Soldiers of Jah

by cofty 214 Replies latest watchtower bible

• 

  cofty

  I would like to propose an ethical dilemma for those who believe in the divine inspiration of the bible.

  In the following scenarios I am not asking you what you would have done but rather, what you hope you would have had the courage to do.

  Scenario 1

  You are camped on the east side of the Jordan waiting for orders to cross into the Promised Land. Moses is nearing the end of his life but he has some unfinished business to take care of before he hands over to Joshua. He announces that he has had an instruction from God to take revenge on the Midianites before he dies.

  The ensuing battle is a complete rout, not one Israelite soldier is killed in return for the complete annihilation of the Midianite army. You return to camp with a massive amount of spoil including tens of thousands of women and children. As you keep guard the commanders go off to report back to Moses. A while later they return with new instructions - Moses is furious about the prisoners of war and wants them separated into groups. The rest of the afternoon is spent separating the youngest girls from the rest of the captives. Its a horrifying task, the cries and of the mothers and the hysterical pleadings of the young girls is very distressing. When its over there are 32,000 girls who your commander says are to be shared out, 16,000 to the army and 16,000 to the rest of the families of Israel.

  Cowering in front of you is a mass of terrified humanity, tens and tens of thousands of women and boys, some are only just too young to have fought with their fathers and brothers, others are just babes in arms clinging to their mothers, blissfully unaware of their fate. Now the order comes that you have been dreading. Moses’ command from Yahweh is that every one of them is to be put to death.

  As your fellow soldiers unsheathe their swords and move towards the crowd there is a growing cacophony of screams. The women cover their children in a vain attempt to protect them from the massacre. Bodies are being dragged from the heap to uncover babies underneath so they too can be dispatched.

  So what do you hope you would have the courage to do?

  Faithfully carry out God’s command through Moses, or refuse to follow orders?

  Scenario 2

  Moses has died and the leadership has passed on to Joshua. The nation has crossed the Jordan and the city of Jericho was defeated miraculously. The next military target is the city of Ai. Yahweh has assured Joshua that the city will be easily defeated and the army have been given permission to take spoils of war.

  Joshua has a plan and you are assigned to be part of a group of 30,000 of the best soldiers who are to sneak around the back of the city during the night and lie in wait. Joshua leads another section who moves out in front of the city gates towards Bethel. In the morning the men of Ai set out to repel Joshua’s frontal attack but the Israelite army flee with the Canaanite army in pursuit. With the city unguarded your section invades Ai and sets it on fire before marching out to help Joshua surround the men of Ai. The bluff works like a treat and victory is quick and decisive. You are excited now at the thought of getting straight back to Ai to discover what riches it may have to plunder.

  Then comes that order again that you have been dreading. Before anybody gets to search out any valuables there is a job to do. The army is commanded to first go through the city carefully searching every house and execute every last woman and child. As you kick doors open you find women and children cowering together pleading for their lives.

  So what do you hope you would have the courage to do?

  Faithfully carry out God’s command through Joshua, or refuse to follow orders?

  Scenario 3

  The nation has been settled in the Promised Land for about 400 years. Your parents have often told you the old stories about the exploits of your ancestors who fought under Moses and Joshua and conquered the land. Israel has its first king now and you are proud to be a soldier in Saul’s army just like your forebears. Mostly your battles are defending the borders of Israel from hostile neighbours but then one day right out the blue you receive a strange instruction. You are ordered to muster at a town called Telaim, when you arrive you see that there are 200,000 foot soldiers as well as another 10,000 from the tribe of Judah. Something big must be happening.

  Samuel addresses the troops and tells them he has had a word from Yahweh. Four centuries ago when your forefathers were leaving captivity in Egypt the Amalekites had attacked them in the desert at Rephidim. Joshua defeated them but not without a number of Israelite casualties. Now all these centuries and many generations later, Samuel says that God wants revenge on the descendants of those Amalekites.

  Then comes the order you were dreading, “Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys”.

  So what do you hope you would have the courage to do?

  Faithfully carry out God’s command through Samuel, or refuse to follow orders?

  Biblical inerrancy is not just a theoretical debate – it has profound ethical implications.
• 

  believingxjw

  From Wikipedia:

  Vietnam War

  "The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities (See: Vietnam War casualties), including 3 to 4 million Vietnamese from both sides, between 1.5 to 2 million Laotians and Cambodians, and 58,159 U.S. soldiers."

  WWII Little Boy

  On Monday, August 6, 1945, at 8:15 AM, the nuclear bomb "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima by an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, [17] directly killing an estimated 80,000 people. By the end of the year, injury and radiation brought total casualties to 90,000–140,000. [18] Approximately 69% of the city's buildings were completely destroyed, and about 7% severely damaged.

  American Civil War

  The American Civil War was one of the earliest true industrial wars. Railroads, the telegraph, steamships, and mass-produced weapons were employed extensively. The practices of total war, developed by Sherman in Georgia, and of trench warfare around Petersburg foreshadowed World War I in Europe. It remains the deadliest war in American history, resulting in the deaths of 620,000 soldiers and an undetermined number of civilian casualties. Ten percent of all Northern males 20–45 years of age died, as did 30 percent of all Southern white males aged 18–40. [3]
• 

  xchange

  Can someone show me where god sanctioned the wars in Vietnam/Camboida, WWII and the American Civil War.

  Thanks!
• 

  believingxjw

  Amercan politicians have frequently given their war efforts the God sanction, shall we say. From the American Revolution to the 2003 Iraq War God has been invoked. Remember America's Manifest Destiny?

  Also from Wikipedia:

  Historian William E. Weeks has noted that three key themes were usually touched upon by advocates of Manifest Destiny:

  1. the virtue of the American people and their institutions;
  2. the mission to spread these institutions, thereby redeeming and remaking the world in the image of the U.S.; and
  3. the destiny under God to accomplish this work.
• 

  cofty

  With respect BJW you seem to have missed or evaded to point.

  The above scenarios are based on real events from the OT - See Number 31; Joshua 8; 1 Samuel 15

  Anybody who subscribes to the inspiration of the bible is obliged to accept that God ordered those massacres of unarmed women and children. They have no choice but to approve of those events and to hope that if they had lived through them they would have had the "courage" to carry out the orders.
• 

  snowbird

  In those times, taking vengeance upon your enemies ( yes, children and women) was viewed as a duty - not necessarily an act of courage.

  Courage is marching through a seabed with water suspended on both sides of you.

  Syl
• 

  believingxjw

  Cofty,

  "Anybody who subscribes to the inspiration of the bible is obliged to accept that God ordered those massacres of unarmed women and children."

  Yes, anyone who believes the Bible is inspired of God or God breathed would have to accept what God did in those instances, which is really what men have done for as long as they have existed. If men kill the innocent in war, even unjust wars, are we to point a finger at God when he determines that at a particular point in history this is a necesssary action? And even so, such acts occur even today in war, women and children and the old are slaughtered in war. Do thousands of sons whose fathers have been killed by another nation in war forget all about that when grown and go on to live in peace with that nation? Can these sons be integrated into this nation as easily as daughters who marry and bear children can be? I'm not giving reasons only trying to say that we today have no idea what it was like in those times. To take our present view of justice, flawed as it is, and apply it to people living at such a different time, place and circumstance is wrong. George Washington was a slave owner, so was his wife. To say today that Washington was a bigot because he did not live as we do without owning slaves is wrong as well. Those were different times and we have learned from those times. If we had lived in Washington's time would we have owned slaves? So too with Moses and his day, different times, different circumstances.

  We today are killing millions of unborn children something that in Moses' day would have been considered unthinkable and probably also in Washington's day. So we hardly have a right to say that we today are somehow more righteous than those who lived long before us. Most Americans never experience war, we kill by proxy with our soldiers, our bombs and drones. If you or I had been born in Moses time we would have been trained to defend the nation at all costs. But without the niceties we have today only our own strength of hand. "Finish the job. Don't allow a new generation to come along and our children have to fight this all over again," was a necessary war tactic in times past. Not pretty but at least real, raw truth. The Bible tells it as it was and for this it is today vilified by many. Would more believe in the Bible if it had said that Moses merely asked the enemy to leave and because God had changed their hearts these people then left their lands and homes with peace and love in their hearts for the Jews? No, that too would have been faulted as being a fantasy. People don't give up everything so easily. Or what if it said that after the battle the Jews allowed the women and children to leave alive and alone. They would not have survived long this band of women with children in a world such as it was in Moses' day. That too would be considered wrong by many today. The Bible is damned if it tells the raw truth and damned if it sugarcoats it. I prefer the truth.

  "They have no choice but to approve of those events and to hope that if they had lived through them they would have had the "courage" to carry out the orders."

  You mistake courage for survival. When our personal or national survival is on the line, we do what we must not what we would like. Do the hearts of most Americans today swell with approval after seeing the pictures of people, children included, whose flesh practically melted away in the bombing of Hiroshima? No, I don't believe so. But I think most hope that what was done was necessary at the time. What Moses' did was necessary at their time and for their time.
• 

  snowbird

  BXJW.

  Syl
• 

  believingxjw

  Syl,
• 

  xchange

  Amercan politicians have frequently given their war efforts the God sanction, shall we say.

  So no official sanction from a god? Just people making it up as they go.

  From the American Revolution to the 2003 Iraq War God has been invoked. Remember America's Manifest Destiny?

  Also from Wikipedia:

  Historian William E. Weeks has noted that three key themes were usually touched upon by advocates of Manifest Destiny:

  1. the virtue of the American people and their institutions;
  2. the mission to spread these institutions, thereby redeeming and remaking the world in the image of the U.S.; and
  3. the destiny under God to accomplish this work.

  Again, no official sanctioning from a god.