictured" in human form, but
he wasn't always so
depicted. Mr. Miller seems not to know that Baal was "the bull god,"
who was sometimes
depicted and worshiped as
a
bull.
Baal, the Bull God, was identified with thunder and life-giving rain. Anath, his sister and consort, was a fertility goddess and a Virgin Warrior Goddess. In myth cycle, Baal was annually killed by Mot, the god of summer heat. When Baal was killed, the rains stopped through the summer drought. Mot scorched the earth, send dust storms, and the earth became hard and cracked. When Anath brought Baal back in the early autumn, the rains returned, and plant life recovered, and it was possible to plow the earth again.
In the Baal Epic, El, the father of Baal, was referred to several times as a "bull," so what Mr. Miller quoted above was not a case of mythological beastiality but of a bull god wanting sexual relations with a female of its species.
Baal was the power worshipped by the Canaanites as God. He is the bull god and is represented by a bull. He is half man and half bull, the god of fertility (the Sun God) (J. P. Timmons, Mysterious Secrets of the Dark Kingdom, p. 114, emphasis added).
Has Mr. Miller never noticed in the Bible that the bull was an object of worship for the Israelites, as when Aaron fabricated the golden calf at Mt. Sinai (Ex. 32:1-6) and when Jeroboam put golden calves at Bethel and Dan to entice the Israelites from going to Jerusalem to worship (1 Kings 12:25-31)? They were worshiping Baal, a form of idolatry that was practiced throughout Israel's "history." Obviously, then, Mr. Miller has completely misinterpreted the Canaanite myth that he quoted above.
For the sake of argument, let's just assume that there were Canaanite myths about beastiality. I showed earlier that even though there are no specific examples of beastiality in the Bible that I know of, there are, nevertheless, implications that it was known to happen in Hebrew society. I cited the metaphorical references to Oholibah's lusting after men with sexual organs like stallions, who ejactulated like horses. I mentioned also Adam's experience of trying to find a "helpmeet" among the animals that Yahweh had created and asked how he could have determined that none were suitable for him unless he had engaged in experimentation. Before Mr. Miller or Turkel or any other biblicist express their indignation over the suggestion that this story might imply beastiality on Adam's part, I will inform them that there is a Talmudic interpretation of Genesis 2:23, in Yebamoth 63a, which claims that "Adam had sexual intercourse with all the animals in the Garden of Eden.” Furthermore, Yebamoth 59b says that "a woman who had intercourse with a beast is eligible to marry a Jewish priest." (This was evidently a clarification of the Levitical law that required the high priest to marry a virgin. He could not marry a widow, a divorced woman, or a harlot, but he could apparently marry a woman who had engaged in beastiality.) As I suggested earlier, the mere fact that the Levitical law legislated against beastiality would indicate that it was known to exist in Israelite society, and I can't imagine why the passage in the Talmud just referred to would have addressed the subject of women who had engaged in beastiality unless it was common enough that the writer thought that it deserved mentioning. Furthermore, those who check will find that the Talmuds made frequent references to beastiality, a fact that I don't understand unless its practice was common enough to make the writers believe that it was a social problem that should be addressed.
To wrap up my reply to this point, I will remind readers of what I have called attention to earlier concerning the other "detestable practices" that Mr. Miller claims the Canaanites were guilty of. If beastiality was a serious problem in Canaan, it would have been something that the adults were doing. Babies and young children would not have been doing it, so Mr. Miller seems to be arguing that Yahweh decided to exterminate all of the Canaanite children because their parents were engaging in beastiality. That certainly doesn't present Yahweh in a flattering light.
Miller:
This appears to be an issue unique to Israel. Homosexual practice was generally not outlawed in the ANE, and certainly tolerated in the ANE in private life (MWR:190-192). It was also part of cultic practice (which we will treat below). But Israel's God condemned this behavior in every culture in which it was mentioned (!): ANE (i.e. Sodom), Canaanite and Egyptian (i.e. Lev 18:3), Israelite (Lev 18, 20), Roman (Rom 1), Hellenistic (I Tim 1.9), and Greek (I Cor 6.9).
Till:
I have let the issue lag for a while, but it is time again to point out
that Mr. Miller is
still engaging in question begging and special pleading. First of all,
he begs the question
of the actual existence of "Israel's God," which is something that he
needs to prove before he
declares something to be wrong because "Israel's God condemned this
behavior." Even if the
existence of "Israel's God" could be established as fact--and it
can't--Mr. Miller is begging
the question of whether this god had anything to do with the writing of
biblical passages that
"condemned" homosexuality. I submit that Mr. Miller can prove neither
one of these questions,
so he accomplishes nothing by asserting that a practice was wrong
because "Israel's God"
condemned it. To do so is a resort to the fallacies of argumentation by
assertion and special
pleading. As I mentioned earlier, even though the research is not yet
conclusive, it does
indicate that homosexuality is a biological condition determined by
circumstances of birth
over which the person has no more control than his/her gender or ethnic
origin. If the
evidence of this ever becomes conclusive--and I think it will--I
suppose that fundamentalist
Bible believers like Mr. Miller will deny the evidence in the same way
that they have denied
the compelling scientific evidence of biological evolution.
Miller:
[I have always found the claim that Judeo-Christianity's lack of
acceptance of homosexuality
as a morally legitimate sexual expression was merely a cultural
stance--not 'timeless' or
'transcultural'--to be a bit weak, in light of the above list of
cultures. The range of
times/cultures included in the list above--many of which accepted
it as 'okay'--would
certainly count as very strong evidence for a moral
'universal/transcultural' conviction
against the practice.]
Till:
Well, let me suggest a more likely reason why homosexuality was not
condemned in other
cultures as it was in Judaism and Christianity. Could it be that these
other cultures had
enough common sense to understand that homosexuality was not just a
"lifestyle" that was
chosen? I don't know, but I do know that the evidence indicates a
strong probability that
homosexuality is biological and not voluntary.
I recall a young black student in one of my classes when I was teaching college writing. I suspected from his mannerisms that he was homosexual, and one day when he was absent, I came into the classroom and found the students making fun of him. I reprimanded them for conduct that I considered as inappropriate as if they had been ridiculing someone who had a physical or mental handicap. The student heard about it and came to my office to express his appreciation. Having found someone who was tolerant of his sexual orientation, he came fairly often to visit with my wife and me. I recall a conversation once in which he said something like, "Mr. Till, I am black, so why would I choose to be gay to bring even more scorn on me than I already have to put up with?" Mr. Miller can align himself with the likes of Fred Phelps if he wants to, and, of course, I can understand why belief that the Bible is "God's word" would lead people to be intolerant, but I personally consider discrimination against homosexuals to be as despicable as racial and religious discrimination.
Miller:
What is interesting about this though, is that of all the
practices we have in the
list above, this is the one practice that is not
represented in the religious
literature. So Bottero, in
MWR:92:
"in mythology and
theology we have not the slightest certain example of homosexual
relations between gods."
Till:
I assume that Mr. Miller meant that this is the "one practice" that is
not represented in the
religious literature of other nations, because it was certainly
represented in Hebrew
literature. Could the absence of this subject in other religious
literature indicate what
I said above? Other cultures had the common sense to recognize that
homosexuality was not
something that a person chose but something that he/she had no
biological control over.
Regardless, we have the same factor here that we had in the other
"detestable practices"
that Mr. Miller has cited as reasons why Yahweh ordered the
extermination of the Canaanites.
That factor would be the children and babies. Although young children
may out of curiosity
experiment with those of the same sex, babies wouldn't have, so does
Mr. Miller think that
his god Yahweh ordered the extermination of even Canaanite babies
because the adults and
older children engaged in homosexual activities?
Mr. Miller:
The use of male and female prostitutes is also attested and sanctioned (to some extent) throughout the ANE (MWR:189-190), and clearly so in Canaanite sanctuaries (AI:384). So, NIEBF:130:
The Bible and the Canaanite texts at Ugarit use the words qadesh and qedesha which mean 'holy one'--the first masculine, the second feminine. At Ugarit these 'holy ones' were homosexual priests and priestesses who acted as prostitutes.
"We find strong Hebrew reaction against this 'cultic prostitution' in passages such as Leviticus 19:29, 'Do not prostitute thy daughter, to cause her to be a whore,' and Deuteronomy 23:17, 'There shall be no whore(qedesha) of the daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite (qadesh) of the sons of Israel.' One of Josiah's reforms was 'to break down the houses of the sodomites' (2 Kings 23:7)."
Till:
We also find Hebrew acceptance of this same "detestable practice" that
Mr. Miller is now
citing as a justifiable reason to exterminate the Canaanites.
1 Kings 14:22 Judah did evil in the eyes of Yahweh. By the sins they committed they stirred up his jealous anger more than their fathers had done. 23 They also set up for themselves high places, sacred stones and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every spreading tree. 24 There were even male shrine prostitutes in the land; the people engaged in all the detestable practices of the nations Yahweh had driven out before the Israelites.
So the people of Judah not only had male shrine prostitution in the land, they also engaged in all the detestable practices of the nations that Yahweh had driven out before the Israelites. Hence, we are back to square one again. The Canaanites engaged in "detestable practices," including male shrine prostitution, and so Yahweh ordered them to be exterminated so that he could repopulate the land with people who did all the destestable practices that had caused Yahweh to order the slaughter of the Canaanites. Can anything be as ridiculous as stuff like this that fills the Bible?
The "detestable practices," including male shrine prostitution, continued until the reign of Asa.
1 Kings 15:9 In the twentieth year of Jeroboam king of Israel, Asa became king of Judah, 10 and he reigned in Jerusalem forty-one years. His grandmother's name was Maacah daughter of Abishalom. 11 Asa did what was right in the eyes of Yahweh, as his father David had done. 12 He expelled the male shrine prostitutes from the land and got rid of all the idols his fathers had made. 13 He even deposed his grandmother Maacah from her position as queen mother, because she had made a repulsive Asherah pole. Asa cut the pole down and burned it in the Kidron Valley.
This sounds conclusive, but it didn't end the "detestable practices."
1 Kings 22:45 As for the other events of Jehoshaphat's reign, the things he achieved and his military exploits, are they not written in the book of the annals of the kings of Judah? 46 He rid the land of the rest of the male shrine prostitutes who remained there even after the reign of his father Asa.
If Jehoshaphat rid the land of "the rest of the male shrine prostitutes," one would think that this put an end to the practice, but it apparently didn't. The text below indicates that by the time of Josiah, male temple prostitution still flourished and the country in general was engaging in just about every "detestable practice" that Mr. Miller could imagine.
1 Kings 23:4 The king [Josiah] ordered Hilkiah the high priest, the priests next in rank and the doorkeepers to remove from the temple of Yahweh all the articles made for Baal and Asherah and all the starry hosts. He burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron Valley and took the ashes to Bethel. 5 He did away with the pagan priests appointed by the kings of Judah to burn incense on the high places of the towns of Judah and on those around Jerusalem--those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun and moon, to the constellations and to all the starry hosts. 6 He took the Asherah pole from the temple of Yahweh to the Kidron Valley outside Jerusalem and burned it there. He ground it to powder and scattered the dust over the graves of the common people. 7 He also tore down the quarters of the male shrine prostitutes, which were in the temple of Yahweh and where women did weaving for Asherah. 8 Josiah brought all the priests from the towns of Judah and desecrated the high places, from Geba to Beersheba, where the priests had burned incense. He broke down the shrines at the gates--at the entrance to the Gate of Joshua, the city governor, which is on the left of the city gate. 9 Although the priests of the high places did not serve at the altar of Yahweh in Jerusalem, they ate unleavened bread with their fellow priests. 10 He desecrated Topheth, which was in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, so no one could use it to sacrifice his son or daughter in the fire to Molech. 11 He 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.
It's hard to imagine how any society of that time could have been more "paganistically" depraved than the one described here. Mr. Miller mentioned above a Canaanite myth about an incestuous relationship between El and Asherah, but as the text just quoted shows, the worship of Asherah was still widespread until the reign of Josiah, which preceded the Babylonian captivity by only 12 years, and parts of the temple of Yahweh were being devoted to relics fabricated in honor of Asherah. The text also indicates that sun worship had been prominent, also in the temple, as well as worship of Chemosh and Molech, but more directly related to the point that Mr. Miller is presently trying to pursue, the text above indicates that living quarters for male cult prostitutes had been set aside in the temple. In other words, the very thing that Mr. Miller is now using to justify Yahweh's orders to exterminate the Canaanites was apparently being widely practiced in Judah too. This brings us back to a point that I want to keep constantly before Mr. Miller. According to him, Yahweh ordered the extermination of the Canaanites because of "detestable practices" like cultic prostitution, so he apparently believes that it was morally right for Yahweh to massacre the Canaanites because of their detestable practices so that he could repopulated the land with another ethnic group that engaged in the same detestable practices.
How much sense does that make?
Miller:
What is important for us to note here is that this sacred prostitution
was not
unquestioned by the surrounding cultures.
Till:
We will see below that a could-have-been, might-have-been vague
reference is all Mr. Miller
had to offer as evidence that sacred prostitution was questioned by
surrounding cultures. I
will say more about that later, but here I want to state what should be
obvious by now:
cultic prostitution was practiced not just in Canaan but in surrounding
cultures, including
even the Hebrew culture.
Miller:
Remember that in the paradigm cases of annihilation we looked at, the
culture was
uniform--all the people (save a handful) were proponents and
transmitters of the
"values" of that culture. There were no rebels, or dissidents, or
minority voices.
Till:
Now just how does Mr. Miller know this? Is this a conclusion he reached
because there are no
known records of such dissent? If so, he is arguing from silence, so I
suggest that he go
to this
section of "Crimes By Speculation," where I replied to his attempt
to explain why
secular contemporary records made no mention of stupendous miracles
that "Matthew" included
in his account of crucifixion day. Mr. Miller proposed several reasons
for the silence, but
they can be condensed into these two: (1) a high level of illiteracy
would have minimized the
chances that others would have recorded them. (2) Secular records could
have been made but
just didn't survive. Wouldn't those same reasons apply here as possible
explanations for
why there are no records of dissenting opinions about cultic
prostitution in Canaan?
Another thing to consider here is that history is written by the winners. In the Old Testament we see clear indications of a power struggle between the Yahwists and those who worshiped other gods. The texts quoted above claim that some kings like Jeroboam and even Solomon actively supported idolatry, so there was a long period of struggle between those who wanted to worship Baal, Ashera, Chemosh, Molech, etc. and those who wanted Yahwism to be the official religion. Eventually Yahwism won the struggle, so we have a view of Israelite history from the perspective of the Yahwists, but if Baalism or one of the other religions had won, we would have an entirely different perspective. Since the Yahwists won the struggle, we have accounts of their dissenting voices in the Bible, but who knows what the Baalists would have said if they had won the power struggle?
For the sake of argument, let's just suppose that in all of the history of Canaan there had never been anyone who opposed cultic prostitution. Would that be a moral basis for exterminating the Canaanites? To argue that people should be killed for "false" religious beliefs and practices is to assume that one knows what the "true" religion is. That is not just arrogantly presumptuous; it is an attitude that has caused inestimable grief and suffering through the ages. In fact, the world is at this present time experiencing a plague of terrorism that was spawned by that very attitude.
Miller:
However, in this situation we have the Canaanite culture totally
sold out to
religious prostitution, but not so the entire ANE! Von Soden,
cited above, points out
in footnote 36 that there was major dissent about such practices:
Inscriptions of the kings Merodachbaladan II and Nabonidus of Babylonia, as well as the Erra myth..., contain references to a type of revolution in Uruk around 765, during the reign of the king Eriba-marduk. This revolution was not caused by social conditions alone, but rather was directed against the cultic practices of the temple of Eanna and the cult prostitutes there; it had only temporary success.
There was no such recorded "protest" in Canaanite [sic]--but rather, an 'evangelistic' posture in favor of it that reached (successfully) deep into Israel!
Till:
Mr. Miller's point here is really too elusive to deserve serious
comment. It certainly isn't
sufficient to prove his assertion that "there was major dissent [in
other cultures] about
such practices." He quoted five lines from a book by Von Soden, but
those lines give none of
the actual content of the "inscriptions" referred to, and he even
truncated the quotation with
an ellipsis in the second line where some content has been omitted. I
always try to research
an opponent's topic before I reply to it, but I was unable to locate
any material about the
"type of revolution" that the inscription referred to. In the
fragmented quotation as Miller
cited it, Von Soden said that the Erra myth, as well as insciptions
of Merodachbaladan II
and Nabonidus, "contained references" to this "type of revolution
in Uruk around 765,"
but the Erra myth dates back to the Akkadian culture, which antedated
by several centuries
the two Babylonian kings mentioned, so I don't quite understand how a
myth that evolved long
before 765 could have referred to a "type of revolution" that occurred
that year. Is Mr.
Miller suggesting that the Erra myth prophesied of this "type of
revolution"? If he is going
to base a point on a source, he really should quote enough from the
source--as he usually
does--to make his point clear. I suspect that at this point he was
scraping the bottom of
the barrel to find some kind of extrabiblical support for his position
on cultic prostitution
in Canaan.
At any rate, 765 BC would have been almost seven centuries after the exodus, the time when Yahweh ordered the Israelites to "utterly destroy" the Canaanites and to leave no one alive to breathe, so is Mr. Miller arguing that because someone in Babylonia seven centuries after the exodus would start a "type of revolution" against temple prostitution, the Canaanites should have known in the time of Moses and Joshua to clean up their act too? If so, I have to admit that I don't see the basis for his argument.
I will close this section with a summation of my replies to all of Mr. Miller's charges of moral depravity in Canaan, which he apparently sees as justification for Yahweh's orders to exterminate them and leave no one alive to breathe.
In other words, I have not allowed Mr. Miller to forget about the thousands of children who were necessarily killed by the Israelites if the biblical accounts of the conquest of Canaan are historically accurate. I know that he would like to forget about the children, but I won't let him do that. His conclusion of this section follows immediately, so I will close this point by reminding readers that Mr. Miller had actually tried to justify the killing of all the children involved in the Yahwistic massacres on the grounds that they had died "swiftly." That is how desperate he is to defend biblical inerrancy.
Miller:
Conclusion:
By 1400 B.C. the Canaanite civilization and religion had become one of the weakest, most decadent, and most immoral cultures of the civilized world. Many of its repulsive practices were prohibited to Israel in Leviticus 18. In view of the sexual perversions listed, it is more than likely that venereal diseases ravaged a large part of the population. Hence stern measures were required to prevent decimation of the Israelites by the spread of these and other diseases such as malaria and smallpox. Contagion would be possible by sudden fraternization before immunity could develop. (ZPEB: s.v. "Joshua", p. 707).
Till:
This is a link to Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible,
so Mr. Miller still
continues to rely heavily on books published by companies in Grand
Rapids, Michigan, where
biblical inerrancy is just taken for granted. I wonder if the Canaanite
civilization and
religion were more "decadent" and immoral than, say, the Mesoamerican
cultures, whose
pratice of human sacrifices exceeded anything done in the ancient
Middle East. I wonder if
the Canaanite civilization and religion were more "decadent" and
immoral than headhunting
cultures of New Guinea, South America, Southeast Asia, and Melanesia or
cannibalistic
cultures of Africa, South America, or the South Pacific. I wonder if
the Canaanite
civilization and religion were more "decadent" and immoral than the
early Grecian, Roman,
Eskimo, Polynesian, Chinese, Egyptian, African, Indian, and Australian
aborigine cultures, which
practiced infanticide as a means of population control. When the tribes
became too large, new
babies were killed in order to contain growth. Babies born with
physical handicaps were also
killed. Seneca,
who
is considered a humanitarian of his time, once said that children who
were "weak and deformed
we drown, not through anger, but through wisdom, preferring the sound
to the useless." I
wonder if the Canaanite civilization and religion were more "decadent"
and immoral than the
cultures like Greece and Rome, where pedastry was
commonplace.
The epitome of love in these ancient societies was pedastry--a sexual relationship between an older man and a young boy; today it is a very serious felony. To the Greeks this was something positive and beautiful. All the Greek greats--Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Plato, for instance--had young boy lovers. And many waxed ecstatic about it, such as the Greek poet Propertius: "May my enemies fall in love with women and my friends with boys."
If the Babylonian Talmud can be accepted as a basis for determining Hebrew social practices, we can know that pedastry was also tolerated in Judaism.
By modern standards, many practices in ancient cultures have to be considered appallingly immoral. Instead of just recognizing that the ancient Hebrews were, in effect, the same as the societies around them, Mr. Miller has been tying himself into verbal knots to try to find some way to justify the ancient Hebrew custom of cherem. Regrettably, that kind of emotional attachment to the Bible is far too commonplace in those who were indoctrinated in their childhood to believe that it is "the inspired word of God."
Mr. Miller seems obsessed with the existence of temple prostitution in Canaan, but if he has ever researched this subject, he surely knows that this was a practice that extended far beyond the Middle East. It was practiced in such diverse places as Greece, Egypt, Rome, and India. If Mr. Miller would bother to investigate, he would find many ancient societies whose cultural customs would be positively repugnant to us, so why is he just picking on the ancient Canaanites?
Well, the answer to that is obvious. He needs some way to justify the moral repugnance of the Yahwistic massacres in the Old Testament, so he has tried to paint the Canaanites as so decadent and immoral that they needed to be exterminated. He is so desperate to find a way to justify this that he has sunk to claiming that killing Canaanite children was morally right, because they died "swiftly."
Miller:
So, we have international and extreme violence and unusually
decadent (and
destructive/ dangerous) religious practices.
Till:
I have shown above that the Canaanite culture was no more decadent than
other cultures. They
didn't eat enemies that they killed in battle, and they didn't engage
in perpetual warfare,
as did some Mesoamerican cultures, so that they could have a steady
supply of human sacrifices.
Their temple prostitution was no more perverse than it was in Israel
and Judah and in the
other societies mentioned above. Mr. Miller needs some way to excuse
the Yahwistic massacres
in the Old Testament, and so he has tried to paint the Canaanites as
more decadent than they
probably were. Readers should keep in mind that history was written by
the winners, and so
the Yahwistic Israelites who won the struggle with other forms of
worship, interpreted the
culture according to the standards of morality that they wanted to
impose on others.
Miller:
What other data do we have about them (or the other
nations in the list)?
Till:
I will reply to Mr. Miller's "other data" in
Part Four.
