For many, many years I have been worried about the cruelty ascribes to Israelites in the Old Testament and frequently supposed to be at the instruction of God via Moses or others. For many years too I have ignored these concerns. However recently I have read the book 'The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. (Headline Book Publishing 1996). I am aware he is an agnostic, or similar, and would like scientific proof for everything. Nevertheless he was drawing my attention again to this concern I have had for many years. I hereby quote Carl Sagan from this book - page 275.

"We are enjoined in Micah to do justly and love mercy; in Exodus we are forbidden to commit murder; in Leviticus we are commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves; in the Gospels we are urged to love our enemies. Yet think of the rivers of blood spilled by fervent followers of the books in which these well-meaning exhortations are embedded.

In Joshua and in the second half of Numbers is celebrated the mass murder of men, women, children, down to the domestic animals in city after city across the whole land of Canaan. Jericho is obliterated in a ‘kherem’, a ‘holy war’. The only justification offered for this slaughter is the mass murderers’ claim that, in exchange for circumcising their sons and adopting a particular set of rituals, their ancestors were long before promised that this land was their land. Not a hint of self-reproach, not a muttering of patriarchal or divine disquiet at these campaigns of extermination can be dug out of holy scripture. Instead . Joshua ‘destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded’ (Joshua, x, 40) . And these events are not incidental, but central to the main narrative thrust of the Old Testament. Similar stories of mass murder (and in the case of the Amalekites, genocide) can be found in the book of Saul, Esther, and elsewhere in the Bible, with hardly a pang of moral doubt".

How do I respond to this? I have searched in vain for a suitable answer. I

Got remains God the old and the new testimant God may

And what was required to prepare for the Incarnation?

The Jews, through whom the Messiah was to come, had to be set apart, had to have a land in which to dwell. They had to have the means to create a stable lineage, requiring a basically coherent society, and record it so that the Messiah could be identified.

We tend to think of the Canaanites as primitive pastoral or farming people who didn't know what hit them when Joshua came and wiped them out. It wasn't like that.

you need to think Incas -- with human and child sacrifice. Consider Molech. Then there was the worship of the Baals, which institutionalized the sexual abuse of children.

God was not without witness that he was giving the land to the people of Israel. Rahab hid the spies because she knew God was with them and she and her household were spared. The Gibeonites sued for peace due to this same witness and the Israelites entered into a treaty with them. We can infer that this same opportunity was there for other towns, but it required giving up the worship of pagan gods and giving up a depraved life, so it wasn't a popular option.

Sometimes people wonder why the Israelites couldn't have just conquered those people and not killed them, but instead absorbed them. But this is not realistic. In a few cases they did take captives. But consider what that would have meant on a large scale. A captive woman and her children would have had to be married just to have care. So you would be talking about the Israelites raising a murderous insurrection under their own roofs.

Remember that everything was to prepare for the Messiah. Even when those people were killed, God was preparing for them to someday be with Him in heaven. We have to remember that he is Sovereign.

The chief feature of Moloch's worship among the Jews seems to have been the sacrifice of children, and the usual expression for describing that sacrifice was "to pass through the fire", a rite carried out after the victims had been put to death -- Catholic Encyclopedia.

The further particulars given by the Bible about the Canaanites are rather scanty. We read occasionally of their cities "great and walled up to the sky" (Deuteronomy 1:28; cf. Numbers 13:29); of their "chariots of iron" (Joshua 17:16): and repeatedly of their gods Baal and Moloch and their goddesses Astarte and Ashera; of their altars and their stone pillars (masseboth) and wooden posts (asherim), in connection with these altars, of their sacrifices of children and manifold forms of moral perversity; the abominations on account of which "the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants" (A.V. Leviticus 18:25), and which, in spite of the severe prohibition of the Law and the admonitions of the Prophets, found but too much imitation in Israel itself. Most of these particulars have of late received a splendid corroboration and explanation in archaeological discoveries, principally in consequence of the systematic excavations conducted in Palestine....

At Gazer eight pillars were found, still standing, the smallest of which (about 51/2 feet high) seems to the oldest, and is perhaps the real emblem of the deity. Of the asherim, or wooden posts, only the stone bases seem to be left. Two large grottos situated under the sanctuary must also have played a part in this worship. But the most disgusting traces of this idolatry are the skeletons of infants -- mostly new-born babes -- sacrificed to the deity, which at Gazer were found buried in jars beneath the floor of the sanctuary, and elsewhere, especially at Mageddo, in its immediate neighbourhood. Several times the remains of these human victims, among which have been adults, were found beneath or in the foundations of houses and other buildings; a striking illustrations of the words of Jos., vi, 26: "Cursed be the man before the Lord that shall raise up and build the city of Jericho. In [or with] his firstborn may be lay the foundation thereof, and in [or with] the last of his children set up its gates." The naturalistic character of this religion becomes especially evident in the numerous Astarte plaques, or statuettes, of divergent types, and likewise in the often occurring phallic emblems -- Catholioc Encyclopedia.

So do the victors write history AND also plant the archeological remains of their enemies in the ground?

noel, God is eternal and unchanging , he entered into histroy but doing so did not change him. It changed humanity , it changed our relationship with HIM , but did not change him.

One must be very careful NOT to make any kind of division between the 'God of the old testiment' and the 'God of the new testiment'. There is no such distiction , nor can thier be, and as such doing so is condemed heresy.

God has ever right to ordian, allow , even cause the destruction of the human race, or any part of it. In doing so he does nothing 'wrong'. He has absolute authority and absolute posession of all of creation.

In bringing about the destruction of one group by another, in favoring one people over another he is making decisions based on what is best for the WHOLE group.

If God will's I should die today in some horrible way, at the hands of an enemy or in a natural disaster, there is a reason and if I sufficently understood the reason , i may not like that it has to happen , but I would indeed agree that it was best that my death happened as and when he willed.

That is where christ was 'lord, if this cup can pass... but your will be done ... not mine'.

"the second person of the Trinity, became man"

I think if understood correctly it is possible to have some insight into how the incarnation did not change God. It requires however not letting your imagination interfer with your intellect which can be very difficult for most people.

Let me make a statement of revealed fact.

God created time.

even this sentense betrays a problem. because how can you apply the past tense of a verb to an action that exist outside of time?

sincerly you cannont.

God is creating time.

As a matter of fact from the postion of the creator ( not man ) there is no before or after because God is not IN time in the same sense that we are IN time.

Everything that happens happens all at once for God. God IS creating the univers, is being born , is dying on the cross, is planning to create the universe , is judging all mankind at the end of time.

The theological concept is called 'the eternal NOW' only God expierences it , but it is an inevitable conclusion of the fact that God is not 'circumscribed' by time. He is wholly outside of time.

So he cannot change , because nothing he does has a before or after, that context is meaningful only to man.

We can talk about how the realtionship between man and God changes in realtionship to God over time. But this change is more like the change in realtionship between a moving car ( mankind) and a fixed point (God).