Bloody, Brutal and Barbaric Part 3: Better Answers: Better for Questions about Genocide and War Rape (2)

Ch.7: War Rape Meets Genocide

Both war rape and genocide share this: “both reflect God’s accommodated ethic as he communicates within a fallen world.” This, though the traditional view tends to see the “kill everybody” texts as unaccommodated divine commands reflecting the good will of God.

Ch.8: Total Kill Hyperbole, Part One: Ancient Near Eastern Warfare

Ancient Israel shared not only the experience of combat with its neighbors but also the use of similar weapons, strategies, tactics, and even beliefs about the right conduct of war.

ANE battles were directed by the gods, and victories won were theirs. Defeat indicated divine displeasure with the people and their leaders and too many defeats could lead revolution against the king. So kings glorified their battles and military achievements every way they could.

Accounts of military achievements served a variety of purposes:

-to enhance the worship of a king’s patron deity, 

-to memorialize his accomplishments for the future, 

-to intimidate conquered peoples, and

-to legitimate the king’s power (usually omitting negative factors.

In Assyrian king Sennacherib’s account of his campaign against Judah in 701 BC he rightly describes a successful campaign in Judah but does not includer data in the Bible (see 2 Kings 18:13–19:37; Is 36–37; 2 Chron  32:1-22) reflecting he was not completely successful, such as why he left the rebellious Hezekiah alive and Jerusalem unconquered.

In this way kings could put the best face on their accomplishments without falsifying the essence of the events. Hyperbole uses emotionally charged overstatement to tell a particular version of a story.


NUMERICAL HYPERBOLE

Amount of troops involved or killed in a battle were frequently overstated or imprecise. Amount of booty was exaggerated, sometimes largely. Number of foes the king defeated were exaggerated as well.


SPEED HYPERBOLE

Sometimes the length of time a battle took is exaggerated, often shortened, to highlight the king’s prowess in battle (and sometimes in hunting).


SEVERITY HYPERBOLE

The extent of the defeat inflicted on an enemy can be heightened. Often the victor claims to have left no survivors among the victims.


EXTENT HYPERBOLE

How much a king captures or rules over can be heightened. Claims about the extent of an army’s victories usually included the immediate theater of combat and lands associated with any opposing forces in the battle. A victorious king might claim dominion over lands controlled by the defeated nation (whether they actually submitted to their new overlord or not).

Halpern notes, “In Assyrian royal inscriptions, then, the torching of a grain field is the conquest of a whole territory beyond it. A looting raid becomes a claim of perpetual sovereignty. But this does not mean that campaigns can be confected. The technique is that of putting extreme spin on real events.”


ATTRIBUTION HYPERBOLE

ANE accounts of war commonly attributed victories to the king alone, not only because he organized and led his army into battle but because he embodied his people. This glorifying of the king served his continuing need to legitimize his leadership among the people.


CONCLUSION

Hyperbole was integral to the genre of ANE war rhetoric.  The ancient world typically thought and talked about war in heightened or exaggerated ways that went well beyond what actually happened to highlight the emotional impact of what happened.

“War-genre hyperbole complicates the reading of ancient battle reports for modern readers attempting to understand ancient accounts, but awareness of these techniques becomes a hermeneutical key for correctly reading descriptions of warfare in the Old Testament. Along these lines, hyperbole in ANE war rhetoric provides an essential backdrop for the next chapter.”

Ch.9: Total-Kill Hyperbole, Part Two: Joshua and Judges

How should we understand the total-kill language of Joshua (8:26; 10:1,28,30,35,37,39,40; 11:11,12,20-21)?


In Judges it is clear that the entire land was not conquered and that Canaanites were left alive—some in cities that Joshua “totally destroyed” and where he left “no survivors.” Even in Joshua itself there is often overlooked evidence that Israel did not conquer the entire land and did not kill everyone. With ANE war genre as a backdrop, this biblical evidence makes a strong case for hyperbole.


TOTAL-LAND AND TOTAL-KILL ASSERTIONS IN JOSHUA

Not only do battle accounts in the book of Joshua describe the total annihilation of the Canaanites, but the book also emphasizes the complete conquest of the lands formerly held by the Canaanites. Joshua 11:23 concludes Israel’s military campaigns, saying, “So Joshua took the entire land, just as the LORD had directed Moses, and he gave it as an inheritance to Israel according to their tribal divisions” (see also 21:43-45).


EVIDENCE FOR HYPERBOLE IN JOSHUA AND JUDGES

Yet, Judges 1 goes on to describe battles it’s the individual tribes themselves as they try, with varying degrees of success, to possess their territory beginning with Judah and ending with Dan.

Not only does Judges 1 suggest that Israel was unable to conquer all the lands allotted to the various tribes, but it also indicates that quite a few Canaanites survived the total-kill warfare described in Joshua.

Other evidence indicates that several of these Canaanite enclaves remained unconquered and relatively unassimilated into Israelite culture until the time of Solomon (1 Kings 9:20).


Joshua indicates that Israel did not conquer the entire land of Canaan. Joshua 13:1-2: “When Joshua had grown old, the LORD said to him, ‘You are now very old, and there are still very large areas of land to be taken over. This is the land that remains.’”


Joshua 1–12 indicates total control of the land but other passages show less than total control.


Joshua: Annihilation of entire city populations?


Israel did not completely destroy all the Canaanite cities and their inhabitants. Rahab and her family are famous examples because of her acknowledgement of Yahweh and her pact with the spies.

Further, Joshua’s first farewell speech warns about the dangers of fraternizing with the Canaanites remaining in the land (Josh 23:7). In addition, “if you turn away and ally yourselves with the survivors of these nations that remain among you and if you intermarry with them and associate  with them, then you may be sure that the LORD your God will no longer drive out these nations before you” (Josh 23:12-13). Thus, plentiful evidence within the book of Joshua itself shows that at the end of Joshua’s life significant numbers of Canaanites still lived within the land, some in the very places where Joshua is said to have left no one alive.

EXCURSUS: RUN, RETURN, REPOPULATE

Some hypothesize that the Canaanites fled and then returned to their cities.

A more likely explanation is that taking a city was described using total-kill (hyperbolic) language, but only the key leaders of that city (the king and a sufficient number of the fighting force to remove the military threat) were defeated and killed by the Israelites in battle. 


(1) Perhaps a small percentage of Canaanites fled before battle since this counters the biblical text in its descriptions of prebattle fear, as noted above. 


(2) Others may have fled over time, when it became clear the Israelites controlled the land. 


(3) Yet other city populations seem to have been assimilated into Israel without battle (e.g., Shechem, Josh 8:30-35; 21:21; 24:1, 25; Judg 8:31; 9:1). 


(4) Another scenario is a description of the total kill of a Canaanite city (using hyperbole) but whose population was not eradicated and continued to hold on. Cities such as these were weakened seemingly to the point of not being a military threat, but the population remained until they were later driven out (e.g., Hebron, Josh 10:36-37; see Josh 15:13-14). 


(5) Finally, there is evidence that some kings and their armies (with no mention of total kill of the city) were initially defeated (Josh 10:23-26; 12:10) but not fully conquered until much later, when they were assimilated into Israel (e.g., 2 Sam 5:6-8; Josh 16:10; 17:13; see Josh 24:16-25; Zech 9:7).

The hyperbole thesis best accounts for these diverse scenarios.



WHY HYPERBOLE MAKES SENSE

Figurative or hyperbolic language is a common feature of biblical and ANE accounts.

“The impression of a speedy conquest of the land of Canaan by Joshua and Israel in some passages, though other sources indicate an extended process of settling in the land, may best be viewed as an example of speed hyperbole. The existence of survivors in areas for which there are claims of complete annihilation (often using total-kill warfare) offers a good example of severity hyperbole, and claims of complete control of regions when other passages indicate that supremacy had not yet been fully secured serve well as examples of extent hyperbole.”

This makes understanding biblical texts more complex.


First, ANE texts use of hyperbole along with texts which appear to contradict the hyperbolic statements was not regarded as contradictory even though we do.


Second, this doesn’t mean we can’t use these texts in historical studies. For example, while the Moabite king Mesha obviously overstates his claim that “Israel has perished forever,” his declaration in the same inscription that he took Nebo  (an Israelite city) finds support in the Old Testament (2 Kings  3:4-5; see also Is 15:2; Jer 48:1-2). “The use of hyperbole does not negate a toned-down reality version of what was described in the text: that a battle took place, that one side was defeated by another, and that lives were lost as the battle was fought. It simply makes us work a little harder to interpret these accounts.”


Third, modern people use hyperbole similarly in some types of reporting. Modern people actually do this as well. We do when a sports reported announces, “The Boston Bruins totally slaughtered the Toronto Maple Leafs; they wiped them off the map!” Later in the broadcast one learns that the score was seven to three. ANE people would recognize the conventions used in such reporting as similar to their own historical reporting.


Fourth, hyperbole in war language is not limited to Joshua and Judges. It is found elsewhere in the Old Testament, esp. the prophets. They frequently speak of the demise of certain peoples or nations with rhetorically inflated language that was never intended to be understood literally.

“The hyperbolic total-kill language was intended to communicate on an emotive level just how displeased Yahweh was with a nation’s behavior. While the total-war rhetoric spoke of the complete destruction of every living human being, the reality of these prophetic statements was much more a matter of losing some (occasionally many) people in war but, even more importantly, losing their former power, dominance, and prestige within the ancient world and with that the prestige of their gods. Clearly the language is that of emotive hyperbole, not intended to be taken in a strictly literal sense.”

EXCURSUS: EVEN GOD’S COMMANDS?

Yes, they should be understood hyperbolically.

The battle summary reports within Joshua discussed in this chapter are best understood in hyperbolic terms. The biblical authors view these reports as confirmation of fulfilling God’s commands (Josh 10:40-42; 11:11-12, 15-18, 21-23; 21:43-45); they do not see any dissonance between their reports and God’s commands. In fact, the summary reports are repeatedly and directly tied to God’s commands. 

“Some scholars understand God’s commands as misconstrued communication or human misrepresentation (Moses’, Joshua’s, etc., incorrect understanding) of what God said. We do not take this misrepresentation or miscommunication view. While we affirm an accommodated ethic within God’s communication (including commands), we see God speaking to Moses and others using war language and total-kill rhetoric in the same hyperbolic manner as the biblical authors themselves.”

We find war texts where God himself is speaking in total-kill language almost certainly hyperbolic terms: (1) the woe oracles against the nations,

(2) the double-merism language of killing men and women, young and old in reverse holy war against Israel and at times against the nations, and 

(3) the side-by-side placement of drive-out commands that by inference affirm hyperbole in the total-kill commands. While the grammatical form varies between these examples, the divine source (God himself speaks), the substance of his total-kill rhetoric, and its intended hyperbolic meaning remain the same.

HYPERBOLE AND THE ETHICS OF ISRAEL’S CONQUEST

This understanding eases some of our difficulties with these war texts.

Reduced severity.

Use of this kind of hyperbole does not mean that battles were not fought, lives not lost, nor  noncombatants never killed. It does mean that those battles were not quite as bloody and brutal as they might at first seem on a literal reading.

No genocide.

Israel’s warfare is not genocide in the sense of military action taken to (literally) eliminate an entire ethnic people/group. Since the inflated war language simply meant a sound defeat of the enemy (as in other ANE war texts), it is inaccurate to label the biblical accounts as genocide.

Ethical baseline within an ANE world.

Common use of hyperbole in biblical and ANE texts provides an ethical starting point for understanding normative war expectations. What it says is that Israel’s total-kill and total-land (hyperbole) warfare was much like that of the rest of the ancient world. an ethical baseline allows us to better look at what might be redemptive in Israel’s war practices. If it not genocidal we may hope to discover helpful ways it differs from common ANE warfare.

CONCLUSION

This does not solve all our problems here. But it is one of several better answers to ethical problems within the biblical war texts. Compared to traditional answers that do not work (chapter two) and need to be realigned with the justice questions of the original audience (chapter  three), hyperbole is indeed a much better answer.