There’s this very interesting trope being forged on TVT, and I found it very interesting from a rationalist standpoint, especially the examples involving God… What an asshole.
Showing Compassion To Designated Enemies; A Punishable Offense
There’s this very interesting trope being forged on TVT, and I found it very interesting from a rationalist standpoint, especially the examples involving God… What an asshole.
Interesting link. Again from a rationalist standpoint it seems to be the correct move (at times, with the same conditions that apply to punishment in general as well as a few others).
As someone who’s studied The Art Of War intensively, and to whom “defeat means friendship” (as long as the opposition does feel thoroughly defeated) is a matter of course, I find that incentivizing unforgiveness and wanton destruction (I mean, seriously, they even had to kill the cattle? How is that in any way practical or rational?) is not only aesthetically dissonant, but wasteful and silly as hell. Going out of one’s way to ensure some don’t get a proper ritual, or otherwise kicking the defeated while they are down, also strikes me as disgusting, wasteful, and, frankly, cartoonishly over the top.
They should make a piece of fiction with a villain whose actions mirror those of YHWH perfectly. Have him blow a fortress to pieces and then demand that everything that breathes within be slaughtered. Have him kill some of his followers for disobeying some arbitrary rule, then have him kill many more just because they complained about it.
With his mind.
That’s not an omnibenevolent deity, that’s a fucking Dungeon Keeper.
See how many people notice the references. See how many identify this overlord as a vile villain before being informed he’s patterned after The God.
As someone who’s studied The Art Of War intensively, and to whom “defeat means friendship” (as long as the opposition does feel thoroughly defeated) is a matter of course,
Do you remember the other parts too? The parts that don’t feel so warm and fuzzy? Or other effective military strategies? Defeat rather seldom means friendship when it comes to pre-established enemies, whether in The Art of War or outside of it. The generals discussed in The Art of War commanded their soldiers to kill other soldiers (and their leaders) and conquer strategic resources. The Art of War gives instructions on how to do so more effectively, with more compliance from soldiers and, where possible, in such a way that the enemy does not fight back significantly.
I find that incentivizing unforgiveness and wanton destruction (I mean, seriously, they even had to kill the cattle? How is that in any way practical or rational?) is not only aesthetically dissonant, but wasteful and silly as hell. Going out of one’s way to ensure some don’t get a proper ritual, or otherwise kicking the defeated while they are down, also strikes me as disgusting, wasteful, and, frankly, cartoonishly over the top.
Yes, God is silly as well as a dick (and non-existent). But looking at the strategy from the perspective of instrumental rationality interest rather than from the perspective of indignant atheism the cattle-killing silliness is not especially relevant. Most people agree that it is better to keep the cattle than kill them. What is more interesting is just when it is instrumentally rational to apply force (be that political, economic or physical) against those that are assisting a particularly troublesome enemy.
The details matter a lot of course. There are cases where it obvious that is instrumentally rational to kill those who are assisting the enemy while there are cases where that would be outright self destructive. On one side of the line there is the sole provider of particularly advanced weaponry to the enemy, who does not trade with you and who has no significant social alliances and on the other side there is an welfare charity who provides medical assistance indiscriminately worldwide, is loved by all and protected by an alliance of powerful nations. In between things are less simple.
Do you remember the other parts too? The parts that don’t feel so warm and fuzzy?
I don’t recall ever mentioning anything fuzzy or warm; It’s simply a pragmatic matter of taking the human factor into account. You simply try to fight and destroy as little as possible because it’s expensive, risky, and creates ill will in the long tern. Napoleon and the armies of the Spanish Empire are excellent examples of how to win every battle, piss everyone off, and never win the peace.
Of course, if you do need to crush, kill, destroy, do it quickly and decisively, with no hesitation or pussyfooting. Therein lies the difference between being respectably compassionate, and being a sentimental fool begging to be abused.
The Art of War isn’t just about winning battles or wars, it’s about winning the peace that comes afterwards; it’s not just about beating your foe, but about getting them to stay beaten, and, in fact, help you out.
And, in particular, Scorched Earth tactics are extremely costly, and they are only effective in very specific circumstances.
As for the Bible examples cited there, I do not see how they are practical in any way, shape, or form. I can see the point of some of the other examples, but most of them are about helping out or standing up for someone who has been reduced to complete harmlessness and can’t be a threat anymore. This is most egregious when the defeated enemy in question is a freaking corpse.
As for the Bible examples cited there, I do not see how they are practical in any way, shape, or form.
God forbid I find myself defending the morality of the Hebrew Bible, but it seems to me you’re making a claim here (i.e. by implication, that the behavior of the Israelites was impractical/silly/evil) from a very poor epistemic position. The details of warfare, religious ritual, and the politics of conquest of that period are thin, and it’s not even clear that the story in Joshua (for example) represents an historical event (we have, and expect, no archeological record of this war), and so the practical purpose of the passage you cite may be entirely other than recommending or reporting a certain mode of warfare. Even if it is making such a report or recommendation, we simply lack the details to evaluate it.
Essentially, we have no idea whether or not what’s being described is silly or cunning or even moral or immoral (unless maybe we’re deontologists, but I doubt that). Speaking so confidently about something where confidence is so ill warrented is often a symptom of being mind-killed on a particular subject. And we should expect that as atheists, we are very, very likely to be mind-killed about biblical historiography (maybe right, as well, but mind-killed nonetheless).
Pointing out the horrors of the bible is a worthwhile way to put the morality of theists in tension with their holy book. But once that rhetorical work is done, the epistemically cautious consequentialist has absolutely no business throwing invective at the bible without a thorough study of the period being written about. Lord knows why you’d bother with that though.
″ the behavior of the Israelites was impractical/silly/evil”
I made no such claim, unless you mean the fictional Hebrews in the book rather than the collection of tribes the Romans diaspora’d many, many centuries later. Even then, what would you expect of the poor guys, when they’re being terrorized and cajoled into being evil by Kira-on-steroids?
However, from what we know of the behaviour of the Judeans under Roman rule, practicality and pragmatism weren’t top priorities for them, and their Scripture probably wasn’t a very sane source of advice on that matter.
More relevantly, some people still (claim to) take their ethics from the Bible, the Old Testament is very popular in the USA, and rhetorics of an Angry God Striking Down Evil and Smiting The Heathen, and of Lambs not Going Astray from Flocks (what a horrifying metaphor, being compared to cattle, of the stupidest sort no less!) are still floating around, influencing the way politics is done, whispering in the subconscious and blaring in the loudspeakers.
That is, of course, not the only culture that was influenced by a book that not only advocates genocide, but demands that, when it be done, it be carried out thoroughly. The Massacre of St. Barthelemy, some of the actions of Cromwell, and think of the horrifying, nauseating, vertiginous irony of Old Testament memes having been a factor, no matter how small, in the intellectual genesis of the Final Solution.
unless you mean the fictional Hebrews in the book rather than the collection of tribes the Romans diaspora’d many, many centuries later.
I mean the Israelites! That’s what these people, whose historicity is not in doubt, called themselves. They’re the ones that wrote the bulk of the biblical material between around 900 and 587 BCE.
The Massacre of St. Barthelemy...
Maybe, though this strikes me as conjecture. I also don’t see how it’s related to claims you seem to be making about the authors of the bible and their people.
You know what, get back to me on the historicity of Hebrews after reading this. I’m not adverse to shifting my priors on that topic; please refer me to a work that does not refer to the Bible as a starting point for its hypotheses, if that’s at all possible.
Until I have a Bible-independent framework on how to think of the ethnic conglomerate that claim to be the Descent of Israel, I prefer to assume it is all fiction as a working hypothesis, and start from there.
This is why also why I am reticent to call them Israelites, despite them calling themselves something like that, just the same way I wouldn’t call Arabs Ismaelites; I doubt that Israel/Jacob, Isac, Ishmael or Abraham existed, and I doubt either group’s direct descent from them. I certainly doubt that any human gained the title of Israel after wrestling with God and winning.
As for them calling themselves Israelites, allow me to be a little pedantic here; they called themselves B’nei Yisrael; Israelites is a greek term.
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.
Showing Compassion To Designated Enemies; A Punishable Offense
There’s this very interesting trope being forged on TVT, and I found it very interesting from a rationalist standpoint, especially the examples involving God… What an asshole.
Interesting link. Again from a rationalist standpoint it seems to be the correct move (at times, with the same conditions that apply to punishment in general as well as a few others).
As someone who’s studied The Art Of War intensively, and to whom “defeat means friendship” (as long as the opposition does feel thoroughly defeated) is a matter of course, I find that incentivizing unforgiveness and wanton destruction (I mean, seriously, they even had to kill the cattle? How is that in any way practical or rational?) is not only aesthetically dissonant, but wasteful and silly as hell. Going out of one’s way to ensure some don’t get a proper ritual, or otherwise kicking the defeated while they are down, also strikes me as disgusting, wasteful, and, frankly, cartoonishly over the top.
They should make a piece of fiction with a villain whose actions mirror those of YHWH perfectly. Have him blow a fortress to pieces and then demand that everything that breathes within be slaughtered. Have him kill some of his followers for disobeying some arbitrary rule, then have him kill many more just because they complained about it.
With his mind.
That’s not an omnibenevolent deity, that’s a fucking Dungeon Keeper.
See how many people notice the references. See how many identify this overlord as a vile villain before being informed he’s patterned after The God.
Do you remember the other parts too? The parts that don’t feel so warm and fuzzy? Or other effective military strategies? Defeat rather seldom means friendship when it comes to pre-established enemies, whether in The Art of War or outside of it. The generals discussed in The Art of War commanded their soldiers to kill other soldiers (and their leaders) and conquer strategic resources. The Art of War gives instructions on how to do so more effectively, with more compliance from soldiers and, where possible, in such a way that the enemy does not fight back significantly.
Yes, God is silly as well as a dick (and non-existent). But looking at the strategy from the perspective of instrumental rationality interest rather than from the perspective of indignant atheism the cattle-killing silliness is not especially relevant. Most people agree that it is better to keep the cattle than kill them. What is more interesting is just when it is instrumentally rational to apply force (be that political, economic or physical) against those that are assisting a particularly troublesome enemy.
The details matter a lot of course. There are cases where it obvious that is instrumentally rational to kill those who are assisting the enemy while there are cases where that would be outright self destructive. On one side of the line there is the sole provider of particularly advanced weaponry to the enemy, who does not trade with you and who has no significant social alliances and on the other side there is an welfare charity who provides medical assistance indiscriminately worldwide, is loved by all and protected by an alliance of powerful nations. In between things are less simple.
I don’t recall ever mentioning anything fuzzy or warm; It’s simply a pragmatic matter of taking the human factor into account. You simply try to fight and destroy as little as possible because it’s expensive, risky, and creates ill will in the long tern. Napoleon and the armies of the Spanish Empire are excellent examples of how to win every battle, piss everyone off, and never win the peace.
Of course, if you do need to crush, kill, destroy, do it quickly and decisively, with no hesitation or pussyfooting. Therein lies the difference between being respectably compassionate, and being a sentimental fool begging to be abused.
The Art of War isn’t just about winning battles or wars, it’s about winning the peace that comes afterwards; it’s not just about beating your foe, but about getting them to stay beaten, and, in fact, help you out.
And, in particular, Scorched Earth tactics are extremely costly, and they are only effective in very specific circumstances.
As for the Bible examples cited there, I do not see how they are practical in any way, shape, or form. I can see the point of some of the other examples, but most of them are about helping out or standing up for someone who has been reduced to complete harmlessness and can’t be a threat anymore. This is most egregious when the defeated enemy in question is a freaking corpse.
God forbid I find myself defending the morality of the Hebrew Bible, but it seems to me you’re making a claim here (i.e. by implication, that the behavior of the Israelites was impractical/silly/evil) from a very poor epistemic position. The details of warfare, religious ritual, and the politics of conquest of that period are thin, and it’s not even clear that the story in Joshua (for example) represents an historical event (we have, and expect, no archeological record of this war), and so the practical purpose of the passage you cite may be entirely other than recommending or reporting a certain mode of warfare. Even if it is making such a report or recommendation, we simply lack the details to evaluate it.
Essentially, we have no idea whether or not what’s being described is silly or cunning or even moral or immoral (unless maybe we’re deontologists, but I doubt that). Speaking so confidently about something where confidence is so ill warrented is often a symptom of being mind-killed on a particular subject. And we should expect that as atheists, we are very, very likely to be mind-killed about biblical historiography (maybe right, as well, but mind-killed nonetheless).
Pointing out the horrors of the bible is a worthwhile way to put the morality of theists in tension with their holy book. But once that rhetorical work is done, the epistemically cautious consequentialist has absolutely no business throwing invective at the bible without a thorough study of the period being written about. Lord knows why you’d bother with that though.
″ the behavior of the Israelites was impractical/silly/evil”
I made no such claim, unless you mean the fictional Hebrews in the book rather than the collection of tribes the Romans diaspora’d many, many centuries later. Even then, what would you expect of the poor guys, when they’re being terrorized and cajoled into being evil by Kira-on-steroids?
However, from what we know of the behaviour of the Judeans under Roman rule, practicality and pragmatism weren’t top priorities for them, and their Scripture probably wasn’t a very sane source of advice on that matter.
More relevantly, some people still (claim to) take their ethics from the Bible, the Old Testament is very popular in the USA, and rhetorics of an Angry God Striking Down Evil and Smiting The Heathen, and of Lambs not Going Astray from Flocks (what a horrifying metaphor, being compared to cattle, of the stupidest sort no less!) are still floating around, influencing the way politics is done, whispering in the subconscious and blaring in the loudspeakers.
That is, of course, not the only culture that was influenced by a book that not only advocates genocide, but demands that, when it be done, it be carried out thoroughly. The Massacre of St. Barthelemy, some of the actions of Cromwell, and think of the horrifying, nauseating, vertiginous irony of Old Testament memes having been a factor, no matter how small, in the intellectual genesis of the Final Solution.
I mean the Israelites! That’s what these people, whose historicity is not in doubt, called themselves. They’re the ones that wrote the bulk of the biblical material between around 900 and 587 BCE.
Maybe, though this strikes me as conjecture. I also don’t see how it’s related to claims you seem to be making about the authors of the bible and their people.
You know what, get back to me on the historicity of Hebrews after reading this. I’m not adverse to shifting my priors on that topic; please refer me to a work that does not refer to the Bible as a starting point for its hypotheses, if that’s at all possible.
Until I have a Bible-independent framework on how to think of the ethnic conglomerate that claim to be the Descent of Israel, I prefer to assume it is all fiction as a working hypothesis, and start from there.
This is why also why I am reticent to call them Israelites, despite them calling themselves something like that, just the same way I wouldn’t call Arabs Ismaelites; I doubt that Israel/Jacob, Isac, Ishmael or Abraham existed, and I doubt either group’s direct descent from them. I certainly doubt that any human gained the title of Israel after wrestling with God and winning.
As for them calling themselves Israelites, allow me to be a little pedantic here; they called themselves B’nei Yisrael; Israelites is a greek term.
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.