Knechtle’s Defense of Biblical Slavery - WORSE than you Think! (feat Joshua Bowen & Kipp Davis)

Summary

This article explores Paulogia’s analysis of Knechtle’s apologetic defense of biblical slavery, featuring insights from scholars Joshua Bowen and Kipp Davis. They dissect Knechtle's arguments using a critical lens, highlighting logical inconsistencies and misinterpretations of biblical texts. The discussion extends to broader themes of violence and morality in the scriptures, ultimately questioning the justification of divine commands and the portrayal of God in the Bible. Through engaging dialogue, the complexities of interpreting ancient texts are revealed, promoting a deeper understanding of these contentious biblical narratives.

Highlights

• Paulogia, with Joshua Bowen and Kipp Davis, takes on Knechtle's defense of biblical slavery, exposing its flaws 🕵️‍♂️.
• The video scrutinizes common apologetic tactics that downplay the harsh realities of slavery in biblical times ⛓️.
• Discussions extend beyond slavery, touching on the themes of divine violence and morality in the Old and New Testaments ⚔️.
• Knechtle's arguments are systematically dismantled, highlighting a need for accurate historical context 🏛️.
• Critical reading is emphasized, showcasing the importance of questioning interpretations and translations of ancient texts 📚.

Key Takeaways

• Knechtle's defense of biblical slavery is critically examined, revealing logical inconsistencies and misinterpretations 🤔.
• Paulogia, along with academic experts, challenges popular apologetic narratives and scriptural interpretations involving slavery 🚩.
• The discussion also touches on broader themes of violence, morality, and divine commands in biblical texts 📖.
• This exploration encourages critical thinking and scrutiny when interpreting ancient scriptures and their relevance today 🔍.
• The video emphasizes the importance of context and scholarly interpretation to understand complex biblical narratives 🎓.

Overview

In Paulogia’s video, he critically analyzes Knechtle’s apologetic stance on biblical slavery, employing insights from scholars Joshua Bowen and Kipp Davis. This trio dissects Knechtle's claims, highlighting logical fallacies and challenging his interpretations of biblical texts. The discussion goes beyond slavery to address broader concepts of violence and morality inherent in religious scriptures.

The video critiques Knechtle's reliance on outdated narratives and apologetic strategies that attempt to rationalize biblical forms of slavery. By meticulously analyzing these arguments, the team underscores the necessity of understanding historical context when interpreting the Bible. This approach reveals the often harsh realities that are glossed over in modern apologetics.

Concluding with a discussion on the broader implications of divine commands and the moral frameworks within the scriptures, the video encourages viewers to adopt a critical lens when reading these ancient texts. Paulogia and his expert guests advocate for an informed and questioning approach to biblical interpretation, pushing for a deeper understanding and acknowledgment of the complexity involved in these age-old narratives.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Faith as an Intellectual and Personal Commitment This chapter discusses the nature of faith, emphasizing that it is not solely an intellectual exercise but also a personal commitment and trust in Christ. The author suggests that faith is a response to Christ's love, which warms the believer's heart. The chapter acknowledges a contrast between this perception and the depiction of God in the Old Testament and humorously suggests that bringing up this contrast might lead to 'canceling' Jesus.
• 00:30 - 01:30: God of the Old Testament vs Jesus of the New Testament This chapter draws a comparison between the God of the Old Testament and Jesus of the New Testament, likening them to different versions of the same character, much like the transformation of Luke Skywalker across the Star Wars trilogies. The discourse suggests that the shift from an initially stern Yahweh to the more pacific Jesus in the Gospel of John is comparable to character evolution in fiction, where characters can mellow or change drastically over time.
• 01:30 - 02:30: Introduction to Poli The chapter introduces the theme of 'Polyia,' where a former Christian critically examines Christian claims. The focus is on an interview by Alex O'Conor with Cliff and Stuart Kley, known for engaging college students in discussions about Christianity. The chapter sets the stage for an analysis of their approach, comparing them to Ray Comfort but noting the absence of his accent.
• 02:30 - 03:30: Gospel Reliability and Character Flaws of God The chapter titled "Gospel Reliability and Character Flaws of God" discusses the perception of God's character in the Old Testament compared to the New Testament, focusing particularly on gospel reliability. The discussion mentions that even within modern Christianity, there is often a distinction made between the God depicted in the Old Testament and Jesus in the New Testament. The narrative suggests that the Old Testament portrays God in a more militaristic and jealous manner, which contrasts with the teachings of Jesus. The chapter begins with the intent to discuss gospel reliability, though the conversation seems intertwined with critiques of God's character as depicted in biblical texts.
• 03:30 - 06:30: Old Testament God's Jealousy and Its Justification The chapter discusses the contrasting depictions of God in the Old Testament and the figure of Jesus in the New Testament. It highlights the Old Testament portrayal of God as sometimes vindictive and one who experiences regret, yet also omnipresent and localized in places like the Garden of Eden and the temple. In contrast, Jesus is described as meek, mild, and the epitome of love and gentleness. The chapter explores the perceived incompatibility between these depictions and the apologetic justifications that attempt to reconcile them.
• 06:30 - 10:30: Hebrew Bible's Concept of Slavery The chapter discusses the concept of slavery in the Hebrew Bible, highlighting the character portrayals of God in the Old Testament. It touches upon the perceptions of God's characteristics, emphasizing his jealousy and nature, as perceived by some characters. The dialogue also includes a moment of humor as a character named Paul seemingly 'rage quits' during the conversation, possibly reflecting frustrations or disagreements.
• 10:30 - 16:30: Slavery in the Old Testament and New Testament The chapter discusses the concept of 'jealousy' in the context of the Old and New Testaments, focusing on the Hebrew Bible's portrayal. It compares modern interpretations of jealousy with those from biblical times, using the Hebrew root 'cana' as an example. The term could possess a positive connotation in certain biblical contexts, differing from contemporary views. This jealousy is illustrated through a metaphor of a parent's protective instincts towards their child in the face of negative influences, like drug dealers.
• 16:30 - 20:30: Critique of Biblical Justifications and Historical Analysis The chapter provides a critique of the justifications found in biblical texts, focusing especially on the story of Phineas. In the text, Phineas's act of driving a spear through a Midianite woman and her Israelite lover is portrayed as a positive, zealous act. However, the summary questions whether such actions should indeed be considered positive, drawing a parallel to a drug dealer analogy to highlight the potential moral issues with this interpretation.
• 20:30 - 25:30: Indictment of Yahweh's Commands This chapter, titled "Indictment of Yahweh's Commands," discusses the concept of jealousy attributed to Yahweh's commands. It raises ethical concerns about the characterization of God as jealous and debates the comfort level we should have with such portrayals. The discussion alludes to the potential negative connotations of jealousy, comparing it to contexts such as in Genesis 26:14, where the Philistines were envious of Isaac's wealth.
• 25:30 - 30:30: Genocide and War in the Old Testament The chapter discusses the theme of jealousy in biblical narratives, specifically in the Old Testament. It highlights various instances where characters such as Joseph's brothers and Joshua exhibit jealousy. It also touches upon the envy present in the Psalms and Proverbs towards individuals who are wrongdoers, arrogant, violent, or wicked. Additionally, the chapter critiques an individual, Cliff, for justifying Yahweh's actions by using inappropriate comparisons to unrelated situations.
• 30:30 - 40:30: Modern Implications and Historical Perspective of Biblical Texts The chapter explores the relationship between the Israelites and Yahweh, emphasizing their exclusive devotion and service to Him. It discusses the fierce reaction and consequences described in the biblical passage Deuteronomy 29:17-20 for those who deviate from this devout path by engaging in idolatry involving materials like wood, stone, silver, and gold.
• 40:30 - 45:30: God's Commands and Moral Ethics This chapter discusses the consequences of turning away from God's commands and following other gods. It warns against the internal corruption that can result from abandoning divine guidance, leading to personal and communal downfall. The narrative highlights a defiant attitude, where one claims peace even while ignoring divine warnings, which in turn, incites divine anger and jealousy. Such actions endanger both prosperity and morality, suggesting that spiritual neglect leads to both material and spiritual desolation.
• 45:30 - 50:30: Debate on Hyperbole and Literal Interpretation in Biblical Narratives The chapter discusses the debate on hyperbole and literal interpretation of Biblical narratives. It highlights the analogy drawn by Cliff between a Biblical curse and a parent's jealousy. Cliff illustrates a scenario where a parent is concerned about a child associating with a negative influence, comparing this to the Biblical depiction of Yahweh's actions and intentions. The chapter raises questions about interpreting such narratives literally versus understanding them as metaphors for larger lessons.

Knechtle’s Defense of Biblical Slavery - WORSE than you Think! (feat Joshua Bowen & Kipp Davis) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 So faith is not just an intellectual gymnastic. It's not just an intellectual gymnastic, but it's at least partially an intellectual gymnastic. Faith is a personal commitment and a trust in Christ, a response to his love, to his warming our hearts with his love. I must say, that's not the picture I get of God from the Old Testament. Uh-oh, Alex is going to cancel Jesus by bringing up some problematic old tweets. Even Christians today will speak as if the God of the Old Testament is like a
• 00:30 - 01:00 different character. There's the God of the Old Testament and there's Jesus. It's like there's Luke Skywalker from the classic trilogy, the goofy farm kid who's generally a glass half full kind of guy, and then there's Luke Skywalker from the Disney trilogy who's grumpy and dire and wants that burn it all to the ground. They're like different characters. Personally, I think this Luke Skywalker shift makes more sense than the initially grumpy Yahweh to the hippie Jesus of the Gospel of John. But it's sometimes true that having a kid late in life can mellow a
• 01:00 - 01:30 deity. Welcome to Polyia, where a former Christian takes a look at the claims of Christians. Today we're going to look at Alex Okconor's interview of father and son duo Cliff and Stuart Kley, a pair best known for harassing college students in the name of Jesus. Think Ray Comfort, but without the charming accent. I'm very excited because they're going to be discussing one of my
• 01:30 - 02:00 favorite topics, gospel reliability. I must say that's not the picture I get of God from the Old Testament. I want to talk about gospel reliability, but but no, but we want to talk about gospel reliability. But perhaps we should do this in order. Even even Christians today will speak as if the God of the Old Testament is like a different character. There's the God of the Old Testament and there's Jesus. I suppose the first question is can you understand why at least people are doing that. If you read the Old Testament and you you you see a much more military jealous
• 02:00 - 02:30 apparently vindictive um one who regrets things, one who seems to physically sort of walk amongst sort of the Garden of Eden but is also sort of really far away but is also kind of localized in a temple. And then you have this Jesus figure, the Meek and Mild, the endlessly loving impossible to picture as anything other than just like love and softness and beautiful. Can you understand why people see these as incompatible? Sure. This is clearly going to be all about the apologetic justification of the
• 02:30 - 03:00 obvious character flaws in the God depicted in the Old Testament and not New Testament stuff at all. I'm out. Josh Hip, you're up. Did Paul just rage quit his own video? Well, I mean, he is known for being a bit of a hotthead. I mean, I get it. I've done it. I also don't have to listen. Maybe I should just go. Maybe you should. Oh well, it's our desk now. But I hope God is jealous. I hope you're jealous. If you have children and they're starting to entertain the friendship of a drug
• 03:00 - 03:30 dealer, I hope that you're going to be jealous for your child's attention and loyalty. And when you see a drug dealer begin to weasel his way into their lives and suck them into drug addiction, I hope that you will have a selfless jealousy where you will seek to win your child back. Well, this is certainly not the picture painted in the Hebrew Bible. First, the Hebrew root cana has different nuances based on context. It can have what would be considered by the writers and their audience a positive aspect, although it might not be positive to us today. For example, in
• 03:30 - 04:00 several places, Phineas is said to have been jealous in driving a spear through a Midianite woman and her Israelite lover. This was certainly seen as positive in the text. Yeah, but put a pin in that for a second. Is this really what we want to promote as positive? If this is the positive aspect of the verb as it's applied to Yahweh, is that seriously a good thing? In Cliff's drug dealer analogy, he's the one driving a
• 04:00 - 04:30 stake to impale another human being because he's jealous for your child's attention and loyalty. I'm just not sure how comfortable we should be with that. But carry on, Josh. No, that that's a good point, Kip. So, the word jealous can also denote a negative emotional or mental state. In Genesis 26:14, we see that the Philistines were jealous of Isaac's wealth. In other places, Rachel
• 04:30 - 05:00 was jealous of Leia for her ability to have children. Joseph's brothers were jealous of him and his relationship with her father. Joshua was jealous of two prophets. Throughout the Psalms and Proverbs, people can be jealous of wrongdoers. the arrogant that prosper, a violent man, sinners, and evil and wicked people. The bigger issue, however, is how Cliff is excusing Yahweh's behavior by comparing it to disanalogous situations. Israel belonged
• 05:00 - 05:30 to Yahweh. They were his slaves and all of their worship was to be directed only to him. Now should they stray from this worshiping other deities, Yahweh would become enraged and exact vengeance upon his people. Consider Deuteronomy 29:17 to20. Moreover, you have seen their abominations and their idols of wood, stone, silver, and gold which they had with them. Lest there shall be among you a man or woman or family or tribe whose
• 05:30 - 06:00 heart turns away today from the Lord our God to go and serve the gods of those nations, lest there shall be among you a root bearing poisonous fruit and wormwood. And it shall be when he hears the words of this curse that he will boast, saying, "I have peace, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart in order to destroy the watered land with the dry. The Lord shall never be willing to forgive him. But rather, the anger of the Lord and his jealousy will burn
• 06:00 - 06:30 against that man, and every curse which is written in this book will rest on him, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven." This is certainly not an isolated idea in the Hebrew Bible. How did Cliff draw an analogy to this? A parent being jealous if they start hanging out with a drug dealer who tries to get them hooked on drugs. He describes a selfless jealousy where the parent seeks to win back the attention of the child. Is this analogous to what Yahweh does? I mean, one might appeal to
• 06:30 - 07:00 passages like Joel 21:18, which says, "Then the Lord will be zealous or jealous for his land and will have pity on his people." But what does this merciful state follow? Horrendous destruction and devastation from Yahweh. It is only because of this punishment and wrath that the people turn back to him. Is this really a good analogy? Would a father execute fierce wrath and anger against his child for getting addicted to drugs? This is not a matter
• 07:00 - 07:30 of Yahweh simply stepping back and allowing the natural consequences of their actions to overtake them. No, Yahweh is shown to be fiercely angry, wrathful, and full of fury as he punishes his weward bride. I mean that that could be some terrible fathers, right? But I think this is the other problem with this analogy. It's that Cliff is assuming pure motives on the part of God that I just don't think we
• 07:30 - 08:00 can simply grant. Sure, you're a parent and maybe you think your child is being manipulated by a friend or a partner into destructive behavior. Look, I get it. Josh and I both have kids. This reading assumes that you are an attentive, observant, and responsible 21st century parent as most of us are. But not all parents are like this. As Josh has pointed out, Yahweh is certainly not like this. So even when
• 08:00 - 08:30 reading about how jealousy is, as critical readers, we need to raise questions about Yahweh's motivations. Is this a legitimate jealousy? Are his people actually in such grave danger? Or is he exacerbating that danger to suit his own agenda? When Yahweh accuses foreign nations and foreign gods of atrocities like child sacrifice, is this a genuine complaint or is he projecting?
• 08:30 - 09:00 when he rants against the people in Jeremiah 32:27-35. Are these even accurate accusations or are they trumped up falsehoods? See, this is why it is so important to be a critical reader of the text. We cannot just assume pure motives for any of the biblical writers for the same reason that we can't really assume pure motives for anyone. At least not at first blush. Reputations are earned. Has
• 09:00 - 09:30 Yahweh even earned the benefit of the doubt that Cliff voiced upon him in this exchange? I hope you'll be angry at times with a righteous indignation. I mean, if I beat you up and steal your wallet, the police come in cuz these guys call the police. Steuart calls the police. And the police say, "Cliff, you beat up Alex. You stole his wallet. Now, let's go to Starbucks." Well, that's ridiculous. Moral outrage is appropriate. Why? Because injustice is horrendous. I think the audience can
• 09:30 - 10:00 fall prey to these terrible and misleading analogies because they identify some overlap between X and Y. They simply buy into the totality of the analogy. As with the parent and the child that was on drugs that we spoke about above, Yahweh's jealousy and wrath are in no way comparable to Cliff's parent analogy. In the same way, if Cliff were to beat up Alex, this would ostensibly be analogous to the Israelites worshiping other deities. At best, this would be analogous to what we
• 10:00 - 10:30 see in Ezekiel 16, where Israel is not grateful for what Yahweh has done for them and instead goes and commits adultery with other nations and their gods. If the analogy were to be fitting at all, we would have to see Alex unleashing his fierce wrath upon Cliff, inflicting great physical violence upon him as punishment for Cliff's actions. drawing some comparison between this and Cliff asking Alex to go to Starbucks is it's just absurd. You know, I I know
• 10:30 - 11:00 this is a bit off topic, but just walk with me here. I think this fits. I'm reminded of something I read recently in Esto Komodo's excellent book, God's Monsters, where she speaks of this intriguing ritual object, the Ark of the Covenant, and what its appearance in the biblical text tells us about the character of this God, Yahweh. And I think this is telling. The turning inward, she says, of the cherubim expresses an increased concern with the
• 11:00 - 11:30 danger God poses to his own people, as we've been talking about already. And this reflects a pattern in the Bible. While we witness God's violence through all periods of biblical writing, there is an alarming development following the devastating Babylonian siege of Jerusalem, destruction of the temple, and exile of the Jews. These horrors are attributed to God's violence against his
• 11:30 - 12:00 own people. Post-exelic writings like Lamentations 2, a gut punch of a poem about God ruthlessly trashing his people show why survivors might crave any possible protection from divine danger. That protection never comes. The image of the violent deity isn't more primitive as it's often brushed off as being. It's the development of people who having survived horrors reflect
• 12:00 - 12:30 greater understanding. The eyes of the people are opened to know good and evil. I think one of the points that Esther Kamorei is getting at here is that this God is dangerous. Protection is required in the biblical text for anyone brave enough even just to enter his presence. Is he really the good guy in this story? Well, the same people who object to that will say, "Oh, well, God's just loving and forgiving." Oh, no, no, no. God in both the Old Testament and the New
• 12:30 - 13:00 Testament is angry about evil. Good gracious, Jesus took a whip of cords and drove the religious hypocrites out of the temple. And the bloodiest book in the Bible is not in the Old Testament, in the New Testament. The last book of the New Testament, Book of Revelation, the blood flows like no other place in the Bible. So, the Bible's very consistent. Yes. Here we agree, at least from the theological position that Cliff and Stuart seem to hold to the Jesus in the Gospels by their lights is the same Jesus in Revelation. But this doesn't help them in their attempt to soften the
• 13:00 - 13:30 actions of Yahweh in the Old Testament. To the contrary, it shows the violence that is inflicted upon the nation of Israel by their God to be completely consistent with what we see in the apocalyptic literature of the New Testament. Yeah. And something more needs to be said about this confrontation of religious hypocrisy in the New Testament that Cliff finds so commendable. Yes, Jesus drove out the money changers who were taking advantage of the temple system as a means to
• 13:30 - 14:00 enrich themselves. But why is it because he was frustrated by how this system disenfranchised poor and marginalized people? Let's look at what the text actually says. Jesus entered the temple and he began throwing out those who were selling and buying in the temple. He flipped the tables of the money changers and the seats of the dove merchants. He would not permit anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying to them, "Is it not
• 14:00 - 14:30 written that my house will be called a house of prayer for all people, but you have made it a den of robbers? Maybe he was just so upset by the loopholes in the system. But I can't help but see this more as an affront to the sanctity of the religious institution that continued to promote many injustices. In Matthew's version of this story, a short time later, Jesus delivers his diet tribe against the scribes and the
• 14:30 - 15:00 Pharisees. He says, "Hypocrites, you shut the kingdom of heaven to men because you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them." Here he is calling the Pharisees hypocrites. But is this a fair characterization? The Pharisees is a term often used in Matthew's gospel, especially as a trope. It's a stereotype by which to denigrate and prejudice against all Jewish people on the basis
• 15:00 - 15:30 of a caricature of their customs and religious practices. It's not in any way a good faith depiction of Jewish culture and religion in the first and second century CE when these texts were written and circulated. You know, we can thank these sorts of tropes for promoting centuries of anti-semitic marginalization and violence among Christians in Europe. Again, it's important to read the text critically to
• 15:30 - 16:00 get a clear picture of everything that's going on. The righteous part is important here, that the commands that God is giving, the things that he's angry about, the things that he demands of the nation of Israel seem to run contrary to a lot of our moral intuitions. Now perhaps we can start by talking about the slavery thing. Yes, I understand that the word slavery is a promiscuous term that can mean lots of different things. When you say slavery, people immediately think of antibbellum American South slavery, right? The kind of slavery that appears in the Hebrew Bible is going to be very different. I'm
• 16:00 - 16:30 sure that Alex is just trying to set up his question by assuming the most charitable version of the Kley's position on slavery, but this is ground that Alex does not need to give. This type of apologetic is very very common. Someone brings up slavery and the first thing the apologist does is say, "Wow, what?" It's not the type of slavery we saw in the antibellum sound. Look, I wouldn't have a problem with this approach if all they were doing was trying to say, "Look, we want to make sure that we aren't letting our modern
• 16:30 - 17:00 understanding of the term slave have undue influence on our interpretation of slave in the Hebrew Bible." I would agree with that. The problem is this is a strategic move, not an academic one. Despite what Cliff and Stuart are going to tell you, the slavery in the antibbellum south had important essential characteristics in common with what we see in the laws of the Hebrew Bible. And we'll revisit this later, but what Cliff and Stewart are not going to do is an applesto apples comparison of
• 17:00 - 17:30 slave laws. They're going to try to distance southern slavery from biblical slavery by comparing what actually transpired in the south and what the laws were in the Hebrew Bible. And it's going to vary depending on what kind of slaves you're talking about. There will be indentured servants. There will be and also it's a different kind of society, right? Where where people literally cannot survive except in safaris and being a servant of a house. False. False. This is a talking point of apologists. And again, I suspect that
• 17:30 - 18:00 Alex is just trying to grant this for the sake of argument. But this idea is just not borne out by the data and not even by the text itself. It does seem at the very least that the Hebrew Bible does not condemn in principle the ownership of other human beings as private property. Would you disagree with that? Yes. So where the Hebrew Bible says things like if he gets up after a day or two, you're not to be the the slave owner not to be punished because the slave is his property and where he says um your male
• 18:00 - 18:30 and female slaves may come from the nations around you. From them you may buy and sell slaves. You may also purchase some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clan, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly. Clearly here we're dealing with the ownership of other human beings private property. Clearly, God is legislating in such a way, sometimes seeming as not to condemn it there and then, and sometimes saying, "You may do this." And I wonder if he's not at least implicitly condoning that. What is he doing in those verses? Mhm. He's giving instruction, not approval.
• 18:30 - 19:00 He's giving regulation, not affirmation of it. What would Cliff say about passages like Exodus 22:25? If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal. charge no interest. Is God just regulating this? He isn't actually giving approval or affirmation for lending money to a needy Israelite, right? Or 23:10-11. For 6 years, you are to sew your fields and harvest the crops, but during the
• 19:00 - 19:30 seventh year, let the land lie unplowed and unused. Then the poor among your people may get food from it. I'm guessing Cliff would argue that God is not approving of them sewing their fields. He's just regulating it. Or what about Deuteronomy 21:18-21? If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, certainly God is not affirming having children or disciplining them. He's just regulating the practice that he does not approve
• 19:30 - 20:00 of. This must also be true for the following verse. If someone guilty of a capital offense is put to death and their body is exposed on a pole, you must not leave the body hanging on the pole overnight. Deuteronomy 21:22-23. Look, God isn't approving of carrying out capital punishment here, right? He's just regulating a practice that he doesn't approve of. And don't forget chapter 22:es 8- 11. When you build a new house, make a parapit around your roof so that you may not bring the
• 20:00 - 20:30 guilt of bloodshed on your house if someone falls from the roof. Obviously, God doesn't approve of building houses. Look, he's just regulating it. And do not plant two kinds of seeds in your vineyard. God's obviously not approving of planting seeds, guys. He's just regulating it. Do not plow with an ox and a donkey yolk together. Nope. Nope. He's not approving of plowing with an animal. It's just regulating it. Do not wear clothes of wool and linen. Of wool and linen. What the idea? God's just not
• 20:30 - 21:00 very good at cutting regulations. He'd suck as a Republican. Look, Josh and I are philologists, so we're naturally going to be looking very closely at the text, asking questions of it, about what is being said and what it means. And I think this is what is so troublesome about responses like this one. Where is that in the text, Cliff? This is going to be an ongoing problem whenever Cliff attempts to present what
• 21:00 - 21:30 is actually said in the Bible. So when Alex reads a passage like in Leviticus 25 providing explicit instructions about specifically how the Israelites are to acquire slaves from the nations around you from the sons of foreigners among you. You can buy male and female slaves from them and from their families with you who are born in your land. They shall be your property and for how long
• 21:30 - 22:00 you are to pass them along to your sons after you to inherit as property in perpetuity and how they are to be treated. These people shall work as slaves. How does Cliff know that this is not an affirmation? Is there anything within this text to indicate that God harbors any reluctance or hesitation about this ruling? Throw me a bone, Cliff. I don't see it. Where is it? I
• 22:00 - 22:30 just don't have the time, patience, nor the timmerity to simply make [ __ ] up about the text. And it is continually frustrating to encounter people like Cliff who has no qualms at all about just pretending the text says things that are not there. Damn. And the key to this is what Jesus says in Matthew chapter 19 when he's asked, "What about divorce?"
• 22:30 - 23:00 And Jesus points out, "Divorce is wrong." Did he though? Divorce is wrong. What about verse 9? And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery. Doesn't sound like divorce is wrong. You just have to do it correctly. Yeah. I'm I'm always particularly amused by how apologists like Cliff stopped short of seeing this teaching all the way through to the end. We see this over and over. So, in the following verses, the disciples of Jesus
• 23:00 - 23:30 rightly recognize that since the rules of divorce are much stricter than what Moses said, it's probably best to just not get married then. And Jesus seems to agree. You could always be a unic. It's not for everyone, but maybe this is something you have the balls to pull off. Come on, do it for the kingdom. Well, then why did Moses say, "Give your wife a certificate of divorce and send her on her way." And Jesus says something fascinating. He says, "Moses permitted this because your hearts were
• 23:30 - 24:00 hard." Is this really what Cliff wants to draw attention to? What's the analogy here? Slavery isn't wrong. You just have to do it correctly. This doesn't sound like much of a flex, does it? Gets right back to the book of Job. We live in an unfair, cursed, messed up world. Not really seeing his point about Job here. Yeah. What is he thinking here? Has Cliff read the Bible? Because this idea about how [ __ ] up the world is as a result of the curse of sin is nowhere to
• 24:00 - 24:30 be found in the book of Job. It's quite the opposite actually. Job suffered because God was collecting data. You know, I I've heard it both ways. I bet you have. And unfortunately, if there's been adultery, divorce is permissible before God. But that is not the way it was from the beginning. from Genesis 2:24. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother, be united to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. But you know what else happens in this story? In Genesis 2, in verse 15,
• 24:30 - 25:00 it says that God took the man and he left him in the garden of Eden. Why did he do this? To work it and to guard it. You see that first word there translated as work. That is the same word that appears in Leviticus 25:46, which we just read, where the law says that the Israelites are permitted to treat foreigners as slaves. It's the same thing. The first man was enslaved to
• 25:00 - 25:30 work God's garden. So remember, those laws in the Old Testament are instructions, not approval, regulations, not endorsement. Yeah, that's that's just a claim and it's one that I think we've shown the problems with here. Cliff is going to have to do a lot more work in order to make the connection between Matthew 19 and the slavery laws. Otherwise, it seems like we could say that God didn't approve of a lot of things that are in the law. He only tolerated them because of the hardness
• 25:30 - 26:00 of their hearts, like loaning money to poor Israelites or building houses. But Jesus wants him some Unix. He does. I I have heard this response before, right? The idea is that there are two ways to look at this. One is to say, well, actually, God was perfectly okay with it, but it just wasn't as bad as you think. And one way is to say, actually, it is pretty bad, but God's not okay with it. Right? For example, in the book of Exodus, where the the law of God says if you have a Hebrew slave, you should go free after seven years. If he has a wife, when he comes to you, then the wife goes free, too. But if while he's
• 26:00 - 26:30 your slave, he takes a wife, he and has children, the wife and children stay with you. They don't get to go with him. I need to make a small correction here to Alex's recollection of this text because it is really important to ensure that we're getting the full picture of what is happening here. First off, Alex is right that in Exodus 21:3, it says that if a man enters his term of dead enslavement alone, he shall leave alone.
• 26:30 - 27:00 If he is literally the lord or owner of a woman, then his woman shall go out with him. But importantly, look at what it says in verse four. If his lord, that is his owner, to whom he is temporarily indebted, he gives him a woman and the woman gives birth to his sons or daughters, then her children shall belong to her lord, and he shall go out alone. The slave in this situation is not taking a wife, technically more
• 27:00 - 27:30 accurately a woman. He is being provided with a woman by his temporary owner who also retains the right of permanent ownership of the woman and any children she may have through the temporary debt slave. Look, there's there is nothing here that indicates this is a valitional act on the part of the slave. This has all been initiated by his owner. But carry on, Alex. If however, it says the
• 27:30 - 28:00 man decides that he loves his wife and he loves his children and he loves his master. Yeah. As if as if those three have to come together. Maybe maybe he just loves his wife and kids, well, he can stay with them. But in doing so, he's taken somewhere. He has his ear pierced like cattle. Mhm. And then he remains a slave for life in order that he can be with his wife and children. Now, I understand the idea that maybe God for some reason couldn't abolish slavery. Maybe the society just couldn't do without it. Whatever the reason may be, it seems to me that it wouldn't have
• 28:00 - 28:30 been too much to ask for God to say, if he has a wife and children and when he goes free, his wife and kids should go with him because I'm a God who believes in the family. I believe in marriage. I believe in sort of the proper uprising of children. And so, if you're going to let that man go, it's a real priority that the wife and kids go with. But no, instead, for some reason, that's that's not allowed. So, so in other words, if it were just the case that we had a list of commands where God said, "Listen, if you're going to be your slave, then this is going to happen. If then, then then fine. Maybe he's trying to sort of ready us for an
• 28:30 - 29:00 abolitionist world." But there are a lot of cases where he seems not to do that. Mhm. So, once again, must read in context. All right. So, you've got Genesis 1, God creates us in his image, male and female, we all have equal dignity. Jesus Christ. What is Cliff doing in context? Are you kidding me? We're talking about Exodus 21 here, right? What the hell? Why the hell is Cliff leaping to another short passage in another book and then wagging his
• 29:00 - 29:30 finger at Alex for not thinking of context? Really, that's just absurd. How is Alex supposed to know that the context for this ruling in Exodus about dead enslavement has something to do with the first chapter of the previous book in the collection? Is there something here that I am missing? Because I don't see anything that prompts me to think, hm, I wonder what Genesis 1 has to say about this. And then even if there were, there's not.
• 29:30 - 30:00 But even if there were, when I turn to Genesis 1 and read it, I'm left confused because there is nothing there. Nothing about dead enslavement. But what the hell? We're here. We should probably parse whatever garbled nonsense Cliff is callulling from Genesis 1 and why he might ever somehow think this is relevant. Okay. Genesis 1:26 says that God proposed to make a man in our image
• 30:00 - 30:30 or likeness according to our form or shape. Notice here that God is speaking not just of himself. His vision is for a replica in appearance to him and the other divine beings in his presence. It's the Trinity, Kip, the Trinity. It's not the Trinity. It's not really. It's not. But I continue to point this out to people who invoke this text as some
• 30:30 - 31:00 grand vision for human sensience or creativity or reason or intelligence. It's not the trinity. Some of those things may be in view here, but importantly that's not what the text says. Are you catching a a theme, a repeated pattern here? These words image and form are used exclusively throughout the Bible to describe statues, sketches, models or figurines. Look, this is just
• 31:00 - 31:30 a declaration about what a man looks like. He looks like the gods. Moving on. In verse 27, it says that God created the man in his image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. So why would Cliff draw from this anything to do with equal dignity? At best, he could try to claim that the creation of humans in the form of both male and female suggests that
• 31:30 - 32:00 they are equal partners in the mandate of verse 28 to be fertile, multiply, fill the earth, and bring it to heal. Rule over fish of the sea, over bird of the sky, and every animal that crawls on the ground. Perhaps this is implied, but it's crucial to point out that it's never spoken. In fact, the implication within the fiercely patriarchal culture of the ancient Levant probably suggests the opposite since even in the heavens,
• 32:00 - 32:30 the boy gods ruled. But very significantly, please also notice that this text has nothing whatsoever to do with slavery. That's what we're talking about, right? For hundreds, thousands of years, people read this story. They knew it by heart. And it never prompted anyone to think it had anything at all to do with owning slaves or being slaves. The only in the only two places where this passage is mentioned in the
• 32:30 - 33:00 entire rest of the Bible. It has nothing to do with slaves. Any connection to slavery is something that Cliff has imported into the text. It's not there. Now, I need to say that what Cliff is drawing from is not ancient history or the original meaning of the text. Rather, he's invoking a thoroughly modern idea. It's true that the invocation of this passage was effective for the 18th and 19th century
• 33:00 - 33:30 abolitionists in their efforts to end slavery. They used the idea of the among day that all people were created in the image of God to counter the by then prevailing notion that some people were intrinsically superior to other people on the basis of race. But the abolitionists were wrong about this text on its own within its original context. It doesn't really do anything to confront the idea that people could own one another under any variety of
• 33:30 - 34:00 conditions. which is why it never prompted anyone to give it a second thought at the slave markets until after many, many centuries. Second greatest miracle in the Old Testament. God frees the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. Oh, good. More completely irrelevant context from Cliff. No, my guy. The Hebrew slaves were not freed to pursue their own independence. As Josh has already
• 34:00 - 34:30 pointed out, the Israelites were Yahweh's slaves. The entire rationale for the laws in Leviticus 25 about what to do with enslaved people in the year of Jubilee is rooted entirely in this fact. The sons of Israel are my slaves. They are my slaves whom I led out of the land of Egypt. I am Yahweh your God. You see, Yahweh was just taking back what was rightfully his and which the
• 34:30 - 35:00 Egyptian Pharaoh had overstepped in basically stealing and inappropriately enslaving people to whom he had no rights of ownership. Slavery was fine. Stealing slaves that belong to someone else was not. Luke 4, first par, first sermon of Jesus, he almost loses his life because he communicates to Jews, God loves Gentiles just as much as he does you Jews. Best known parable, Luke chapter 10. The parable of the good Samaritan. Jesus makes a direct frontal attack on racism as he tells how a
• 35:00 - 35:30 Samaritan gets down on his hands and knees and cleans out the cuts and bandages of the wounds of a Jew. Galatians 3:28, "In Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free." Very clearly, the first century church of Jesus Christ was committed to slavery is unacceptable. I just can't do any more of this. I can't. Cliff's bizarre definition and application of context has probably broken my brain and has me seriously questioning what the hell I'm even doing here. Give me a minute. Yeah, go grab a
• 35:30 - 36:00 cup of coffee, man. Just just relax. I got or bleach. I might grab bleach. Look, that Galatians 3:28 is not intended to do away with the social institution of slavery. It's clear for several reasons. First, the other two statements in the verse, neither Jew nor Gentile, and especially neither male nor female, can hardly be understood as doing away with such distinctions, as Alex will point out shortly. Whatever one would argue concerning the attitude of the New Testament writers on the role
• 36:00 - 36:30 and status of women, it would be difficult to maintain that passages like 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 would allow the social distinctions between men and women to just be ignored. The point of Galatians 3:28, it would seem, is to express the unity that members of the body of Christ share by being in Christ. Scott Mcnite writes to this end. To be in Christ is to be in spiritual fellowship with him through God's spirit. This is one way of
• 36:30 - 37:00 defining what a Christian is, one who is in Christ. Although believers are now all united and equal in the eyes of God, having been baptized into Christ, this does not negate the reality of social and role distinctions between members of the referenced social groups, including slaves. And if the New Testament's teaching on slavery was so clear, as Cliff seems to state, let's see what the early church actually said about slavery, shall we? Jennifer Glansancy, a specialist in slavery in the New
• 37:00 - 37:30 Testament and early Christianity, writes this. Every generation of Christians in antiquity included slaveholders. The persistence of slaveholding as a practice among geographically scattered Christians over a period of centuries testifies to the enduring power of the institution of slavery in antiquity. With rare and limited exceptions, Christian authors expressed no approprium towards Christian slaveholders. Slaveholding was not considered a sin. Let's take John
• 37:30 - 38:00 Chrysstm for an example. In his homaly on 1 Corinthians 15:29, he spends some time on the greed and laziness of those who have many slaves. He says this, "For why hath he many servants? Since as in our apparel we ought to follow our need only, and in our table, so also in our servants." What need is there then? None at all. For in fact, one master need only employ one servant. Or rather, two or three masters one servant. But if
• 38:00 - 38:30 this be grievous, consider them that have none, and enjoy more prompt attendance. For God hath made men sufficient to minister unto themselves, or rather unto their neighbor. Also, Chrysism is speaking against those who are relying on slaves to do the work that they themselves were created capable of doing. Lansancy writes, Petristic authors objected to ownership of excessive numbers of slaves, not out of concern for the slaves, but out of concern for the owners. owning slaves
• 38:30 - 39:00 was associated with gluttony and dissipation. In short, quoting Galatians 3:28 as a statement against the social institution of slavery is unconvincing to say the least. That's interesting because, well, uh, Cliff, I I wonder if you know what you've just committed yourself to. I didn't know that you were also a a woke gender abolitionist. Because I I often hear people quote this this particular verse. They say, "Look, I know that that God seemed to suggest that he was sort of maybe pro-slavery, but look, we have it
• 39:00 - 39:30 in the scripture. There is neither slave nor free, for we're all one in Christ." Well, it also says there's no male or female. There's no male, no female, no slave, no free, no Jew, no Gentile, for we're all one in Jesus. If we're supposed to interpret that as God condemning the earthly practice of of slavery because there is no no slave and there is no master, but he also says there is no male and there is no female. So, he's not also a gender abolitionist. I would I would say I mean, I don't want to guess your position. I don't think you'd believe that. If that's the case, then the fact that God is saying that there's no male and although there's
• 39:30 - 40:00 male and female on earth, of course, in Christ we're all one. Even though there's male and female on earth, in Christ we're all one. And so, if we're going to interpret that that way, I think we also have to say, even though, of course, on earth there's, you know, slave and master, of course, but we're all one in Christ. In other words, I think this might be a reaffirmation of the earthly practice of slavery. Well, I would take it totally differently. I would take it that uh Steven Carter who teaches at Yale Law School, a black intellectual, is absolutely correct when he points out the demographic that has the highest percentage of followers of Christ in the world is women of color.
• 40:00 - 40:30 And the demographic in the United States that has the highest percentage of followers of Christ is black women. Yeah, women get it. There is nobody who has elevated the position of women as much as Jesus Christ has. What on earth is he talking about? How does this answer the question at all? Let's see if we can follow the dialectic here just so we can see how much Cliff is dodging the question. Cliff attempted to use Galatians 3:28 to say that God is against the social institution of slavery because the verse says that
• 40:30 - 41:00 there is neither slave nor free. Alex responded that the verse also says that there is neither male nor female. If Cliff is arguing that there is no distinction on earth between slave and free and thus God is against slavery, then he would have to argue that God is against gender roles as there is neither male nor female. In short, Alex is asking what the symmetry breaker is between neither male nor female and
• 41:00 - 41:30 neither slave nor free. Cliff responds to the implicit request for a symmetry breaker with this. The highest percentage of Christians in America is women of color. Therefore, women understand that Jesus elevated the position of women. Therefore, that's the symmetry breaker. Okay. Okay. Alex is going where I would go here. And it's worth reiterating it. It does not work to just tease out the
• 41:30 - 42:00 one statement of equity in Christ as it applies to slaves. If we are also not doing the same thing with Paul's statement on gender. And moreover, since Paul declares that this equity is achieved in Christ, then this also erases any need to apply the same maxim in day-to-day life. Another way to say this is that since there is no Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female in Christ, then there is no impetus to provide any meaningful correction to
• 42:00 - 42:30 these social, cultural, and economic imbalances in the real world. Since being in Christ is the solution, no further action needs to be taken, which is probably why no further action was taken like for centuries. And then we keep on reading Paul, you get to the letter of Phileiman and he's asking a slaveholder Phileiman to accept his runaway slave Onesimus back no longer as a slave but as a brother in Christ. So I think it's abundantly clear that God is
• 42:30 - 43:00 totally against slavery and it's abundantly clear that God is against chauvinism and sexism and women being degraded by men. Ah, and over 60% of atheists worldwide are white male and just about every single humanist conference year round is all represented now that by white western um has Stuart ever been to an apologetics conference? I hear that you have. I I have and I I tell you it it Yeah, it it
• 43:00 - 43:30 Yeah, I I didn't I didn't see either Cliff nor nor Stewart there, but there's a lot of white people. All right, let's see if we can continue to track his response. Cliff has concluded that Jesus elevated the position of women on tenuous evidential grounds. Now, he argues that because Paul requested that Philemmon accept Onesimus back as a brother, not as a slave, and to release him to Paul for the work of the ministry, that this demonstrates that God is quote totally against slavery.
• 43:30 - 44:00 He further adds without any evidence that God is against chauvinism, sexism, and women being degraded by men. He then draws this line of reasoning together by stating that the majority of atheists in the world are white men. So to recap, Alex asked implicitly for a symmetry breaker between slave and free and male and female in Galatians 3:28. Cliff's
• 44:00 - 44:30 response, Jesus elevated women and God is totally against slavery, chauvinism, sexism, and women being degraded by men. Oh, and atheists are mostly white men. Look, this absolute lack of response results in Alex carefully circling back to it below. I mean, what else is he going to do, right? And and maybe maybe uh check out an apologetics conference near you, Cliff. Um but like in particular that verse right where people
• 44:30 - 45:00 say that this is God condemning slavery. This is God condemning slavery. There is neither male there is neither you know slaver but he then says there's neither male nor female. Mhm. How can we not interpret that in the same way that he's sort of like you know somehow condemning gender categories? If that's what he's doing to slavery in that verse why is that not what he's doing to to gender in the in the same verse? Well just study the first century church and first century society. Just watch the movie Yentle. Barbara Scarzan plays a young lady who has to disguise herself as a man in order to get an education. I'm sorry. Uh Cliff Sources Yentle. He He's
• 45:00 - 45:30 aware that this is fiction, right? Modern fiction which is set in the early 20th century. Like what on earth does this have to do with Alex's question about gender categories in first century Roman Jewish culture? Yeah. I mean, if he's going to slate fiction, he should site The Hobbit, right? Yeah. I mean, isn't that what They all love them some Tolken, I hear. So, and there's a lion and a a wardrobe out there, I'm sure. Maybe even a witch. That's true. It's all a journey. It is. I I I completely
• 45:30 - 46:00 agree, which is that that's obviously not what God's doing. But if that's not what God's doing in the gender case, then I don't think it's what God's doing in the slavery case either. So, if it is the case that well, look at the early church. Obviously, God is not, you know, condemning gender categories here. Well, if he's saying there's neither male nor female, and yet in doing so, not actually condemning this earthly distinction. And when he says there's neither slave nor free, then he's not condemning that either. I don't think Paul is writing there that there's no literal distinction between a male and a female in terms of gender. I think he's
• 46:00 - 46:30 attacking the sexism, the chauvinism, the minimalizing of women that was so rampant in that culture. I mean, women were not allowed to get an education. They weren't allowed to testify in court. I mean, they were viewed as scum of the earth and it was tragic. Were allowed to speak in church. Yeah. But then wait a second. They also can't speak in church if they have their heads covered. if they're prophesying. All right. And Aquilla and Priscilla taught the great preacher Apollos. So Priscilla, who's obviously not a guy, is teaching a man. And Paul is going, "Bravo, Priscilla. Keep going." Yeah, I was being a little cheeky there. You
• 46:30 - 47:00 know what I'm getting at, right? So So I mean, look, let's let's talk about position of women here. It would seem that Cliff either did not understand Alex's question or was ultimately backed into a corner and felt that he had to answer it more directly. Cliff's response was to argue that Paul's point was not that quote there's no literal distinction between male and female in the terms of gender. Let's stop there for a moment. If that is true, then Paul would not have been saying that quote there's no literal distinction between a slave and a free person in terms of their social inequality and status as
• 47:00 - 47:30 property. Of course, there was a distinction. Here's the problem with Cliff's comparison. He would almost certainly say that there should be a distinction between male and female in terms of gender. Would he say the same thing about slaves and free? In other words, by Cliff's lights, there should be a distinction between genders. Would he also say that there should be a distinction between slave and free? No, obviously not. And what of his assertion that Galatians 3:28 is a statement of
• 47:30 - 48:00 condemnation of chauvinism, sexism, and the minimization of women? He's going to have to make some sort of argument to back up that claim. I think that Scott Mcnite said it rather well in his commentary on Galatians. Our social mandate in Galatians, he says, can be taken in two ways. as a social statement for the abolition of slavery as an institution or as a declaration for the irrelevancy of the institution in Christ. Just as Kip was saying earlier, in light of 1 Corinthians 7:21-24 and
• 48:00 - 48:30 Phileiman, it seems best to see Paul giving a declaration of the second option, the irrelevancy of one's social status. For acceptance with God and life in the church, as with culture or race, so with social status, there are distinctions, but they are irrelevant." End quote. While Mcnite, an evangelical, unsurprisingly believes that the text created an atmosphere that would
• 48:30 - 49:00 eventually lead to the abolition of slavery, he sees the text as a declaration of the irrelevancy of social status to be in Christ, not a declaration against the social institution. So to be clear as we close out this section on slavery, Cliff's use of Galatians 3:28 was clearly shown to be inadequate to show a divine condemnation of the social institution of slavery, but not Unix. The slavery stuff, the genocide stuff, that's all kind of the Old Testament god. There he
• 49:00 - 49:30 is again. Um, but the winning stuff props up in the New Testament, too. So, I was wondering if perhaps we could go through some of the most problematic verses as pertains to gender relations in the New Testament and see what you have to think about. All right, we're totally finished with this video. Yeah. in your dreams. Do you think that this grace, this omnipotence, this love and charity
• 49:30 - 50:00 of the Old Testament God is expressed in the instances where he commands the complete obliteration of entire nations of people including the women and the children and even the animals uh in multiple at multiple points throughout the history of the uh Israelites trying to conquer for their holy land which is promised to them by God such that if anybody is already living there they're driven out and if they're refused to leave they're chased out and they're
• 50:00 - 50:30 killed and then they come back and they kill the women and the children. Um do you think that this is the same graceful loving God that's issuing these commands? No. Instead I think we've got to read very carefully. It always stands out to me when apologists offer this sort of truism at the beginning of their answer. We need to read carefully. Yeah, we need to pay attention to the context. We need to think deeply about these things. We know, we know, everyone that
• 50:30 - 51:00 is seriously engaging with these texts knows this stuff. And the perhaps implication that Cliff is making here is that if someone is voicing such an objection, well, they must not be doing this very thing, reading very carefully. And the irony here is that Cliff is probably not able to do this at an academic level. If he's not trained in the biblical languages, various interpretive methodologies, and the wider ancient neareastern background, then his only level of quote unquote
• 51:00 - 51:30 careful reading is to rely, no shame, and as he does, on what other primarily evangelical scholars have to say about these texts. Look, that's not reading very carefully to my lights. At least not enough to throw shade at somebody else. Yeah, there there's something more going on here, too. When when Cliff cautions Alex to read very carefully, he's also priming his audience to think that
• 51:30 - 52:00 whatever he says next is the result of just that. He's the one who has read the text very carefully. So whatever he says about it is the product of that rigor and that diligence that he's promoting. You know, it almost doesn't even matter what he says at this point. His audience is conditioned to accept it on his authority as a very careful reader. And it's so ironic. It's so ironic given everything else Josh has just observed
• 52:00 - 52:30 here about Cliff's actual experience with the biblical text in a highlevel academic setting. First point, do I allow God to judge? In my culture, that's unacceptable. And yet, the Bible insists God does have the right to judge. To be clear, however, there is an expectation in the Hebrew Bible that God will do what is right by some observable standard. Note passages like Genesis
• 52:30 - 53:00 18:23-2. And Abraham approached and said, "Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Perhaps there are 50 righteous men in the city. Will you sweep away and not spare the place for the sake of the 50 righteous men that are in its midst? Far be it from you to do something like this, to kill the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous are treated like the wicked. Far be it from you. Will not the judge of all the earth do justice? There's an expectation on the part of Abraham that
• 53:00 - 53:30 God would behave in a way that is in line with a standard that Abraham recognizes. Throughout the Psalms, God is praised and trusted because he is and does all things righteous and just. In fact, in Psalm 82, the other gods lose their right to inherit as they are condemned in this way. How long will you judge unjustly and favor the cause of the wicked? Defend the lowly and fatherless. Render justice to the afflicted and needy. Rescue the lowly
• 53:30 - 54:00 and poor. Deliver them from the hand of the wicked. In other words, there are expectations that are ostensibly measurable to one giving him praise. His actions, at least in these cases, are able to be reviewed and found consistent with what is good and just according to the likes of of the writers. We cannot simply assume that any act that God might do would have been considered good or just to this ancient audience and therefore would be above reproach to the
• 54:00 - 54:30 reader today. Instead, there was an expectation in the text itself that whatever God did, it would align with what they believe to be good and just, not simply good and just because he did it. Second point, is exaggeration being used? Is hyperbole being used in a lot of those passages? Yes, it is. Because clearly, obviously, many of those people who were supposedly all wiped out appear in the next book. Do you know that they weren't all wiped out? Okay, let's make sure
• 54:30 - 55:00 we're clear on the rationale here. One, the text states that ex people group was wiped out. Two, later that people group shows up in the narrative. Three, conclusion, the text could not have meant that they were entirely wiped out. Four, therefore, it must be hyperbole. To be clear, there is little doubt that hyperbolic language was used throughout particularly royal inscriptions in the ancient near east. Kings were always patting their resumes, as it were. Thus, when Sinakarb writes that he quote put
• 55:00 - 55:30 to the sword the population of the city of Hiramu, a dangerous enemy, and did not spare a single one, this is almost certainly hyperbolic language. As only three lines later, we read, "I reorganized that district and imposed for eternity one ox, 10 sheep, 10 of wine, and 20 of dates as his first fruit offerings to the gods of Assyria, my lords." However, because there's hyperbole in some passages of ancient neareastern text, that does not mean that we can assume such hyperbole in any
• 55:30 - 56:00 given text, especially if it goes against the narrative's internal frame of reference. Thus, as I have explained before to Cliff and Stewart, one cannot simply argue that 1st Samuel 15 contains hyperbolic commands just because Amalachites show up later in 1 and 2 Samuel. There are other reasons that explain such narrative inconsistencies. The narrative in 1st Samuel 15 requires
• 56:00 - 56:30 that it not be hyperbolic language. In short, Cliff and Stewart, like so many other apologists, have a tendency to lean on the work of Paul Copan, who's leaning on the work of Lawson Younger, who leaned on the work of Mario Liverani, when it comes to hyperbole in the text, without really developing a clear justification for such conclusions in specific passages being discussed. Yeah, let let's let's talk about something else Cliff is doing here. when he's talking about differences that
• 56:30 - 57:00 appear in the running narrative between the books of Joshua and Judges. There are a number of instances in the book of judges which presume the ongoing presence of people and places that had already been destroyed earlier in the book of Joshua. So, for example, in Judges 4, we read about D'vorah, the one and only woman to lead the Israelites among the so-called judges. The text says that the sons of Israel
• 57:00 - 57:30 once again did bad things in the eyes of Yahweh. When Ehood died, so Yahweh sold them into the hand of Yavin, king of Canaan, who ruled in Katsur. So the traditional dating for this is around 1100 to 1060 B.CE some 100 years after when the supposed conquest of Joshua and the Israelites occur. And yet we're told in Joshua 11, that the same city of
• 57:30 - 58:00 Katzor, this is the largest city in Canaan, was completely destroyed by Joshua's forces and then it was abandoned during the earlier conquest. How can this be? Well, in Cliff's mind, the ongoing existence of Canaanites in the large city of Khsor is proof that the statements made about its destruction over a century earlier than Devora's great war must be hyperbolic
• 58:00 - 58:30 exaggerations. Surely when Joshua 11:10-11 says that Joshua captured Katsur and struck dead every living thing in it by the sword aam offering there was nothing left alive and he burned Katsur with fire. Surely this means that some people of the city were left to carry on since we read that Dvora had to go back and do it all over again. And like never mind why this is
• 58:30 - 59:00 an interpretive crux because like the both Joshua and Deborah must wage war against the same king of Hatsur uh Yavin in Joshua 11 and Judges 4 in conflicts that seem to have been over a century apart. Now there are like arguments like maybe Yavin is like a a name of the they're all named Yavin just you know it was the most popular name and and like there's some there's some there's some evidence but that the point is that like this is a this is a complicated textual
• 59:00 - 59:30 history interacting between Joshua and Judges. It's not this simple like you did. Sorry. Right. Yeah. No, no, no. It's good. Right. And and you're picking this up. Everyone should be picking this up. So, here's the problem. Cliff presumes a veneer of univocality on the biblical text that does not work historically. It doesn't work literally, nor does it work culturally. By making this dumb assertion about what the
• 59:30 - 60:00 awkward inconsistency must mean, Cliff is just showing that he has no idea what scholars are actually saying about these texts and is just assuming that they are straightforward, historically verifiable narratives. Yeah, they're not. The fact is scholars see Judges and Joshua as two quite different late creative retellings of some of the events at the end of the Bronze Age. The Joshua stories are
• 60:00 - 60:30 clearly the later of the two. And while they are also not historical reports, the stories in Judges probably do reflect a more or less accurate picture of things taking place at this time when most scholars believe that the Israelites started to emerge as a more distinct ethnic group from out of the larger population of Canaan. But both books still need to fudge a lot of the
• 60:30 - 61:00 details to fit with their own ideas about their group identity. So here's what Thomas Dozman has to say in a recent commentary about the differences between Joshua and Judges and their approach to the little bit that we do know about the early history of Israel. He says, "The books of Joshua and Judges agree in portraying the Israelites as non-indigenous to Canaan, requiring an invasion to secure residency in the land. But the nature of the invasion,
• 61:00 - 61:30 the view of the city states, and the relationship between Israelites and the indigenous urban population of Canaan are significantly different in the two books. The book of Joshua does not share Judge's dark view of history in which tradition inevitably leads to forgetting of the past resulting in apostasy and the decline of culture. Instead, the story of Joshua traces the procession of the ark into the land with the positive goal of the Israelites resting within
• 61:30 - 62:00 the land in covenant with Yahweh. The contrasting view of history in the two books are reinforced with different presentations of the most prominent characters. Joshua emerges as the central leader and the most dominant character in the book of Joshua as compared with his less defined role in judges. The Israelites are presented as a unified nation under Joshua in their conquest of Canaan rather than as individual tribes as in judges. The plot
• 62:00 - 62:30 is also different in the two books. Judges is a story of conquest. Joshua is an account of extermination. And then Dozeman goes on to say this. Joshua is a story about the successful purging of royal cities from the promised land of Canaan and the extermination of its indigenous population. The point of view of the two books provides a further contrast. Judges idealizes the southern tribe of Judah in telling the story of the conquest, while the book of Joshua
• 62:30 - 63:00 focuses on the northern side of Sheckchum as the central sanctuary of the ark. The comparison indicates that the author of Joshua reinterprets the partial and failed conquest of judges into an account of the successful extermination of the indigenous kings and royal cities under the leadership of the northern hero Joshua. I know that was a lot, but let's also look at how Susan Naid describes the situation among
• 63:00 - 63:30 scholars. She says, "American and European biblical scholars in the 20th century expressed an understandable interest in matching the narratives of Joshua and Judges with actual historical origins of the Israelites in the land." The Bible itself seems to offer two versions. one represented in Joshua for example the summaries in Joshua 10:4-42 11:23 18:1 and 248-13 this suggests that the Israelites swept into the land in an unbeatable
• 63:30 - 64:00 military wave in which all enemies fell before Joshua and the Israelites portrayed as a unified successful commando force aided by the divine warrior and assorted miracles. the other version well represented in the middle chapters of Joshua for example chapter 13 1-7 1563 1610 and 1712 and throughout judges offers a more halting and disjunctive portrayal of the Israelites
• 64:00 - 64:30 early presence in the land describing successes and failures in establishing themselves. Judges includes both alternating periods of subjugation and of subjugating and a more tribal accounting as Israelite groups are seen in various geographic locations north to south living side by side with non-Israelite groups who have not been rooted out. Thirdly, you look at the archaeological evidence for Jericho and
• 64:30 - 65:00 I and you begin to realize those were probably smaller fortresses. I think what frustrates me about people that make these types of matterof fact statements about things like biblical archaeology or the narrative of the Hebrew Bible is that they're often based on one scholars's often minority take on the issue. Here he's referencing the work of Richard Hess. Whether he knows it or not, I'm not sure, who published an article on Jericho and I and Joshua in a 2008 edited volume. We've addressed Hessa's arguments elsewhere, but to
• 65:00 - 65:30 state that Jericho was probably a fort when one has no training ostensibly in the archaeology, as if this is a position broadly held is at best irresponsible. I don't know. I bet if you asked Cliff, he would tell you he's referencing God. Well played, sir. God is my source. Jesus told me. Yeah. Yes. Rahab was in there as a prostitute, but those were not just families and women and children. Those were fortresses that were protecting the families that lived
• 65:30 - 66:00 out in the countryside around them. This runs directly in conflict with what the text states. First, the narrative states that they were to quote utterly destroy everything in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and donkey. But with respect to Rahab herself, Joshua 6:17 states that she was not by herself, only Rahab the harlot and all who are with her in the house shall live, which is more specifically detailed in verse 23. So the young men
• 66:00 - 66:30 who were spies went in and brought out Rahab and her father and her mother and her brothers and all that she had. They also brought out all her relatives and placed them outside the camp of Israel. Furthermore, when they went into I, we read, "And all who fell that day, both men and women, were 12,000, all the people of I next point is I think that there is not the emphasis on individualism in the Old Testament that we have in our culture." Y and yet the
• 66:30 - 67:00 more we struggle with through children of alcoholics and realize that there are real consequences that stretch down through the generations, I think the Old Testament does present a picture that we are more interconnected than we as American individuals would like to admit. And when God judges a people group, yes, some innocent people are swept along in the judgment. And that bugs me. I don't like that. And yet, that is part of, I think, what the Bible is talking about when it says we're created in the image of God, meaning that we do have free will. I just need to break in and say that I do not see
• 67:00 - 67:30 how the description of the creation of mankind in the image of God connects in any way to the concept of free will. Look, we've talked about this text. There's nothing there providing any meaningful information with regards to this nebulous idea of free will. How do you get there, Cliff? Which means there are consequences to my decisions that affect my children, that affect my
• 67:30 - 68:00 grandchildren. We're more interconnected than we would like to admit. Okay. So, so we're all on the same page here. It sounds like Cliff is drawing an analogy between judgment narratives like those found in the book of Joshua and a child suffering the effects of an alcoholic parent. In the former, Yahweh is commanding one group of people to go and fight against another group of people in order to judge them for their wicked behavior in keeping with the narrative's internal frame of reference. In the
• 68:00 - 68:30 latter, a person does something quote unquote wicked, drinking too much alcohol, and the natural effects of that sin can pass down to their children through things like genetic disorders, abuse, neglect, etc. Is this a good analogy for what we're seeing in places like the Joshua Conquest? This is not simply God taking a step back and shaking his head while the people sin and their children suffer the natural effects of their behavior through neglect, abuse, etc. Instead, this is
• 68:30 - 69:00 direct action taken by the deity against the people and their children. So, no, those children are not being punished for anything they did wrong, but yes, they're born into a cursed, messed up world, and there are consequences to that. Again, Cliff appears to be appealing to the natural effects of this quote unquote sin-cursed world, but that's not what's under discussion here. We're not asking questions like, "Why did a hurricane hit the house of that righteous person?" This is a question about Yahweh giving commands for
• 69:00 - 69:30 deliberate genocide of people groups down to the children. I mean, I benefited from going to Davidson College and a lot of people sacrificed to put Davidson together. you benefited from going to Oxford University and there are a lot of people who have over many years given sacrificially to build it. One of these things is not like the other. You got to give you got to give Cliff some credit here though. I think you know I certainly don't know if if I would be bragging as much about having attended Davidson College, you know, when when
• 69:30 - 70:00 speaking to someone who graduated from Oxford. But that's that. Yeah, that's a Cliff thing. That's fine. It's a journey. It's good. Yeah. Be proud, Cliff. Way to go. you did it. So there are real consequences that stretch down through the generations of our decisions. Again, not the same. And also, the Bible never says that those children and all those people go to eternity separate from God. I'm convinced that we will see those children in heaven if they were killed before an age of accountability. So the justice of God will ultimately triumph. I guess it makes it okay that these
• 70:00 - 70:30 children were killed according to the narrative in a horrifically violent way because they end up in heaven. Look, weren't they deprived of the life here on earth that Ecclesiastes speak so highly of? But also, why why is Cliff convinced that the Canaanite children slaughtered by the Israelites are in heaven? Can he find any indication about that? Anything at all in any text? I want to see it. There is a lot of
• 70:30 - 71:00 bravado from guys like this about promoting a biblical worldview and so much of it is just a fabrication of their own imaginations. But do I have problems with the text? Yes, of course I have problems with the text. I don't understand it exactly. I don't understand what God is doing exactly there, why he says that kind of thing. But I'm also convinced that hyperbole is being used. And I think that's a very important thing. For instance, when I was in high school, we used to say we're going to kill Yeah. opposing team that
• 71:00 - 71:30 we're going to play that weekend. Not meaning we're literally going to kill them. Uh that's exactly what the text in Joshua says. And in 1st Samuel 15 and the whole idea of in Hebrew her hm of clearing out these people from the promised land, the whole idea that God had given them 400 over 400 years to repent and they had chosen not to and now God clears them out. Okay, look, I'm confused. Does Cliff think that the people including the children were killed or doesn't he? Look, if it's
• 71:30 - 72:00 hyperbole and it's more like saying that one football team killed the other team in the game and that they were instead of being killed simply just cleared out, then yeah, that would imply that they were not killed. But he just said that the babies were killed and went to heaven. What is his position? Has he actually thought any of this all the way through? Or is this just apologetics? Throw anything and everything you've got up against the wall and see what sticks. If they don't have a response for the
• 72:00 - 72:30 baby's going to heaven, great. If they don't have a response for the hyperbole, also great. Whatever works. Whatever gets us the W. This isn't academic at all. It just seems to be a bunch of rhetoric. And it's just wrong. I'm so tired of listening to people who neither read nor understand the ancient Hebrew language dictating to their gullible audiences about the meanings of Hebrew words. Instead of just taking Cliff's word for it, let's see what an actual academic source has to say about the
• 72:30 - 73:00 usage of the verbam in the stories of the conquest. So the form of this word belongs to the fixed framework of a generally constant narrative schema found in duteronomistic texts. It appears regularly in wars of conquest against enemy cities. The negative is implied when anyone survives, is delivered, is released, is
• 73:00 - 73:30 shown mercy, is saved alive, or even is allowed to make a treaty or enter into a marriage. The taking of booty can also imply the negative. Not as extensively but still quite clear. We find karam in the context of the sacred in the sense of something removed from the sphere of the profane and set apart for Yahweh. The precise position of in the context of the sacred does not become apparent
• 73:30 - 74:00 until the contrasts are noted. When we survey the usage of this word in the biblical texts, its meaning is actually very clear and without much flexibility. Within the conquest stories, the proclamation of which is derived from the same root as the verb was always precisely defined. Everything from man to woman, young to old, ox, sheep and donkey was to be slaughtered. You know,
• 74:00 - 74:30 I think it's a complex issue. more complex than the person would would allow it to be who just says, "I just can't believe that God would do something like that." What what kind of instruction had these people been given, you know, like the people of I, the people of Jericho, the Canaanites? I mean, did they have you Jewish prophets coming to them and saying, "You should repent of your ways, or were they just sort of expected to work it out on their own?" Fascinating question. I'm not sure. I do not know. Obviously, they have consciences. We all have consciences. Yeah. And when you study uh ethics from around the world, it's amazing that it seems we're all like reading off the same sheet music. Yeah.
• 74:30 - 75:00 And there's there's more and more research coming out too on just how bad these people groups really I'm seeing more of this child sacrifice. Exactly. Just gets worse every year. How bad is it going to get? What the [ __ ] is he on about? What research has been coming out every year about the population groups that were in Canaan during the late Bronze Age? Mary Ellen Buck published the Canaanites, their history and culture from texts and artifacts with Whipintock in 2019, the same year her dissertation was published with Brill, the Amorite dynasty of Garrett, historical
• 75:00 - 75:30 implications of linguistic and archaeological parallels. But I don't remember her referencing recent or annual discoveries concerning the gross wickedness of these Canaanite cultures. Perhaps Stuart could enlighten us on this new research that we've all been missing. you're you're just not a careful reader reading in the broader context. Have you wrestled with this being a really culturally conditioned question? The Chinese don't don't struggle with this one. I've talked to people of other cultures and I've brought it up and like that's totally
• 75:30 - 76:00 fine. God judges in that kind of way. It's so much worse. It's it's not just like culturally relative like I'm I'm a moral anti-realist. I don't believe in moral values, right? So like you know what could I possibly be be meaning here? But I don't wrestle with it because my my job here isn't to say that this is wrong. My job is to say something like what Lincoln said of slavery. If if uh if this isn't wrong, then nothing is wrong. If there is such a thing as objective morality, I find it very I mean, look, we just condemned the Canaanites in part for, you know, they were killing children. Well, that's exactly what God ordered the Israelites
• 76:00 - 76:30 to do when they came into their nation. And and we say, okay, well, these people were sinful, idolatrous, and they should have repented. Well, the same is true of the Israelites. They were sinful. They were idolatrous. And yet they had the benefit of having the prophet of God come to them with literal stone tablets telling them what to do. And even then it took them a few tries to get right. The Canaanites didn't have that. And yet when the Israelites are sinful, they get a prophet who comes and sets them straight. When the Canaanites are sinful, they get obliterated. They get exterminated. They get chased out. Just the same way the Israelites were at first the ends of the Assyrians and then
• 76:30 - 77:00 the Babylonians. I just want to pause here for a moment to point out that Cliff has 100% not engaged with Alex's critique. Instead, he's picked up on one part of what Alec said and dodged the main point. Alex said essentially that the Canaanites and the Israelites were both wicked people groups. Both did things that were worthy of divine punishment. However, while the Israelites were given multiple prophets who came to them and urged them to repent, the Canaanites were not provided
• 77:00 - 77:30 with such profits. Instead of engaging with his critique, Clif grabbed onto the fact that the Canaanites got exterminated and chased out, stating that the Israelites did eventually get that same treatment as well. But that wasn't the point. This type of, I don't know, seemingly dishonest engagement seems consistent throughout this discussion. It just comes across as a debate strategy that allows him to dodge difficult questions by focusing on a minor point that is ultimately
• 77:30 - 78:00 irrelevant to the critique. It's true. But it's wrong for the Assyrians to do that. It was wrong for the Babylonians to do that. Yeah. But the Old Testament insists that that was part of God's judgment on the Israelites for them doing the child sacrifice, temple prostitution, idolatry. God, you know, so it's not it's God's, it gets often it gets back to does God have the right to judge? Yes, he judged the Canaanites, but then remember a few hundred years later, he judged the Jews first at the hands of the Assyrians and then the Babylonians. Thank you, Cliff, for answering a question that no one asked. Yeah, he does that a lot. I wanted to
• 78:00 - 78:30 talk about the hyperbole thing, right? Because maybe we're not talking about killing everybody. Maybe we're obviously not cuz they were in the next book to But okay, so for example, in the destruction of I um 12,000 people fell that day. all the people of I. That's what's said uh in the book of Joshua. Now, maybe all the people of I is like an exaggeration, but 12,000 people, it's pretty specific. It' be a weird thing to be doing as hyperbole, right? We have a number of people, 12,000 people. We know
• 78:30 - 79:00 it's men, we know it's women, we know it's children are slaughtered. We know that that's not hyperbole. We know that thousands of men were killed. We know that it I should I should point I don't want to get this wrong. Perhaps we should um look at the text. Yeah. So in um in Joshua chapter 8, when Israel had finished killing all of the men of I in the fields and in the wilderness where they had chased them and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all of the Israelites returned to eye and killed those who were in it. 12,000 people fell that day. 12,000 men and women fell that day. All the people of
• 79:00 - 79:30 I. So we know that women are being killed, non-combatants being killed. We know that there are thousands of them. We also know that there were people who had left. They'd run into the wilderness. They were out of the promised land, but the Israelites chased after them and then killed them in the wilderness. And it says all of them were put to the sword. Maybe that's an exaggeration. Maybe that some of them ran away. Maybe all of the ones that they captured were put to the sword, but some of them managed to actually run away. And those are the people who show up in the next chapter. But it's only because, you know, for want of trying that they managed to survive, but maybe it is just hyperbole. But we know that 12,000 people were killed. We know that the Israelites then turned around after
• 79:30 - 80:00 killing the fleeing combatants came back into the city and killed who's left. Well, who's left? The women, the children, the disabled. So even if there's some hyperbole being involved here in terms of the ultim the complete destruction maybe it's not a genocide but it certainly still seems to be the kind of military practice which if done today would see you know condemnation and and a lot more from you the United Nations um in 1 Samuel um there's this again I should read the text to to be sure and I do have it have
• 80:00 - 80:30 it written down um this is the destruction of the Amalachites God issues the command Now go attack the Amalachites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them, but to the death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys. Of course, this can't be literal because it's not just the camels and sheeps and the donkeys. Oh, but you can leave the, you know, you can leave the pigs or whatever. This is sort of like slightly rhetorical language. It's very clear like leave alive nothing that breeds. Kill the men, kill the women, kill the
• 80:30 - 81:00 kill the animals, kill the cattle. And in fact, when Saul decides at the end of the battle to keep alive the king, take him as a hostage and also keeps alive some of the animals to sacrifice to to to s as a sacrifice to God. What happens? He's condemned. And and and God says, the scripture says that God regretted that he made Saul king. He regretted that he made Saul king because he didn't follow his command. What command didn't he follow? That after wiping out the Amalachites, he refused to also kill all of the animals and he kept the king alive as a hostage. And
• 81:00 - 81:30 that was enough for God to say, "I regret that I have made Saul king because he didn't follow my commands." And so I understand that there may be some hyperbole involved here, but in the case where Saul is punished specifically not for killing all of the animals, it's hard for me to imagine like how much scope there is for hyperbole here in terms of um you undermining the criticism that we are talking about the slaughter of innocent people here. Mhm. It shows the importance and just how clear God wants to make it that Israelites are to be set apart and a holy people. And so whether it's an ant
• 81:30 - 82:00 or a soldier all the way down, we see with sinful human beings just how easy it is for them to slip into prostitution, but more so getting a herum or so whatever this might be, and slip into assimilation of some sort with other civilizations. And so God has to act in this kind of way, however extreme it seems, to show them whether it's Achen later on in Acts chapter 5, for example, the temptation and how quick this happens. It's such a slippery slope where God is saying here's the line and we have to do away with any level of temptation. You talked
• 82:00 - 82:30 about temptation earlier. We know how easy is it to fall prey to temptation. This is another thing with university students and older people. All they want to talk about is temptation and how easy it is to fall typically into like porn addiction and these kinds of things. Very similar to what's going on there in terms of you have to kill off any and everything that's going to cause temptation because you are God's holy chosen people. Let me see if I'm following the dialectic here. Alex just asked about hyperbole. He said that even if there is hyperbole, it doesn't seem to do away with the problems in the text as non-combatants, children, animals,
• 82:30 - 83:00 etc. were still killed intentionally by divine command. Cliff responded that God wants his people, the Israelites, to be set apart from the rest of the nations. Clarifying by saying that it is very easy to fall into sin. This slip into sinful behavior was connected to the Israelites being around and in contact with these other civilizations. Again, this really does seem like Cliff not actually engaging with Alex's critique. He's voicing an opposition to the
• 83:00 - 83:30 hyperbole argument. Cliff is essentially assuming extreme actions on behalf of the deity, but turning the conversation to why God would command their destruction. Let's think about Cliff's response. Essentially, he's justifying the at a minimum removal of an entire population from their homes, driving them off of their land so that the Israelites would not be tented by them. Would Cliff care to give us another example from real life where this type of behavior would be acceptable to him? Okay. Whoa, whoa, wasn't that really
• 83:30 - 84:00 ethnosentric? Doesn't Isn't that a big issue still? I don't see that in my mind because I believe what's going on in the Old Testament with the Israelite people is probably the most exclusive inclusivity you could ever imagine which is God is this God of the Israelites were holy people who are not supposed to mix at all even with an animal with people of another civilization. So that's how exclusive they are but how inclusive in the sense of they're a light to all the nations. So this is a problem of having a flat
• 84:00 - 84:30 historically ignorant and scholarly bankrupt approach to the biblical texts. Look, the Bible is a collection of literature. In actual fact, there are many different Bibles that have been compiled by any number of different Jewish and Christian communities. There's not just one. Depending on how the texts have been arranged, depending upon what of the many many versions of these texts that have been selected, depending on the thematic or the
• 84:30 - 85:00 theological emphasis any given collecting community has chosen to apply to their Bible, you can walk away with any number of very different readings of any number of the same texts. Cliff and Stuart have come to the text with their own ideas of what it should be about already in place and they are applying those to whatever version of the text they're choosing to read almost certainly through an added interpreted
• 85:00 - 85:30 layer of their favorite English translation. But the Bible is complicated. It does not speak with a single voice. For every seemingly positive message of inclusion, there are multiple narratives of cultural, religious, and social denigration. But Steuart and Cliff can't see any of this because they just do not understand the nuances of these texts, which require years of training and careful study to
• 85:30 - 86:00 uncover. They don't actually care about anything in the Bible beyond what this or that text does to validate their already preformed ideas. So, it's a light to all nations. And that separateness, that word holy and righteousness, he takes so seriously and so extreme. I wish it wasn't that extreme, but it stacks up to me. It also makes sense seeing how powerful human temptation really is and how hard it is to restrain yourself. Let me see if I can put this into an analogy. Let's say
• 86:00 - 86:30 that the people of the state of Maryland become predominantly Catholic and they decide that they're going to go and take the land of the state of Virginia whose residents are predominantly Protestant. In our hypothetical, let's build in that these Protestant Virginiaians are doing really bad things, much higher rates of crime, rape, murder, robbery, etc. So, the leaders of Maryland's army get together and decide that they are going to engage in combat with the Virginiaians. And if the people run away and leave their state, their homes,
• 86:30 - 87:00 possessions, etc., then they would not chase after them. They would just let them escape. However, if they stayed and fought, the Virginiaians would be killed, including non-combatants, women, children, animals. But what if some of the Virginiaians didn't fight, but just wanted to continue to live in the land? This would not be allowed because the Marylanders that are taking over the land of Virginia might be tempted to do some of those evil things. So, every Virginia must be removed from the land
• 87:00 - 87:30 either through death or by being driven out. Now, here's the kicker. Even though this sounds really exclusive, the Catholic Marylanders have an exception. If any Virginia were to agree to convert from Protestantism to Catholicism and recognize that they are not a true Marylander, but a Virginia that has been graciously allowed to join the Maryland group, they would be allowed to live and remain on the land and follow Maryland rules. Is Steuart really going to defend
• 87:30 - 88:00 this type of behavior? If not, why? Is it just because he believes that God didn't command it? God told Abraham to take Isaac up on Mount Mariah and sacrifice his son. Now, if someone interprets that as being God's laying down wise principles for good parenting, they're an idiot. Sure. Yeah. That is not what Genesis chapter 2 is communicating. God gave Abraham a very specific command. And it was not to give an example of wise parenting. It was
• 88:00 - 88:30 Abraham, who's number one in your heart. Is it gonna be God or is it going to be your son? Who are you gonna build your future on? your son or me. Similarly, what Israel does there in the Old Testament is not examples of just war theory. No, it is a unique example of God using a theocracy and we don't live in a theocracy. We don't have a theocracy in Israel now. We're definitely not a theocracy in the United States or in UK. God using a theocracy to carve out a land that he brings in Messiah into. That's a one-time deed because you're absolutely right. It is
• 88:30 - 89:00 not an example of just war. No way. I recoil at that as you do, I'm sure. Yeah. Because of course the difference in this case is that you have the orders from the top the top men. It's sort of if there is some extraordinary circumstance in which this kind of otherwise morally condemnable behavior can be justified, you better have the authority to know that you're making the right decision. And in this case, you know, the Christian will be able to say that they did have that authority. But I mean it's it's a struggle. You know, we're talking about the intentional
• 89:00 - 89:30 killing of non-combatant children here. we're and I read this text as a land dispute. I read in Deuteronomy where God gives instructions when you march uh up onto a city to attack it. Like in in in the in the broad sense um when you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you some peace. If they refuse to make peace and engage you in battle, which you know isn't entirely unreasonable given what the terms of
• 89:30 - 90:00 peace are, lay wast lay siege to that city. When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, and the livestock, and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves, and you may use the plunder the Lord gives you from your enemies. This is how you are to treat the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby. Women and children being described as plunder. Plunder that can be used because God has given them to you as plunder. But of course, those are the people who you're attacking, not because they're in the promised land. And it's just, well, it's look, we gave
• 90:00 - 90:30 them a chance to leave. What are we supposed to do? This is God's chosen. No, these are these are other cities. Because it goes on, however, in the cities of the nations, the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance. Do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, but then this, you know, the Jesuites, as the Lord your God has commanded you. otherwise they will teach you to follow all detestable things that they do in worshiping their gods and you will sin against the Lord your God. So clearly what you're saying about them being these detestable characters and God is issuing his judgment must be true here because it's saying that otherwise
• 90:30 - 91:00 if you don't destroy them completely you know they will they will teach you their ways you will fall into sin. But this idea of, you know, marching up to a city and even if they accept you, they're going to become, you know, your your indentured servants. And if they don't, then you may take the women and children as plunder. And you may use the plunder the Lord gives you. But of course, if you're marching into a city of one of the nations that you've been promised by God, oh, then don't leave anything that breathes. Kill all of the children, kill all of them. I mean I the difference there in other
• 91:00 - 91:30 words about like the the people in the inherited lands and the people outside of it tells me that the the explanation for why these people need to be completely and utterly destroyed is because this is our land. You know we want this land seems to be and when I when I read about somebody intentionally driving out or killing nations of people so that they can sort of essentially ethnically cleanse a land I don't know what else to call that other than a genocide. Before we hear Stuart's response, let me see if I can lay out Alex's points and implied question again. He reads Deuteronomy 20:10-14
• 91:30 - 92:00 concerning the rules of engagement, focusing on those cities that are far away outside of the land of Israel. These are either to be controlled as vassels or if they resist, all the men are to be killed and the women, children, cattle, and possessions are taken as plunder. These are not those wicked people inside the promised land that refuse to leave, but those cities that are far off. He then returns to those in the land of Canaan, saying that they all needed to be eradicated because they would lead the Israelites to sin against Yahweh. He then concludes by
• 92:00 - 92:30 stating that this type of behavior seems to be nothing other than genocide. Thus, how could a loving God command such atrocities? That seems to be the implied question. Yeah. And and I think Alex is absolutely right. And I'm I'm I'm really proud of him for doing this. He's absolutely right in attempting to frame this more clearly as a land dispute. He actually repeated that a couple of times and it's great because the brilliant Tracy Lemos has argued that massive increases in population density which
• 92:30 - 93:00 occurred in the 8th century B.C.E. This is close in time to when a lot of these conquest stories were written. This resulted in land scarcity that is comparable to the leadup to Rwanda conflict in the 1990s. She says, "We have then archaeological evidence for mark population increases that in all likelihood decreased the amount of land available for most households. textual evidence for the land seizure by elites
• 93:00 - 93:30 as resources became more scarce. What social scientists would call resource capture in both archaeological and textual evidence for marketkedly increasing social stratification. All of this was occurring in Iron 2, that's iron age 2, just as the rise of the Assyrians placed increasing pressures on the small polities of the Levant. It would not be surprising for increasing population and decreasing resources to
• 93:30 - 94:00 lead to tensions of various kinds and to competition between groups. And again, biblical texts and other evidence seem to amply attest to this. What she's saying here is that resource scarcities that we can track through the archaeological record appear to provide the prompting for the rhetoric of othering and violent extermination that punctuates these stories. So let's see
• 94:00 - 94:30 how Stuart responds. But it's still eventually the point is to welcome them in and it's not like they're going to sit in the land flowing with milk and honey forever and again be God's chosen people and that's it. So that's one. Okay, point one. Eventually, Israel is supposed to welcome foreigners in. So, if I'm hearing him correctly, Steuart is justifying these commands of genocide by saying that even though God is commanding that these people be wiped out completely or taken as plunder in the case of cities outside of Canaan,
• 94:30 - 95:00 eventually God wants foreigners to be able to join the nation of Israel. Just assuming that he's correct about this point, it's far more nuanced than that. What on earth is he on about? How does this justify genocide? Secondly, we're reading this again from our 21st century Judeo-Christian lens. So your outrage and indignation over this is entirely Christian. That's why the Bible is self-critiquing, which I love about it. Point two, the fact that Alex is outraged is because he has learned from
• 95:00 - 95:30 Christianity that he should be outraged over these atrocities. Is this his point that Christianity is responsible for providing modern readers with the sense of morality that they have? I mean, does he know what an internal critique is? If Christianity teaches that genocide is wrong, how does that help him justify God commanding it? Thirdly, putting to the sword even women and children, as me as that sounds, many would say that that was actually more gracious in that time period than other civilizations who rape
• 95:30 - 96:00 they're going to rape the rest of their lives, right? and just horrific things that are unimaginable to us. So that's another really important thing to remember. Point three, it was actually gracious that God commanded the women and children to be cut open with swords until they died. Because had the Israelites not done this, these women and children would have been quote raped the rest of their lives. Look, setting aside the absolute
• 96:00 - 96:30 ludicr instead of God commanding the Israelites to rescue these women and children from the horrific practices according to their lights, commanding them not to harm them or take advantage of them in any way, he decides that it would be better to just slaughter them. Does Steuart hear himself? You know, these are the same people who freak out about abortion. Eh, lastly, the one you got to wrestle with is, okay, so in ancient Neareastern culture, you're looking for God to act in a very humane kind of way. All right. To what
• 96:30 - 97:00 extent, and what extent does free will come into play as well, not just not just the evil heart of humankind, but how exactly do you want to play God? Because I want to play God, too, in those passages, but what does that look like? What specifically does that look like? Point four, there's only so much that God can do because he doesn't want to impose on people's free will. According to this argument, it would seem that God should not have set any restrictions upon the nation of Israel as setting such laws would have infringed on their free will. God could
• 97:00 - 97:30 have set the rules of warfare to be that when they approached a foreign nation, they must treat each of the residents with dignity and care. If they resisted as a last resort, they could defend themselves. But the non-combatants were to be cared and provided for, and the Israelites were to rebuild their city and provide them with food and provisions. And as in passages like Deuteronomy 15 and Leviticus 25, if they would obey him, God would supernaturally provide enough food and provisions for them to accomplish this. I mean, for
• 97:30 - 98:00 real, how Christians like Cliff and Stewart would tout these passages if the Bible actually contained them. But of course, they don't. Before I just I'll ask you a question that I asked William Lane Craig. I'm interested in your response which is suppose you woke up tomorrow and you were a Canaanite. You just sort of had woke up in someone else's body. You traveled back in time. You're a Canaanite now. Well, this has been pretty long already and it sounds like Alex is moving on to other topics. So, that's probably a good
• 98:00 - 98:30 point to end the video on. End of the video. Alex is talking about time travel now. It just got good. Yeah, go ahead and keep talking about Kananite Terminator. We're not stopping you. Sounds like he's proposing more of a quantum leap scenario. Whatever nerd, we're out. Thank you, Josh and Kip. Please subscribe to their channels linked in the description. And for more Josh and Kip on Polyia, tap on the thumbnail on screen now. And I'll see you over there. Until next time. Later.