>>> Yeah, it’s a little strange that God would impose immoral constraints at all.
>>> But this isn’t so foreign to our lives. Bosses and teachers and governments impose poorly-thought-out constraints on us all the time. And, sure, you could disobey them whenever it felt right to—but you’d quickly find yourself out of a job, expelled, in prison.
But surely we expect more from God than an incompetent middle manager. And surely we should treat divine commands differently than a silly constraint we face at work: say, Elon Musk demanding we send him an email summarizing everything we've done at work recently.
Yeah, passages like these are a big part of why I would have extremely low confidence in the truth of Judaism (or Christianity, for that matter) even if I was a confident theist. But I enjoy the tradition of pulling semi-trite life lessons out of the text anyway!
One wonders how much heredity was believed to be involved in various kinds of behaviors. The scriptures are full of insinuations along those lines, including “bad trees not yielding good fruit,” etc. So maybe the command to exterminate ALL of Amalek was about the belief that there should be no chance left for the heinous callousness of the Amalek to survive. (Take for example the Sinwar character, who despite being cured of cancer by the Jewish doctors chose to plot and carry out a terrible massacre.)
The other layer mentioned was about the army not being allowed to benefit financially from its missions on top of their salary & obligations of duty, hence not leaving even the animals alive. That is, the army ought to be in the service of the civilians, not itself, because it’s a slippery slope…
On the repairability… I have to agree. There’s something very heartless and inhumane about favoring factory production and replacement over employing people locally to repair.
Yeah, a strict hereditarian view seems like a very good assumption. In all the commentaries, a lot more effort is spent explaining the animal-killing than the child-killing, and this would explain that.
Yes, the animals were probably kept for the soldiers' sake, and I like your reasoning for why God would disapprove.
>>> Yeah, it’s a little strange that God would impose immoral constraints at all.
>>> But this isn’t so foreign to our lives. Bosses and teachers and governments impose poorly-thought-out constraints on us all the time. And, sure, you could disobey them whenever it felt right to—but you’d quickly find yourself out of a job, expelled, in prison.
But surely we expect more from God than an incompetent middle manager. And surely we should treat divine commands differently than a silly constraint we face at work: say, Elon Musk demanding we send him an email summarizing everything we've done at work recently.
Yeah, passages like these are a big part of why I would have extremely low confidence in the truth of Judaism (or Christianity, for that matter) even if I was a confident theist. But I enjoy the tradition of pulling semi-trite life lessons out of the text anyway!
One wonders how much heredity was believed to be involved in various kinds of behaviors. The scriptures are full of insinuations along those lines, including “bad trees not yielding good fruit,” etc. So maybe the command to exterminate ALL of Amalek was about the belief that there should be no chance left for the heinous callousness of the Amalek to survive. (Take for example the Sinwar character, who despite being cured of cancer by the Jewish doctors chose to plot and carry out a terrible massacre.)
The other layer mentioned was about the army not being allowed to benefit financially from its missions on top of their salary & obligations of duty, hence not leaving even the animals alive. That is, the army ought to be in the service of the civilians, not itself, because it’s a slippery slope…
On the repairability… I have to agree. There’s something very heartless and inhumane about favoring factory production and replacement over employing people locally to repair.
Yeah, a strict hereditarian view seems like a very good assumption. In all the commentaries, a lot more effort is spent explaining the animal-killing than the child-killing, and this would explain that.
Yes, the animals were probably kept for the soldiers' sake, and I like your reasoning for why God would disapprove.