Ancient Words

Growing up in a conservative Church of Christ in Nashville, TN (the “Bible Belt”), my teachers told in me that children are “safe” and not “saved” because they have nothing to be saved from. They haven’t sinned, and so they aren’t in need of salvation. This stance is markedly different from the prevailing theory of sinful nature.

Personally, I agree with the idea of child innocence. Those cute little babies and precious toddlers surely couldn’t be guilty of any sin or rebellion. When their lives tragically come to an early end, they are not to blame. It is not their sin that took them from this earth. How could someone be guilty of something when he or she isn’t capable of understanding right and wrong? I find a certain well-justified comfort in these thoughts.

A baby or young child is surely innocent by nature (though if you’ve ever been a parent, you know there are times when you’re certain the devil has possessed your child). A person too young to comprehend the concept of good and evil can’t be guilty of sin. Period. End of story.

Curiously, the Bible, or at least a chunk of the Old Testament, takes the opposite stance: children are not innocent. Or, more accurately, not all children are innocent.

“Don’t Kill the Innocent” vs “Kill Them All”

In Exodus 23:7, in the middle of a series of various exhortations, God gives this command to the people at Sinai:

Keep far from a false charge, and do not kill the innocent or the righteous, for I will not acquit the guilty.

According to this law, it is forbidden for an Israelite to kill an innocent person or a righteous person, as the two are similar in nature. Bracketing this command are other commands of a practical and universal nature: don’t pervert justice (Exodus 23:6), don’t take bribes (Exodus 23:8), help your enemy if his donkey is lying helpless, and do not oppress strangers in the land. Practical stuff. Universal stuff. Moral stuff. Ethical stuff.

The problem is that this command in Exodus 23:7 runs painfully and awkwardly headlong into later commands for Israel to slaughter groups of people, all of them, everyone, man, woman, and child. For example, there is God’s command to Saul in 1 Samuel 15:3:

Now go and strike Amalek and completely destroy everything that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.

Some accounts, such as Joshua 6:21, approvingly report the slaughter of everyone (including innocent youth), after the fact:

They utterly destroyed everything in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, sheep, and donkey, with the edge of the sword.

Can We Resolve This Dissonance?

We certainly have an inconsistency to resolve. On the one hand, the Israelites are forbidden to kill the innocent. On the other hand, we here have a command from God and an approved report of the Israelites’ wholesale massacre of infants and children. How can this be if children are innocent?

Option 1: God Commanded It, So It Was An Exception to the Rule

This explanation essentially says that people are free to perform evil acts so long as God commands it — i.e., God can use people to break his own laws. I’m not buying this explanation. Why would God need people to perform a gruesome massacre? Why couldn’t God simply strike them dead with no need for any human intervention? Why wouldn’t God perform his own dirty work? Why would God set such a precedent of commanding evil in the name of good?

If we take these stories in 1 Samuel, Joshua, and Judges at face value, it means God sent people on a mission to execute children. God’s servants obediently thrust their spears and swords into the wombs of pregnant women and into the hearts of babies and toddlers.

None of this masks the fact that these acts were gross, immoral, and evil whether God commanded them or not. If God commanded this evil, then God is evil, and there is no getting around that conclusion.

Option 2: The Atrocities Reported are Not Historical, So This is a Moot Debate

To be honest, this is the option I would like to be the correct answer, but I have my doubts. These stories and the gruesome tales they tell are there for a reason, presumably because they reflect historical events at least to some degree. It seems unlikely that the historicity (historical accuracy) of these stories is entirely inaccurate. Perhaps stretched, but not invented out of whole cloth.

But, let’s assume for the sake of argument that these stores were entirely made up. Why are they there? Like a detective investigating a crime, we would need to search for a motive. Why would the Bible authors invent these stories, and why would later scribes maintain them in the canon unless they had reason to believe they were true?

Perhaps these stories serve to justify bravado, a way to brag (“my ancestors defeated your ancestors”)? Perhaps they provide a claim to the land (“we won this land fair and square!”). Perhaps it was a common thing for cultures at that time to invent great war stories, and the Israelites were no exception. In any case, it would be next to impossible to prove these massacres never happened — as it’s always difficult to prove a negative.

I do think, however, we must face the reality that these stories are at least partly rooted in historical fact. This being the case, we should not accept this option to resolve the dissonance. Alas, the easy button does not suffice here.

Option 3: Those Israelites Believed God Wanted Them to Massacre All Canaanites Because They Believed Those Children Weren’t Innocent

This option makes the most sense to me. Throughout human history, and into the modern age, people have used religion as an excuse to commit atrocities. What better way to justify a slaughter than to claim your God wants you to do it? Nothing stirs up the troops like a good “do it for your God” pep talk.

As for the “innocent” children, my guess is that these Israelites from 1000 BC wouldn’t consider those pagan Canaanite children to be innocent. Sure, Israelite children would be innocent, but not pagan offspring. Again, have we not seen this happen even in recent history, where one people was willing to overlook the slaughter of another people because of their race, heritage, or religion?

If we accept this premise, that ancient peoples would consider offspring of the unclean to also be unclean, might it shine light on a confusing statement Paul made in the 1 Corinthians 7:14?

For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband; for otherwise your children are unclean, but now they are holy.

It is difficult, to say the least, to understand why the holiness of children would be derived from the sanctification of the parents unless the first century Jewish mind associated lineage with innocence. If the parents are holy, so are the children. Such a way of thinking isn’t a far cry at all from what we see in 1 Samuel, Joshua, and Judges, where the children are pagans worthy of death because who their parents are pagans worthy of death. Kill all of them, even the youth, because they are of the same stock.

So we have nice parallels, one from 1000 BC and another from AD 50. The law of Moses commanded the Israelites to “not kill the innocent”, but to them those children weren’t innocent because they were the offspring of pagans. Paul equated the sanctification of a parent to the holiness of the child. We find a concept manifested across two millennia in the belief system of a single religion.

Final Thoughts

I think option three best fits with the historical tendency of humans to see other races as collectively evil or collectively good. It also best fits as a religious belief we can track across a thousand years of documented Biblical history. And it just makes sense to me.

As a side note, a nice advantage of this option is that we don’t need to accuse God of wrongdoing because God’s true desires aren’t a part of the equation. If God is good, children (all children) are innocent, despite whatever reasoning a group of Israelite soldiers and scribes used to justify themselves in their own eyes two and a half millennia ago.