OT Question

[theyownyou33]

Hello everyone, I was just wondering what the purpose was for Jews to write down their conquests all the way down to the slaughter of innocent children. Was this just a fear tactic for anyone who would read their history or just to indoctrinate younger Jews? I would think that the creators of the New Testament would want to get as far away from those problems as possible, but they didn't make any attempts to distance themselves from it or slavery. Why would this be?

[LogicalFallacy]

They didn't see it as a problem - neither do many Christians today.

 

Remember they thought they were acting under the instructions of God to slaughter every man, woman and child. Their God was one who had no qualms about wiping the earth clean of life save for those in the ark.

 

As to the writers of the New Testament - there is actually a softening in position in the New Testament. It goes from a god ordained conquest on earth to a fight "against principalities and powers of this world". The fight becomes more spiritual... it had to evolve from the devastating loss of Jerusalem in 70AD. At the time the early Christians who would have actually been Jewish couldn't take any fight for the holy land so they evolved their religion... but kept the OT and wove the story through.

[Storm]

I would say that a lot of the stuff you read in the old testament never actually happened. Its all a bunch of stories.

[mymistake]

Like Storm said.  They didn't mind the genocide stuff because they didn't see it as wrong.  But they wanted to pretend that the Jewish people had been a great empire like the Egyptians.  So they made up a history that sounded like what great empires do.  It is most likely that the Jewish people were Phoenician survivors of the Sea People invasion.  They had to run for their lives and settled in hills that had never been populated before.  Read up on the Sea People invasion if you are interested.