You know what, get back to me on the historicity of Hebrews after reading this.
I see the point that post is making, but I’m not just blowing air here. I have a degree in near-eastern history, and I studied with an archeologist who works on this period. None of us were theists, or remotely interested in defending or even discussing any modern religion. The historical books of the Hebrew bible are a relatively reliable historical record, so far as we can tell, but the fact is we just don’t have that much detail about the period in which it was written, so mostly we just don’t know. Too many of our sources are (as EY points out) singular. However the historicity of the first-temple (900-587 BCE) Israelites very roughly as we find them in the HB is not really subject to much doubt. There are people who argue that the whole bible was written much later, and the history of Israel was just made up, but this theory is taken about as seriously by archeologists and historians as is ID by biologists. Needless to say, pretty much everything from the Torah that’s plausible (like the period of slavery) is pretty much unconfirmable. And no one takes seriously the implausible stuff, like Abraham or Noah.
I’m throwing authority at you here for two reasons. 1) the real argument consists in taking you through a bunch of archeology and historiography and I don’t feel like taking the time and 2) neither do you. You don’t, I suspect, actually care at all about first temple Israelite culture. You care about how modern Abrahamic religions are false and politically destructive. Granted! But that claim doesn’t have anything to do with history, and thinking that arguments against modern theists constitute an understanding of an ancient culture is not justifiable.
My real point however was one of caution. You’re exactly right to point out that by the standards of Christians or Jews or Muslims, the god of the Hebrew bible is savage. But you have no empirical standing to make claims about the morality or practicality of first temple Israelites, because pretty much no one does.
I doubt that Israel/Jacob, Isac, Ishmael or Abraham existed, and I doubt either group’s direct descent from them.
Yeah, who knows. But I call them Israelites because they called themselves that. I see no reason to make a point of it. And ‘Israelites’ may happen to have been a Greek term, but today it’s just the way you translate that Hebrew phrase into English.
You make some very good points and provide me with plausible background for them, so I’ll updateon that.
Still, I don’t remember judging the morality of “first temple Israelites”. If I had to emit a conjecture based on currently available evidence, I’d say that the very fact that their religious books threatened to punish them for their compassion meant that they were, in fact, quite capable of compassion.
As for the lack of Art-Of-War-Compliance of the mythical group featured in the Bible, it would be as unfair to fault them for that as it would be to complain that they didn’t use some other rational-practical form of thought; that kind of stuff only seemsobvious in retrospect. (This is so true that I currently have it as a rule of thumb that, if something doesn’t seem obvious in retrospect, and still seems wondrous and amazing, it means either that I didn’t fully understand it or that there’s something wrong with it).
Okay, I’ll forget about the ‘judging the morality of first temple Israelites’ thing. For fun, let’s talk about the Joshua ‘kill all the cattle and everything that breathes’ story. I’m going to make an educated guess as to the reasoning behind some of Joshua’s behavior on the basis of what I know about warfare several centuries after the time of the action of the story (when, in any case, this story was probably written).
Joshua is the story of the eponymous warlord of the Israelites after their arrival in the Levant and after the death of Moses. The Israelites had been living as nomads and had decided, for whatever reason, that the Levant was the place they would settle down. Unfortunately, the Levant was occupied and controlled from several city-states ruled by kings. Joshua’s army totally annihilates (down to the cattle) a couple of cities, Jericho and Hazor. The question is why.
The Israelites had until now been living as a nomadic tribe, moving through pretty poor territory and subsisting largely by pillage or by the contributions of or extorsions from allies. This means that Joshua’s army has no redoubt, and no consistant source of food or men or materials for fighting. His aim is to settle the Levant permanently, and to do so he has to oust the occupying people.
This means he cannot tolerate a series of long sieges: his army is living off the crops sown by the people he is attacking and if his invasion of a certain territory lasts more than a year, his army will starve. People need to surrender, and surrender immediately. Joshua has to find a way to communicate this message to his enemies, and in these days the only form of mass communication is to do something interesting enough to be gossiped about.
What do you do if you want to convince a whole region full of people that the game has changed, and that you’re no longer pillaging and threatening? So long as people think you’re coming for wealth and food, they’ll fight you because they think you’re making a cost/benefit analysis: if they cause you more trouble then their cattle are worth, you’ll go away. So long as everyone is thinking about warfare in terms of materials gained and lost, you’re pirate and a nomad and they’re the homeowners. But you’re trying to move in, and quickly, so you need to send a serious message.
The way to do this is to kill every living thing in a city. Everything. If you keep the cattle, then people will think you’re after the cattle. But if you ‘offer the city up to god’ and kill every living thing, that’s when people stop thinking of you as a pirate. That’s when they start realizing that they need to leave, and leave now. Because you’re not going to be satisfied with wealth, and you’re not going to take your time. You’re the unstoppable terror, and you’re here for good.
Joshua sends this message twice. First when he arrives in the region, with Jericho. Second, when the kings of the northern part of the Levant (the really nice part) get together to fight back, with Hazor. Fighting back is not allowed. Each time, the total annihilation was about sending a message, about saying ‘Stop fighting. We’re not going to be bought off, or sated by plunder. It’s over for you. Get. Out.’ Again, Joshua needs to send this message fast and loud because he has, tops, a few years before every Israelite is a slave or dead or scattered to foreign parts. The enemy needs to feel like it’s fighting a storm, or a god. Something with no pity, and no mercy, something that does not rest or negotiate.
I’m no student of strategy, but this doesn’t seem to me to be foolish or irrational. It also doesn’t seem to me that this involves anything like ‘turning off your morality’. Was any of this immoral? I dunno, this is kind of how warfare works, and for Joshua, it was this or death. It seems to me to be a well thought out strategy, and one that was very successful. Within a generation, the Israelites ruled the Levant. Within five, they were one of the greatest regional powers, capable of sitting at the table with Egypt and Babylon. And the civilization they established became one of the greatest cultural heavyweights in history, probably matched in the ancient world only by vedic India and classical Athens.
Yes, you’ve reinvented the classic economic/game-theoretic justification for total war—pour encourager les autres. This reasoning was more or less the explicit goal of the Mongols when they did things like build pyramids of skulls, and I’ve read economic analyses of New World pirates in which the Jolly Roger served a similar intimidation function. The tactic works best when coordination is hard, because if the intended victims can coordinate, such extremism may prompt the formation of an effective alliance against oneself even by parties who would’ve preferred to remain neutral.
The tactic works best when coordination is hard, because if the intended victims can coordinate, such extremism may prompt the formation of an effective alliance against oneself even by parties who would’ve preferred to remain neutral.
This in fact seems to have happened to Joshua several times, though he managed to fight his way out of it both by way of some powerful alliances of his own, and by taking the defensive in these exchanges. One of his major advantages seems to have been that though he could not outlast his enemies year-to-year (having no city of his own), he could always outlast them within a given year, since the locals had to return home to plant and harvest crops and he didn’t. It was probably touch and go for a bit.
… You’ve succeeded at breaking through my rationality. I am so horrified by this line of thought that I cannot even begin to try to pick it apart. I’ll have to let this fester in my subconscious mind for a while, until all the screaming dies out and productive thought can take place.
The premise, inimical to the modern ear, that makes all of the above rational is ‘nothing matters but my people. Nothing.’ The problem with that principle is not obvious, however. We’re talking about a period which long predates the earliest emergence of the idea of a common humanity. That idea is hard won and hard kept and not at all obvious. I only half believe it myself: I’d drive a bulldozer through a crowd of people to save my baby son. I wouldn’t hesitate one tiny little bit.
ETA: But it’s not as if they didn’t think about this kind of thing quite deeply either. Once you forget about the relationship the bible has to modern religions, I think you can see it for the extremely interesting and profound book that it is (when it’s not being super boring, anyway). The bible, especially Genesis, is anything but moralizing. It’s very much a story about what it means to be part of a family, and this isn’t all happiness and roses. The first thing that happens to the mythical original family is fratricide, though the characters of genesis do slowly, over generations, figure out how not to destroy each other the first chance they get. The bible chronicles a profound struggle with morality and identity in a world (by our standards) so deadly and strange we’re often just unable to believe it. The bible’s status today as a fixed and univocal moral tablet is both absurd and irrelevant to the actual book.
And these are the people we understand and identify with enough to hold them to moral standards at all. The Babylonians were...like aliens. There’s a period before the Persians came where the following is all we know.
1) The most fertile region in the near east was suddenly and totally depopulated.
2) Every religious object in the entire region was moved to Babylon and covered in sacrifices.
There’s no report of a plague, or famine, or anything. That’s all we know. A decade later, the Persians came and took the city without any real struggle, and that was the end of Babylon.
I’d drive a bulldozer through a crowd of people to save my baby son. I wouldn’t hesitate one tiny little bit.
What’s worse, going through another pregnancy and another time and resources teaching and caring for a new child, or murdering a truckload of people to preserve the one that already exists? Unless these are exceptionally evil people, the answer should be obvious.
You don’t, I suspect, actually care at all about first temple Israelite culture. You care about how modern Abrahamic religions are false and politically destructive. Granted! But that claim doesn’t have anything to do with history, and thinking that arguments against modern theists constitute an understanding of an ancient culture is not justifiable.
Just for the record, I do care: anthropology is, I believe, an utterly curcial subject, and understanding what humans are capable of, how they invented different systems and methods to live together and apart, to associate and to resolve conflict—I think that’s absolutely essential if one wants to look at the world and at oneself with clear eyes.
I see the point that post is making, but I’m not just blowing air here. I have a degree in near-eastern history, and I studied with an archeologist who works on this period. None of us were theists, or remotely interested in defending or even discussing any modern religion. The historical books of the Hebrew bible are a relatively reliable historical record, so far as we can tell, but the fact is we just don’t have that much detail about the period in which it was written, so mostly we just don’t know. Too many of our sources are (as EY points out) singular. However the historicity of the first-temple (900-587 BCE) Israelites very roughly as we find them in the HB is not really subject to much doubt. There are people who argue that the whole bible was written much later, and the history of Israel was just made up, but this theory is taken about as seriously by archeologists and historians as is ID by biologists. Needless to say, pretty much everything from the Torah that’s plausible (like the period of slavery) is pretty much unconfirmable. And no one takes seriously the implausible stuff, like Abraham or Noah.
I’m throwing authority at you here for two reasons. 1) the real argument consists in taking you through a bunch of archeology and historiography and I don’t feel like taking the time and 2) neither do you. You don’t, I suspect, actually care at all about first temple Israelite culture. You care about how modern Abrahamic religions are false and politically destructive. Granted! But that claim doesn’t have anything to do with history, and thinking that arguments against modern theists constitute an understanding of an ancient culture is not justifiable.
My real point however was one of caution. You’re exactly right to point out that by the standards of Christians or Jews or Muslims, the god of the Hebrew bible is savage. But you have no empirical standing to make claims about the morality or practicality of first temple Israelites, because pretty much no one does.
Yeah, who knows. But I call them Israelites because they called themselves that. I see no reason to make a point of it. And ‘Israelites’ may happen to have been a Greek term, but today it’s just the way you translate that Hebrew phrase into English.
You make some very good points and provide me with plausible background for them, so I’ll update on that.
Still, I don’t remember judging the morality of “first temple Israelites”. If I had to emit a conjecture based on currently available evidence, I’d say that the very fact that their religious books threatened to punish them for their compassion meant that they were, in fact, quite capable of compassion.
My working hypothesis is that they were not-evil-mutant not-chosen-by-god normal humans whose morality had to be religiously/ideologically turned off to help them perform atrocities. All their religion and the excesses, both in history and myth, are explainable by a sum of perfectly standard, naturally-arising human biases that manifested a certain way.
As for the lack of Art-Of-War-Compliance of the mythical group featured in the Bible, it would be as unfair to fault them for that as it would be to complain that they didn’t use some other rational-practical form of thought; that kind of stuff only seems obvious in retrospect. (This is so true that I currently have it as a rule of thumb that, if something doesn’t seem obvious in retrospect, and still seems wondrous and amazing, it means either that I didn’t fully understand it or that there’s something wrong with it).
Okay, I’ll forget about the ‘judging the morality of first temple Israelites’ thing. For fun, let’s talk about the Joshua ‘kill all the cattle and everything that breathes’ story. I’m going to make an educated guess as to the reasoning behind some of Joshua’s behavior on the basis of what I know about warfare several centuries after the time of the action of the story (when, in any case, this story was probably written).
Joshua is the story of the eponymous warlord of the Israelites after their arrival in the Levant and after the death of Moses. The Israelites had been living as nomads and had decided, for whatever reason, that the Levant was the place they would settle down. Unfortunately, the Levant was occupied and controlled from several city-states ruled by kings. Joshua’s army totally annihilates (down to the cattle) a couple of cities, Jericho and Hazor. The question is why.
The Israelites had until now been living as a nomadic tribe, moving through pretty poor territory and subsisting largely by pillage or by the contributions of or extorsions from allies. This means that Joshua’s army has no redoubt, and no consistant source of food or men or materials for fighting. His aim is to settle the Levant permanently, and to do so he has to oust the occupying people.
This means he cannot tolerate a series of long sieges: his army is living off the crops sown by the people he is attacking and if his invasion of a certain territory lasts more than a year, his army will starve. People need to surrender, and surrender immediately. Joshua has to find a way to communicate this message to his enemies, and in these days the only form of mass communication is to do something interesting enough to be gossiped about.
What do you do if you want to convince a whole region full of people that the game has changed, and that you’re no longer pillaging and threatening? So long as people think you’re coming for wealth and food, they’ll fight you because they think you’re making a cost/benefit analysis: if they cause you more trouble then their cattle are worth, you’ll go away. So long as everyone is thinking about warfare in terms of materials gained and lost, you’re pirate and a nomad and they’re the homeowners. But you’re trying to move in, and quickly, so you need to send a serious message.
The way to do this is to kill every living thing in a city. Everything. If you keep the cattle, then people will think you’re after the cattle. But if you ‘offer the city up to god’ and kill every living thing, that’s when people stop thinking of you as a pirate. That’s when they start realizing that they need to leave, and leave now. Because you’re not going to be satisfied with wealth, and you’re not going to take your time. You’re the unstoppable terror, and you’re here for good.
Joshua sends this message twice. First when he arrives in the region, with Jericho. Second, when the kings of the northern part of the Levant (the really nice part) get together to fight back, with Hazor. Fighting back is not allowed. Each time, the total annihilation was about sending a message, about saying ‘Stop fighting. We’re not going to be bought off, or sated by plunder. It’s over for you. Get. Out.’ Again, Joshua needs to send this message fast and loud because he has, tops, a few years before every Israelite is a slave or dead or scattered to foreign parts. The enemy needs to feel like it’s fighting a storm, or a god. Something with no pity, and no mercy, something that does not rest or negotiate.
I’m no student of strategy, but this doesn’t seem to me to be foolish or irrational. It also doesn’t seem to me that this involves anything like ‘turning off your morality’. Was any of this immoral? I dunno, this is kind of how warfare works, and for Joshua, it was this or death. It seems to me to be a well thought out strategy, and one that was very successful. Within a generation, the Israelites ruled the Levant. Within five, they were one of the greatest regional powers, capable of sitting at the table with Egypt and Babylon. And the civilization they established became one of the greatest cultural heavyweights in history, probably matched in the ancient world only by vedic India and classical Athens.
Yes, you’ve reinvented the classic economic/game-theoretic justification for total war—pour encourager les autres. This reasoning was more or less the explicit goal of the Mongols when they did things like build pyramids of skulls, and I’ve read economic analyses of New World pirates in which the Jolly Roger served a similar intimidation function. The tactic works best when coordination is hard, because if the intended victims can coordinate, such extremism may prompt the formation of an effective alliance against oneself even by parties who would’ve preferred to remain neutral.
This in fact seems to have happened to Joshua several times, though he managed to fight his way out of it both by way of some powerful alliances of his own, and by taking the defensive in these exchanges. One of his major advantages seems to have been that though he could not outlast his enemies year-to-year (having no city of his own), he could always outlast them within a given year, since the locals had to return home to plant and harvest crops and he didn’t. It was probably touch and go for a bit.
… You’ve succeeded at breaking through my rationality. I am so horrified by this line of thought that I cannot even begin to try to pick it apart. I’ll have to let this fester in my subconscious mind for a while, until all the screaming dies out and productive thought can take place.
The premise, inimical to the modern ear, that makes all of the above rational is ‘nothing matters but my people. Nothing.’ The problem with that principle is not obvious, however. We’re talking about a period which long predates the earliest emergence of the idea of a common humanity. That idea is hard won and hard kept and not at all obvious. I only half believe it myself: I’d drive a bulldozer through a crowd of people to save my baby son. I wouldn’t hesitate one tiny little bit.
ETA: But it’s not as if they didn’t think about this kind of thing quite deeply either. Once you forget about the relationship the bible has to modern religions, I think you can see it for the extremely interesting and profound book that it is (when it’s not being super boring, anyway). The bible, especially Genesis, is anything but moralizing. It’s very much a story about what it means to be part of a family, and this isn’t all happiness and roses. The first thing that happens to the mythical original family is fratricide, though the characters of genesis do slowly, over generations, figure out how not to destroy each other the first chance they get. The bible chronicles a profound struggle with morality and identity in a world (by our standards) so deadly and strange we’re often just unable to believe it. The bible’s status today as a fixed and univocal moral tablet is both absurd and irrelevant to the actual book.
And these are the people we understand and identify with enough to hold them to moral standards at all. The Babylonians were...like aliens. There’s a period before the Persians came where the following is all we know.
1) The most fertile region in the near east was suddenly and totally depopulated. 2) Every religious object in the entire region was moved to Babylon and covered in sacrifices.
There’s no report of a plague, or famine, or anything. That’s all we know. A decade later, the Persians came and took the city without any real struggle, and that was the end of Babylon.
What’s worse, going through another pregnancy and another time and resources teaching and caring for a new child, or murdering a truckload of people to preserve the one that already exists? Unless these are exceptionally evil people, the answer should be obvious.
Those aren’t accurate descriptions of the options.
You’re the one who lay down this thought experiment: it falls upon you to also accurately describe the options.
Just for the record, I do care: anthropology is, I believe, an utterly curcial subject, and understanding what humans are capable of, how they invented different systems and methods to live together and apart, to associate and to resolve conflict—I think that’s absolutely essential if one wants to look at the world and at oneself with clear eyes.