When Yahweh killed the first-born of the enemy of Israel.

6,960 Views | 73 Replies | Last: 4 yr ago by Zobel
Zobel
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It's not a defense, just an observation.

And yes, with regard to the giant clans. The explanation offered by the scriptures is that the mode of worship was sexual in nature and involved demonic procreation. It was intolerable. Those clans could not continue to exist. It doesn't mean that genocide was required per se - the idea of clan and ethnicity in the ancient world weren't matters of heredity as much as of practice and custom. They had no concept of genetics.

Better by far for anyone to die than to lose their souls. What does it profit anyone to gain the whole world and lose their soul? God is just and death is not the end for any person. If you can even spend a moment imaging a non materialistic workview the whole discussion changes. If you're purely materialistic death is the chief evil, so it's kind of a non starter.
Quad Dog
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Demonic Procreation is simultaneously a ridiculous concept, and a great band name.
Zobel
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If you're a modern materialist, sure.

The concept was more or less universal in the ancient world. What we're talking about is ritualized sex as a part of worship, and people believing that the offspring produced in these rituals were possessed with some kind of strength, ability, whatever. It's all over Greek mythology. Gilgamesh is supposed to be like this. Even Japan still does a sanitized version of the ritual when the new emperor is crowned.
Quad Dog
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Once you've labeled someone as a part of demon-worshipping giant clan then they are now less than human, even if it isn't true. Any actions you or your God take against them is justified and encouraged. It's the worst of tribalism that humans have been doing to each other forever. Most of the atrocities performed by humans against each other, including by Christians, have been performed because we labeled them as demon-worshipping, or socialist, or degenerate, or a crooked Jew, or whatever.
You might as well be creating QAnon conspiracies about baby-eating Democratic presidential nominees.

Zobel said:

If you're a modern materialist, sure.

The concept was more or less universal in the ancient world. What we're talking about is ritualized sex as a part of worship, and people believing that the offspring produced in these rituals were possessed with some kind of strength, ability, whatever. It's all over Greek mythology. Gilgamesh is supposed to be like this. Even Japan still does a sanitized version of the ritual when the new emperor is crowned.


Do you not see the irony here? Mocking other ritualized sex as a part of worship when the basis of Christianity is virgin sex with a God that produced a powerful offspring. It's celebrated once a year. If it had been a swan or a horse with Mary you'd just throw it away as Zues, but since it's your religion that means it's the one true thing.
Zobel
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A couple of things fly in the face of this narrative. One, that kind of religious my-god-versus-your-god warfare and i-want-your-land-and-women-and-stuff conquest is more or less endemic to humanity. Israel stands as an exception - they were allowed only defensive wars by religious law. Even further, they got nothing from the spoils of these conqeuring wars. They were to destroy everything - cattle, gold, all of it. This is why Saul loses his kingship, as the Amalekites were a giant clan and he kept their stuff (cf 1 Samuel 15). The Israelites were not the ones doing the conquering but acting as the agents only, this was God's judgment, and why they say - Yahweh does battle for us.

But anyway, as I said, this is universal to human history. You have as much of it in your blood as I do. The difference is all of the other pagan tribes put no limits on conquest. The God of Israel forbade it, outside of the specific giant conflict (the rebellious demons and their enslaved humans). You can say its a good yarn, or a story, I don't really care. It's an important part of the OT narrative.


Quote:

Mocking other ritualized sex as a part of worship when the basis of Christianity is virgin sex with a God that produced a powerful offspring
One of the most intriguing and powerful ways to read the OT is in connection, in dialogue with pagan religions. The demons brought knowledge - in the OT this is cast as bad, in almost all other ancient myths it's good (cf Prometheus or the Akkadian Apkallu). The powerful that do great feats can become divine (apotheosis), but these feats are usually conquest. The sign of power is control, domination, brutality, wealth. The powerful in the OT is inverted from that - caring for the other, humility, and so on. Others taught that humans were created as playthings of the gods, or perhaps worker-slaves for them, that the world was evil or whatever. The OT teaches that humans have divine purpose and value. They teach the rebellion or overthrow culminates with the Most High God being displaced by the usurper, obviously the Christian texts tell a different version. All of these things are in direct dialogue with the scriptures.

So I don't think the inversion you're describing is insignificant, and therefore the differences are critically important.

The demonic offspring are described as being 2/3 divine (in the OT but also in other ancient religious traditions). In this case that would be the demon or god, the ruler who was also a god, and the temple concubine or priestess who was human. (In Gilgamesh's case it was a goddess so he is said to have two mothers, but whatever). There is a ritualized sex act involved. Consent wasn't a thing. The offspring is not quite human and not quite god, more than one, less than the other.

The Christian story inverts it in nearly all particulars. Christ fully God and fully Man; there is no human father. There is no sex act whatever (you badly bungled this, by the way) and Christ was not powerful in any way. In fact, one of the earliest and sharpest critiques against Christ by the Pagans (e.g., Celsus) was that he was a nobody, from nowhere, with a nobody for a mother, therefore how could he be divine? He wasn't said to be beautiful, or strong, or tall, or have some kind of powerful physique or able to enchant people or dominate them. These are all things the gods do, or the god-kings. There is explicit consent for the Incarnation - possibly one detail that did more for women than anything else in western history.

These things matter a lot, especially as they are so novel in history, they stand in such direct opposition to the other side of the dialogue. I also think it is a mistake for us to take the other side of the dialogue as ridiculous superstition, dreamed up by backwards fools. The ancients were not fools. St Paul doesn't say the gods of the nations don't exist, he says they're demons. Zeus wasn't imaginary.
 
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