Lost Civilizations

In the Old Testament, God advocates genocide. The Hebrews are encouraged to take the land of Canaan from its original inhabitants, and in doing so to slaughter entire cities. How can this be justified?

Entire cities? Wait—didn't Harry Truman slaughter entire cities in Japan with the first two atom bombs? Didn't Churchill kill a large part of the population of Dresden? Apparently, then, there are circumstances in which it is morally justified to kill civilians in war. In the days of walled cities, for example, killing everyone in a city that held out could encourage the next one to give up without a long seige—possibly saving lives in the long run.

What about the territorial aggression? What right did the Hebrews have to take the land of another ethnic group?

For the sake of the greater good of world peace, we all agree in these times that no one government has the right to seize the land of another; but this principle of international law arguably dates only from about 1919. Theoretically, after all, there could be issues greater than this or that nation's territorial integrity. Tony Blair, for example, has recently argued that the rest of the world has a right to intervene when the present government of any country is in flagrant violation of human rights. This was the justification for Kosovo.

Bingo. That is exactly the reasoning given in the Bible. Canaan was given over to the Hebrews not because they were entitled to it, or better than other people, but because of the wickedness of its previous inhabitants: “It is not for your righteousness or for the uprightness of your heart that you are going to possess their land, but it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD your God is driving them out before you” ().

Specifically, the evil of which the Canaanites were charged was that of burning their children as sacrifices to their gods (Deuteronomy 12:31).

Given that this was indeed their common practice, and that it was so accepted as to have been central to their very religion, it does seem to be possible to argue that even the Canaanites themselves were better off if this particular culture were wiped out, as a culture. “Cultural genocide,” in other words, would have been justified, and might be elsewhere as well.

Why not? We are inclined these days, Romantically, to assert that all cultures are good and equal and worthy of preservation, albeit with the odd exception of white European male culture, which is oppressive. But Shintoist/Imperialist Japan was also a culture, with longstanding religious traditions, and we found it worth wiping them out by force. Child sacrifice does sound like a reasonably serious violation of human rights.

So Yehweh and the Hebrews might indeed have been fully morally justified. After all, if God exists and indeed loves us, he must consider it of some importance to protect us from false doctrines: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:27-29). Simply dying by an earthquake or a Hebrew sword is trivial; we all die. But to be led astray by false doctrine—that's more serious, because the results can be eternal. So a culture that not merely practices but preaches true systemic evil may, by its nature, and in the natural run of things, be crying out to heaven for destruction. So the Old Testament supposes. If not by Hebrew armies, by fire and brimstone falling from heaven, like Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities of the plain, guilty almost to a man of the sin of sodomy, or more precisely, of traditions of homosexual gang rape of wayfaring strangers.

Now, this leads to another thought. If the Old Testament is right about this, might it also be possible to find a pattern of cultures that overtly promote evil being wiped out, suddenly and dramatically, throughout history? If so, we would seem to have one more proof of the existence of God, just as he Old Testament envisions him. Of course, we must be cautious: as they say, history tends to be written by the winners.

It does look as though we do. The first example that naturally occurs is the neopagan and ethics-denying regimes of Germany, Italy, and Japan, within living memory; few of us would argue, surely, that their doctrines were not intrinsically evil, regardless of who writes the histories. As regimes and as a social theory, they were wiped out within a couple of dozen years at most. Within three or four years they went from the apparent inevitable wave of the future to a belief that no longer dared say its name.

Next, also within living memory, we have atheistic Stalinism, which lasted seventy years, then seemed to pop like a balloon. “Communism” still survives nominally in China and a few other countries; but this communism seems to have been able to transform itself into a rather different, and less malicious doctrine, as did the people of Nineveh after the warnings of Jonah.

Let's go further back in time, to consider other regimes and nations that have faced total or near-total destruction: what about the famous ancient example of Carthage, burned to ashes by the Romans and the ashes salted over?

Interestingly, the charge against Carthage is exactly the same as that against the Canaanites: they sacrificed children to their gods. This is not too surprising—Carthage was a branch of the same cultural tree as was Canaan. The accusations of child sacrifice against Carthage, therefore, support the historical truth of those against Canaan, and vice versa.

Another legendary collapse is that of Minoan civilization on Crete. The Minoans get a good press these days, because feminists believe they were a matriarchal society; but there is definite evidence that they, too, practiced human sacrifice. The bones of children have been discovered which seem to show them to have been ritually sacrificed, then eaten. The Greek legend of Theseus and the Minotaur seems to confirm this with an ethnic memory of regular human sacrifice on Crete.

The Minoans disappeared so suddenly that it is commonly believed that the culture was wiped out by the eruption of the Thera volcano in 1600-1500 BC—like Sodom, a death by fire falling from the sky. It is also often suggested that its fate is the origin of the myth of Atlantis.

Now we get really controversial: how about the many disappeared cultures of Native North America, pre-Columbus? They too collapsed suddenly, spectacularly, and almost completely. Not primarily because of Europeans, either: they seem to have been devastated by diseases before they fought, the Aztec and Inca Empires fell before a mere handful of Spaniards, and the Mayan civilization collapsed before the first Europeans arrived. It all almost looks like a judgement from God.

We know that they, too, practiced human sacrifice on a large scale. We know that they practiced ritual torture and cannibalism. When Columbus first encountered the Carib Indians, his journal describes "limbs of human bodies hung up in houses as if curing for provisions," and "body parts ... roasting before the fire." Three young Carib slaves who had been captured and castrated by another tribe, fled to him and sought shelter, claiming they were soon to be eaten. His men theorized that they might have discovered Hell.

The Caribs then quickly and almost completely disappeared.

Easter Island is another famous example of a disappearing culture. Without foreign intervention, the islanders seem to have deliberately desecrated their huge religious statues over a period of just four years, and a large, rich island population rapidly dwindled to a poor and tiny remnant.

Here too, human sacrifice and cannibalism had been part of the culture, with children the preferred victims.

It is all, at least, as I said, evocative.

Note that the issue is not simply that of killing people, or of killing children. One might suppose that any culture or civilization that takes to killing its young is almost committing deliberate suicide, with or without divine intervention. But that's too obvious—the number of killed were unlikely ever to be that great. Moreover, the exposure of unwanted infants was a common practice in many other ancient societies that saw no similar collapse: Greece, Japan, China—not to mention our own current taste for abortion. Yet it seems to be only the societies in which killing was part of the religion or ideology, part of the official culture at its deepest core, that experience this phenomenon of sudden collapse.

Exactly the cases that call for God's attention.

One might also suppose that such bloodthirsty cultures would be unlikely to generate strong affections among their followers, so that, once the culture were threatened by whatever means, they could command little loyalty, and so tend to sudden collapse. Yet there is evidence this is not a factor: we know from recent polls, for example, that Josef Stalin is still rather popular even in modern Russia, and contemporary Chinese still more or less revere Mao Zedong. My country, it would seem, remains my country, right or wrong; and this perhaps further justifies the Biblical need to extirpate such doctrines in dramatic fashion.

In most of these cases, too, there seems to be something uncanny, almost miraculous, about the suddenness of the collapse, beginning with the falling walls of Jericho. Generally, the fall is sudden, and we do not understand and cannot explain its causes; at most, there are conflicting theories. It is as though God has left his calling card, repeatedly, pressed between the pages of history, for those who have eyes to see.