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From: david@ssc-vax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: More on the Midianites (groan)
Message-ID: <746@ssc-vax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 11-Jan-84 20:06:56 EST
Article-I.D.: ssc-vax.746
Posted: Wed Jan 11 20:06:56 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 14-Jan-84 02:50:10 EST
Organization: Boeing Aerospace, Seattle
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> Tim Maroney's third response:
> You are correct, Dave:  my quote IS out of context.  Here is a
> representative quote from Numbers 25: [quote here - Dave]
> (Note in this last
> sentence that Israel is commanded to perform human sacrifice to appease
> their wrathful deity.)

There is a difference between useless sacrifice and just punishment. 

> It doesn't seem to me that the offense of apostacy is deserving of the death
> penalty.  The people freely went over to the rites of the Moabites.  This is
> hardly a capital offense.  Or do you really think that we should pass a law
> imposing the death penalty against those who leave their religion, or those
> who preach any religion other than Christianity or Judaism?

Tim seems determined to convince us that the Midianites were not as bad as
they seemed.  I have already pointed out what they were: they sacrificed the
children to their god; they seduced Israel to sin against their God; they
attempted to weaken and thereby destroy Israel by perverse means.  This is
a summary, but I explained these in my earlier article.  It is not as if the
Israelites innocently left to join in the festivities;  they were tricked and
decieved into committing evil (in a sense, they were being infected by a
disease). 

>Nor is fornication to be considered a crime deserving of execution.

This may be argued (but not by me, and not here).  But you have to examine
the results of this fornication.  Balak was trying to destroy Israel;  again,
refer to original article.  Also, refer to the last verse of Numbers 25.

> Also, it has not escaped my attention that in Gen. 38:15-19, Judah practices
> solicitation of a prostitute quite openly and without the slightest qualm.
> His later embarrassment is only over having been tricked by a whore, not in
> having used one.  In Gen. 49:8-12, Israel himself deems Judah a praiseworthy
> man.  Is this yet another example of moral monopoly, that is, "It's OK if we
> do it, but no one else can"?

Tamar pretended to be one of the "kedeshot" (religious prostitutes) and tricked
Judah into believing she was a whore. 

This demonstrates the depth of immorality the Chosen People had fallen to.
Earlier, we find that he marries a pagan Canaanite, starting a chain of sinful
events.  His two sons, Er and Onan, died without leaving children.  

"The contrast between Joseph and his elder brother would be more sharp when
Joseph revealed his behaviour in the hour of temptation.  Judah needed to
become a new man to be pleasing in the Lord's sight" (Dr. Kyle Yates)

> The early Christians were accused of the selfsame offense by their enemies,
> as were the Jews in the Middle Ages and in the 1930's.  Their enemies were
> lying.  Similarly, when the enemies of the Midianites said this, they were
> almost certainly lying.

Huh?  How so?  I am no logician, but I believe that there is a minor flaw
in your reasoning here....

> If you are going to treat blatant propaganda as
> fact, we aren't going to get anywhere.

The same holds true in reverse.  I thought that, for the sake of argument, we
had accepted that a) God exists and b) the OT is an accurate transcription.
I may as well quit right here if you really believe this; it can be used
against any scriptural reference I make, and there is no defense to it.

> However, even if these tales were
> true (which I do not think is the case, but which I will concede for the
> sake of argument), the Midianites could not have killed as many Midianite
> children as the armies of Israel did in Num. 31.  "For the crime of killing
> your babies, we will kill your babies"?  Absurd.  You're the one defending
> slaughter, not me.

We don't know how many children they sacrificed.  Anyway, this seems like a
good time to bring up Tim's refusal to reckon with the prerogative of a
righteous Sovereign to judge sin (ref Ex. 20:5).  And Tim makes it appear that
the Israelites a) only killed babies (false) and b) only because the
Midianites killed babies (false).  As I explained, this was the lesser of two
evils.

There was a recent movie that depicted a woman in WWII forced to choose between
saving only one of her two children.  With Tim's view, the woman can be
considered "evil" because she is "ordering the slaughter" of her own baby.  This
analogy is not perfect, but it represents the kind of decision God had to make.
Granted, there is the problem of "omnipotence" here, but that is a separate
argument.  

> Your reasoning about the destruction of the Midianites for the salvation of
> Israel is worthy of a true Stalinist or Nazi.

This is a stale argument, and used by many of the other responses to my
earlier article ("Dave would make a good Nazi").  You are equating the evil
Midianites to the suffering Jews, and the Israelites to the Nazis.  This 
argument has a lot of emotional appeal, but this analogy isn't good enough
to be used as a model comparing Hitler and God, or me to a Nazi.  

> The principle of the purge is
> the same in all three cases -- slay an unliked people so that a liked people
> can prosper.  I don't buy it from them, and I'm not buying it from you.

Unliked?  Only in the sense that a murderer is "unliked".

> So what do we have by our examination of Num. 25?  All we find is that the
> worshippers of another religion were popular, so Yahweh had them all killed.

That is not all I have found about the Midianites (weren't we here before?)
Tim, your insistence of the innocence of the Midianites is getting a little old.

> A few chapters later, with Israel firmly planted in Heshbon, many miles from
> Midian, and having had no further dealings with the Midianites, Yahweh
> decided that killing a few of them hadn't been enough, and ordered Israel to
> march over 100 miles south and wipe them out to the last person.

I think you have your history mistaken; in 25, it is the Israelite offenders
who were killed.  The Midianites were killed in 31.

>  Their only
> crime was that they worshipped a different religion; this was apparently
> considered enough to justify genocide.

Not again!

> One last point in favor of the Midianites.  Moses' wife Zipporah was a
> Midianite, and there is no suggestion that she is "vile" by the standards of
> Yahweh, although the prejudices of some Israelites turn them against Moses
> for marrying her.  Furthermore, Zipporah's father Jethro, also a Midianite,
> gives Moses good advice in Ex. 18:13-27, and is generally painted in a
> positive fashion by the book's author.  Clearly the people of Midian were
> not beyond hope of redemption if these two individuals came from their
> number!  By the way, I hope Jethro got out of Midian in time, since it says
> that all the males were put to death.

Moses has been criticized for this act, but Jethro conditioned his advice
with "and God commanded thee so"; we may assume that Moses inquired of the
Lord here.  At any rate, we find just earlier the passage where Jethro was
"converted", shall we say.

I don't think this argument can be used to justify the Midianites.  I might
say it is like saying Jethro is like a Nazi soldier who defects.  This
hardly puts the Nazis in a good light.

> All this is to some extent beside the point, which is that no possible crime
> justifies actions such as depicted in Num. 25 and 31.  Brutal slaughter of
> civilians is completely unacceptable to any reasonable moral standard.
> Yahweh's ordering it puts him on a par with Hitler, Stalin, Manson, and
> Calley.  This is a leader that should not be followed under any
> circumstances; he has proven himself unfit to hold power by his brutal
> abuses.

"Brutal slaughter", "Hitler, Stalin, Manson, and Calley", and "brutal abuses"
are, again, very emotional appeals, but let me get to the root of Tim's
argument: "No crime justifies death".  I would conclude that you believe the
death penalty should never be used.  This has been a hotly debated issue for
some time (and maybe doesn't belong in net.religion).  I would rather turn
this argument over to the lawyers and statisticians who know more about
crime rates than I.  But I do feel that, for certain crimes, a man should
forfeit his life.

> Finding out how small was the "crime" of the Midianites only makes
> this fact all the plainer.

Here we go again with the "innocent" Midianites....

> Thank you, Dave, for [blah, blah, blah - Dave]... 

Right.

	-- David Norris
	-- uw-beaver!ssc-vax!david