Religious Genocide in the Old Testament, Deuteronomy 13 & 20, and Numbers 31, 15-17

This post will be the first of several posts examining troubling passages of scripture in the Old Testament.  These verses are rarely read during Sunday Scripture lessons.

Standard Christianity

The Bible

The Bible is an amazing document.  It is amazing for its antiquity, for its content, and that it remains a living keystone of life for many of the people in the world.

However, the inconsistencies and absurdities of the Bible (including multiple creation stories, inconsistencies between the Gospels, anachronisms or general nonsense such as the story of Jonah and the whale) clearly preclude the Bible from being the literal and truthful word of God.  The Old Testament contains any number of fantastical accounts: human lifespans on hundreds of years, the sun stopping in the sky for three days during the battle of Jericho, the plagues of ancient Egypt and parting of the Red Sea, Lot’s wife being turned into a pillar of salt.  If such things are literally true and part of objective reality, why do they not happen today, when the fantastic occurrence can be documented and objectively verified?  Such things do not occur in modern times, and it is unreasonable to think that miracles could only occur in the past.  So, we are left to acknowledge the human authorship of the Bible, and derivation from various pre-biblical texts and traditions. 

But, notwithstanding the human authorship of the Bible and the inclusion of various myths, to what degree should we accept the divinity of the Bible, and its authority over Christian life?  Does the Bible consistently display a standard of morality that should command our obedience and devotion?

Old Testament

The portrait that the Bible gives of God is hardly flattering.  The God of the Old Testament is brutal and fickle, vengeful and prone to human jealousy.  For the moment, I will focus on the book of Deuteronomy. 

Religious Genocide

Consider the horror of the commandments in Deuteronomy 13, for example, which is not often the topic of Sunday’s Scripture reading. 

Deuteronomy 13: Verses 6 – 10: 

“Even your brother or your son or your daughter or the wife you love or your closest friend may secretly encourage you to worship other gods, gods that you and your ancestors have never worshipped.   One of them may encourage you to worship the gods of the people who live near you or the gods of those who live far away.  But do not let him persuade you; do not even listen to him.  Show him no mercy or pity, and do not protect him.  Kill him!  Be the first to stone him, and then let everyone else stone him too.  Stone him to death!”

And continuing, Deuteronomy 13: Verses 12 – 16: 

“When you are living in the towns that the Lord your God gives you, you may hear that some worthless men of your nation have misled the people of their town to worship gods that you have never worshiped before.  If you hear such a rumor, investigate it thoroughly; and if it is true that this evil thing did happen, then kill all the people in that town and all their livestock too.  Destroy that town completely.  Bring together the possessions of the people who live there and pile them up in the town square.  Then burn the town and everything in it as an offering to the Lord your God".     

[Good News Translation.]

So we are given a commandment of religious genocide.  By what standard of ethics can these verses be considered “good”?

Deuteronomy 13 is particularly ironic in the context of Christian fundamentalists.  For these Christians, who believe in the literal truth of the Bible as the word of God, must honor this passage; but for the ancient Hebrew who first recorded this passage, these Christians worshiping Jesus Christ would surely be among those deserving of death.  I wonder how fundamentalists interpret and rationalize that passage.

 

Religious genocide is a repeated theme through the Old Testament, an ever-present directive in the continuous warfare of the Israelites against their neighbors.  The command is repeated in Deuteronomy 20, as I will discuss in a post on tribalism in the Bible.  These verses in Numbers give a clearer look at the practice of genocide.  

 Numbers 31:Verses 15 - 18

"15 Moses said to them, “Have you allowed all the women to live? 16 These women here, on Balaam’s advice, made the Israelites act treacherously against the Lord in the affair of Peor, so that the plague came among the congregation of the Lord. 17 Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. 18 But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves." 

 

The reason for the execution of women who are not virgins may be understood in verse 16; it is possible that the rape of captive women introduced sexually transmitted disease to the Israelites.  Concern for plague may have also influenced the ritual treatment of plunder.  In Numbers 31, plunder taken in the course of genocidal warfare must be purified by fire or water before use by Israelites.

 

 The specifics of the genocidal commandments differ from book to book.  Deuteronomy 20 distinguishes between warfare in lands far away and warfare against neighboring tribes.

 

Deuteronomy 20: Verses 13 - 15
"13 and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword. 14 You may, however, take as your plunder the women, the children, livestock, and everything else in the town, all its spoil. You may enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. 15 Thus you shall treat all the towns that are very far from you, which are not towns of these nations here."

 

But towns and lands near the Israelite's lands are given harsher treatment in the following verses, where the commandment for genocide is complete.
Deuteronomy 20: Verses 16 - 17

"16 But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. 17 Indeed, you shall annihilate them—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded."

[New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition]

 

To me, as a 21st-century American liberal, these genocidal commandments are horrific.  I am baffled by my contemporaries and fellow-countrymen who continue to look to the Bible for guidance in life.  Our recently elected Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, says that the Bible is his worldview.  

"I am a Bible-believing Christian.  Someone asked me today in the media, they said, 'It's curious, people are curious: What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?' I said, 'Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That's my worldview.'"

I don't know whether to be appalled that Johnson doesn't understand the Bible, or worried that he does.

That concludes today's Bible study of rarely-heard Bible verses.

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Originally published on 10/25/2017, updated on 10/31/2023
https://www.businessinsider.com/mike-johnson-earn-his-views-by-reading-the-bible-2023-10