I am having trouble wrapping my brain around something: How was it justifiable that the Israelites exterminate the Canaanites because "God had promised them the land?" How is this any different than any other culture/nation taking over a nation that what not theirs to begin with in order to increase their power (this region especially b/c it was the gateway between two continents for trade.) The more I read, the more clearly I am seeing the perspective in text, the same way Fox News or CNN will comment so differently on the same story.
Besides the stories and scripts that have been handed down for generations by people of one religious faith (which forcibly attempts the masses to sympathize their enslavement and exile), has there ever been texts written by Persian, Assyrian or Babylonian point of view regarding this history? I find it strange how we frown upon genocide in history, but the Canaanite extermination was okay because it was done in the name of God by Jews?
Besides the stories and scripts that have been handed down for generations by people of one religious faith (which forcibly attempts the masses to sympathize their enslavement and exile), has there ever been texts written by Persian, Assyrian or Babylonian point of view regarding this history? I find it strange how we frown upon genocide in history, but the Canaanite extermination was okay because it was done in the name of God by Jews?
The Canaanites, with whom the Israelites came into contact during the conquest by Joshua and the period of the Judges, were a sophisticated agricultural and urban people. The name Canaan means "Land of Purple" (a purple dye was extracted from a murex shellfish found near the shores of Palestine). The Canaanites, a people who absorbed and assimilated the features of many cultures of the ancient Near East for at least 500 years before the Israelites entered their area of control, were the people who, as far as is known, invented the form of writing that became the alphabet, which, through the Greeks and Romans, was passed on to many cultures influenced by their successors--namely, the nations and peoples of Western civilization.
The religion of the Canaanites was an agricultural religion, with pronounced fertility motifs. Their main gods were called the Baalim (Lords), and their consorts the Baalot (Ladies), or Asherah (singular), usually known by the personal plural name Ashtoret. The god of the city of Shechem, which city the Israelites had absorbed peacefully under Joshua, was called Baal-berith (Lord of the Covenant) or El-berith (God of the Covenant). Shechem became the first cultic center of the religious tribal confederacy (called an amphictyony by the Greeks) of the Israelites during the period of the judges. When Shechem was excavated in the early 1960s, the temple of Baal-berith was partially reconstructed; the sacred pillar (generally a phallic symbol or, often, a representation of the ashera, the female fertility symbol) was placed in its original position before the entrance of the temple. http://history-world.org/canaanite_culture_and_religion.htm
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