Originally posted by: iamaelephant
Joshua said to the people, "Shout; for the LORD has given you the city. And the city and all that is within it shall be devoted to the LORD for destruction...But all silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and iron, are sacred to the LORD; they shall go into the treasury of the LORD."...Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword...And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.
Good old peaceful Christians....
Sarcasm is best left out of discussions like these.
Anyhow, in response:
1.) It's actually pretty ignorant to attribute that to "Good old peaceful Christians..." ... or any Christians at all, for that matter.
Those were Jews, and that, sir, is from the Old Testament.
2.) In order to understand the violence as anything other then genocidal mania, you have to understand that, as sad and horrible as this fact is:
that's the way wars were fought back then. Jerusalem and the Hebrew people were surrounded pretty much completely by other aggressive civilizations. Empires were constantly conquering, falling, reconquering and falling, during the centuries that the Hebrew people were forming. In most cases, the way that armies dealt with threats from their neighbors was to annihilate them. That's simple and historical fact. The Jews did it when they thought it in their interests, and so did their neighbors.
3.) So you may wonder why such barbarism is recollected in the Jewish sacred text. Well, one easy explanation is that it's a product of violent madmen, drunk on power and blind zealotry for their "God."
Another explanation is that, in light of the historical reality that all people faced in the entire region, and especially in light of the fact that the Old Testament is a collection of an entire culture's and people's religious story, it's only natural for the accounts in the Old Testament to contain parts of the story that describe their success and failure, both spiritually and militarily, not to mention that it includes accounts of public health, political intrigue and... well... pretty much everything that goes on in any human culture.
This includes times when they had success, and times when they themselves were victims of slaughter equivalent to what you quote from Joshua up there.