War Crimes in the Bible

@suzianne said
This is the mantra of the unbelievers. If you thought that a law against murder was 'immoral' and therefore had no effect on you and you thought you had no compulsion to obey and proceeded to murder someone anyway, would you be surprised to be arrested and tried for said murder?

Whether you believe it or not, you, as do we all, have to pay for your unrepented sins, yes, ...[text shortened]... free' card. God does exist, whether you choose to believe it or not. Yes, your unbelief is tragic.

@suzianne said
Whether you believe it or not, you, as do we all, have to pay for your unrepented sins, yes, even if you don't consider them sins. There is no 'get out of jail free' card. God does exist, whether you choose to believe it or not. Yes, your unbelief is tragic.

@ThinkOfOne

Allowing the ability to remove all evidence at anytime will be abused.

@Duchess64

If Sonship were confident about defending exactly what he wrote, then he should
NOT have deleted his post. Deleting it makes it easier for him to lie about it.

@caissad4

You must believe that women are inherently evil.

You have no wife and no daughters I would surmise.

@suzianne said
Whether you believe it or not, you, as do we all, have to pay for your unrepented sins, yes, even if you don't consider them sins.

@sonship said
@ThinkOfOne

Allowing the ability to remove all evidence at anytime will be abused.

I don't need to remove "ALL" evidence.
"You said this ...sonship!!" doesn't bother me that much.

I'm not writing the Bible. I'm expressing my opinions, which sometimes change.

Now aside from process and etiquette do you have something on the subject matter of War Crimes in the Bible?

@ThinkOfOne

Thank you for providing evidence of how the ability to delete posts can be abused by those seeking to cover-up what they posted earlier.

@sonship said
You're now abusing the freedom to make side comments about tangential matters and neglecting to discuss the OP of the thread.

"Moses is furious that the Midianite women have been spared. … Moses orders his troops to execute all the Midianite boys and all the Midianite females except for the virgins. Isn’t this a kind of sick, grotesquely disproportionate atrocity? ... Numbers informs us, with
its usual fondness for precision, that 32,000 virgin females survive the mass execution (and were then enslaved, incidentally). By my rough estimate, this means the Israelites killed more than 60,000 captive, defenseless women and boys."

Let’s make some observations first, from the text and the historical background:

1. Only 12,000 Israelite men go into the battle. That would imply that the Midianite force would have been estimated in the 8,000-15,000 person range. This, of course, means that we are not dealing with all of the Midianites, but only just this small tribal sub-group (i.e., its not a genocide thing). [Other Midianites will be attacking Israel in force within 30 years, as will Moab.]

This number would fit roughly with the estimated number of wives/mothers/daughters that would have participated in the sexual warfare on Israel (in the 8,000-15,000 person range), providing further support for our understanding of the scale of this action.

2. The Moabites are NOT included in this judgment—only the specific Midianites behind the atrocity (the 5 chieftains):

4. The number of women who would have been executed for their personal involvement in the deceptive and malicious treachery might be estimated from the number of girls spared. If the 32k girls were spared, we might estimate the number of boys at around 20k (infant mortality for males is 30% higher than for females), and with a 3-4 kids/family ratio, we get around 12,000 sets of parents. This 12,000 number accords well with the troop count and estimates of the number of women who approached the Israelites in the deception of Baal Peor. [And this also confronts us with the sobering fact that the number of adult Israelites who died in the plague of judgment—24,000—roughly matches the number of adult Midianite deaths, under this scenario. Israel did not get off ‘scot free’ from this horror…they were the subject of God’s judgment first.]

5. The 32,000 girls who were absorbed/assimilated into Israel would have been actually a small number. According to the distribution of them, the 12,000 ‘soldiers’ received 16,000 (half of them), making an average of between 1 and 2 per household, depending on the soliders-per-household ratio. The other half (16,000) was distributed throughout all of Israel, meaning that very few families would get one. This would still have been some hardship for the Israelite families, who at this time are still nomadic peoples without any material base from which to live. More than one commentator has noted that this seems to be a surprise act of mercy, and it is interesting to note that Whiston, in a footnote on his 18th-century translation of Josephus’ account of this passage [Antiq, VII] argues that this sparing of the little girls is a surprise of mercy, given the practical demands of this type of combat in the OT/ANE (which we will discuss later):

“The slaughter of all the Midianite women that had prostituted themselves to the lewd Israelites, and the preservation of those that had not been guilty therein; the last of which were no fewer than thirty-two thousand…and both by the particular command of God, are highly remarkable, and shew that, even in nations otherwise for their wickedness doomed to destruction, the innocent were sometimes providentially taken care of, and delivered from that destruction”

Later, when Israel was more established and settled in the land, and had adequate economic means, they would be able to absorb all the women and children (from hostile-but-conquered foreign cities), but at this early stage this was quite an impossibility. They had no need for “slaves,” nor means to support them at this time.

6. The only way they could absorb the 32,000 girls was that 24,000 (mostly) adults citizens of Israel had died as a result of the treachery of their mothers at Peor earlier. This created some ‘capacity’ for absorbing innocents into Israel for the moment.

7. The remaining people were the non-combat age boys (sub-12?). Philo asserted that the Israelites actually spared the little boys, although the Hebrew text doesn’t provide much support for this (Moses 1.57):

“And they led away a perfectly incalculable number of prisoners, of whom they chose to slay all the full-grown men and women, the men because they had set the example of wicked counsels and actions, and the women because they had beguiled the youth of the Hebrews, becoming the causes to them of incontinence and impiety, and at the last of death; but they pardoned all the young male children and all the virgins, their tender age procuring them forgiveness” (311)]

According to the text, though, the number of these boys present at this scene would have been very minimal. According to 31.9, they had already killed “every male (kal zkr—not the normal word for adult male, or ‘man’ )”. This would mean that the reference in verse 17 to kill kal zkr (‘every male’ ) “among the children” would likely be a reference to any boys who had somehow ‘hidden’ or been unnoticed among the group of captive children. Given the general statement of verse 9, this would imply that this would have likely been a very small number of boys left.

@sonship said

"Moses is furious that the Midianite women have been spared. … Moses orders his troops to execute all the Midianite boys and all the Midianite females except for the virgins. Isn’t this a kind of sick, grotesquely disproportionate atrocity? It’s collective punishment of a most repellent sort—and all to take revenge for the one bad date between an Israelite and a Midia ...[text shortened]... t this would have likely been a very small number of boys left.

Copied with permission.

sonship, you have condemned Humanists as merely "eating faeces" and "spreading germs" when they share their ideas. You have compared atheism to "animal excrement". And you've likened people who do not have the same beliefs as you to unclean dogs and pigs and cockroaches. Would you describe the Midianites as vermin?

@sonship said
The only way they could absorb the 32,000 girls was that 24,000 (mostly) adults citizens of Israel had died as a result of the treachery of their mothers at Peor earlier. This created some ‘capacity’ for absorbing innocents into Israel for the moment.

The remaining people were the non-combat age boys (sub-12?). Philo asserted that the Israelites actually spared the little ...[text shortened]... th of the Hebrews, becoming the causes to them of incontinence and impiety, and at the last of death