Till:
After laboring at length to try to put spins on terms like "drive out,"
"defeat," "subdue,"
"cast out," etc. that would make them mean that Yahweh didn't really
want to destroy
totally the Canaanite nations but just wanted to make them
"migrate" to other lands,
Mr. Miller turned in the section below to a quote-the-authorities
apologetic method in support
of his position. As I go through each of the quotations, I ask readers
to keep in mind what I
pointed out earlier: there is no religious belief for which a
proponent of that belief
cannot find books and articles that agree with it. Hence, the fact that
Mr. Miller was able
to quote below authors who agree with his position is no more of an
indication that his
position is true than if a Muslim should support his belief in an Islam
doctrine by quoting
authors who also accept that doctrinal belief. Whether what an author
says in a book or
article is true or not must be determined by logical argumentation, and
we will see that Mr.
Miller usually falls short in this aspect of his "apologetics."
Miller:
Till:
I have already pointed out that Canaanites were still in the land as
late as the reign of
Solomon. Their presence means only that the Israelites didn't do what
Yahweh had presumably
commanded. That command, as we have noted numerous times now, was to
destroy totally
the Canaanites
(Deut. 7:2)
and to leave
none of them alive to breathe
(Deut.
20:16;
Josh.
10:40;
Josh.
11:12-15), so
the presence of Canaanites in the land years after the alleged conquest
could mean only that
the Israelites did not do as Yahweh had commanded them, but it would in
no way prove that
Yahweh really didn't want the Israelites to destroy totally the
Canaanite nations.
I have a simple question for Mr. Miller, which I really don't expect
him to answer: If
Yahweh didn't want the Israelites to kill the Canaanites, why did he
command them to destroy
them TOTALLY, as the passages that I cited immediately above plainly
show that he did?
I certainly don't think that a god named Yahweh had any involvement at all in Israelite affairs and their battles with the Canaanites, any more than I believe that a god named Chemosh was involved in Moabite affairs as king Mesha claimed in the inscription on the Moabite Stone, but for the sake of argument let's assume that the god Yahweh does exist and that in biblical times, he had selected the Israelites to be his "chosen people" (Deut. 7:6) above "all the peoples on the face of the earth." With that assumption, we can determine that if he commanded the Israelites to destroy totally the Canaanites and to leave none of them alive to breathe, as passages that we have repeatedly quoted plainly say (Deut. 7:1-2; 20:16-17; Josh. 10:40; 11:10-12,14-15), then he would have been displeased with the Israelite failure to carry out the command. We can conclude this by Yahweh's reaction when king Saul disobeyed his command to destroy totally the Amalekites and to spare none of them, including children and infants and livestock (1 Sam. 15:1-3). When Saul kept just one Amalekite alive, i. e., their king, and the best of their livestock, Yahweh threw a tantrum, sent the prophet Samuel to reprimand Saul and to hack king Agag to pieces (1 Sam. 15:10-33). If Yahweh was this angry about the Israelite failure to destroy totally the Amalekites, as he had commanded them, why should we not think that he was also angry at the Israelite failure to destroy totally the Canaanites? Mr. Miller evidently wants to see the lingering presence of Canaanites in the land as an indication that Yahweh had been merciful toward them, but I assume everyone noticed that he neither cited nor quoted any scripture that so claimed. I, however, have quoted or cited where Yahweh ordered the Israelites to show no mercy to the Canaanites (Deut. 7:2,16). As Mr. Miller pursues his attempt to make Yahweh Mr. Nice Guy, notice that he consistently fails to support this claim with biblical citations.
Miller:
Till:
It is? So we are supposed to believe that the omniscient, omnipotent,
omnibenevolent Yahweh
from whom all principles of objective morality emanate had no control
over the situation, and
so he was compelled to issue a "culture-focused judgment" on the
Canaanites? If we can
believe the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth was willing to buck the
cultural customs and
practices of his time to teach higher principles of morality. In his
personal ministry, he
wasn't reluctant to say, "You have heard it said... but I say to you"
(Matt.
5:21-22,27-28,35-45), so if Jesus was willing to swim against the
cultural tide to propose
higher principles of morality, we have to wonder why Yahweh--if he was
really the omniscient,
omnipotent creator of the universe and the source of objective
morality--couldn't have said to
the Israelites, "Other tribes and nations may barbarically kill entire
populations of people
of other ethnic origins, but I expect higher moral conduct from you." I
said that "we" have
to wonder, but apparently Mr. Miller doesn't wonder about this. He
seems to think that it was
just hunky-dory for the creator of the universe to issue a
"culture-focused judgment" for one
ethnic group to destroy toally other ethnic groups. This is the
kind of silliness that
inerrantists have to resort to in order to defend the morality of the
barbaric god Yahweh.
Till
I will make a quick observation here and then move quickly to Mr.
Miller's population estimate.
He is still trying to find a mass Canaanite "migration" from their
land, which he justifies by
repeating his claim of "an international fear of Israel at the time."
In this assumption, he
is still begging the question of biblical accuracy in its claims that
news of Israelite feats
spread like wildfire throughout Canaan and other regions and evoked
fear in all of the people.
I addressed the unlikeliness of that assumption earlier in
this section of Part
Five, so there is no need to rehash it here. Instead, I will go to
Miller's population estimate.
I have said before that both Robert Turkel and Glenn Miller show an appalling lack of biblical knowledge for two laymen who aspire to be biblical apologists, and it is just such comments as the one above that I see over and over in their articles that lead me to the conclusion that their biblical knowledge is deplorably superficial. Mr. Miller inconsistently acknowledges below much of what I am going to say here, but I need to introduce it now in order to respond properly to his unscipturally low population estimate above. In Deut. 7:1-2, Yahweh ordered the Israelites to destroy totally seven nations in Canaan--the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites--described as being "larger and stronger than you." The KJV said that they were "greater and mightier" than the Israelites. In "The Population Claims," I analyzed the Israelite census figures in the book of Numbers to show that the Hebrews who were in the exodus and wilderness wanderings would have numbered 2.5 to 3 million if those census figures were accurate. As we will soon see, Mr. Miller fixed the exodus population at 1.6 million, so to give him the advangage, I am going to accept his estimate, because if the seven nations in Canaan were "stronger and larger" than the Israelites, that would mean that the seven-nation population would have totaled 11.2 million if we interpret Deuteronomy 7:2 to mean that each Canaanite nation was "stronger and larger" than Israel. If we interpret it to mean that the seven nations were collectively "stronger and larger" than Israel, that would mean that there was at that time a population of more than 1.6 million Canaanites. Either way, the total population killed by the Israelites would have numbered substantially more than the 70,000 that Mr. Miller arrived at above, but again, for the sake of argument, let's accept his 70,000 estimate. Does he seriously expect us to assume that the total destruction of 70,000 people would have been morally right?
Joshua 12, which Mr. Miller cited above as a proof text, was a summation chapter of the battles that had been described in the previous chapters. That the population of all of the cities ruled by the kings listed in Joshua 12 were totally destroyed is evident from repeated references in the battle descriptions to their "utter destruction."
I could continue this and list the passages that claim that the populations of cities ruled by some of the other kings were totally destroyed, but the last example that I cited says something that dashes more water onto Mr. Miller's attempt to justify the Yahwistic massacres of the Canaanites on the grounds that the populations involved were small, as if massacring civilian populations in time of war is morally all right as long as it isn't overdone. Notice that the last example cited says that the Israelites took the city [Hebron] and its villages and totally destroyed everyone. Mr. Miller simplistically counted all the kings in Joshua 12, found that they totaled 31, and then assumed that this meant that the Israelites had captured only 31 towns. He then assumed an average population of just over 2,000 per city and concluded that there would have been only about 70,000 people in the cities ruled by the kings in Joshua 12, but if he would read the Bible a little more carefully before he presumes to write apologetic articles, he might notice things like what I just pointed out. The kings of the Canaanite cities didn't just rule over the cities they were in, but they also had their satellite villages, as Joshua 10:36-37, cited above, noted about Hebron. Here are some more biblical passages that made reference to the satellite villages of Canaanite cities.
Numbers 21:25 Israel captured all the cities of the Amorites and occupied them, including Heshbon and all its surrounding settlements.
Numbers 21:32 After Moses had sent spies to Jazer, the Israelites captured its surrounding settlements and drove out the Amorites who were there.
Numbers 32:42 And Nobah captured Kenath and its surrounding settlements and called it Nobah after himself.
After the conquest of Canaan, Joshua distributed the captured cities to the tribes of Israel. If Mr. Miller will read the chapters that described this distribution, he will see that the cities were counted after the listings and then the writer(s) added that the villages of these cities were also allocated to the tribes designated.
Joshua 15:21 The towns belonging to the tribe of the people of Judah in the extreme South, toward the boundary of Edom, were Kabzeel, Eder, Jagur, 22 Kinah, Dimonah, Adadah, 23 Kedesh, Hazor, Ithnan, 24 Ziph, Telem, Bealoth, 25 Hazor-hadattah, Kerioth-hezron (that is, Hazor), 26 Amam, Shema, Moladah, 27 Hazar-gaddah, Heshmon, Beth-pelet, 28 Hazar-shual, Beer-sheba, Biziothiah, 29 Baalah, Iim, Ezem, 30 Eltolad, Chesil, Hormah, 31 Ziklag, Madmannah, Sansannah, 32 Lebaoth, Shilhim, Ain, and Rimmon: in all, twenty-nine towns, with their villages.
The writer of this passage apparently couldn't count, because there were actually 36 towns in this list. Inerrantists will say that the writer meant that there were 29 towns and that some of the others listed were "their villages," but the broader context of this chapter indicates otherwise.
Joshua 15:42 Libnah, Ether, Ashan, 43 Iphtah, Ashnah, Nezib, 44 Keilah, Aczib and Mareshah--nine towns and their villages.
A count of the towns listed here will show that there are nine of them, just as the text says, so "their villages" would mean that in addition to the towns, there were villages that belonged to the towns listed.
Joshua 15:55 Maon, Carmel, Ziph, Juttah, 56 Jezreel, Jokdeam, Zanoah, 57 Kain, Gibeah and Timnah--ten towns and their villages.
A count of this list will show that there were ten towns listed, just as the text said, so "their villages" would be settlements in addition to the towns.
There are other examples of towns listed in which the writer's count was off by one or two, but for the most part, the listings conform to the author's count. In addition to the lists, there are references in this chapter to single towns "with their villages."
Joshua 15:45 Ekron, with its surrounding settlements and villages; 46 west of Ekron, all that were in the vicinity of Ashdod, together with their villages; 47 Ashdod, its surrounding settlements and villages; and Gaza, its settlements and villages, as far as the Wadi of Egypt and the coastline of the Great Sea.
The battle accounts in Joshua show very clearly that the towns conquered had "surrounding settlements" or satellite villages that were also taken in the conquest. Hence, Mr. Miller's population estimate is seriously flawed, because he estimated--without giving any grounds for the estimate--that the cities captured numbered only about 2,000 in population, but he didn't provide for the "surrounding settlements" and "villages" that were also captured. As noted above in reference to Hebron (Joshua 10:36-37), the Israelites "took the city and put it to the sword, together with its king, its villages and everyone in it" and "totally destroyed it" and left no survivors." From Hebron, they went to Debir, attacked it, captured the king, the city, and all its villages, and then totally destroy everyone and left no survivors (vs:38-39). If the Israelites massacred the populations in Hebron's and Debir's satellite villages, why can't we assume that when biblical texts say that the Israelites totally destroyed everyone and left no survivors in such and such cities, they did the same to the villages that belonged to those cities?
Mr. Miller presumes to tell us that there was nothing immoral about the Yahwistic massacres in Canaan because of a comparatively sparse population--as if killing 70,000 people is nothing to be morally concerned about--but in so arguing, he shows that he is not only morally challenged but that his knowledge of what the Bible says about the alleged Israelite conquests is deplorably superficial. If, for example, the populations of those cities were as sparse as Mr. Miller claims, perhaps he can explain the numerical description of the allied army of the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites under the leadership of Jabin, which Joshua "utterly destroyed" in Joshua 11.
Joshua 11:4 They [the army just described] came out, with all their troops, a great army, in number like the sand on the seashore, with very many horses and chariots. 5 All these kings joined their forces, and came and camped together at the waters of Merom, to fight with Israel.
I had always thought that when Yahweh promised that he would make the descendants of Abraham "as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sand that is on the seashore" (Gen. 22:17), he meant that these descendants would become too numerous to count, which he, in fact, said when renewing this promise to Jacob (Gen. 32:12), but now I know that this was just a figure of speech that meant no more than 70,000. At any rate, if Mr. Miller is going to get his population claim off the ground, he will have to explain how cities that contained no more than 70,000 in population could have been in nations that were "stronger and larger" than the 2.5 to 3 million (or 1.6 million according to Miller) Israelites. More than that, however, he will have to explain the morality of totally destroying even a population of 70,000.
I will say again that I am very glad that my
standards of morality are higher than Mr.
Miller's.
Later, in this section of Part Seven, I will return to Mr. Miller's claim that the population of Canaanite cities averaged only 2,000 and show that the textual evidence disputes this estimate.
Miller:
But this 70,000 is against a base of close to 2 million people! (Israel
was approximately 1.6
million at the time, and these nations are said to be 'more numerous'
than Israel in a
number of places--e.g. Deut
7.1,7.)
Till:
I noted above that Mr. Miller would refer to the same population texts
that I was referring to
at the time, so now that he has introduced this passage too, I can say
more about textual
inconsistencies in the Bible. As I have noted before, the census
figures in the book of
Numbers require the estimate that Israel's total population at the time
of the exodus was
somewhere between
2.5 and 3 million
people. I have no idea where Mr. Miller got his "base of close to 2
million people," which
I will talk about later, but for now I want to notice a textual
inconsistency in Mr. Miller's
proof text cited above. In speaking to the Israelites in
Deuteronomy
1:10, Moses
said that Yahweh had "multiplied" them so that "you are this day
as the stars of heaven
for multitude," but in one of the verses that Mr. Miller cited above,
Moses indicated that the
Israelites were few in number.
Deuteronomy 7:6 For you are a people holy to Yahweh your God. Yahweh your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession. 7 Yahweh did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples.
So one biblical passage says that the Israelites were as numerous as the stars of heaven, but another says that Yahweh didn't choose them to be his "treasured possession" because of their number, because they were "the fewest of all peoples." When confronted with a biblical discrepancy, inerrantists will always find a way to quibble around it, so they will argue that the Israelites at the time of the exodus and wilderness wanderings were as numerous as the stars of heaven but at the time when Yahweh chose their ancestors to be his chosen people, they were "the fewest of all peoples." This quibble, however, doesn't consider the audience that Moses was speaking to, which was the Israelite nation preparing to cross into Canaan. Throughout his speeches to them, he addressed them as you, you, you, and in the text just quoted, Moses said to this audience, you were the fewest of all peoples.
As for what the Deuteronomist meant when he referred to seven nations in Canaan that were "stronger and larger," I personally think that his intention was to say that the seven nations in Canaan were individually "stronger and larger" than Israel. There were some battles in which the Israelites fought just one of those nations, as in the cases of the battles with the Amorites under the leadership of kings Shihon and Eglon already discussed earlier, so unless the Amorites had outnumbered the Israelites, there would have been nothing exceptional about an army of 600,000 defeating the army of a nation whose total population would have been less than the size of Israel's army. If we accept Mr. Miller's population estimate of 1.6 million for the nation of Israel and assume that the population base of all of Canaan was just 2 million, that would have made the average population of a Canaanite nation just 285,000 (2 million ÷ 7 = 285,714), so in a battle with just one of these Canaanite armies, the Israelites would have outnumbered the entire Amorite or Hivite or Hittite population by over two to one. With that kind of numerical advantage, the Israelites wouldn't have needed Yahweh to fight on their side, so it seems likely that when the Deuteronomist said that the seven nations in Canaan were "stronger and larger" than Israel, he meant that each of the nations was larger.
While I am still on this point, I will note another likely discrepancy in the biblical text. If, as Mr. Miller claimed above, the base population of Canaan was 2 million people, then we have to assume that those two million people were able to keep the wild-animal population under control so that the animals didn't become "too numerous for them" (Deut. 7:22), so why wouldn't 1.6 million Israelites have been able to keep a reasonable check on the population of wild animals so that Yahweh wouldn't have had to let them possess the land "little by little" in order to keep the wild animals from "multiply[ing]" against them? Of course, if we accept a more reasonable estimate of Israel's population based on the census figures in the book of Numbers, there would have been at least 2.5 Israelites to control the animal population. In order for the "little-by-little" text to be inerrant, Mr. Miller's estimation of a "base population" of two million Canaanites would have to be wrong, so the only alternative for a biblical inerrantist would be to say that "stronger and larger" in Deuteronomy 7:1 meant that each of the Canaanite nations was larger than the 2.5 to 3 million Israelites. This would allow for a Canaanite population of more than 17 million Canaanites that was able to control the wild animal populations, which just 2.5 million Israelites could not have been able to do if Yahweh had given them all of Canaan "quickly" as Deuteronomy 9:3 said that he would do.
The larger population estimate, however, would put in a very unfavorable light a god who would have ordered the total destruction of 17 million people. My goodness, that would make the Yahwistic massacres of the Canaanites numerically worse than the Nazi holocaust of the 1930s and 1940s, but that isn't my problem. It's a problem for Mr. Miller and everyone else who argues that the Bible is inerrant.
Miller:
This amounts to approximately 3.5% of the 'target population'. [sic]
Till:
What Mr. Miller meant here was that the 70,000, which he estimated to
be the total population
of the cities ruled by the 31 kings listed in
Joshua 12,
would have been
only 3.5% of his "base population" estimate of two million Canaanites
overall, but I just
showed good reasons why we should think that the Bible claimed a much
higher Canaanite
population of at least 17 million, and before that I showed
that the
31 kings "destroyed" in Joshua 12 ruled over surrounding settlements or
satellite villages
as well as the cities in the list. Hence, his population estimate of
just 70,000 that these
kings ruled over is undoubtedly far below what the biblical data would
indicate.
For the sake of argument, however, let's just accept Mr. Miller's population estimate. What would have been moral about killing 70,000 people so that their land and towns could be occupied by the invading Israelites who had not worked to build the towns or plant the fields and vineyards in the land? According to biblical accounts, ancestors of the Israelites had voluntarily left Canaan over four centuries earlier (Genesis 46), so any claims that they had to the land would have been dubious indeed. Mr. Miller, then, still confronts the need to justify the morality of killing even 70,000 people in order to gain access to the land, fields, vineyards, wells, and towns.
Miller:
The Israelites were specifically told to execute those who remained in
the cities (Deut
20.16) and those who hid in the Land--and therefore did not
migrate out--Deut
7.20.
Till:
Once again, we see Mr. Miller distorting the obvious meanings of
biblical texts in order to
force them into preconceived molds that he thinks can morally justify
the Yahwistic massacres.
The best way to show his distortion of the texts is to examine them in
their entirety.
Deuteronomy 20:10 When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. 11 If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. 12 If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. 13 When Yahweh your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. 14 As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder Yahweh your God gives you from your enemies. 15 This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.
These verses lead up to the verse that Mr. Miller cited above, and as the last verse quoted shows, they gave instructions on how the Israelites were to deal with distant cities and their inhabitants, i. e., cities and people located outside of the Canaanite nations. The next verse is the one that Mr. Miller cited above, and it clearly shows that the Israelites were commanded to deal differently with cities located within the Canaanite nations.
Deuteronomy 20:16 However, in the cities of the nations Yahweh your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. 17 Completely destroy them--the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites--as Yahweh your God has commanded you.
This doesn't say one word about killing only those Canaanites who refused to high tail it out of the country and "migrate" somewhere else. It simply says that those who lived in "the cities of the nations" that Yahweh was giving to the Israelites "as an inheritance" were to be completely destroyed and not one in them was to be left alive to breathe.
Here now is the second passage that Mr. Miller cited to try to prove that Yahweh was Mr. Nice guy, who ordered the killing only of those who hid within Canaan and refused to "migrate" somewhere else.
Deuteronomy 7:20 Moreover, Yahweh your God will send the hornet among them until even the survivors who hide from you have perished.
Mr. Miller wants this verse to mean that Yahweh was saying that if any Canaanites tried to hide instead of "migrating" to some other land, the Israelites were to kill them, but the broader context of this passage, which has already been analyzed and reanalyzed, does not support this distorted interpretation.
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—2 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.
As noted now more times than I can remember, this text shows that terms like "driving out," "delivering over," "defeating," etc. were used in the sense of totally destroying, and the continuation of this chapter shows that
Deuteronomy 7:16 You must destroy all the peoples Yahweh your God gives over to you. Do not look on them with pity and do not serve their gods, for that will be a snare to you. 17 You may say to yourselves, "These nations are stronger than we are. How can we drive them out?" 18 But do not be afraid of them; remember well what Yahweh your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt. 19 You saw with your own eyes the great trials, the miraculous signs and wonders, the mighty hand and outstretched arm, with which Yahweh your God brought you out. Yahweh your God will do the same to all the peoples you now fear. 20 Moreover, Yahweh your God will send the hornet among them until even the survivors who hide from you have perished.
Obviously the passage was not saying what Mr. Miller tried to distort it to mean, but, to the contrary, it was ordering the total destruction of the Canaanites. If entire populations of Canaanite cities and towns were being massacred, including even women and children, quite naturally some would try to hide to escape death, but the "proof text" that Mr. Miller cited was saying that no Canaanites would be able to hide, because Yahweh would send a "hornet," already interpreted as some kind of torment or pestilence, to flush them out to ensure that they would also be killed.
The Old Testament clearly states that the god Yahweh ordered the total massacre of the Canaanite nations, and there is just no way for Mr. Miller to distort these texts to make them not mean what they clearly say.
Miller:
Granted the Israelites were less than thorough in their warfare, but
this small percentage is a bit ridiculous! This doesn't seem like
serious genocide to
me--what's going on here?
Till:
Well, as I have repeatedly shown, the book of Joshua claims over and
over that the Israelites
destroyed totally the people in the cities they conquered and
that they left none
alive to breathe. That sounds rather "thorough" to me. Mr. Miller is
trying to capitalize
on textual inconsistencies in the Bible, because after saying that the
Israelites had taken
all the land that Yahweh had promised to give to them, the book of
Joshua later said,
especially in Joshua 13,
and
chapters
1 and 2 in Judges
that the Israelites did not take all of the land and drive out all of
the nations that Yahweh
had commanded them to. In
this section of the
"Goofy Gaffe Exchanges" with Robert Turkel, I explicated this
inconsistency in detail to show
that it was an X not X (P and ~P) contradiction in the Bible. Readers
can go there to see the
full explication of this argument, but for convenience, I am quoting
below the essence of
it, which will be sufficient to show that the Bible is an unreliable
source to quote in
support of a position like the one Mr. Miller is trying to defend.
Skippy in second round: We have shown that the formula is not "X" versus "not X", [sic] but "X plus Y" (giving land plus fulfilling conditions) versus "X plus Z" (giving land plus not fulfilling conditions).
Till:
Skippy [Turkel] has shown no such thing. He can't even recognize the difference in apples and oranges. When I say that the Bible says X and not X (or P and ~P), I'm not talking about what was said in the original land promise but what the books of Joshua and Judges said about the fulfillment of the promise. First, Joshua claimed that the Israelites had been given all the land that Yahweh had promised.Joshua 21:43 So Yahweh gave to Israel all the land of which He had sworn to give to their fathers, and they took possession of it and dwelt in it. 44 Yahweh gave them rest all around, according to all that He had sworn to their fathers. And not a man of all their enemies stood against them; Yahweh delivered all their enemies into their hand. 45 Not a word failed of any good thing which Yahweh had spoken to the house of Israel. All came to pass.
This passage is clear enough that even Skippy should be able to understand it. The passage flatly says that Yahweh had given to Israel all the land that he had sworn to their fathers to give to them and that they took possession of it and dwelt in it. It even explicitly says that "not a word failed of any good thing which Yahweh had spoken to the house of Israel." It then went on to say that "all came to pass."
Yet we read something entirely different in another passage.
Joshua 13:1 Now Joshua was old, advanced in years. And Yahweh said to him: "You are old, advanced in years, and there remains very much land yet to be possessed...."
Skippy, being Skippy, will probably try to argue that the statement in Joshua 13:1 was made before the one in Joshua 21, and so at the time of Joshua 13, the Israelites had not taken all of the land but had done so in Joshua 21. Notice, however, that 13:1 was said when Joshua was "old, advanced in years." What we have, then, is a typical problem of inconsistencies that resulted from the patchwork method that was used in putting the hexateuch together from different documents and/or traditions. That this is the explanation for why a text about Joshua's "advanced" years would have preceded one about his earlier years is evident from a statement in chapter 23. The chapters following Joshua 13 recorded the dividing of the land among the tribes, and it was in this context that the claim was made that "Yahweh gave to Israel all the land of which He had sworn to give to their fathers," but after two more chapters that described the division of the land, this statement was made about Joshua's age.
Joshua 23:1 Now it came to pass, a long time after Yahweh had given rest to Israel from all their enemies round about, that Joshua was old, advanced in age. 2 And Joshua called for all Israel, for their elders, for their heads, for their judges, and for their officers, and said to them: "I am old, advanced in age...."
The text in Joshua 21, which said that Yahweh had given to the Israelites all the land he had sworn to their father to give to them, also said that "Yahweh gave them rest all around, according to all that He had sworn to their fathers" (v:44), so after the time that it was claimed that Yahweh had given to the Israelites all the land he had promised them, it was said two chapters later that "a long time after Yahweh had given rest to Israel" Joshua was "old, advanced in age," so at the time of the claim in Joshua 21:43 that Yahweh had given all the land promised to the Israelites, Joshua was younger but later became old and advanced in years. Hence, the reference in 13:1 to the "much land" that remained to be possessed could not have chronologically preceded the claim in 21:43 that all of the land promised had been given to the Israelites, because in 13:1 Joshua was old and advanced in age, but in 21:43, he wasn't yet old and advanced in years but became so "a long time after" this. In 21:43, however, before Joshua was old and advanced in years, it was said that Yahweh gave to the Israelites all the land he had promised to their fathers and that they possessed it and dwelt in it.
Clearly, then, we have a case of X and not X (or P and ~P), because one text says X (Yahweh gave the Israelites all the land he had promised them) but another text says not X (Yahweh did not give the Israelites all the land he had promised them). So this is not a matter of X (giving the land) plus Y (keeping the land), as Skippy is trying to claim, but both X and not X (P and ~P) pertain to the giving of the land and not to the keeping of it. One text says that Yahweh had given to the Israelites all the land he had promised, and that they possessed it and dwelt in it, and the other text says that all the land had not been given to the Israelites. This is a clear case of X and not X (P and ~P), so Skippy has not explained this contradiction.
In case Skippy still wants to quibble that Joshua 13:1 (the not X text) was written before 21:43 (the X text), I will point out that even if he could establish this, he would still have the same X and not X problem, because the book of Judges claimed that the Israelites could not take all of the land.
Judges 1:19 And Yahweh was with Judah. And they drove out the mountaineers, but they could not drive out the inhabitants of the lowland, because they had chariots of iron.
Furthermore, Joshua 21:44 said that "there stood not a man of all their enemies before them," and the next verse says that "not a word failed of any good thing which Yahweh had spoken to the house of Israel" but that "all came to pass." One of the good things that Yahweh promised was that the Israelites would drive out all the nations in Canaan (Deut. 7:1-2; 9:20-24), but Judges is filled with examples of where the Israelites had been unable to drive out the original inhabitants of the land.
Judges 1:21 But the children of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites who inhabited Jerusalem; so the Jebusites dwell with the children of Benjamin in Jerusalem to this day.
Judges 1:27 However, Manasseh did not drive out the inhabitants of Beth Shean and its villages, or Taanach and its villages, or the inhabitants of Dor and its villages, or the inhabitants of Ibleam and its villages, or the inhabitants of Megiddo and its villages; for the Canaanites were determined to dwell in that land.
Judges 3:1-3 Now these are the nations which Yahweh left, that He might test Israel by them, that is, all who had not known any of the wars in Canaan 2 (this was only so that the generations of the children of Israel might be taught to know war, at least those who had not formerly known it), 3 namely, five lords of the Philistines, all the Canaanites, the Sidonians, and the Hivites who dwelt in Mount Lebanon, from Mount Baal Hermon to the entrance of Hamath. 4 And they were left, that He might test Israel by them, to know whether they would obey the commandments of Yahweh, which He had commanded their fathers by the hand of Moses.
We see a lot of retrospective rationalization in the last passage, but these texts clearly contradict Joshua 21:43ff, which claimed that everything Yahweh had promised to the Israelites had been fulfilled at that time, but one of Yahweh's promises was that he would drive out all of the nations in Canaan and that not a man would be able to stand against them. Judges 3:1-3 claims that this didn't happen. Some nations did stand against the Israelites.
Without even addressing this inconsistency, then, Mr. Miller is trying to make the Yahwistic commands to destroy totally the Canaanite nations mean only that the ones living in the cities or "cultural centers" were to be killed but that the others were to be forced to "migrate" out of the country, but he has yet to produce a single biblical passage that says that Yahweh wanted only the cultural leaders to be killed and the others to be forced into migrating. If he knew of any passage in the Bible that supports this view, he would surely have cited it.
As for his claim that "this small percentage is a bit ridiculous"--meaning his unsupported assertion that the Israelites actually killed only about 3.5% of the Canaanites--by his own "base population" estimate of Canaan, these 3.5% would have been 70,000, so what principle of morality is guiding him when he says that "this small percentage is a bit ridiculous"? He talks as if killing 70,000 people would be nothing just as long as a tribal god had ordered it.
He went on to say that this doesn't "seem like serious genocide" to him, but I will address this later on when he tries to quibble that what the Israelites did to the Canaanites wasn't "technically genocide."
I will wrap up this point with a recommendation that readers go to this section of Part Five of my land-promise replies to Robert Turkel to see where I analyzed in detail Joshua 11-12 to show that the the places captured in chapter 11 and the 31 kings listed in chapter 12, whom the Israelites allegedly killed and possessed their land, were from all parts of the so-called promised land, from Kadesh Barnea in the extreme south to "Greater Sidon" in Lebanon, which would have been in the north, and from the Salt [Dead] Sea in the east to the Mediterranean coast in the west. This section will show that accounts of these conquests, such as Joshua 10:40-42, 11:11-12,14-15, and 11:22 explicitly state that the Israelites totally destroyed these places and their inhabitants and left none alive to breathe, so the first part of the book of Joshua clearly claims that the Israelites conquered Canaan from the extreme south to the north and from the east to the west, as far as the Mediterranean sea, and exterminated the Canaanite populations in these locations. Mr. Miller conveniently wants to ignore all of these passages to try to make his readers believe that later passages in Joshua and Judges, which spoke of Canaanite groups that still inhabited the land, somehow meant that Yahweh didn't really command the Israelites to destroy totally the Canaanites, but all he has done is call attention to a glaring inconsistency in the Bible that Robert Turkel was never able to resolve. Maybe Mr. Miller would like to try his hand at resolving it.
Meanwhile readers should keep in mind all of the passages I have quoted and requoted and cited and recited that plainly said that Yahweh had ordered the Israelites to destroy totally the Canaanites and leave none of them alive to breathe. Try as he may, Mr. Miller will never be able to make these passages mean that Yahweh just wanted the Israelites to force them to "migrate" to other lands.
Miller:
Let's put a few facts together:
Till:
And I have shown repeatedly that expressions like "drive out," "cast
out," "defeat,"
"subdue," and such like were consistently used in broaders contexts
that showed that they
were being used interchangeably with terms like "destroy" and "wipe
out." Just recently, the
new president of Iran called for Arabs to wipe Israel off the map. I
suppose
that Mr. Miller thinks that this was only a call to make the Israelis
"migrate" to other
places.
Miller:
Till:
Why doesn't Mr. Miller ever quote or even cite passages that would show
that Yahweh meant that
the Canaanites were to be forced to "migrate" and that only those who
refused to do so were to
be "executed"? Well, he doesn't because he can't. As I have shown over
and over and over,
Mr. Miller's frequent references to terms like "drive out," "cast out,"
"subdue," etc. were
consistently used in contexts that show they were intended to mean
"destroy," and not just
"destroy" but destroy to the extent that none were to be left alive to
breathe. I defy Mr.
Miller to produce a passage that would show that Mr. Miller's spin on
these passages is the
correct one and that they meant only that Yahweh wanted the Israelites
to force the Canaanites
to "migrate" to other lands.
For the sake of argument, let's just assume that despite having said that the Israelites were to destroy totally the Canaanites and to leave none of them alive to breathe, Yahweh meant only that those who refused to "migrate" out of the land were to be killed. What would be moral about ordering people to abandon their homes, fields, vineyards, wells, etc., which they had worked to build and maintain, and go to another land? Let's suppose that the United States should try to end the fiasco in Iraq by ordering all of the people to leave and go to other countries with the warning that those who stayed would be killed. If such an order were issued, would Mr. Miller defend the morality of killing those who stayed in Iraq?
If Mr. Miller says, "Well, the United States is not God," he will be begging the question of "God's" involvement in the Israelite invasion of Canaan. If Robert Turkel reads this and says, "Till"s problem is that God didn't kiss his patoot," aside from ignoring a legitimate moral issue, he too will be begging the same question.
Miller:
Till:
No, they were told to pursue them and kill them within the land
of Canaan. I have
already shown in this
section of Part Five that the Israelites consistently pursued the
Canaanites when they turned and fled, so those who want to see how
explicit the book of Joshua was about this can click the link and read
that section. In fact, the Israelites were specifically commanded in
Joshua
10:18-19 to
pursue and "smite" the Canaanites who had fled from them. I know of no
text that says that
Yahweh told the Israelites "to hunt the Canaanites down 'throughout the
uttermost reaches of
the earth' and kill them," but how does that in any way remove the fact
that Yahweh explicitly
commanded the Israelites (in passages that I have quoted and quoted and
quoted) to destroy
totally the Canaanites and to leave none of them alive to
breathe. If that was
the charge given to the Israelites, that was what they were expected to
do, so why would
Yahweh have said to them, "Now if you don't destroy totally the
Canaanites in their land, I
expect you to hunt them down throughout the uttermost reaches of the
earth and kill them
there"? In ordering king Saul to destroy totally the Amalekites
and to spare none of
them--not even children and babies--Yahweh didn't go on to say, "Now if
you don't kill all of
the Amalakites when you invade their land, I want you to pursue them
'throughout the uttermost
reaches of the earth and kill them there.'" He obviously expected Saul
to obey his command and
kill all of the Amalekites when he invaded their land, so in the same
way, Yahweh would have
expected the Israelites to do exactly what he had commanded in
reference to the Canaanites.
There is a hermeneutic principle known as the law of exclusion, which
recognizes that specific
commands that stated what was to be done didn't have to go on to
stipulate what was not to be
done. When, for example, Yahweh ordered Moses to make the ark of the
covenant from acacia
wood (Ex.
25:10), he didn't
have to go on and say, "Don't make it of oak or hickory or willow or
cedar or sycamore, etc.,
etc., etc.," because in stipulating the kind of wood that was to be
used, all other woods were
excluded. Likewise, when Yahweh said that the ark was to be two and a
half cubits in length,
he didn't have to say, "Don't make it just two cubits in length or
three cubits in length,
etc., etc., etc.," because the specification of the dimensions would
have automatically
excluded all others. Mr. Miller seems not to understand this
hermeneutic principle, because
he is laboring hard to mitigate Yahweh's orders to destroy totally
the Canaanites and
to leave none of them alive to breathe, but he is failing
miserably to make the command
to destroy totally mean only to expel from the land. The
Bible says what it says, and
nothing that Mr. Miller can say will change that.
Miller:
Till:
Migrated to a city in a foreign land? Even Mr. Miller has estimated the
Canaanite "base
population" at two million. What foreign city could have absorbed that
many refugees? What
foreign cities [plural] were within a range that two million
refugees could have fled
to them? What foreign cities would have even allowed such numbers of
refugees to come into
their cities?
I seriously doubt that Joshua and Judges contain accurate historical accounts of the conquest of Canaan, but for the sake of argument, I will assume that those accounts are accurate. Mr. Miller has been laboring hard to put the blame on the Canaanites for what happened to them in the biblical accounts. Darn it, if those Canaanites had just packed up and left their country, he is saying, none of this would have happened to them, but in so arguing, he is showing that he has an incredibly naive grasp of reality. What inhabitants of national territory have just abandoned their homes and land to go somewhere else when outsiders were encroaching on their homeland. Native populations in Afghanistan, Persia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Eastern Europe didn't abandon their land and homes with the advancement of Genghis Khan's advancing Mongol army. They stayed and fought. They lost, but that is just one of the stark realities of war. The most powerful armies usually win, so if the Israelites did indeed enter into Canaan and conquer it, they succeeded because of their military superiority and not because they had a god named Yahweh fighting for them. If the Canaanites stayed and fought against them, they did no more than what other peoples confronting outside invaders would have done. The fact that Mr. Miller is trying to blame the Canaanites for what they Bible says happened to them shows just how desperate he is to defend an ancient collection of superstitious writings.
Miller:
Till:
I have tried to give Mr. Miller the benefit of doubt and assume his
sincerity, but the more I
see him so blatantly distorting scriptures like the one he just cited,
the more I wonder if I
am not giving him more benefit than he is entitled to. Notice that he
cited only the 18th
verse of Deuteronomy 20, but a look at the two verses that preceded it
will clearly show that
the spin that Mr. Miller is trying to put on his proof text is a
distortion of its obviously
intended meaning.
Deuteronomy 20:16 However, in the cities of the nations Yahweh your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. 17 Completely destroy them--the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites--as Yahweh your God has commanded you. 18 Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against Yahweh your God.
The verse that Mr. Miller cited above does indeed claim a concern that the Israelites could be influenced by the Canaanites to worship other gods, but the passage certainly doesn't say that the Israelites were to prevent this from happening by "removing them from the land" by forced immigration to other lands. The text clearly states that the Israelites were to keep the Canaanites from influencing them to worship their gods by completely destroying the Canaanites and not leav[ing] alive anything that breathes.
I have cited and quoted and cited and quoted passage after passage that clearly stated that the god Yahweh ordered the Israelites to destroy totally the Canaanite nations, and some of those passages, like the one just quoted, were equally clear in saying that the Israelites were to destroy the Canaanites so that the Israelites wouldn't be enticed into worshiping their gods.
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— 2 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. 3 Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, 4 for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods, and the Lord's anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you.
In our culture, we practice religious freedom, but Yahweh apparently wasn't so tolerant. He ordered that those who didn't worship him be killed so that they could not influence others to practice their religion, but this and the text quoted above it says absolutely nothing about removing the influence of other gods by forcing the Canaanites who worshiped them to "migrate" to other lands. They clearly said that the worship of other gods was to be prevented by killing those who worshiped them. Indeed, the Israelites were even ordered to kill members of their own families if they worshiped other gods.
Deuteronomy 13:6 If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, "Let us go and worship other gods" (gods that neither you nor your fathers have known, 7 gods of the peoples around you, whether near or far, from one end of the land to the other), 8 do not yield to him or listen to him. Show him no pity. Do not spare him or shield him. 9 You must certainly put him to death. Your hand must be the first in putting him to death, and then the hands of all the people. 10 Stone him to death, because he tried to turn you away from Yahweh your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 11 Then all Israel will hear and be afraid, and no one among you will do such an evil thing again. 12 If you hear it said about one of the towns Yahweh your God is giving you to live in 13 that wicked men have arisen among you and have led the people of their town astray, saying, "Let us go and worship other gods" (gods you have not known), 14 then you must inquire, probe and investigate it thoroughly. And if it is true and it has been proved that this detestable thing has been done among you, 15 you must certainly put to the sword all who live in that town. Destroy it completely, both its people and its livestock. 16 Gather all the plunder of the town into the middle of the public square and completely burn the town and all its plunder as a whole burnt offering to Yahweh your God. It is to remain a ruin forever, never to be rebuilt.
Mr. Miller's attempt to make Yahweh a nice guy, who just wanted to force those who worshiped other gods to "migrate" to other lands, is patently contrary to the plain teachings of the Bible. Yahweh's way was to kill those who didn't worship him, and the passage just quoted is not the only one in the Bible where the massacre of those who worshiped other gods was ordered.
Deuteronomy 17:2 If a man or woman living among you in one of the towns Yahweh gives you is found doing evil in the eyes of Yahweh your God in violation of his covenant, 3 and contrary to my command has worshiped other gods, bowing down to them or to the sun or the moon or the stars of the sky, 4 and this has been brought to your attention, then you must investigate it thoroughly. If it is true and it has been proved that this detestable thing has been done in Israel, 5 take the man or woman who has done this evil deed to your city gate and stone that person to death. 6 On the testimony of two or three witnesses a man shall be put to death, but no one shall be put to death on the testimony of only one witness. 7 The hands of the witnesses must be the first in putting him to death, and then the hands of all the people. You must purge the evil from among you.
If Yahweh was the good guy that Mr. Miller is trying to paint him, who just wanted to rid the land of idol worship by forcing its practitioners to "migrate" to other lands, why didn't Yahweh just order the exile of Jews who turned to "false worship" instead of commanding that they be killed? Well, that is not hard at all to answer. Death was the Hebrew way of dealing with those who violated what they thought their god Yahweh wanted, so Mr. Miller's attempt to make his readers believe that this god really didn't want the Canaanites killed but just wanted them forced out of the land is clearly contrary to what the Bible plainly says.
I had another reason for quoting these passages where Yahweh ordered the killing of Jews who worshiped gods other than Yahweh, and that reason will soon become apparent.
Miller:
Till:
The "strong suggestion" is only rationalization on Mr. Miller's part. I
have shown over and
over and over and over that his spin on the Yahwistic commands to destroy
totally the
Canaanites just isn't so. There is no need for me to recite or requote
again the passages
that clearly dispute what Mr. Miller is trying to dupe his readers into
believing.
Miller:
Till:
Before we look at Mr. Miller's distortion of the biblical passages he
quoted below, I will
just ask him to explain to us how "this understanding" makes
perfect sense of all of
the passages I have quoted where the writers had Yahweh clearly
ordering the Israelites to
destroy totally the Canaanites and to leave none of them
alive to breathe and
also explain to us how "this understanding" makes perfect sense
of all of the passages
I quoted and requoted and requoted in the book of Joshua, which say
that the Israelites did
totally destroy the Canaanites and left none of them alive
to breathe AS YAHWEH
THE GOD OF ISRAEL HAD COMMANDED
Josh.
10:40;
Josh.
11:10-12,15).
So now let's look at the passages that Mr. Miller thinks that "this understanding" makes perfect sense of.
Miller:
Leviticus 18.24-29 "`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 (also Lev 20.22).
Till:
I must interrupt here to comment on the last sentence in Mr. Miller's
proof text, which said
that everyone who did "any of these detestable things" would be "cut
off from their people."
I have shown already in
this section of Part Five
that "cut off" in Hebrew meant
to kill. That section explicated the very passage that Mr. Miller is
now quoting as a proof
text, and to see that "vomit out" did not mean expulsion from the land
but rather death, all
we need to do is look at the broader context of the passage.
Leviticus 20:1 Yahweh 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.
Notice that "put to death" and "cut off from his people" were used interchangeably here, as in the other examples that I pointed out in Part Five linked to above, so to the Hebrews "cut off" meant "put to death," just as "drive out," "cast out," "subdue," etc. were at times used interchangeable with destroy. Other sections of the broader context of Leviticus show that "cut off" meant "put to death."
Leviticus 20:6 "'I will set my face against the person who turns to mediums and spiritists to prostitute himself by following them, and I will cut him off from his people.... 27 A man or woman who is a medium or spiritist among you must be put to death. You are to stone them; their blood will be on their own heads.'"
Inerrantists will grab any straw in sight, so Mr. Miller may argue that the persons who "turned to mediums and spiritists" were to be "cut off" or expelled from the land but that the mediums or spiritists were to be put to death, but this quibble won't work. As I noted in the section of Part Five linked to above, parallel offenses or "detestable deeds" were condemned in both Leviticus 18 and 20. In chapter 18, they were just identified as "do nots" after which the writer said, "Everyone who does any of these detestable things--such persons must be cut off from their people," but in chapter 20 most of the same offenses (incest, adultery, beastiality, child sacrifices, etc.) were listed and the death penalty decreed for them with the exception of the two places noted above where "cuf off" was used synonymously with "put to death." Elsewhere, Yahweh had commanded the Israelites to keep the sabbath and had fixed death as the penalty for those who didn't. In giving the command, he used "put to death" and "cut off" interchangeably.
Exodus 31:14 "'Observe the Sabbath, because it is holy to you. Anyone who desecrates it must be put to death; whoever does any work on that day must be cut off from his people. 15 For six days, work is to be done, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of rest, holy to Yahweh. Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day must be put to death.
Obviously, then, "cut off" to the Hebrews meant put to death, so if the Levitical writer followed up his list of "detestable things" by saying that the people who did these things would be "vomited out of the land" (v:28), he was using "cut off" to mean put to death, just as other writers in the various passages I have quoted and quoted and quoted used terms like "drive out," "cast out," "subdue," etc. to mean totally destroy.
As I continue through this section of Mr. Miller's article, I will be showing that Yahweh decreed death to those who worshiped idols, so Mr. Miller's attempt to make "vomit out" mean "expulsion" is just another distortion of the intended meaning of a proof text that he has cited. This will become very evident as I continue.
Miller:
Notice in verses 28-29, God holds Israel to the same standard--both as
a nation
(vs.28)
and as individuals
(vs.29)!
Till:
Yes, but that "standard," was that both the individuals and the nations
that did these things
were to be "cut off," and as I showed above, "cut off" was a Hebrew
expression that meant
"put to death." Hence, Mr. Miller has found nothing in Leviticus 18 to
prove his assertion
that Yahweh didn't really want to kill the Canaanites; he just wanted
to force them to
"migrate" to other lands.
Miller:
He didn't intend to annihilate them (when they later 'went pagan'),
Till:
Of course, he didn't. That was why he decreed in Deuteronomy 13 and 17,
quoted above, that
even beloved family members were to be stoned to death if they
worshiped other gods and why
he said in Mr. Miller's own proof texts in Leviticus 18 and 20 that
those who did such
"detestable things" as offer child sacrifices, commit adultery and
incest, engage in
beastiality, etc. were to be "cut off/put to death." He pronounced
these sentences because
he "didn't intend to annihilate them when they later 'went pagan.'" I
think we can all see
that.
What Mr. Miller needs to do is find passages that unquestionably say that Yahweh wanted Israelites who turned to the "detestable" practices of paganism to be banished from the country, and he has not yet done that.
Miller:
but he warned them of 'expulsion from the Land' in the same way
He did the Canaanites!
Till:
Uh, just where did biblical writers say that Yahweh only wanted the
Israelites to "expel"
Canaanites from the land? Where did biblical writers say that Yahweh
wanted Israelites who
engaged in "detestable" practices of the Canaanites to be expelled from
the land? I have
shown where Yahweh clearly and unequivocally commanded the Israelites
to totally destroy
the Canaanites and to leave none of them alive to breathe, and
I have shown where
Yahweh commanded that those Israelites who engaged in the "detestable"
practices of the
Canaanites be put to death, so now it is time for Mr. Miller to show us
that Yahweh didn't
really mean all of this but that he only meant that both Canaanites and
Israelites who
engaged in "detestable" practices were to be expelled from the country.
Miller:
For this comparison to work in the verse, the punishment ("vomit") must
mean
expulsion.
Till:
I showed above that (1) "vomit out" was used interchangeably with "cut
off" and (2) "cut off"
was used interchangeably with "put to death"; hence, the only
"comparison" that will work in
Mr. Miller's own proof text is to recognize that "vomit out" meant to
put to death.
If not, why not?
Miller:
But was it the same way?
Absolutely!
Till:
Mr. Miller can't make an assertion true by just shouting it in bold
print. He must show
that the Bible absolutely and unequivocally said that Yahweh only
wanted to expel from the
land Canaanites and Israelites who engaged in "detestable practices,"
and so far, he hasn't
even come close to doing that. I, on the other hand, have cited passage
after passage that
very clearly said that those who engaged in these activities were to be
"cut off/put to
death."
Readers have now seen why I quoted above the two texts from Deuteronomy, which ordered Jews to kill close relatives who were found to be worshiping other gods and even to destroy completely villages that were found to have worshipers of other gods in them. Mr. Miller wants his readers to believe that Yahweh would merely "vomit" idol worshipers out of the land in the sense of expelling them to other places, but clearly the two passages in Deuteronomy don't say that. They ordered the killing of those who worshiped other gods. Hence, we have to conclude that vomit in Leviticus 20 was being used in the same sense that "drive out," "cast out," "subdue," etc. were used in the passages that I have quoted over and over. Their interchangeable use with words like destroy and expressions like leave none alive to breathe clarified them to mean that Yahweh was ordering the annihilation of the Canaanites. The reference in Mr. Miller's proof text to "vomiting out" must have therefore been used in the same sense; otherwise, Miller's proof text contradicts the two passages in Deuteronomy.
Miller:
Not only were the warnings that God gave Israel about covenant
treachery the flip-side of
what they were to enjoy in Canaan (e.g. houses and vineyards given to
others --
Deut
28.30-33), but the
actual experience of Judah before her "expulsion" to Babylonia was
essentially the same.
Till:
I will interrupt here to point out that the Bible claims that so-called
"expulsion" from the
"promised land" had occurred long before the Babylonian captivity.
After years of subjugation
to Assyria, Israelites in the northern kingdom (Israel) were deported
to Assyria and "the
cities of the Medes" in 722 BC
(2
Kings 17:3-6). These
became the famous "lost tribes of Israel," whose exact fate has never
been accurately
determined probably because they were assimilated into the local
populations. The Assyrians
repopulated Samaria with people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and
Seph-arvaim
(2
Kings 17:24). All
this happened more than 100 years before the Babylonian sacking of
Jerusalem and the
subsequent captivity of the Judeans.
Before either of these captivities, the Israelites were continually doing "that which was evil in the sight of Yahweh," but their punishment was not to be "vomited out" of the land in the sense that Mr. Miller is assigning to this term. They were "punished" in different ways. Judges 3:7-8 says that the Israelites "did that which was evil in the sight of Yahweh," and so he "sold them into the hand of Cushan-rish-a-thaim, king of Mesopotamia" for eight years. Judges 3:12-14 says that the Israelites "again did that which was evil in the sight of Yahweh," who then put them into servitude to Eglon the king of Moab for 18 years. Judges 4:1-4 says that the Israelites "again did that which was evil in the sight of Yahweh," who somehow sold them into the hand of Jabin king of Hazor, whom Joshua had killed a generation earlier (Josh. 11:1,10-11), and so the tales of "evil in the sight of Yahweh" went on and on and on ad nauseam. These were just subjugations through occupation of their land by foreign powers, but the people were not deported or expelled from the land because of having done "that which was evil in the sight of Yahweh," and what has apparently never even crossed Mr. Miller's mind, even though he mentioned earlier a "culture-focused judgment" to try to justify the Yahwistic commands to destroy totally the Canaanites, is that in biblical times, all tribes and nations in the Near East believed that calamities and misfortunes were the result of having displeased the national gods. In the examples just cited from Judges, the Israelites would never even have considered the possibility that they had been subjugated to Mesopotamia, Moab, and Hazor for no other reason but the military superiority of those nations at that particular time. No, to their primitive, superstitious way of thinking, if something calamitous had happened to them, the reason for it had to be that they had "done that which was evil" in the sight of their god.
There are numerous examples of this primitive superstition that I could cite. In the inscription on the Moabite Stone, king Mesha said that "Omri king of Israel... oppressed Moab many days, because Chemosh was angry with his land." Like his Israelite contemporaries just across the way, Mesha thought that oppression of his country by an outside power had to mean that Moab's god was angry with the land. In 2 Samuel 21:1-9, a tale was told of a three-year famine in the land, which caused David to "seek the face of Yahweh." It just didn't occur to David that climatic conditions, through no fault of anybody, were causing the famine. To his primitive way of thinking, if a calamity like this had happened, it had to be because of something that had angered the Hebrew god Yahweh. Sure enough, when David "sought the face of Yahweh," this god told him [snicker, snicker] that the famine was due to Saul's treatment of the Gibeonites. Although Saul's mistreatment of the Gibeonites would have happened years before this time, to David's angry-god mentality, he apparently didn't wonder at all why Yahweh had waited so long to punish the land with a famine. A calamity had fallen upon the land, and calamities come from angry gods, so David wanted to find out what Yahweh was upset about. As this superstitious yarn was spun, the Gibeonites demanded that seven of Saul's male descendants be put to death, and David decreed that this be done.
This is the sort of ancient, superstitious nonsense that Mr. Miller is trying to defend, but it apparently never occurs to him that "punishments" like exiling were all in the minds of biblical writers who constantly looked for "culture-focused judgments" to explain why tragedies, disasters, and such like would happen to Yahweh's "chosen people." The problems with Mr. Miller's spin on the "vomit-out" passage cited in Leviticus is that (1) he gives it a meaning that conflicts with other passages that clearly say that the same offenses banned in Leviticus 18 were to be punished by death and (2) he ignores the many biblical passages that indicate that "cut off" to Hebrews meant "put to death."
Miller:
When Judah had begun to practice the same cruel and destructive
practices of the
Canannites [sic]--including child sacrifice
(Is 57:5;
2 Kgs
17.17), ritual
prostitution (Jer 13.27),
cultic homosexual prostitutes
(I Kgs
15.12;
22.46;
2 Kgs
23.7), and
widespread social violence
(cf. Ezek
45.9;
Is
59.6-10)--God
judged them to be expelled from the Land. He sent the Babylonians to
'drive them out'.
[sic] They were supposed to obey God and go into
exile--the prophets told the
people to surrender to 'dispossession' to avoid being killed!
Till:
Well, "God" certainly took his good sweet time "driving out" the
Judeans who "began" to
engage in the "same destructive practices of the Canaanites," didn't
he? Isaiah was an
8th-century BC prophet, who lived 150 years before "God" judged the
Judeans "to be expelled
from the land," so what would the two passages in his book have to do
with when the Judeans
"began" to engage in the destructive practices of the Canaanites? The
reference in 2 Kings
17:17 was to what Israelites in the northern kingdom were doing
in the late 8th
century BC, when the Assyrians, as mentioned above, took control of the
kingdom and exiled
them to Assyrian and Mede cities, so there is certainly nothing in this
text to support Mr.
Miller's claim that Yahweh "expelled" the people of Judah from the land
when they began to
engage in "destructive" Canaanite practices. The text in Jeremiah
certainly referred to the
captivity of the Judeans, but, duh, this book was written by a
"prophet" who lived at the
time when the captivity occurred, and so he had the advantage of
writing after the fact so
that he could conveniently affix blame wherever he wanted to put it. He
did attribute the
captivity to "your adulteries and lustful neighings, your shameless
prostitution" (Jer.
13:27), but since when did the Judeans of Jeremiah's time have a
monopoly on adultery, lust,
and prostitution? If "God" expelled from their lands everyone who
engaged in such activities,
he would have long ago run out of places to expel them to.
Mr. Miller just can't seem to understand the ancient Semitic mind (which his partner in apologetic crime, Robert Turkel, talks about so much), which always felt the need to find reasons for the misfortunes that happened from time to time. We hear in our time the saying shit happens, which although crude, nevertheless expresses an obvious truth: rotten luck is just a part of life. Just recently, our nation has experienced a series of tragic hurricanes that have left parts of the country devastated. Although we have fundamentalist preachers--counterparts of the Hebrew prophets--who are blaming the destruction of New Orleans on the evils of homosexuality and sexual promiscuity in this city, more rational people will recognize that... well, shit just happens. There have always been earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tsunamis, droughts, volcanic eruptions, and other natural disasters, and there always will be as long as the world stands. Nations have always risen and fallen and will continue to rise and fall as long as nations exist. There are no angry gods up there pulling strings to make these things happen. Shit happens, but neither the Hebrew prophets nor Mr. Miller could recognize this truth.
There is no need to look at the other scriptures that Mr. Miller misapplied above, because it is easy to show that what he claims as the reason for the Judean captivity in Babylon is not what the Bible says was the reason for it. Mr. Miller says that "God" expelled the Judeans from the land when they began to engage in the "destructive practices" of the Canaanites, but the Bible put the blame for the captivity on king Manasseh, who had "shed innocent blood till he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another" (2 Kings 21:6). Even though Manasseh's grandson Josiah became the most righteous of all of the kings of Israel and Judah (2 Kings 23:25) and instituted far-reaching religious reforms, Judah was soon overrun by Nebuchadnezzar, who sacked Jerusalem and took many of the Judeans into captivity. The writer of 2 Kings, however, did not say that Yahweh expelled the Judeans from the land because they had begun to engage in the "detestable practices" of the Canaanites; he said that the captivity happened because of the evil of king Manasseh, who had died 45 years before Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians.
2 Kings 23:25 Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to Yahweh as he did--with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with all the Law of Moses. 26 Nevertheless, Yahweh did not turn away from the heat of his fierce anger, which burned against Judah because of all that Manasseh had done to provoke him to anger. 27 So Yahweh said, "I will remove Judah also from my presence as I removed Israel, and I will reject Jerusalem, the city I chose, and this temple, about which I said, 'There shall my Name be.'"
After Jerusalem had fallen to Nebuchadnezzar, the writer of 2 Kings repeated the charge that Yahweh had caused it to happen because of the atrocities committed by Manasseh.
2 Kings 24:3 During Jehoiakim's reign, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon invaded the land, and Jehoiakim became his vassal for three years. But then he changed his mind and rebelled against Nebuchadnezzar. 2 Yahweh sent Babylonian, Aramean, Moabite and Ammonite raiders against him. He sent them to destroy Judah, in accordance with the word of Yahweh proclaimed by his servants the prophets. 3 Surely these things happened to Judah according to the Lord's command, in order to remove them from his presence because of the sins of Manasseh and all he had done, 4 including the shedding of innocent blood. For he had filled Jerusalem with innocent blood, and Yahweh was not willing to forgive.
What we have, then, is Glenn Miller vs. the Bible. Miller says that Yahweh expelled the Judeans from the land when they "began" to engage in "the detestable practices" of the Canaanites, but the Bible says that Yahweh sent the Judeans into Babylonian captivity because of the "innocent blood" with which Manasseh had filled Jerusalem. Even if the texts quoted above, which flatly contradict Mr. Miller's claim, were not in the Bible, we could determine that Yahweh didn't expel Israelites from the land when they began to engage in the "detestable practices" of the Canaanites, because from the very beginning of the Israelite nation, they practiced idolatry, just like the other nations in that part of the world. When Moses was on Mt. Sinai chatting with Yahweh, the Israelites persuaded Aaron to make a golden calf for them to worship (Ex. 32:15-24), but Yahweh didn't withhold from them the land, which they had not yet reached; he just killed 3,000 of them (Ex. 32:27-28) and led them on to the promised land. Idolatrous events continued throughout the wilderness years. They worshiped Baal at Peor (Num. 25), but Yahweh still didn't withhold the land from them; he just killed 24 thousand of them (Num. 25:8-9) and led them on to the promised land. After they had entered the land, they engaged in extensive idol worship.
Judges 10:6 Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of Yahweh. They served the Baals and the Ashtoreths, and the gods of Aram, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the Ammonites and the gods of the Philistines. And because the Israelites forsook Yahweh and no longer served him, 7 he became angry with them....
And because the Israelites forsook Yahweh and no longer served him, he became angry with them and expelled them from the land. Is that what happened? Not at all.
Judges 10:6 And because the Israelites forsook Yahweh and no longer served him, 7 he became angry with them. He sold them into the hands of the Philistines and the Ammonites, 8 who that year shattered and crushed them. For eighteen years they oppressed all the Israelites on the east side of the Jordan in Gilead, the land of the Amorites.
So Yahweh didn't expel the Israelites from the land when they began to engage in the "detestable practices" of the Canaanites; he let the Philistines and the Amorites oppress them within their land. Mr. Miller's claim that Yahweh didn't want to kill anybody but just wanted to expel idolaters from the land of Canaan just doesn't agree with what the Bible plainly says.
Miller:Jeremiah 38.17 Then Jeremiah said to Zedekiah, "This is what the LORD God Almighty, the God of Israel, says: `If you surrender to the officers of the king of Babylon, your life will be spared and this city will not be burned down; you and your family will live. 18 But if you will not surrender to the officers of the king of Babylon, this city will be handed over to the Babylonians and they will burn it down; you yourself will not escape from their hands.'"
Jeremiah 38.2 "This is what the LORD says: `Whoever stays in this city will die by the sword, famine or plague, but whoever goes over to the Babylonians will live. He will escape with his life; he will live.' 3 And this is what the LORD says: `This city will certainly be handed over to the army of the king of Babylon, who will capture it.'"
Jeremiah 21.8 "Furthermore, tell the people, `This is what the LORD says: See, I am setting before you the way of life and the way of death. 9 Whoever stays in this city will die by the sword, famine or plague. But whoever goes out and surrenders to the Babylonians who are besieging you will live; he will escape with his life. 10 I have determined to do this city harm and not good, declares the LORD. It will be given into the hands of the king of Babylon, and he will destroy it with fire.'
If the residents of Judah had surrendered to the Babylonians, they would have simply been deported (read: "expelled from the Land"!) to Babylon--just like the Northern Kingdom had been 'migrated forcibly' to other lands.
Till:
Mr. Miller is trying hard to make destroy totally and leave
no one alive to
breathe to mean only "to expel from the land," but the biblical
accounts of the forcible
"migration" of the Israelites in the northern kingdom just don't
support the spin he is trying
to put onto those accounts. The Bible indicates quite clearly that the
Israelites in the
northern kingdom didn't just wave white flags and surrender to the
Assyrians; they resisted
the invasions of their land.
2 Kings 17:7 All this took place because the Israelites had sinned against Yahweh their God, who had brought them up out of Egypt from under the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They worshiped other gods 8 and followed the practices of the nations Yahweh had driven out before them, as well as the practices that the kings of Israel had introduced. 9 The Israelites secretly did things against Yahweh their God that were not right. From watchtower to fortified city they built themselves high places in all their towns. 10 They set up sacred stones and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every spreading tree. 11 At every high place they burned incense, as the nations whom Yahweh had driven out before them had done. They did wicked things that provoked Yahweh to anger. 12 They worshiped idols, though Yahweh had said, "You shall not do this." 13 Yahweh warned Israel and Judah through all his prophets and seers: "Turn from your evil ways. Observe my commands and decrees, in accordance with the entire Law that I commanded your fathers to obey and that I delivered to you through my servants the prophets." 14 But they would not listen and were as stiff-necked as their fathers, who did not trust in Yahweh their God. 15 They rejected his decrees and the covenant he had made with their fathers and the warnings he had given them. They followed worthless idols and themselves became worthless. They imitated the nations around them although Yahweh had ordered them, "Do not do as they do," and they did the things Yahweh had forbidden them to do. 16 They forsook all the commands of Yahweh their God and made for themselves two idols cast in the shape of calves, and an Asherah pole. They bowed down to all the starry hosts, and they worshiped Baal. 17 They sacrificed their sons and daughters in the fire. They practiced divination and sorcery and sold themselves to do evil in the eyes of Yahweh, provoking him to anger. 18 So Yahweh was very angry with Israel and removed them from his presence. Only the tribe of Judah was left....
All of the idolatrous practices described here didn't happen overnight. As far back as the reign of Solomon, shrines were built to other gods (1 Kings 11:6-8), and long before the Assyrian captivity of the northern Israelites, repeated references were made to their kings who "did that which was evil in the sight of Yahweh (1 Kings 15:25-26,33; 1 Kings 16:25,29). Solomon reigned over 200 years before the Assyrian captivity, and Nadab, Baasha, Omri, and Ahab—the kings of the northern kingdom referred to in the other references—reigned from 175 to 135 years before the Assyrians overthrew the northern kingdom, and they all practiced idolatry. Northern kings after them continued to engage in idolatry (2 Kings 3:1-3; 2 Kings 13:1-2; 2 Kings 15:18). The passage quoted above indicated that idolatry in the northern kingdom was practiced as far back as the breakup of the united kingdom following the reign of Solomon, because verse 16 said, "They [the Israelites in the northern kingdom] forsook all the commands of Yahweh their God and made for themselves two idols cast in the shape of calves." This is a reference to the attempt of Jeroboam, the one whom Yahweh had personally chosen to be king of the northern kingdom (1 Kings 11:29-40), to keep his subjects from going to Jerusalem to worship. Hoping to achieve this, he made two golden calves and put them in Bethel and Dan, and declared that they were the gods who had led the Israelites out of Egypt (1 Kings 12:25-31). This happened early in Jeroboam's reign, which began around 922 BC, so 200 years before Mr. Miller claims that Yahweh "vomited" the Israelites of the northern kingdom out of the land for engaging in "detestable practices" of the Canaanites, idolatry had been long entrenched in the country. Furthermore, the continuation of 2 Kings 17, quoted above, which told of the Assyrian captivity of the northern kingdom, clearly said that the Judeans were also practicing idolatry.
2 Kings 17:18 So Yahweh was very angry with Israel and removed them from his presence. Only the tribe of Judah was left, 19 and even Judah did not keep the ' commands of Yahweh their God. They followed the practices Israel had introduced.
So both the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom had been practicing idolatry for centuries, but for some reason, Yahweh "vomited out of the land" only the people in the northern kingdom and let the Judeans remain in the land for 125 years before they were taken into captivity by the Babylonians. Mr. Miller thinks that the captivities happened because of idolatrous practices, but a more realistic interpretation of the events of that time will recognize that the writer(s) of the books of kings was simply engaging in scapegoating. The northern kingdom was overrun by the Assyrians and its people sent into captivity, so to the primitive mind of the author(s) of these books, something had to have displeased Yahweh. He fixed the blame on idolatrous practices in the northern kingdom but apparently didn't wonder why the Judeans, who were also engaging in idolatry, retained their land. Over a century later when Judah fell to Nebuchadnezzar, the writer(s) put the blame on the atrocities committed by Manasseh. That Assyria and Babylonia had been militarily superior to Israel and Judah just didn't occur to the writer(s). Yahweh's people had been taken captive, and blame had to be put somewhere. The idolatry of Israel and the atrocities of Manasseh respectively became the "explanations" of the captivities.
All of this happened during a tumultous period in Israelite history. Besides the hostility between Assyria and the northern kingdom, both Judah had to contend with an alliance between Syria and Israel. Judah suffered high casualties, which, of course, were attributed to king Ahaz's tolerance of idolatry.
2 Kings 28:1 Ahaz was twenty years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem sixteen years. Unlike David his father, he did not do what was right in the eyes of Yahweh. 2 He walked in the ways of the kings of Israel and also made cast idols for worshiping the Baals. 3 He burned sacrifices in the Valley of Ben Hinnom and sacrificed his sons in the fire, following the detestable ways of the nations Yahweh had driven out before the Israelites. 4 He offered sacrifices and burned incense at the high places, on the hilltops and under every spreading tree. 5 Therefore Yahweh his God handed him over to the king of Aram. The Arameans [Syrians] defeated him and took many of his people as prisoners and brought them to Damascus. He was also given into the hands of the king of Israel, who inflicted heavy casualties on him. 6 In one day Pekah son of Remaliah killed a hundred and twenty thousand soldiers in Judah--because Judah had forsaken Yahweh, the God of their fathers.
The Israelites also took 200,000 Judeans back to the northern kingdom as captives (2 Chron. 28:8-15), but a prophet named Oded rebuked the Israelites for taking their "brethren" captive, so the Judeans were taken down to Jericho and released. Notice the inconsistency in the reasons that the biblical writers gave for the misfortunes of Israel and Judah. Both the Israelites and the Judeans were practicing idolatry, but the writers claimed that the Israelites were punished by being taken into Assyrian captivity, whereas the Judeans after being taken captive were released and allowed to return home. Regardless of what happened, the writers attributed it to the judgment of Yahweh. When the Israelites were taken into Assyrian captivity, this was punishment from Yahweh. When the Judeans were released after being taken captivity, this was also the will of Yahweh, even though the Judeans had been practicing idolatry just like the Israelites. Then 125 years later, when Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem, that too was a judgment from Yahweh, even though this time the captivity was punishment for atrocities committed by king Manasseh 45 years earlier. To biblical writers, whatever happened was decreed by the god Yahweh.
Mr. Miller has tried to take such rank inconsistencies as these and distort them into proving that Yahweh had only wanted the Canaanites to get out of the land and that if they had, they would not have been killed. He quoted above three texts from the book of Jeremiah to support his unfounded claim that the Canaanites would not have been killed had they surrendered to the Israelites and accepted forced migration to other lands, but as usual, Mr. Miller has quoted without considering what was said in other biblical texts. He quoted Jeremiah 21:8, 38:2, and 38:17, where the prophet told the people that those who surrendered to the Babylonians would escape with their lives, and from these verses, Mr. Miller arrived at the conclusion that the Canaanites would have escaped with their lives if they had only surrendered to the Israelites. First of all, Mr. Miller is again arguing from an assumption of biblical inerrancy. If Jeremiah said it, then it had to be true, but this non sequitur in Miller's "argument" is almost too absurd to warrant comment. He just cannot assume that if the lives of Judeans who surrendered to Babylonians in 597 BC were spared, then the lives of Canaanites 800 years earlier in entirely different circumstances would also have been spared if they had only surrendered. For one thing, Mr. Miller's assertion gives no consideration at all to what we have repeatedly noticed: the Israelites had allegedly been ordered by their god Yahweh to destroy totally the Canaanites and to leave none of them alive to breathe. As I have previously asked, how could the Israelites have obeyed this command and at the same time spared the lives of Canaanites who surrendered?
Besides that problem are biblical claims that Mr. Miller seems completely unaware of: First, the Judeans surrendered to the Babylonians only after they were starved into submission by a siege that lasted a year and a half.
Jeremiah 52:1 Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem eleven years. His mother's name was Hamutal daughter of Jeremiah; she was from Libnah. 2 He did evil in the eyes of Yahweh, just as Jehoiakim had done. 3 It was because of Yahweh's anger that all this happened to Jerusalem and Judah, and in the end he thrust them from his presence. Now Zedekiah rebelled against the king of Babylon. 4 So in the ninth year of Zedekiah's reign, on the tenth day of the tenth month, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon marched against Jerusalem with his whole army. They camped outside the city and built siege works all around it. 5 The city was kept under siege until the eleventh year of King Zedekiah. 6 By the ninth day of the fourth month the famine in the city had become so severe that there was no food for the people to eat.
Second, some of the Judeans were killed by the Babylonians even though they had surrendered.
2 Chronicles 36:17 He [Yahweh] brought up against them [the Judeans] the king of the Babylonians, who killed their young men with the sword in the sanctuary, and spared neither young man nor young woman, old man or aged. God handed all of them over to Nebuchadnezzar. 18 He carried to Babylon all the articles from the temple of God, both large and small, and the treasures of the Lord's temple and the treasures of the king and his officials. 19 They set fire to God's temple and broke down the wall of Jerusalem; they burned all the palaces and destroyed everything of value there. 20 He carried into exile to Babylon the remnant, who escaped from the sword, and they became servants to him and his sons until the kingdom of Persia came to power.
So a "remnant," i. e., those who had "escaped from the sword," were taken to Babylon as captives, but others weren't so "lucky."
Jeremiah 52:24 The commander of the [babylonian] guard took as prisoners Seraiah the chief priest, Zephaniah the priest next in rank and the three doorkeepers. 25 Of those still in the city, he took the officer in charge of the fighting men, and seven royal advisers. He also took the secretary who was chief officer in charge of conscripting the people of the land and sixty of his men who were found in the city. 26 Nebuzaradan the commander took them all and brought them to the king of Babylon at Riblah. 27 There at Riblah, in the land of Hamath, the king had them executed. So Judah went into captivity, away from her land.
This captivity, by the way, was not the big deal that Mr. Miller later tried to make it when he referred to "considerable" numbers of captives who were taken to Babylon. The number of Judean captives taken to Babylon at this time was just 832, and the number of Jewish captives that Nebuchadnezzar took to Babylon altogether--on three different occasions--was only 4,600.
Jeremiah 52:28 This is the number of the people Nebuchadnezzar carried into exile: in the seventh year, 3,023 Jews; 29 in Nebuchadnezzar's eighteenth year, 832 people from Jerusalem; 30 in his twenty-third year, 745 Jews taken into exile by Nebuzaradan the commander of the imperial guard. There were 4,600 people in all.
Biblical writers often fixed the size of Judean armies in the hundreds of thousands (2 Chron. 25:5; 2 Chron. 26:12-13), and when Pekah of Israel invaded Judah, he killed 120,000 "in one day" and, as noted earlier, took 200,000 captive (2 Chron. 28:6-8), yet somehow when the Judeans surrendered to Nebuchadnezzar after a siege of about 18 months, only 832 were taken captive. This certainly implies that the number who had been "killed with the sword" (2 Chron. 36:17) was substantial and that those who saved their lives by surrendering to the Babylonians weren't quite so many as Mr. Miller would have his readers believe.
Mr. Miller may counter that 2 Kings 24:14-16 claims that Nebuchadnezzar took 18,000 captives to Babylon after his first sacking of Jerusalem, but if he does, he will need to explain why the "inspired, inerrant word of God" said in the text quoted above from Jeremiah that 3,023 captives were taken to Babylon at this time, but the writer of 2 Kings said that 18,000 were taken. This inconsistency merely underscores what I have already noted several times in my replies to Mr. Miller: the Bible is just too inconsistent to consider it the final word on what happened in the matters that Miller has wagged into this discussion.
Whatever Mr. Miller may want to say about this inconsistency, there are good reasons to think that Jeremiah's account of how many captives were taken to Babylon is probably more accurate than the account in 2 Kings 24. For one thing, the numbers in Jeremiah were specific (3,023) as opposed to the round numbers in 2 Kings: 18,000 princes chief men, mighty men of valor, craftsmen, and smiths. We could hardly imagine that these all just happened to number 18,000, so it is more reasonable to think that 3,023 was an exact, official count obtained from Babylonian records (which I will say more about shortly). Second, this counting of the captives (Jeremiah 52:28-30) is missing from the Septuagint version, an indication that these numbers were added later, after the exile, possibly from Babylonian records.
This probability was addressed by Rodger C. Young in his article "When Did Jerusalem Fall?"
Jer 52:28–30 gives the number of captives taken by Nebuchadnezzar in his seventh, eighteenth, and twenty-third years. There is one thing certain about the counting of captives—the captives themselves are in no position to do it. Every king and pharaoh must have had an official assigned to this task, so that the number of those vanquished could be recorded on a stela or in the annals glorifying the king’s exploits. Thus the list of captives in Jer 52:28–30 could not have originated in a Judean record—it came from the official records of Nebuchadnezzar.
Biblical writers were prone to hyperbole, so we see over and over again references to improbably high enemy casualties, such as the 120,000 Judeans that Peka of Israel killed in one day, armies of unlikely size, such as the million-man army of Zerah the Ethiopian (2 Chron. 14:9-15), which king Asa with Yahweh's help defeated. The claim of 18,000 captives taken to Babylon in 2 Kings 24 is far more unlikely than the more realistic number given in Jeremiah 52:29. Despite Mr. Miller's apparent belief, stated below, that nations like Assyria and Babylonia had the "resources and structure to move huge populations around," herding 18,000 captives some 650 miles from Jerusalem to Babylon would have been no easy task, so Jeremiah's 3,023 would be easier to believe.
The sudden switch in Jeremiah 52:28-30 from nonaccession years to accession years is another indication that someone added these verses from a source that used different chronology from what Jeremiah had used throughout his book. The reigns of kings were calculated in some societies from the actual time that they assumed power, whereas others calculated the reigns from the beginning of their calendar year. Nebuchadnezzar succeeded his father in August 605 BC, but the Babylonians calculated reigns from the month of Nisan, which came some seven months later. In terms of accession years, used by Jeremiah and other biblical writers, the first year of Nebuchadnezzar's reign began in August 605 BC, but to the Babylonians, his first year did not begin until Nisan 1, 604 BC.
As just noted, Jeremiah and other biblical writers counted reigns in terms of acession years, so to biblical writers, Nebuchadnezzar's first defeat of Jerusalem occurred in his eighth year and his second defeat in his 19th year.
2 Kings 24:10 At that time the officers of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon advanced on Jerusalem and laid siege to it, 11 and Nebuchadnezzar himself came up to the city while his officers were besieging it. 12 Jehoiachin king of Judah, his mother, his attendants, his nobles and his officials all surrendered to him. In the eighth year of the reign of the king of Babylon, he took Jehoiachin prisoner.
2 Kings 25:8 On the seventh day of the fifth month, in the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, Nebuzaradan commander of the imperial guard, an official of the king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem.
Jeremiah 52:12 On the tenth day of the fifth month, in the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, Nebuzaradan commander of the imperial guard, who served the king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem.
The writer of Kings said that Nebuzaradan came to Jerusalem on the seventh day of the fifth month, whereas Jeremiah said that it was the 10th day of the fifth month. This is just one of those biblical inconsistencies for which no satisfactory solution has yet been found, but otherwise the two writers agreed on the date. It happened in the 19th year of king Nebuchadnezzar. Both writers were using accession years, because to the Babylonians, as we will soon notice, this was the 18th year of Nebuchadnezzar.
Analyzing the chronology in Jeremiah and 2 Kings would take too much time, but those who take the time to check it will find that Jeremiah consistently used accession-year chronology until "he" came to 52:28-30, where the numbers of the captives were given. Let's look at it again.
Jeremiah 52:28 This is the number of the people Nebuchadnezzar carried into exile: in the seventh year, 3,023 Jews; 29 in Nebuchadnezzar's eighteenth year, 832 people from Jerusalem; 30 in his twenty-third year, 745 Jews taken into exile by Nebuzaradan the commander of the imperial guard. There were 4,600 people in all.
At this point a switch was made from accession years to nonaccession years, because the first captivity occurred in the eighth year of Nebuchadnezzar according to 2 Kings 24:12. Rather than considering this an error, it should be looked upon as different ways of calculating regnal years. The writer of 2 Kings and Jeremiah, up until this point, used accession years, but suddenly the text in Jeremiah switched to nonaccession years. Hence, Nebuchadnezzar's eight year became his seventh, and his 19th year became his 18th. A comparison of 2 Kings 25 and Jeremiah 52 will show that they are so similar in content and wording that common sense tells us that both writers used the same source. However, the information about the number of captives taken from Jerusalem is not in 2 Kings 25, and the 52nd chapter of Jeremiah, which had used accession-year chronology up to this point, suddenly shifted to nonaccesion years. Then immediately after these three verses, Jeremiah 52 switched back to accession years.
Heremiah 52:31 In the thirty-seventh year of the exile of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the year Evil-Merodach became king of Babylon, he released Jehoiachin king of Judah and freed him from prison on the twenty-fifth day of the twelfth month.
The writer of 2 Kings gave the same year for this event.
2 Kings 25:27 In the thirty-seventh year of the exile of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the year Evil-Merodach became king of Babylon, he released Jehoiachin from prison on the twenty-seventh day of the twelfth month.
One writer said that this happened on the 25th day of the month, and the other said that it was the 27th day, but the year is the same. The most sensible explanation for the sudden change to nonaccession years in 52:28-30 is that these verses were added by another writer some time later, and he used nonaccession years instead of accession years. This switch would indicate that whoever this writer was, he was relying on a Babylonian source for his information. Further indication of a nonbiblical source, possibly Babylonian, for this information about the number of captives is found in the reference to the 745 Jews that were taken captive in the 23rd year of Nebuchadnezzar, a claim that is found no where else in the Bible, even though both 2 Kings 25 and 2 Chronicles 36 mentioned the taking of captives on the other two occasions. Although this theory of a Babylonian source for the captive counts cannot be proven conclusively, these variations, if nothing else, are