I am studying through Joshua this Summer and just came to Chapter 6, which is where my contemplation and Web search led to you.

It seems to me an even more basic question than eschatology is what are the underlying premises of many of these types of questions that have to do with God killing babies (these would include my own troubled questions), which is an underlying complaint that God does not live up to His own standards. E.g., I had previously trolled through one section of mereatheism.com and thought if we were to judge events by whatever we individually believe are right standards, we’d get nowhere at all. You can just as easily decide God is capricious, unfair and even evil (and hence dismiss God altogether) by your standards as I could defend God by mine.

This might be a restatement of the tension between understanding how God is love and how God is righteous, but I think it goes more deeply. I think we might start answering our questions by asking what is the underlying premise in our hearts when we ask? That would force us to decide and accept what God really teaches in Scripture about what His views of right and wrong are. And then, and here I think this is unusual for American culture, we might force ourselves to delve more into the realities of evil. We tend to recoil from so much reflexively without really understanding the essence of what we abhor – poverty, hunger and, yes, even genocide. I have no doubt the details of genocide are terrible, excruciating. But then we have to decide if the realities of an event in and of itself make it wrong – the teleogical view if I remember my college philosophy class correctly.

I say all this without having come to a firm conclusion myself; they’re just notes along the way.

By the way, I am not convinced that brief mention in the NT is any evidence that NT writers did not think these questions serious. By nature, we tend to ignore and downplay the horrendous, even in our writings, so the fact that little evidence exists doesn’t mean it wasn’t and isn’t important. If anything, Jesus’s grieving over Jerusalem might be the best evidence that God abhors genocide, too.

I do not imagine that the slaughter described in some of the narratives ever took place exactly as described. The Bible itself is pretty clear that the accounts were very rough estimates, to say the very least. It is also pretty clear that there were enough people left to retake some areas, and to shape the development of the kingdom for centuries. In some of the earlier narratives, even the epitaph for God was apparently “borrowed” from the very people that were supposed to be destroyed. I do not remember exactly where you stand on Biblical authority, but this may be one area that is much easier to accept that the human hand aided in the development of the Bible, particularly a human hand with more than a passing interest in praising God…anyway, I enjoyed the topic.

But, I find it more difficult that the children died as well in Jericho, or that the babies outside the ark drowned. What does it look like to kill every child in Jericho?

Of course, I think any tensions I feel with this biblical truth, or any other, are my problems and not that of truth. And, I think my problem here is that I think too much in Western individualist terms, whereas the reality is that we are not islands unto ourselves, but are roped to people around us.

Thanks for this series of posts.