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Why would such a horrifying practice have become entrenched?
Perhaps because infanticide is a one hundred percent reliable form of
birth control. All the benefits that are seen to accrue to societies
which limit their population growth would have flowed to the
societies that followed this abominable practice. Living standards
rise when agricultural production is not outstripped by population
increase. But it's a moral atrocity, so God says no.
It's interesting to play 'What if' with history. What if
Carthage, an advanced civilization which led the world in naval
architecture, had won its competition with Rome for mastery of the
western Mediterranean, and it was the Carthaginians who adopted the
motto, 'Roma delenda est,' or its Punic equivalent? Would there be a
tophet filled with little coffins on the outskirts of every American
small town? Heaven turned its weeping eyes away from this scene. Instead of
joining the atheists in their mourning, let's look on the bright side.
Justice
In the case of Canaan, as for that matter in the case of
consigning the wicked to an eternity in outer darkness, God's
punishments are not remedial, and punishment on any grounds other
than rehabilitation excites the atheists' indignation. In this particular
case, destroying the Canaanite culture ended the suffering of the little
ones and vindicated their cause against those (their own parents) who
sought to destroy them. What rolled back upon the parents was the stone
they had set in motion, murder: "Then hear thou from heaven, and do, and
judge thy servants, by requiting the wicked, by recompensing his way
upon his own head; and by justifying the righteous, by giving him
according to his righteousness." (2 Chronicles 6:23). Where is the
injustice in that?: "Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that
rolleth a stone, it will return upon him." (Proverbs 26:27). If justice
giving to each his due, they have no complaint.
But then, how were the blameless children rescued from the
oppression of human sacrifice by ensuring no more of their brothers
or sisters would be born? This is the kindness of the vegetarian,
who ensures that no animal will ever be sacrificed for meat on his
account; not that cattle and sheep will be left free to roam the
country-side; these creatures have not been spared, rather they will
not ever be born unless someone sees a profit in raising them. Very
little of the meat supply comes from wild animals, so if a
vegetarian saves a spring lamb by not eating meat, this means only
the lamb will never be born.
The Bible states the principle of sparing the lives of the
innocent,
“But the LORD said, 'You have had pity on the plant for which you have not labored, nor made it grow, which came up in a night and perished in a night. And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than one hundred and twenty thousand persons who cannot discern between their right hand and their left—and much livestock?'”
(Jonah 4:10-11).
. . .but in the case of Canaan that principle was not applied.
Why not? What is the remedy here: for the infant
children to be raised by the conquerors, to learn to sing the
praises of the conquering nation, not their own? The defenders of
Masada slaughtered their children rather than send them to the fate
of serving as slaves to their enemies. The women and children of Phocis took
a vote on this very question, though happily their men prevailed and it
did not come to this. They voted not to sing the songs of the
conquerors:
"The Thessalians were engaged in a war without quarter
against the Phocians. For the Phocians had slain on one day all the
Thessalian governors and despots in their cities. Whereupon the
Thessalians massacred two hundred and fifty Phocian hostages; then
with all their forces they made an invasion through Locris, having
previously passed a resolution to spare no grown man, and to make
slaves of the children and women. Accordingly Daïphantus,
Bathyllius's son, one of the three governors of Phocis, persuaded
the men to meet the Thessalians in battle, and to bring together
into some one place the women with their children from all Phocis,
and to heap about them a mass of faggots, and to post guards, giving
them instructions that, if they learned the men were being
vanquished, they should with all haste set fire to the mass and
reduce the living bodies to ashes. Nearly all voted approval of the
plan, but one man arose in the council and said it was only right
that the women approve this also; otherwise they must reject it,
and use no compulsion. When report of this speech reached the women,
they held a meeting by themselves and passed the same vote, and they
exalted Daïphantus for having conceived the best plan for Phocis. It
is said that the children also held an assembly on their own account
and passed their vote too." (Plutarch, On the Bravery of Women,
Chapter II, The Women of Phocis).
The children who survived in Canaan had won the struggle for survival
with their siblings. That some children were murdered under the auspices of
the child sacrifice system left improved conditions for those who were spared, not through the favor and
blessings of the demon (as those who bought into this system thought), but simply in the natural order of things. The
child who survived thus benefited from the death of the sacrificed
child, his older brother, though of course not from any conscious,
malicious intent on his own part. The law demands restitution: what can
the surviving child pay back to the murdered child to make up for his
stolen life? Is this surviving child even innocent, if he benefited from
a murder? In wiping the slate clean, God was not wronging these
children.
Israel was a theocracy, which ultimately failed owing to human
sinfulness. There is no such thing as a 'do-it-yourself' theocracy;
no nation not so founded and constituted by God can be a theocracy at all.
Atheists err in generalizing this one-time command; only God can
judge a people in this way, not man. It is very common nowadays for
people to assume that all religion is invented by man, and from this atheistical perspective, it is
hard to differentiate between Israel's view that Palestine would be better off without the
Canaanites and Adolf Hitler's decision that Germany would be better
off without the Jews. However, there is a difference as sharp as between that
of night and day: God delivered the first verdict, man the second.
Israel chafed under the theocracy, and did not want to be governed
by God. They wanted to be governed just like other people: "But the
thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us.
And Samuel prayed unto the LORD. And the LORD said unto Samuel,
Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee:
for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I
should not reign over them." (1 Samuel 8:6-7). However at the time
of these actions, they were not governed like other people, they
were governed by God. And there can be no question that He who gives
life is also entitled to take it away: "See now that I, even I, am
he, and there is no god with me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound,
and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand."
(Deuteronomy 32:39).
Some people say that this event, the conquest of Canaan, never
happened, inasmuch as archaeologists have discovered no layer packed with
burnt human bones such as would attend the general destruction of a
nation. These people intend to disprove the Bible account, but they misunderstand what the Bible says. God's
intent was not to corral these people and exterminate them, but
rather to drive them out of the land: "Observe thou that which I
command thee this day: behold, I drive out before thee the Amorite,
and the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, and the
Hivite, and the Jebusite." (Exodus 34:11). God's intent was to drive
out, expel, cast out, drive away these people, to destroy their
national existence, not to wipe them out to the last man: “Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them: ‘When you have crossed the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, destroy all their engraved stones, destroy all their molded images, and demolish all their high places; you shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land and dwell in it, for I have given you the land to possess.’”
(Numbers 33:51-53). It was those who did
not flee who were devoted to destruction. Undoubtedly there were waves
of refugees fleeing before the conquest; God did not leave them
with no escape route, nor command that they be pursued beyond the
national border. To see that this is so, compare the accounts in
Joshua and Judges: areas in which God's directive was fully carried
out were found, years later, to have been re-populated by
Canaanites. When the U.S. military would cleanse a given region of
Viet Cong, they weren't always deluding themselves in finding their
efforts successful; these people had the good sense to leave when
there was pressure, then come back when the heat was off. It would have
been better here, though, once having left, to have stayed gone,
because in the end, Israel's failure to follow the Lord's
directives punctiliously led to the result, as predicted, that the Canaanite religion
proved a lasting snare.
The ancient world presents a dramatic tableau of large-scale
movements of entire population groups, which we really don't see any
more. The Huns, the Cimbri, and many other groups, picked up stakes
in their home territory and came sweeping down on the already
settled and fully populated civilized world. These invaders were not
just the young warriors, intending to return home with their
plunder, but all of them, and they were looking for a home. In some
cases they had been pushed out of their prior habitation by
invaders, or their population had outgrown its carrying capacity, or
a string of crop failures and natural catastrophes left the people
convinced that land was accursed. These human tsunamis were
terrifying and unstoppable; but often after this monumental wave had
rolled on through, it could be hard to find its traces. The Vandals
conquered Northern Africa and established a kingdom there; they
settled the land. But conquering is one thing, and occupying is
another. I've never been to North Africa, but I'm betting you don't
see a lot of Germanic place names there. Not only would the original
inhabitants seek to re-establish themselves, but newcomers, like the
Berbers, and the Arabs, moved in and had no intention of conserving
any German-language cultural heritage. in the Israelite conquest of
Canaan, we see one of these large-scale population displacements
from the inside. And we know why God vetoed continued Canaanite
habitation: because of Molech et al. So even though Bible 'critics'
are always seeing contradiction between the book of Joshua and
Judges, it is not the same thing to conquer and to occupy. Did the
Vandals conquer North Africa? Yes. Are they still there? No. It's
not 'mythology' that they were ever there. Sometimes one's fellow
immigrants, like the Berbers, or the Arabs, or the Philistines in
Canaan, can be a bigger threat than the original inhabitants.
Molech, whether this is a proper name or a title, 'king,' was a harsh
task-master. Whatever he was presumed to be, he was no real god; it may
be some roaming demon thought up this brutal system. Another pagan deity to whom no one ever said, 'Lead, Kindly
Light' is Dionysos. Blameless Agave was his acolyte, fervent
in her devotion; so how did the god reward her for her service? By
causing her to tear her own son, Pentheus, limb from limb. Some people, when
they think about paganism, think about the spring-time meadows and
ever-blooming flowers of the pagan revival during the Renaissance. The
real thing was somewhat darker:
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When the children of Israel came into the promised land, they
were commanded by God to extirpate the people already living there,
the Canaanites. No human being can lawfully reach such a verdict
concerning an entire race; it was God, the righteous judge of all the world,
who delivered the verdict against them. Their culture was
built around a practice which would make even Hitler blanch: burning
alive infant children as an offering to their gods.
