> After the Lord your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself, “The Lord has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness.” No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is going to drive them out before you.
I think there is a common belief that Israel was "given" the land beyond the Jordan because they were God's chosen people based on their merits.
Deuteronomy seems to imply Israel were just the least bad people.
Israel seems wicked to me now.
Deuteronomy 20:15-18 is more appropriate to the current conflict, as it relates to how the Jews should fight wars in the land of Israel. It commands the utter destruction of the inhabitants of the land, not sparing any that breathe (not just those who “pisseth-on-the-wall”)
Discussions about modern Israel/Palestine are full of shibboleths that reveal where people are drawing their information:
In the Hebrew the word in 20:16 for inheritance is “Nachala”. Worth Googling: Nachala is also the name of a present‑day Israeli settler movement led by Daniella Weiss, whose own literature says it’s “continuing the biblical mandate to settle the land.” In other words, the same term that the Torah uses for a gift that can be forfeited is now used as branding for a modern political project—illustrating how ancient vocabulary still shapes today’s arguments about the land.
For an example from the Palestinian side: you do not have a full understanding of Hamas if you do not know about the Hadith about the Gharqad tree. Hamas charter writers alluded to this story; many Palestinians learn it young, while most Israelis have never heard of it.
Recognizing these code‑words doesn’t require agreeing with the theology behind them. It simply keeps us from talking past each other—and, one hopes, from letting someone else’s apocalyptic script dictate who lives and dies. I think we all agree that the other-sides’ eschatology is a dumb reason to die.
> “When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
Plus the general idea that humans in general are morally flawed, sinful, etc. But, "Good news!" If you follow the one true god, that'll all be sorted out. Following the classic marketing strategy of creating a need, and then filling it.
People are being murdered thousands of years later because of the ancient Judea equivalent of 'Harry Potter', and the batshit insane people who still believe it in earnest.
I understand the instinct to treat Bronze‑Age literature like fanciful fiction: engineers are wired to put "myth" in one bucket and "hard data" in another. But for better or worse, the Bible isn't just an ancient novel. It's the source code for a huge fraction of the world's legal systems, ethics, holidays, and political claims, including the one we are discussing. Dismissing it as "Harry Potter" misses the point:
If we're serious about reducing violence, we need to debug the real code people are running in their heads, not the straw‑man version.
As written by a member of "the least bad people". If you're going to have a historical look at events then, you need to take sources with a grain of salt.
