Response to OT Justice

Before further enumeration of the reasons I no longer believe in God, I would like to post a response to Part 1 in the Christianity to Atheism series and my rejoinder to that response. I received a number of responses. This one was, for the most part, on point and was written by someone who I know maintains the same evangelical worldview from which I departed. I have removed all of the personal portions to protect the individual’s identity, but the content of their arguments remain intact.

I made my response to the reader in-text using this color and font.

---

Subject: blog                              

[Gavagai],
I read your blog and recognize you indeed have fallen into a "black hole".

The ‘Gavagai Hole’ is a mixed reference to Alice in Wonderland, Plato’s allegory of the cave, and more generally, a nod to my studies in philosophy.  Anyhow, when I arrived at the conclusion that significant portions of the worldview I had held for the first 30 years of my life were false, it was a bit disorienting, like waking up and realizing that I’ve been living in Wonderland.

It must be a long, long time since you read the story of David and Bathsheba. Their infant son did indeed die. Remember that David was fasting and praying that God would spare the child and when he died David's servants were afraid to tell David.

You are right, and I was wrong, King David’s first born did die. Thank you for the correction. I should have more carefully reviewed the whole narrative. I have edited the post to reflect that part of the narrative, but the change only required the deletion of one sentence. Nothing in my argument hinged on that statement.

There were many consequences for David's sin beyond that. One was David's son Amon raped his sister Tamar. Then Absalom killed Amon. Later Absalom lead a rebellion against David. When Absalom was defeated and killed, in spite of all that he had done against his father, David grieved for his son. Many times a parent suffers more for the actions of their children than they would if consequences had fallen on themselves.

The consequences Achan faced didn’t just fall on him. His entire family was stoned with him. I’m not sure what you’re suggesting here. If we are still comparing the stories of David and Achan, I can’t believe that David would have chosen Achan’s fate over his own. Would you prefer to have had your whole family stoned than to see one or more members of your family suffer for a time or make some bad choices? I seriously doubt that.

You also questioned the story of Achan. …well, I questioned whether the punishment Achan received was just, but ok.  God had specifically commanded that everything be destroyed when they entered the land of Canaan otherwise "they (the people of the land) will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods and you will sin against the Lord you God" (Deut. 20:18).  In fact, because Israel did not completely destroy these evil people as God commanded Israel was constantly oppressed by them and experience greater bloodshed and destruction then if they had followed God's instructions in the first place.

I acknowledged Achan’s disobedience, but David also disobeyed God’s command. In fact he disobeyed several. Interesting side note, speaking of Deuteronomy 20, Joshua allowed Rahab (a prostitute) to live and join the Israelites in Joshua chapter 6, to borrow your words, which would seem to also be in direct disobedience to God’s command.

Back to Achan, your scripture brings up another question. According to Joshua 8:2, God told Israel they could take the plunder of the city of Ai “…you may carry off their plunder and livestock for yourselves.” This was the very next chapter. Like I pointed out in my blog, Achan’s sin was circumstantially wrong. However, it was not wrong in every situation. We generally make distinctions between sin and crime that is situationally wrong and those that are inherently wrong. Punishments are nearly always more severe for crimes that are inherently wrong because the latter set of sins are more profoundly wrong.

Here is an example to illustrate the distinction I’m trying to make between Achan’s sin and the sins David committed. It is wrong to drive through an intersection if there is a red light. However, there is nothing morally abhorrent about the act of driving through the intersection itself. A person just has to wait for the green light. Achan took plunder during a time when it wasn’t ok (red light). It was wrong, but was it so wrong that it required the slaughter of him and his whole family (...with no opportunity to repent)? That doesn’t seem right. David, on the other hand, coveted, committed adultery, lied, deceived, used his position of power for personal gain, and murdered a man. None of those acts ever have a “green light”.

Achan's offense was in direct defiance to an explicit command of God. David’s sins violated at least four of the Ten Commandments; coveting, murder, bearing false witness, and adultery. Unless the Ten Commandments don’t count as explicit commands from God, King David’s offenses were more grievous, more numerous, and his actions were wrong independent of the circumstances. Moreover, we generally hold that people in positions of power and authority should be held to a higher standard of moral scrutiny than people with no power or influence due to the fact that people who hold positions of power serve as examples and their mischief has the potential to affect greater numbers of people. All of these facts suggest that David’s punishment should have been more severe than Achan’s.

The results of Achan's sin are:
    1. Many men died : You can only attribute those deaths to Achan’s sin if you accept Joshua’s authority in ascribing the blame. Imagine if the President sent three soldiers to kill Osama Bin Laden and they were run off without success. One of the three died in the endeavor. Then imagine Obama announced that the reason for the failure was due to the fact that someone in Kentucky didn’t pay his tithe. He put the offender and his whole family in prison, sent 30 men to kill Bin Laden and, with their success declared that God had blessed the mission because this non-tithe payer had been punished. The scenario is ridiculous, but it isn’t even as extreme as Achan’s story.

    2. Israel's army melted in fear : See above. The wrong guy got the blame for this too. It was Joshua’s poor leadership that resulted in the failed assault. If that was not the case, it wouldn’t have been necessary to so drastically change the scope and strategy for the second attack. In other situations, God even tells the leaders of Israel they are taking too many soldiers into battle and commands the leader (Gideon) to pare down his army so they won’t get big heads and start thinking it was by their strength and not God’s that they won the battle. If God was with them in this instance, why was it necessary to make such drastic changes to the scope and strategy of the attack? Either God wasn’t powerful enough to deliver Ai into their hands with 3000 men, or Joshua made serious errors (didn’t consult with God before the battle and/or misjudged the nature of the obstacle) that resulted in Israel’s humiliating defeat. I don’t see how you can square these issues without having to shrug off reason and say “we just have to believe no matter if it makes sense or not”.

    3. Joshua questioned God : I thought it was okay (doctrinally speaking) to question God. If not, Jesus sinned on the cross when he cried out “God, why have you forsaken me?”

    4. God threatened to withdraw his presence from the people : So said Joshua…

    5. Achan & his family had to be destroyed : The point was that Achan’s punishment was unjust. Siting the punishment or the authority who pronounced it doesn’t make it just. If I was defending the Roe v Wade decision by saying, “well, that’s what the Supreme Court decided, so it’s just”, you would laugh and rightly so. If you want to support that claim, you have to explain why they had to be destroyed rather than offered the same kind of mercy as David and his family. Achan confessed and his sin was reversible. He could have repented and given the gold and silver to the tabernacle. The only reason you believe Achan and his family had to be destroyed is because the Bible said so, even though you would never accept the same punishment in similar circumstances in any other situation. If you think I’m wrong, I would love to hear of a modern example where one man’s crime or sin justly dictates the destruction of his whole family.

In the ancient world the family was treated as a whole.  Achan as the head of his family was like a tribal chief.  If he prospered the family prospered with him.  If he suffered so did they.  Many Israelites had already died in battle because of Achan's sin.  Now he was to be completely cut off from Israel. So, you believe it was just for the family to be subject to the punishment?

I think everyone probably knows at least one person, who by him or herself is a wonderful and kind person, but he/she married a lousy spouse. For the sake of discussion, let’s call the kind person Marge, and the bad spouse Homer. Imagine that Homer gets caught embezzling money at work. No one is shocked because he’s a louse. But there would certainly be outrage if a judge decided that the punishment should be extended to Marge and their children. “The whole family has to serve prison time.” Worse yet, the death penalty… by stoning… with neighbors hurling stones at them until they have been bludgeoned to death? I suspect not. The practice of punishing relatives because of crimes they did not commit as individuals is not right. If you are saying that in that culture it was just, but not in ours, you are suggesting moral relativity. Either it was just then and now, or it wasn’t just then or now, or justice/morality is culturally dependent and relative.

    Achan's entire family was to be stoned along with him so that no trace of the sin would remain in Israel.

I touched on this issue in the blog as well. I can’t believe that in a population of hundreds of thousands of people there were no other sins. Why was Achan’s singled out? Most likely because he happened to be the first guy they came across who lost his cool and was shaking in his boots.

 

In our permissive and individualistic culture we have a hard time understanding such a decree, but in ancient cultures it was a common punishment. We would have a hard time understanding it because it is not just. The punishment fit the crime. Achan disobeyed God's command to destroy everything in Jericho …Joshua also disobeyed this command by letting Rahab live when Israel attacked Jericho…; thus everything that belonged to Achan had to be destroyed. Sin has drastic consequences so we should take drastic measures to avoid it. David abused his office, stole a poor man’s wife, killed the man and tried to hide it. Apart from the fact that the author of the book of 2^nd Samuel associates certain events that occur later in David’s life to his sin, none of his alleged punishments could be directly correlated. The authority (Nathan the prophet) does not administer the punishment; he just makes predictions about bad things that will happen to David. This is open to interpretation and there doesn’t seem to be any reason to believe those “penalties” were related to the crimes he committed. As I see it, they were just a bunch of things that happened. Prophesying that a baby would die in that period of human history was probably more likely to be right than prophesying the baby would live. I don’t know what the infant mortality rate was, but I suspect it was quite high, even for royal families with access to adequate food. The rest of the punishment was more attributable to the choices that his children made, unless you are suggesting that David’s children were not responsible for their own actions and they were compelled by God or fate or some other force that was beyond their control.

    It is interesting that you chose these two stories to attack the veracity of God's Word. There are at least a dozen more passages from the Old Testament that I could have chosen to illustrate the point about injustice being passed off as justice. There are more passages I could have cited that are just bizarre, horrific, or just silly. Nor do the Old Testament problems comprise the most profound reasons I no longer believe. This was the first post of many on the subject of why I no longer believe. I chose these two stories because I was shocked at the disparity in justice they illustrate. I pointed these problems out in the Sunday school class. The pastor refused to meet with me when I requested on the visitor card… In both, the offending sinner was not the only one who suffered the consequences of his sin, the entire family was effected and suffered the consequences. I do believe that immoral choices affect our loved ones. I have chosen to live morally to the best of my ability. That, for me, means striving to hold true beliefs and rejecting those I believe to be false; so far, so good.  [Gavagai] have you weighed the consequences of your rebellion against God?  Who else will suffer the consequences of your actions and words?  You aren’t going to convince me that I should believe the Bible by pointing to consequences the Bible says I might face. Bad things happen to bad people and good people, to believers and atheists. Stuff happens. I will do my best to rise to the occasion when I am faced with difficulties and challenges. I will always do my best to act with dignity and honesty and to show love and kindness to people around me. I hope others will do the same for me.