Satan showed me some passages from the good book that I hadn’t seen as clearly before.
The first part of Deuteronomy 7 calls for a holy genocide (“the driving out of nations”) against the people of Canaan, later known as Palestine.
When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you
2 and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.
3 Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons
4 for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods, and the Lord’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you.
5 This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire.
6 For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.
***
The wiping out, driving out, of the seven nations makes me think about another indigenous genocide closer to home in the newish world. And of course the one underway in Gaza. God has sent us his chosen ones down this brutal road almost habitually through the ages.
The part about Asherah caught my eye too. This was what those original-issue Israelis called a goddess named Astarte, who the native peoples of greater Phoenicia worshiped, and I do too.
***
There’s also the end of Psalm 137: https://www.jw.org/en/library/bible/nwt/books/psalms/137/
O daughter of Babylon, who is soon to be devastated
Happy will be the one who rewards you with the treatment you inflicted on us.
Happy will be the one who seizes your children
And dashes them against the rocks.
The secret of human happiness, the Psalmist says, is to hunt down the ones who have wronged you, those evil Others, and smash their babies against some handy geology until they’re pulped.
The current government of Israel, it seems, believes it still.
It’s a holy land, you know. Those animals the Amorites never deserved it–god said it Himself–and taking it away from them was the godly thing to do in Joshua’s time, and again in 1948.
***
Satan had several other interesting takes.
I’m grateful to have heard them.
Even if they were propaganda, which of course they might be too; what do I know about it?
I know nothing.
I only have what I feel.