Tribalism
The God of the Bible is very tribal.
The God of the Old Testament is concerned with the well-being of only the faithful among the Jewish people. In Deuteronomy, other people and cultures are
to be swept away with little mercy.
Women prisoners of war are to be forced into marriage with their
captors; cities are to be razed, children to be slaughtered – all for the greater
glory of God.
Deuteronomy 7 describes the conquests to come.
“The Lord your God will bring
you into the land that you are going to occupy, and he will drive many nations
out of it. As you advance, he will drive out seven nations larger and more powerful
than you: the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the
Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 2 When the Lord your God places
these people in your power and you defeat them, you must put them all to death.
Deuteronomy 20 continues.
10 “When you go to attack a
city, first give its people a chance to surrender. 11 If they open the gates
and surrender, they are all to become your slaves and do forced labor for you.
12 But if the people of that city will not surrender, but choose to fight,
surround it with your army. 13 Then, when the Lord your God lets you capture
the city, kill every man in it. 14 You may, however, take for yourselves the
women, the children, the livestock, and everything else in the city. You may
use everything that belongs to your enemies. The Lord has given it to you. 15
That is how you are to deal with those cities that are far away from the land
you will settle in.
16 “But when you capture cities
in the land that the Lord your God is giving you, kill everyone. 17 Completely
destroy all the people: the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the
Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord ordered you to do. 18 Kill
them, so that they will not make you sin against the Lord by teaching you to do
all the disgusting things that they do in the worship of their gods.
Many other passages in the Old Testament deal with war against
neighboring tribes, and in particular, wars of conquest and genocide “in the
land that the Lord your God is giving you.”
There are too many passages to include in a blog post. But the essence of the passages is that the
other people have no right to live, no right to their lands and the cities they
have built, no right to live peacefully in their own homes. Does the behavior of the Old Testament God
pass the test of reason and justice?
The words of Deuteronomy are disturbingly close to the Muslim
fundamentalist ideas and practices of the Islamic State. The ethic expressed in the bible calls on
other cultures to submit to the Israelites and the Jewish God or be
crushed. The script is the same, whether
we are considering the Israelites, Alexander the Great, the Romans or the
Mongol hordes. The God of the Old
Testament operates on the same level – submit or die.
