‘Israel is a People Apart
When the Lord God has brought you into the land which you are to possess, and he clears away many nations before you – Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jubesites(a), seven nations greater and stronger than yourselves – and the Lord your God brings them before you and strike them, you must destroy them utterly(b). You must not make any treaty with them or show them any pity. You may not intermarry with them; you may not give a daughter of yours to a son of theirs, or take a daughter of theirs for a son of yours, for this would turn away your child from following me to serve other Gods; the wrath of the Lord would blaze out against you and he would instantly destroy you. Instead, treat them like this: tear down their altars, shatter their standing-stones, cut down their sacred poles and burn their idols. For you are a people consecrated to the Lord your God; of all the peoples on earth, the Lord your God chose you to be his treasured possession.‘
Footnote “a”: A conventional list: the canaanites are the original inhabitants of the country. Hittites are non-Semitic inhabitants, Gn 23. Jebusites are the ancient inhabitants of Jerusalem, 2 S 5:6.
Footnote “b”: The image of such brutal destruction (herem) is far from the historical reality, which was gradual and peaceful infiltration. Such ritual destruction in a holy war is a Near Eastern convention found also in contemporary texts, e.g. the Mesha Stone. In Dt and in Deuteronomic texts the command should be seen as a function of a post-exilic fear of religious contamination and of the apostasy which had led to the Exile, cf. Jos 6:17c.
Holy Bible, Revised New Jerusalem Bible – Study Edition – Darton, Longman, and Todd, (2019), Page 262 – Deuteronomy 7:1
Despite the Catholic compilers of this learned edition of the Bible attempting to justify and placate the inherent violence and ignorance inherent in this text – there is NO objective historical evidence that Judaism existed much before 500 BCE – or that the followers of this originally “polytheistic” religion possessed any significant numbers or were ever held captive in Babylon or Egypt! What texts such as the above have done in the past is served to justify the racist ideology of contemporary “Zionism” – declared by the UN in 1975 as a form of “White Supremacy”.
SANGHA KOMMUNE (SSR) 