God by Jack Miles

Author:Jack Miles [Miles, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78913-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-30T04:00:00+00:00

Not every oracle is as jejune as that one, but all are long on the wrath to be visited and short on just what provoked it. In the Book of Joshua, when the Israelites visited genocide upon Canaan in the name of the Lord, the Canaanites were similarly innocent. Perhaps these oracles, rather than images of divine judgment, are simply images of future Israelite victories, morally neutral in some sense, as those earlier victories were simply the enactment of a divine plan for the land, like clearing a field before planting. True, the Lord has been merciless against those who stood in his path, such as the Amalekites whom Saul failed to exterminate completely, but even then his ferocity was essentially not a moral judgment. Only in the case of Israel does physical annihilation follow unmistakable moral condemnation.

On the other hand, if other nations are now found worthy of moral condemnation, perhaps the Lord’s view of them has changed. Paradoxically, the fact that those nations may now be truly punished rather than merely eliminated brings them a step nearer to moral equivalency with Israel. The older view may live on in some of these oracles, but a new view now competes with it. The premise of the older view was the impossibility—better put, the sheer unimaginability—of conversion. But midway in this series of classic prophecies of doom comes an astonishing prediction of conversion: “The Lord will make himself known to the Egyptians” and they will come to him.

In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian will come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians will worship with the Assyrians. In that day Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, whom the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying, “Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage.” (19:23–24)

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