Ping!
So much for Catholics lecturing Protestants about "private interpretations" of scripture!
If God doesn’t punish the innocent, why did he kill David’s son?
as to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah— Scripture speaks in Chapter 18 of the debate and one needs consider Biblical symbols to understand some of it.It appears ethno centrism is going on here — the text speaks of the number of men—not the number of souls. The speculator does not allow Scripture to speak for itself but plays what if? As it appears the society was governed by men—the judgement for their unrighteousness rests with the guilty. When we play what if with Scripture we end up wholly seduced like Eve in the garden.”Thou shalt not surely die?” Genesis 19 : declares that Sodom and Gomorrah were overthrown -so it was.
Israelites were the first people on Earth to figure out that they did not need to be worshiping dwarf stars. “Yahveh” is the same basic word as “Jove” (Jupiter) and you can convince yourself that “El” meant Saturn by doing Google searches on ‘El Saturn Babylon’ and you need to included the term ‘Babylon’ to keep from seeing all the hits for GM Saturn dealerships. I’d assume that Jericho and Ai were before Israelites figured out that God was not Jupitor or Saturn...
>> “Is it possible that in these examples the sense of utter destruction was not meant to be understood literalistically, but was used as an expression?” <<
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No, it is absolutely not possible.
The people and culture of Jerico were immensely evil, casting their infant children into the red hot arms of a bronze idol in the middle of an intensely hot fire, to die in agony as the crowd danced and played loud music to drown out the shrill cries of the dying infants.
The author of this tripe will deserve what he gets at the judgement seat!
And this is what happens when you impose chrstianity (and “natural law”) on the Hebrew Bible.
What I think is 1) since the archeological evidence suggests that Jericho had been sacked and abandoned about 200 years before the probable date of the Exodus, the authors of Joshua were not describing a real event, but a symbolic one; 2) the writers of the Bible were quite capable of inserting divine commands into accounts of flawed human actions, in order to justify their ancestors behavior.
When God used Israel carry out His judgement on a nation, it was not evil. His judgements are always righteous.