This entry is wrong, but typical. What is painful is that it is so stupid from a man reputed to know something and to have integrity. Only one of those could possibly be true for the author of such a piece. It is simply false and obviously false to anyone who reads the text of the OT that the Jewish treatment of the Samaritans was pleasing to God.
Much of what we find in the OT is, to use an NA phrase, “Iron Age tribalism”: our god is better than your god, and he told us to take your land, kill all of you, and keep the booty. When Christians respond that the OT also carries the injunction to “love your neighbor,” NA responds that one’s ”neighbor” in the OT is fellow Israelites. God is not telling the Israelites to walk on over to the Canaanites and “love them.” Rather, he is telling them to wipe them out and take their land.
Enns actually sides with this libel. I suppose he will insist these were redacted insertions for a later time: “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God” (Leviticus 19.34).
And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of the Lord, which I am commanding you today for your good? Behold, to the Lord your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it. Yet the Lord set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples, as you are this day. Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn. For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. You shall fear the Lord your God. You shall serve him and hold fast to him, and by his name you shall swear (Deuteronomy 10.12-20).
What anti-intellectual morons are our new sophisticates. They notice that God ordered the extermination of the Canaanites that remained in the Land and that is all they need to hear. God preaches hate of all non-Israelites until Jesus comes to correct him. There couldn’t possibly be any depth or complexity in the OT record. We already know that it is Iron Age primitivism.
So Jesus is the answer to this? Eternal conscious torture? Yes, that will win the New Atheists over. “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna” (Matthew 10.28). Glad we’ve got Jesus to protect us from the Iron Age god of the Old Testament.
What reeks about all this is that it refuses to face up to the real offense of the OT ethics and face up to the real problem of God. The New Atheists will face it, but not neo-whatever professors.
God kills children. And in the case of the Canaanites and the Amalekits he made a special provision to do so by human agency. It was always exceptional. It climaxed in the book of Esther where those who allied with Haman the Agagite (from King Agag of the Amalekites) were destroyed (though many actually converted and became Jews–strange form of tribalism that would allow for that–but I’ll bet Enn’s thinks Esther is all fiction anyway). It was never a standard practice in war or any other time. On the contrary, Isrealites were to show love to non-Israelites. When Saul killed Gibeanites (descendants of Canaanites who, due to their faith in the true God, tricked Joshua into a perpetual covenant with them), God cursed the land in retaliation.
But why are we engaged in the fantasy that there is any possible God who does not kill the innocent? I just attended the burial of a baby God killed within days of her deliverance from the womb. We see people being struck with decrepitude all around us, though we try to keep them out of site to be tormented by low-wage “health care workers.” God kills every single human being to whom he gives life. There are a few people who have resisted His inexorable attack for over a century but they will soon be gone.
The extermination of the Canaanites is a drop in the ocean of blood. If it doesn’t detract from the general OT ethic that one should love the stranger as well as the native born as oneself, then the only thing left, is “the problem of evil.” And in that context, it barely merits comment.
New Atheists are probably aware of cancer wards for children. If we can preach an ethic of love in such circumstances, we can show the basic courtesy of the OT to not lie about its ethic of love.
The fact is, the United States own policy toward strangers (“illegal” aliens) is precisely a barbarous monstrosity that violates every principle of the civilized ethic found in the OT.
I have tried to stay away from the Enns mess because I can’t stand giving any credit to the machine that railed against him. But there was no way I could read this and not comment. And I resent that he makes such bad guides look more credible by his own wandering from the path in such obvious and unjustifiable ways. He’s not the only one to do this and he won’t be the last. Pharisees and Saducees and all that.
PostScript: An awesome providence in blogging.
PostPostScript: Notice that Jesus’ reasoning about loving others is directly from the Deutoronomy 10, quoted above. In Deuteronomy, Moses points out that God feeds and clothes the sojourners. Jesus says:
You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
I wonder if Enns will begin to tell us that that text from leviticus was from the late “priestly” code that was later in the “trajectory” away from Iron Age Tribalism?
It is quite interesting how the story of Elisha is so “New testament” in feel, with Naaman, and even God protecting Moab from Israelite aggression.
The “much of” is the really egregious part of his quote. I could MAYBE be convinced there are some tiny threads of IAT in the OT, but “much of”?
My old NASB study Bible has a great (partial) answer to this:
“The battles for Canaan were … the Lord’s war, undertaken at a particular time in the program of redemption. God gave His people under Joshua no commission or license to conquer the world with the sword but a particular, limited mission.” (emphasis mine)
What seems to be missing in the article seems is a high view of the unchangeable God. He gave His people a mission limited by time and space, even after setting out rules of warfare in Deuteronomy 20 that protect women and children (“… you shall strike all the men in it with the edge of the sword. Only the women and the children…, you shall take as booty for yourself.” Deut. 20:13b-14a). He even warns Israel that there will be exceptions (“Only in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes.” Deut. 20:16 [emphasis mine]). So it was clear then that God knew of a particular time and place when He would ordain an exception to the law of warfare. He wasn’t faltering.
The “moral trajectory” argument implies that God’s holy (OT) people, among whom He dwelled, were an acceptable dwelling place under a moral standard a quantum leap below that of NT Christians. This implies that God’s standards of holiness changed.
Alternatively, this implies that there is an essential difference between OT saints and NT saints; the latter being truly a temple of the Lord and the former only living in a desert around a type of it. But if these two bodies aren’t truly the same, then what you have is dispensationalism.
I didn’t pay attention to the Enns donnybrook either so this is actually the first of his material I’ve read. If this post is any indication of the quality of his other writings and argumentation, yikes! Much like Lazarus after a few days in the tomb, this post stinketh. You point out his complete flubbing of the OT where “neighbors” are concerned. Moreover, we should point out that only those nations in the promised land were under the ban and therefore targets of herem warfare. God used Israel to judge them at a specific point in time because they had “filled up the measure of their wickedness.” He did this at other times as well. He did this to Israel both in the OT and in 70 AD (which was threatened in the Olivet discourse in the NEW TESTAMENT). You’re right Mark, what Enns really has a problem with is the generic problem of evil and the very idea of divine judgment. His whole argument is a fig leaf which tries to cover a much bigger problem that he has with biblical teaching in both testaments.
Of course he also flubbed the Sermon on the Mount by failing to notice: 1. it starts with a statement of continuity with the OT, 2. it critiques what was “said,” not what was written, 3. one of the things critiqued (Matt. 5:43) didn’t exist in any form in the OT (it was a pure rabbinic addition instead of being a misinterpretation as was the case for the other critiques), and 4. huge chunks of the sermon come straight from the OT (see A.W. Pink, The Sermon on the Mount). Using the sermon as discontinuity with the OT is a huge error.
His early claim about “reasonable, compassionate” persons is also embarrassing. Could he beg such a big philosophical question any harder? It appears that someone needs some serious epistemological self-awareness.
And then there’s the methodologically erroneous statement that “everyone will have to decide what model best explains the phenomena.” But this is confused at several levels. First, the Bible doesn’t simply lay out bits of data in a descriptive manner with respect to this question and then require us to think up a model that best fits the data. It tells us in numerous places that God righteously performed such and such judgment, that all His way are just, that all His word is true/pure/etc., and on and on. We don’t need to come up with a “preview of God’s final judgment” story to justify herem warfare (as if the fact that God commanded it wasn’t good enough without this “explanation”). Besides, God did in fact give us an explanation for herem: the nations had “filled up the measure of their wickedness.” God judged the wicked in history. How was that unique? But even if, for psychological reasons, we wanted an overarching model, we don’t need to dream it up. The Bible gives it to us. So it appears that Enns simply rejects that model while simultaneously trying to explain discontinuities that aren’t there.
Forget about whether or not he should be fired for being “too liberal.” If this post is any indication of his work in general, people should have been asking whether or not he had the basic competency for his position. Even Homer nods. For Enns’ sake, I hope this was a rare example of him in a coma.
Is it possible the anti-Enns crowd was right in substance even if they were really wrong in how they went about things? I’m asking that in a “really asking” kind of way, not a “see? see?” kind of way, because I didn’t like a lot of what I heard from them, either.
Of course being right in substance doesn’t make up for it if they were really wrong in approach — both matter. But just maybe they were half right.
I’m not sure of the rights and wrongs. I’d have to decide to trust some source or other in order to make any claim to knowledge, and I am pretty firmly in the “distrust” camp.