1) The author makes precisely 3 statements regarding Halacha (Judaic law), each of which is demonstrably incorrect.
Well, no. He makes those statements about the Old Testament, not actual Jewish law. It seems blatantly obvious that the rulings and commentary you cite are indeed “apologetic glosses on a defective primary text.” The fact that they were written when scientific knowledge was still rudimentary is immaterial—clearly, they patched the locust thing when they finally got around to counting its legs.
2) The author asserts that the Tanakh (Old Testament) “doesn’t talk about a sense of wonder at the complexity of the universe.”
Again, in trying to refute this you cite texts that were written much later. If the Old Testament actually contained references to a sense of wonder at the complexity of the universe you’d be able to quote it. I think the closest it comes is a sense of despair and humility at the incomprehensibility of the universe.
3) The author asserts that historical Judaism defends the authenticity of the Torah without accounting for Bayes’ Theorem.
I think you’ve simply misunderstood, here: this is close to the opposite of what the author is saying.
4) The author asserts that contemporary religionists justify false opinions by claiming that their religion is a separate magisterium which can be neither proven nor disproven.
You don’t really dispute this, you just sort of argue that it’s okay. It’s not. If something like “the nature of good and evil” does not describe some aspect of human experience, then it’s vacuous. If it does, then it is subject to scientific analysis.
Given all of this, the popular contention that the Torah endorses slave-ownership is difficult to defend.
The Torah condemns nonmarital sex. Repeatedly, explicitly, and harshly. It does not condemn slavery. Nonmarital sex is an inevitable constant across all cultures, times, and places. It is so much more inevitable than slavery. This seems to suggest a somewhat different attitude toward slavery than toward nonmarital sex.
The passages you quote, brutal as they are, concern only Jewish slaves. The Torah explicitly permits Jews to buy non-Jewish slaves and never free them (Leviticus 25:45-46), but pass them and their children on to your children, forever. It instructs the Jewish people to, when conquering a culturally powerful enemy city, kill the men, women, and male children, but allow the soldiers to keep the virginal girls as slaves. Such a genocide is depicted in Numbers 31, for example. How do you think that kind of slavery went? Imagine you’re a young Midianite woman. Your father dies defending your city, and then it falls to the invaders a day later. Jewish soldiers come to your house. Your old, weak grandfather grabs a sword and bars the door, but you plead with him to surrender, and the soldiers watch as you tug the sword out of his hands and lead him inside to a chair. One of them laughs, walks inside, and runs him through. Your mother wails and he turns to her, sighs dutifully, squares off, and cuts her head off cleanly in a single stroke. You’ve barely had time to register what just happened, when he pulls your baby brother out of his crib. Some part of you manages to mobilize yourself and you find yourself charging towards him, screaming. By the time you reach him, he’s already bashed your brother’s brains out and dropped the body. You get in one wild punch before he backhands you to the ground. He could kill you in an instant but instead he stares at you appraisingly.
Would such a woman ever so much as weave a basket for her captor voluntarily? She’d have to be chained up at night, I bet, or else she’d slit his throat. She’d have to be beaten half to death before she even considered accepting this man as a master—the man who killed her family in front of her. Would the soldier sell her to another Jew? It might not make much of a difference: these would still be the men who destroyed her entire civilization. Would she be sold to outsiders? Sold, as a young, virgin slave, to outsiders who aren’t bound by all those ethical Biblical rules? Yeah, that’s going to end well for her. What do you suppose she would say, if she saw you praying today? Chanting some of the same prayers, thanking the same God in the same language, as the man who slaughtered her family thanked God for delivering her into his hands. Attending synagogue and saying “amen” as they read aloud the story, recorded for all eternity, of her torment and her people’s genocide.
At this point you are already preparing your response, where you explain that the genocide was pragmatically necessary. “They had to kill those people, or the next generation would have killed them. God commanded it because He knew it had to be done. Enslaving the girls was the most merciful practical option.” I beg you not to say this. This is the worst modern consequence of the Talmudic tradition: an intellectual, explaining how mass killings and brutal slavery are sometimes justified. Every time you defend genocide, you hasten the day when it will happen again. I ask again: What could you possibly say to any of those sixteen thousand Midianite women and girls, if they asked you why you were commemorating the atrocities committed against them, and adopting the perpetrator’s heritage as your own?
The next time you kiss a Torah, I expect you to picture that Midianite slave. She’s watching you kiss it. She knows what’s written there. She sees you as reaffirming, in that moment, your allegiance to the worst parts of human civilization. What do you need to do to get right with her?
On the contrary, HonoreDB is using emotional outrage in an attempt to force religious readers to recognize the illogic of their text. It’s when they’re apathetic about the Midianite women that they come to proclaim outlandishly evil things like genocide being ok if god said to.
The Old Testament did condone slavery and rape (in the taking of slaves as wives). This is outrageous and wrong. Nothing illogical about it.
I don’t intend to get in an argument over that can o’ worms. I’ll just point out that that particular line of retreat is unavailable to many of the theists promoting the moral quality of the Torah or Bible. Their god is supposed to be unchangable and his laws are supposed to be written on all men’s hearts. They instead tend to move into one of these positions:
1) “You need to focus on the essence of the text instead, which is whatever I say it is.”
2) “You’re misinterpreting the obvious and plain text. It’s really saying the opposite of what it says.”
3) “Rape and slavery and murder really aren’t that bad, in a certain angle and light.”
In my experience, they tend to abhor your line of reasoning, and if it is logical or reasonable it is still not an option for them. (Feel free to correct me with examples.) I think HonoreDB’s comment is still a reasonable approach for pushing against that inconsistency.
Here’s a line of argument which doesn’t fall into your three categories. I have no idea whether it’s completely honest.
Judaism is as Judaism does. In other words, if you want to know what Judaism is, look at actual Jewish behavior first, and then if you like make some predictions so that you can update.
The conquest of Canaan was a long time ago. While, to put it mildly, there are some contentious issues associated with the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, even the most Orthodox aren’t recommending or engaging in anything as horrific as that quote from Leviticus. (OK, I don’t know this with absolute certainty, but I’m willing to bet one minus something close to epsilon that if it were happening, it would get back to me.)
Just because it says on the label that Judaism is about the absolute G-d-given truth (in some sense) of the Torah, it doesn’t mean that’s exactly what Judaism is about. This does make it a lot harder to figure out what’s going on, but people stuff is like that.
Does this unpack to “Judaism whatever people who claim to be Jewish do”? Or is there some other standard available to determine what particular subset of the observable behavior in the world is “what Judaism does”?
Does this unpack to “Judaism whatever people who claim to be Jewish do?”
Pretty much that, though I’d amend it to “Judaism is whatever people who claim to be Jewish do that they say is part of their religion.” Deli food is Jewish, but not Judaism.
I admit I want some consensus exceptions for Jews for Jesus (from what I’m told, actually Baptists) and Christian Identity (white supremacists who claim to be the only Jews).
I’d amend it to “Judaism is whatever people who claim to be Jewish do that they say is part of their religion.”
(nods) OK, understood. I’m not sure that’s a particularly informative place to carve, but it’s at least coherent.
I admit I want some consensus exceptions for Jews for Jesus (from what I’m told, actually Baptists) and Christian Identity (white supremacists who claim to be the only Jews).
I understand why, though I wonder how viable that is. I mean, sure, it’s probably true that approximately all non-JfJ soi-disant Jews agree that the JfJ are no more Jews than the Jehovah’s Witnesses are. Then again, it’s also probably true that approximately all haredim would agree to something similar about Reform Jews. And as long as we’re ignoring some people’s self-labeling, I’d sort of like to put in for an exception excluding the haredim, come to that; I’m a Jew, but I don’t do what they do.
Which I guess is OK, it just leads to lots of different mutually exclusive things to which the label “Judaism” applies, and the need to resolve what Judaism we’re talking about before the conversation gets too far. Which happens a lot with language anyway.
Thinking about this some more, I am interested in your thoughts about the difference between “Judaism is whatever people who claim to be Jewish do that they say is part of their religion” and “Judaism is whatever people who claim to be Jewish do that people who don’t claim to be Jewish don’t do.”
The latter has some interesting properties, but I’m not sure if they’re valuable ones from the perspective of wanting to preserve a coherent notion of Jewish identity.
Would such a woman ever so much as weave a basket for her captor voluntarily?
Stockholm effect. IIRC, in studies of aborigines like the Yanomano, they find that kidnapped women are common in family trees and also that men have very high death rates from homicide, implying both that the women did indeed do more than basket-weaving for their captors and they are nontrivially likely to have a dead relative.
Would such a woman ever so much as weave a basket for her captor voluntarily?
in studies of aborigines like the Yanomano, they find that kidnapped women are common in family trees [...] implying both that the women did indeed do more than basket-weaving for their captors
Er… because do you think the Yanomano man is standing there, shaking the non-existent shackles, saying ‘weave a basket and bear my children!’ every minute of the day? Such guard labor would be impossibly expensive.
Some sort of voluntary ness is involved. They are not cutting the throat of their ‘husband’ while he sleeps, they are not poisoning the kids to spite him, they aren’t taking the first opportunity to slip away into the jungle, etc. The more days that pass, the more opportunities they are passing up. Hence, Stockholm syndrome. People can get used to pretty much anything.
Someone in a supermax can be truly involuntary: burly men at every point stand ready to force them to do something, will force them into the solitary cell, will force-feed them food if they go on a hunger strike, will call for doctors and powerful sedatives, and hard concrete and steel hem them in.
And Stockholm syndrome evolved (says evolutionary psych). Because clearly it’s in the woman’s (and her children’s) best interests to comply with captors & survive rather than rebel & be killed.
The next time you kiss a Torah, I expect you to picture that Midianite slave. She’s watching you kiss it. She knows what’s written there. She sees you as reaffirming, in that moment, your allegiance to the worst parts of human civilization. What do you need to do to get right with her?
Not to play apologist, but as long as I’m going to play apologist I might as well point out that pretty much every well-documented culture I’ve ever heard of has some comparably horrible things in its backstory. Memorializing them is less common; usually they get swept under the rug, like some of the nastier consequences of the Philippine insurrection (1899 – 1902) in American textbooks or (so I’m told) the Armenian genocide (1915 − 1923) in Turkish ones. But if you take the veneration of the (semi-) historical sections of the Torah as evoking some kind of national sentiment, which from my outside view certainly seems like it’s got something to do with what’s going on, then you’re only a hop or two away from a blanket condemnation of nationalism.
Which I think I’d actually be rather comfortable with—I’m no great fan of massive involuntary identity groups given what they do to people’s sanity—but it does seem rather broader than what I took you to be going for.
I’ll break this down into two response, because of the length.
-Assuming the locust-thing is an apologetic gloss doesn’t seem warranted. Locusts have been a common food source in many parts of Asia and Africa for thousands of years, and the fact that the Torah permits the consumption of certain locusts strongly implies that they were being eaten. It seems fair to estimate that the people eating these locusts would have known how many legs they really had, regardless of illiteracy and poor knowledge of animal biology.
-I’m not claiming that the Tanakh itself contains clear, obvious passages expressing wonder at the universe, in fact I pointed out that the text itself generally doesn’t. I’m claiming that the legal tradition that derives from it necessitates the study of nature and makes it inevitable, and that the study of nature became a part of Jewish oral tradition as a consequence. While I used the Kuzari for easy citation, the necessity for scientific study can be seen from the text of the Mishnah. How would the Tannaim have fixed a calendar without studying astronomy, established rules for identifying sick animals without studying animal disease, established rules for eruvin without studying plane geometry, etc? Simply reiterating that the written Tanakh itself doesn’t express much wonder for the universe, ignores the fact that both oral tradition and written law had an equal stake in how Judaism began, and in how it developed. It also ignores the fact that Judaism has always been much more concerned with the morality of concrete, physical activity than with scientific speculation, the latter having been appropriately subordinated and sublimated to the cause of the former.
-You’re right, I am admitting that certain aspects of Jewish thought occupy distinct magisteria. What I am disputing is that rational, scientific methodology is synonymous with reason itself. Many schools of philosophy utilize methods of logic other than the scientific process. As an example (and I don’t mean this to be below the belt), one could claim, as Peter Singer does, that an adult baboon has more utility and moral value than a human infant, since the baboon would have a more developed brain and therefore greater consciousness. By extrapolation, one could similarly claim that a super-intelligent computer would have more utility and moral value than a contemporary adult human, since the former would have a more developed mind and therefore greater consciousness. If ethics are to be understood through the prism of the scientific process as we know it, these ideas could actually be argued for pretty effectively, and I don’t think such methods of reasoning are appropriate for the discussion of such issues.
It seems fair to estimate that the people eating these locusts would have known how many legs they really had
Any large text that makes scientific claims makes errors. A modern science textbook averages about 14 errors. Ancient Greek texts are full of erroneous factual claims that they could have easily checked. Aristotle claimed that men had more teeth than women. Had such a claim been in the Torah, there would be later commentary explaining that in women, certain teeth don’t count as teeth.
Being fair to Aristotle, it may be the case that empirically, in Ancient Greece, or in whatever sample he used to check his claim, the women did actually have fewer teeth on average. Worse nutrition, more stress on the body due to pregnancy, whatever. If you check ten women and ten men in a non-modern community you might easily get such a result by sheer chance.
Since a large part of what he did was checking empirically, I don’t think your opinion is justified. Really, the most likely explanation is that he checked empirically—the same way he observed that the kidneys filter urine, that some sharks give birth to live young, and numerous other biological discoveries that were obtained in part through first-hand vivisection.
-I say “below the belt,” because I imagine that there are individuals of the Less Wrong community who strongly support SIAI’s work and goals concerning AI, but who simultaneously would not consider such AI creations to be of greater moral value than humans, and I didn’t want these individuals to think that I was making an assumption about their ethical opinions based on their support of AI research.
-Yes, it is largely because of disapproval of the conclusions, but I disapprove of the conclusions because the conclusions are not rational in the face of other intellectual considerations. The failure to see a qualitative difference between humans, baboons and computers suggests an inability to distinguish between living and non-living entities, and I think that is irrational.
there are individuals of the Less Wrong community who strongly support SIAI’s work and goals concerning AI, but who simultaneously would not consider such AI creations to be of greater moral value than humans
I normally hate to do this, but Nonsentient Optimizers says it better than I could. If you’re building an AI as a tool, don’t make it a person.
The failure to see a qualitative difference between humans, baboons and computers suggests an inability to distinguish between living and non-living entities, and I think that is irrational.
That’s a question of values, though. I don’t value magnitude of consciousness; if baboons were uplifted to be more intelligent than humans on average, I would still value humans more.
Secondly, the story of the young Midianite girl is still not good evidence that the Torah considers mass slaughter to be morally okay, and it is not good evidence that historical Jewish ethics have considered it okay. But as hard as it is to say, both economic oppression and war are difficult to uproot, in a way that nonmarital sex is not. War is often a necessary evil, and so is economic inequality, even nowadays; the gradual elimination of both, as horrid as it sounds, probably is more pragmatic. I don’t think the mere fact that permission was granted, in the very beginning, is enough to claim that the Torah treats sex more harshly than economic oppression and war. Both, along with violence & militarism in general, are condemned in the Prophets (especially Jeremiah & Isaiah) repeatedly, explicitly and harshly, over and over again, much more so than any of the other societal ills of the time. This is especially significant when one considers that the Torah does not differentiate between general economic inequality on the one hand, and slavery on the other- the laws that regulate treatment of slaves and treatment of workers are grouped together in the same sections of Deuteronomy.
If slaughter and war were morally okay in the Torah’s view, this notion would have continued on into the Prophets & Writings, as well as the Mishna, and it doesn’t. The general idea expressed in these texts is that war is morally vile, but also often necessary. The defeat of the Greeks was barely mentioned in the way the Channukah story was told, to avoid the celebration of militarism. Where would such an attitude towards war have originally derived from?
Your use of the word genocide is not accurate, anyhow. Genocide is the systematic murder of an entire nation or race, and it is militarily one-sided. The Torah does not describe genocides, it describes wars between mutually opposing armies, and the evils of war do not obviate the fact that it is often practically necessary (this includes tribal war practices of the 13th c. BCE). I am not arguing that genocide is justifiable, I am arguing that war is justifiable, and it is important to use correct terminology. If one were to argue that the Jewish laws defining a just war are defective, then that is a separate discussion, but to argue that Judaism is violent by telling a story about the everyday horrors of war is not reasonable. War is condemned far too clearly, frequently and harshly in the Prophets, and the glorification of warrior-culture and hero worship is far too absent from both the Tanakh and commonly accepted history books on Jewish history, to be able to argue that Judaism is okay with even militarism in general, let alone senseless violence.
Genocide is the correct term for what the Jewish people do in Numbers 31. After the war is over, Moses discovers that the military commanders have spared the women and children, and is wroth. Or, from the New International Version:
Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle. “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the LORD in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the LORD’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
This is meant as a destruction of their ethnicity to prevent them from tainting the Israelites, following commandments such as that in Deuteronomy 7:
When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you— and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.
There are plenty of other passages where the Israelites are described as killing “all the men, women, and children.” Numbers 31 is notable to me because it makes it clear that this was not commonly accepted practice—it was something Moses had to specifically instruct. But really this is also demonstrated by the way that these sort of genocidal injunctions feel the need to spell out that mercy is not to be shown to the women and children.
If you’d rather not use the word genocide, we can of course substitute “killing a girl’s entire family in front of her, then enslaving her,” and multiply it by, in this case, sixteen thousand.
I’ll concede the use of the word genocide, since you’re right: substituting “killing a girl’s entire family in front of her and then enslaving her” sounds just as bad.
The accounts of wars recorded in the books of the Prophets and Writings often describe women and children being killed in war by surrounding nations, such as Babylonia, Persia and Assyria; it was, revoltingly, a common practice. The rule of war laid down in Deuteronomy 20:14 only allows the Jews to kill adult males in the course of war, and forbids the murder of women and children. The exceptions to this rule were the Canaanite nations and the Amalekites; wars against these nations made no exceptions for women and children. This is why Moses needed to give a specific order concerning the Midianites: the Israelite soldiers assumed that the women ought to be spared, in accordance with Deut. 20:14, and Moses basically informed them that the adult women who attempted to sexually engage with Jewish men in pagan rituals should be killed as any other enemy combatants. It should also be noted that Deut. 20:10 requires the Jews to always offer a peace settlement before laying siege or running into battle, including the Canaanites and Amalekites (Numbers 31 describes them doing this with the Midianites), and forbids the killing of any men, women or children if the peace offering is accepted. In the event the offer is turned down, it is still forbidden to surround the entire enemy camp, and anyone who wishes to flee must be allowed to flee unharmed.
I’d be lying if I were to claim to be entirely at peace with all this: I am not. But evidence for the assertion that the Torah views violence and war as okay, rather than something to be diminished gradually, still seems lacking. The hope for the eventual abolition of war, and for peace between nations, is repeated far too frequently and clearly in the Prophets for the assertion to hold, and the assertion clashes with how most Jews have historically felt about unnecessary violence, beyond their very early, formative period of their history.
While your other objections are sound, you seem to be applying your modern ethics to the ancient times in your emotionally charged story of the girl.
For comparison, here is a more likely point of view from that girl. Her mother was likely stolen by her father from a neighboring tribe and used for sex, chores and housekeeping at the ripe old age of 12. The woman was constantly raped and beaten by her husband (=owner). The daughter, the girl you are describing, is also considered a property of her father, and is often beaten and abused by her father (and maybe even her mother) and his family, maybe even raped, depending on the local customs.
When the handsome and muscular soldier killed the hated abusers, she looked with hope at the person whose strange customs she had only heard of. She does not mind in the least his quick inspection of her virginity, knowing that it raises her worth, and the odds of better treatment by her future owner.
She has no concept of genocide, which is a norm of the times. She does not mind learning the new language and the new prayers, and is happy to discover that she would not be sacrificed as an offering to her old gods, something she had seen her tribe do countless times with the prisoners and even with their own.
The next time she watches her new owner kiss the Torah, she recites the words with him and hopes that this strange invisible god will be more merciful to her than the gods of her mother or the gods of her father.
For comparison, here is a more likely point of view from that girl.
Does “logic” truly tell you that the young pubescent and prepubescent girls in the situation were more likely to feel gratitude at the killing of their mothers, fathers, brothers and older sisters, than they were to feel grief and hatred for it?
That for the Midianite girls in question P(glad|whole family killed) > P(sad|whole family killed) ?
Again, applying modern standards to the life 3000 years ago is not helpful. Here is another potential option: her grandfather, realizing that all is lost, decides to deprive the attackers of as much profit as he can, destroying all his valuable property, including the women. He kills the girl’s mother and is trying to kill the girl, when he is slain by the soldiers.
This seems highly implausible to me.
An informed opinion of an expert would be more helpful than our idle musings.
Again, applying modern standards to the life 3000 years ago is not helpful.
I’m not applying modern standards. Even Deuterenomy 21:10-14 seems to predict that young captured women will be mourning their father and mother, not be glad at their deaths.
The default emotional response of any human is grief (and/or anger/hate) at the death of one’s family, not joy. This seems just human nature, not culture-specific behavior. The exceptions are just that.
Well, no. He makes those statements about the Old Testament, not actual Jewish law. It seems blatantly obvious that the rulings and commentary you cite are indeed “apologetic glosses on a defective primary text.” The fact that they were written when scientific knowledge was still rudimentary is immaterial—clearly, they patched the locust thing when they finally got around to counting its legs.
Again, in trying to refute this you cite texts that were written much later. If the Old Testament actually contained references to a sense of wonder at the complexity of the universe you’d be able to quote it. I think the closest it comes is a sense of despair and humility at the incomprehensibility of the universe.
I think you’ve simply misunderstood, here: this is close to the opposite of what the author is saying.
You don’t really dispute this, you just sort of argue that it’s okay. It’s not. If something like “the nature of good and evil” does not describe some aspect of human experience, then it’s vacuous. If it does, then it is subject to scientific analysis.
The Torah condemns nonmarital sex. Repeatedly, explicitly, and harshly. It does not condemn slavery. Nonmarital sex is an inevitable constant across all cultures, times, and places. It is so much more inevitable than slavery. This seems to suggest a somewhat different attitude toward slavery than toward nonmarital sex.
The passages you quote, brutal as they are, concern only Jewish slaves. The Torah explicitly permits Jews to buy non-Jewish slaves and never free them (Leviticus 25:45-46), but pass them and their children on to your children, forever. It instructs the Jewish people to, when conquering a culturally powerful enemy city, kill the men, women, and male children, but allow the soldiers to keep the virginal girls as slaves. Such a genocide is depicted in Numbers 31, for example. How do you think that kind of slavery went? Imagine you’re a young Midianite woman. Your father dies defending your city, and then it falls to the invaders a day later. Jewish soldiers come to your house. Your old, weak grandfather grabs a sword and bars the door, but you plead with him to surrender, and the soldiers watch as you tug the sword out of his hands and lead him inside to a chair. One of them laughs, walks inside, and runs him through. Your mother wails and he turns to her, sighs dutifully, squares off, and cuts her head off cleanly in a single stroke. You’ve barely had time to register what just happened, when he pulls your baby brother out of his crib. Some part of you manages to mobilize yourself and you find yourself charging towards him, screaming. By the time you reach him, he’s already bashed your brother’s brains out and dropped the body. You get in one wild punch before he backhands you to the ground. He could kill you in an instant but instead he stares at you appraisingly.
Would such a woman ever so much as weave a basket for her captor voluntarily? She’d have to be chained up at night, I bet, or else she’d slit his throat. She’d have to be beaten half to death before she even considered accepting this man as a master—the man who killed her family in front of her. Would the soldier sell her to another Jew? It might not make much of a difference: these would still be the men who destroyed her entire civilization. Would she be sold to outsiders? Sold, as a young, virgin slave, to outsiders who aren’t bound by all those ethical Biblical rules? Yeah, that’s going to end well for her. What do you suppose she would say, if she saw you praying today? Chanting some of the same prayers, thanking the same God in the same language, as the man who slaughtered her family thanked God for delivering her into his hands. Attending synagogue and saying “amen” as they read aloud the story, recorded for all eternity, of her torment and her people’s genocide.
At this point you are already preparing your response, where you explain that the genocide was pragmatically necessary. “They had to kill those people, or the next generation would have killed them. God commanded it because He knew it had to be done. Enslaving the girls was the most merciful practical option.” I beg you not to say this. This is the worst modern consequence of the Talmudic tradition: an intellectual, explaining how mass killings and brutal slavery are sometimes justified. Every time you defend genocide, you hasten the day when it will happen again. I ask again: What could you possibly say to any of those sixteen thousand Midianite women and girls, if they asked you why you were commemorating the atrocities committed against them, and adopting the perpetrator’s heritage as your own?
The next time you kiss a Torah, I expect you to picture that Midianite slave. She’s watching you kiss it. She knows what’s written there. She sees you as reaffirming, in that moment, your allegiance to the worst parts of human civilization. What do you need to do to get right with her?
I think this is the single most powerfully written argument against Judaism that I’ve ever read in my life, and it’s four paragraphs long.
HonoreDB, I don’t know how long that took you to write, but if you wrote a book of Bible stories from the victims’ perspective, I think it might sell.
You should know better than to succumb to the emotions where logic is warranted.
On the contrary, HonoreDB is using emotional outrage in an attempt to force religious readers to recognize the illogic of their text. It’s when they’re apathetic about the Midianite women that they come to proclaim outlandishly evil things like genocide being ok if god said to.
The Old Testament did condone slavery and rape (in the taking of slaves as wives). This is outrageous and wrong. Nothing illogical about it.
This is “outrageous and wrong” now. It was neither back then.
I don’t intend to get in an argument over that can o’ worms. I’ll just point out that that particular line of retreat is unavailable to many of the theists promoting the moral quality of the Torah or Bible. Their god is supposed to be unchangable and his laws are supposed to be written on all men’s hearts. They instead tend to move into one of these positions: 1) “You need to focus on the essence of the text instead, which is whatever I say it is.” 2) “You’re misinterpreting the obvious and plain text. It’s really saying the opposite of what it says.” 3) “Rape and slavery and murder really aren’t that bad, in a certain angle and light.”
In my experience, they tend to abhor your line of reasoning, and if it is logical or reasonable it is still not an option for them. (Feel free to correct me with examples.) I think HonoreDB’s comment is still a reasonable approach for pushing against that inconsistency.
Here’s a line of argument which doesn’t fall into your three categories. I have no idea whether it’s completely honest.
Judaism is as Judaism does. In other words, if you want to know what Judaism is, look at actual Jewish behavior first, and then if you like make some predictions so that you can update.
The conquest of Canaan was a long time ago. While, to put it mildly, there are some contentious issues associated with the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, even the most Orthodox aren’t recommending or engaging in anything as horrific as that quote from Leviticus. (OK, I don’t know this with absolute certainty, but I’m willing to bet one minus something close to epsilon that if it were happening, it would get back to me.)
Just because it says on the label that Judaism is about the absolute G-d-given truth (in some sense) of the Torah, it doesn’t mean that’s exactly what Judaism is about. This does make it a lot harder to figure out what’s going on, but people stuff is like that.
Does this unpack to “Judaism whatever people who claim to be Jewish do”? Or is there some other standard available to determine what particular subset of the observable behavior in the world is “what Judaism does”?
Pretty much that, though I’d amend it to “Judaism is whatever people who claim to be Jewish do that they say is part of their religion.” Deli food is Jewish, but not Judaism.
I admit I want some consensus exceptions for Jews for Jesus (from what I’m told, actually Baptists) and Christian Identity (white supremacists who claim to be the only Jews).
(nods) OK, understood. I’m not sure that’s a particularly informative place to carve, but it’s at least coherent.
I understand why, though I wonder how viable that is. I mean, sure, it’s probably true that approximately all non-JfJ soi-disant Jews agree that the JfJ are no more Jews than the Jehovah’s Witnesses are. Then again, it’s also probably true that approximately all haredim would agree to something similar about Reform Jews. And as long as we’re ignoring some people’s self-labeling, I’d sort of like to put in for an exception excluding the haredim, come to that; I’m a Jew, but I don’t do what they do.
Which I guess is OK, it just leads to lots of different mutually exclusive things to which the label “Judaism” applies, and the need to resolve what Judaism we’re talking about before the conversation gets too far. Which happens a lot with language anyway.
Thinking about this some more, I am interested in your thoughts about the difference between “Judaism is whatever people who claim to be Jewish do that they say is part of their religion” and “Judaism is whatever people who claim to be Jewish do that people who don’t claim to be Jewish don’t do.”
The latter has some interesting properties, but I’m not sure if they’re valuable ones from the perspective of wanting to preserve a coherent notion of Jewish identity.
Attempting to incite emotional/moral outrage is a valid form of argument. What is this “emotion is not logical” bullshit?
Stockholm effect. IIRC, in studies of aborigines like the Yanomano, they find that kidnapped women are common in family trees and also that men have very high death rates from homicide, implying both that the women did indeed do more than basket-weaving for their captors and they are nontrivially likely to have a dead relative.
How does this address the question?
Er… because do you think the Yanomano man is standing there, shaking the non-existent shackles, saying ‘weave a basket and bear my children!’ every minute of the day? Such guard labor would be impossibly expensive.
So the point stands. They can and do.
Oh, of course. It’s not like they’re chained to the ground, so they must be going along with it voluntarily!
There’s no such thing as rape in marriage, right?
Edit: Okay, I’m probably too angry about this to be especially rational right now. I apologize if I’ve misinterpreted your position.
Some sort of voluntary ness is involved. They are not cutting the throat of their ‘husband’ while he sleeps, they are not poisoning the kids to spite him, they aren’t taking the first opportunity to slip away into the jungle, etc. The more days that pass, the more opportunities they are passing up. Hence, Stockholm syndrome. People can get used to pretty much anything.
Someone in a supermax can be truly involuntary: burly men at every point stand ready to force them to do something, will force them into the solitary cell, will force-feed them food if they go on a hunger strike, will call for doctors and powerful sedatives, and hard concrete and steel hem them in.
And Stockholm syndrome evolved (says evolutionary psych). Because clearly it’s in the woman’s (and her children’s) best interests to comply with captors & survive rather than rebel & be killed.
Not to play apologist, but as long as I’m going to play apologist I might as well point out that pretty much every well-documented culture I’ve ever heard of has some comparably horrible things in its backstory. Memorializing them is less common; usually they get swept under the rug, like some of the nastier consequences of the Philippine insurrection (1899 – 1902) in American textbooks or (so I’m told) the Armenian genocide (1915 − 1923) in Turkish ones. But if you take the veneration of the (semi-) historical sections of the Torah as evoking some kind of national sentiment, which from my outside view certainly seems like it’s got something to do with what’s going on, then you’re only a hop or two away from a blanket condemnation of nationalism.
Which I think I’d actually be rather comfortable with—I’m no great fan of massive involuntary identity groups given what they do to people’s sanity—but it does seem rather broader than what I took you to be going for.
I’ve copied some of this to my blog—thanks!
I’ll break this down into two response, because of the length.
-Assuming the locust-thing is an apologetic gloss doesn’t seem warranted. Locusts have been a common food source in many parts of Asia and Africa for thousands of years, and the fact that the Torah permits the consumption of certain locusts strongly implies that they were being eaten. It seems fair to estimate that the people eating these locusts would have known how many legs they really had, regardless of illiteracy and poor knowledge of animal biology.
-I’m not claiming that the Tanakh itself contains clear, obvious passages expressing wonder at the universe, in fact I pointed out that the text itself generally doesn’t. I’m claiming that the legal tradition that derives from it necessitates the study of nature and makes it inevitable, and that the study of nature became a part of Jewish oral tradition as a consequence. While I used the Kuzari for easy citation, the necessity for scientific study can be seen from the text of the Mishnah. How would the Tannaim have fixed a calendar without studying astronomy, established rules for identifying sick animals without studying animal disease, established rules for eruvin without studying plane geometry, etc? Simply reiterating that the written Tanakh itself doesn’t express much wonder for the universe, ignores the fact that both oral tradition and written law had an equal stake in how Judaism began, and in how it developed. It also ignores the fact that Judaism has always been much more concerned with the morality of concrete, physical activity than with scientific speculation, the latter having been appropriately subordinated and sublimated to the cause of the former.
-You’re right, I am admitting that certain aspects of Jewish thought occupy distinct magisteria. What I am disputing is that rational, scientific methodology is synonymous with reason itself. Many schools of philosophy utilize methods of logic other than the scientific process. As an example (and I don’t mean this to be below the belt), one could claim, as Peter Singer does, that an adult baboon has more utility and moral value than a human infant, since the baboon would have a more developed brain and therefore greater consciousness. By extrapolation, one could similarly claim that a super-intelligent computer would have more utility and moral value than a contemporary adult human, since the former would have a more developed mind and therefore greater consciousness. If ethics are to be understood through the prism of the scientific process as we know it, these ideas could actually be argued for pretty effectively, and I don’t think such methods of reasoning are appropriate for the discussion of such issues.
Any large text that makes scientific claims makes errors. A modern science textbook averages about 14 errors. Ancient Greek texts are full of erroneous factual claims that they could have easily checked. Aristotle claimed that men had more teeth than women. Had such a claim been in the Torah, there would be later commentary explaining that in women, certain teeth don’t count as teeth.
Being fair to Aristotle, it may be the case that empirically, in Ancient Greece, or in whatever sample he used to check his claim, the women did actually have fewer teeth on average. Worse nutrition, more stress on the body due to pregnancy, whatever. If you check ten women and ten men in a non-modern community you might easily get such a result by sheer chance.
I don’t think that Aristotle did check empirically, though.
Since a large part of what he did was checking empirically, I don’t think your opinion is justified. Really, the most likely explanation is that he checked empirically—the same way he observed that the kidneys filter urine, that some sharks give birth to live young, and numerous other biological discoveries that were obtained in part through first-hand vivisection.
Why would this be below the belt? If “greater consciousness” is what you value, it seems self-evidently true.
Is there a reason for this other than disapproval of the conclusions?
-I say “below the belt,” because I imagine that there are individuals of the Less Wrong community who strongly support SIAI’s work and goals concerning AI, but who simultaneously would not consider such AI creations to be of greater moral value than humans, and I didn’t want these individuals to think that I was making an assumption about their ethical opinions based on their support of AI research.
-Yes, it is largely because of disapproval of the conclusions, but I disapprove of the conclusions because the conclusions are not rational in the face of other intellectual considerations. The failure to see a qualitative difference between humans, baboons and computers suggests an inability to distinguish between living and non-living entities, and I think that is irrational.
I normally hate to do this, but Nonsentient Optimizers says it better than I could. If you’re building an AI as a tool, don’t make it a person.
That’s a question of values, though. I don’t value magnitude of consciousness; if baboons were uplifted to be more intelligent than humans on average, I would still value humans more.
How do you define a living entity?
Secondly, the story of the young Midianite girl is still not good evidence that the Torah considers mass slaughter to be morally okay, and it is not good evidence that historical Jewish ethics have considered it okay. But as hard as it is to say, both economic oppression and war are difficult to uproot, in a way that nonmarital sex is not. War is often a necessary evil, and so is economic inequality, even nowadays; the gradual elimination of both, as horrid as it sounds, probably is more pragmatic. I don’t think the mere fact that permission was granted, in the very beginning, is enough to claim that the Torah treats sex more harshly than economic oppression and war. Both, along with violence & militarism in general, are condemned in the Prophets (especially Jeremiah & Isaiah) repeatedly, explicitly and harshly, over and over again, much more so than any of the other societal ills of the time. This is especially significant when one considers that the Torah does not differentiate between general economic inequality on the one hand, and slavery on the other- the laws that regulate treatment of slaves and treatment of workers are grouped together in the same sections of Deuteronomy.
If slaughter and war were morally okay in the Torah’s view, this notion would have continued on into the Prophets & Writings, as well as the Mishna, and it doesn’t. The general idea expressed in these texts is that war is morally vile, but also often necessary. The defeat of the Greeks was barely mentioned in the way the Channukah story was told, to avoid the celebration of militarism. Where would such an attitude towards war have originally derived from?
Your use of the word genocide is not accurate, anyhow. Genocide is the systematic murder of an entire nation or race, and it is militarily one-sided. The Torah does not describe genocides, it describes wars between mutually opposing armies, and the evils of war do not obviate the fact that it is often practically necessary (this includes tribal war practices of the 13th c. BCE). I am not arguing that genocide is justifiable, I am arguing that war is justifiable, and it is important to use correct terminology. If one were to argue that the Jewish laws defining a just war are defective, then that is a separate discussion, but to argue that Judaism is violent by telling a story about the everyday horrors of war is not reasonable. War is condemned far too clearly, frequently and harshly in the Prophets, and the glorification of warrior-culture and hero worship is far too absent from both the Tanakh and commonly accepted history books on Jewish history, to be able to argue that Judaism is okay with even militarism in general, let alone senseless violence.
Thank you for continuing to engage.
Genocide is the correct term for what the Jewish people do in Numbers 31. After the war is over, Moses discovers that the military commanders have spared the women and children, and is wroth. Or, from the New International Version:
This is meant as a destruction of their ethnicity to prevent them from tainting the Israelites, following commandments such as that in Deuteronomy 7:
There are plenty of other passages where the Israelites are described as killing “all the men, women, and children.” Numbers 31 is notable to me because it makes it clear that this was not commonly accepted practice—it was something Moses had to specifically instruct. But really this is also demonstrated by the way that these sort of genocidal injunctions feel the need to spell out that mercy is not to be shown to the women and children.
If you’d rather not use the word genocide, we can of course substitute “killing a girl’s entire family in front of her, then enslaving her,” and multiply it by, in this case, sixteen thousand.
I’ll concede the use of the word genocide, since you’re right: substituting “killing a girl’s entire family in front of her and then enslaving her” sounds just as bad.
The accounts of wars recorded in the books of the Prophets and Writings often describe women and children being killed in war by surrounding nations, such as Babylonia, Persia and Assyria; it was, revoltingly, a common practice. The rule of war laid down in Deuteronomy 20:14 only allows the Jews to kill adult males in the course of war, and forbids the murder of women and children. The exceptions to this rule were the Canaanite nations and the Amalekites; wars against these nations made no exceptions for women and children. This is why Moses needed to give a specific order concerning the Midianites: the Israelite soldiers assumed that the women ought to be spared, in accordance with Deut. 20:14, and Moses basically informed them that the adult women who attempted to sexually engage with Jewish men in pagan rituals should be killed as any other enemy combatants. It should also be noted that Deut. 20:10 requires the Jews to always offer a peace settlement before laying siege or running into battle, including the Canaanites and Amalekites (Numbers 31 describes them doing this with the Midianites), and forbids the killing of any men, women or children if the peace offering is accepted. In the event the offer is turned down, it is still forbidden to surround the entire enemy camp, and anyone who wishes to flee must be allowed to flee unharmed.
I’d be lying if I were to claim to be entirely at peace with all this: I am not. But evidence for the assertion that the Torah views violence and war as okay, rather than something to be diminished gradually, still seems lacking. The hope for the eventual abolition of war, and for peace between nations, is repeated far too frequently and clearly in the Prophets for the assertion to hold, and the assertion clashes with how most Jews have historically felt about unnecessary violence, beyond their very early, formative period of their history.
While your other objections are sound, you seem to be applying your modern ethics to the ancient times in your emotionally charged story of the girl.
For comparison, here is a more likely point of view from that girl. Her mother was likely stolen by her father from a neighboring tribe and used for sex, chores and housekeeping at the ripe old age of 12. The woman was constantly raped and beaten by her husband (=owner). The daughter, the girl you are describing, is also considered a property of her father, and is often beaten and abused by her father (and maybe even her mother) and his family, maybe even raped, depending on the local customs.
When the handsome and muscular soldier killed the hated abusers, she looked with hope at the person whose strange customs she had only heard of. She does not mind in the least his quick inspection of her virginity, knowing that it raises her worth, and the odds of better treatment by her future owner.
She has no concept of genocide, which is a norm of the times. She does not mind learning the new language and the new prayers, and is happy to discover that she would not be sacrificed as an offering to her old gods, something she had seen her tribe do countless times with the prisoners and even with their own.
The next time she watches her new owner kiss the Torah, she recites the words with him and hopes that this strange invisible god will be more merciful to her than the gods of her mother or the gods of her father.
Does “logic” truly tell you that the young pubescent and prepubescent girls in the situation were more likely to feel gratitude at the killing of their mothers, fathers, brothers and older sisters, than they were to feel grief and hatred for it?
That for the Midianite girls in question P(glad|whole family killed) > P(sad|whole family killed) ?
This seems highly implausible to me.
Again, applying modern standards to the life 3000 years ago is not helpful. Here is another potential option: her grandfather, realizing that all is lost, decides to deprive the attackers of as much profit as he can, destroying all his valuable property, including the women. He kills the girl’s mother and is trying to kill the girl, when he is slain by the soldiers.
An informed opinion of an expert would be more helpful than our idle musings.
I’m not applying modern standards. Even Deuterenomy 21:10-14 seems to predict that young captured women will be mourning their father and mother, not be glad at their deaths.
The default emotional response of any human is grief (and/or anger/hate) at the death of one’s family, not joy. This seems just human nature, not culture-specific behavior. The exceptions are just that.
..
As long as we’re swapping emotionally inciting stories, maybe you could pick a consistent one.
… those were just some possible options, they don’t need to be “consistent”. I guess I could have phrased it better.