Are Americans Canaanites or Israelites?

In the Tanakh, when Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, children were also killed. When Jericho was destroyed, children were also killed, except the family of Rahab. When other cities were condemned to be destroyed, they were destroyed utterly and even their livestock along with the bodies and all their possessions were to be burned as a holocaust to G-d. Whether you regard such events as historical is irrelevant: we are peering into the theology of such a thing, not the history.

Now many if not most people who hear such stories would say that such things are horrendous and that's another reason for regarding the Tanakh as the product of a barbaric Bronze-Age people with no regard for human life. We have gone beyond such things now in our civilized age (as we abort our babies and drop bombs on children in other countries.)

However it is of a whole cloth with a pattern in the Torah and the Tanakh which I would like to call "the medicinal application of death." The Flood in Genesis (again, whether you believe it happened or not, we are talking theology not history) is the prime example of this. In that case, the whole world had gotten so rotten that the whole of humanity had to be destroyed, except for one righteous family. Obviously many children, almost all children on Earth, also died.

Evil is depicted in the Torah as a kind of infection, an infection that can be communicated down through families. This latter part is easy to see: men whose fathers were abusive or whose fathers were criminals are far more likely to be violent or criminal themselves. This is the actual meaning of the saying, "the sins of the fathers are on the sons." There are of course exceptions and this statement is not literally true (no one can actually inherit sins that are not their own,) but rather you are more likely to be evil yourself if you come from an evil line. Wicked families teach their children wickedness.

Deuteronomy is very clear about this "medicinal application of death," applied both outside the Israelite tribes and within it. Within the tribes, for those who are convicted of capital crimes including such things as pagan idolatry, it repeatedly says "wipe out the evil from among you." Jesus may have said "do not resist an evil person," but the Torah states differently. Kill them, with extreme prejudice, but through the scrupulous application of a process of justice. The penalty for falsely accusing someone of a capital crime is the same as for a capital crime: death. The idea being expressed here is clearly that, like a disease, if you do not expunge evil it will multiply. The sons and daughters of the unpunished wicked will likely go on to being wicked also. The image of evil being here described is like gangrene: chop off the finger to save the hand. Chop off the hand to save the arm. The sooner and more vigorously evil is opposed by force, including lethal force, the less damage will be done in the long run.

Outside the people of Israel itself, to the Canaanites, only the medicine of the Flood can apply. Evil has taken too deep a root:

"When the Lord your God brings you to the land

you are about to enter and possess, and He
dislodges many nations before you...
(list of Canaanite and other kingdoms) ...and the Lord

your God delivers them to you and you defeat

them, you must doom them to destruction:
grant them no terms and give them no quarter.

You shall not intermarry with them: do not give your

daughters to their sons or take their daughters

for your sons. For they will turn your children
away from Me to worship other gods, and the
Lord's anger will blaze against you and He
will promptly wipe you out. Instead, this is
what you shall do to them: you shall tear

down their altars, smash their pillars, cut

down their sacred posts, and consign their

images to the fire."

~Deuteronomy 7:1-5

To the children of Sodom, the children of Gomorrah, the children of Jericho, the children of these Canaanite kingdoms, how do you justify their deaths? They were presumably innocent. But children cannot live without their parents, and if they were old enough to live without their parents they were old enough to have assimilated the ambient evil of their environment. Their deaths not only meant being spared a life of wickedness themselves, but that future generations might be spared the curse of that evil. The evil nipped in the bud, the future clean and righteous. That's what they died for.

Of course Israel started breaking all these commandments almost immediately upon entering Canaan. They took Canaanites for their wives and adopted their gods, they spared their kings and even King Solomon married foreign and pagan wives. But that is a story for another time.

***

So lets turn it around on ourselves now.

I have been against abortion for decades, though not always as strongly as I now wish I had been. I actually don't remember a time when I was FOR abortion, even though I was raised liberal. But if those who are visiting the abortuaries are functionally just like the Canaanites or the residents of Sodom, should I be? They are sparing those children and future generations the inheritance of their evil ways. Is America a holy nation, or is it Sodom? Is America Israelite or Canaanite?

I expect like Sodom, it is a little of both, though perhaps a little better off than Sodom. When G-d told Abraham he was going to judge Sodom, Abraham asked that if there were any righteous there, would He spare it? He answered yes, but ultimately there was only one family of righteous there, Lot's family, relatives of Abraham.

America has an inheritance as a godly nation, but even that inheritance was mixed from the beginning. There were the devout Pilgrims and Puritans, and the lawless mercenary rabble in Jamestown and New Amsterdam (later New York.) In the time of the Revolutionary War, Boston which was founded by Puritans is depicted by most sources as a lawless and drunken town, prone to violence and rioting (even unrelated to conflict with the British) and as being controlled by street gangs with corruption rife. If the more religious immigrants to the New World were blessed by G-d, well, other immigrants were busy wearing that blessing thin.

Even if America was originally a godly nation, that horse has bolted the corral and fled to Alaska by now. We have to accept that the current condition of most of America is that of Canaan, of Egypt, of Sodom. Wickedness has triumphed over what godly inheritance we had.

So should we still be against abortion? For believers, absolutely and unequivocally, and we should teach that it is wrong in hopes that others will come to their senses. As perhaps the leaders in some States have: in Texas if abortion is not utterly banished it is the next best thing. We should still agitate for the abolition of abortion, in the hopes that the people will come to their senses about that and many other things.

But should we resist the Canaanites of this country killing their own to the point of force? Should we march into Canaanite territory and blow up their clinics? I was once sympathetic to such an idea, I am not sure I am anymore. If that Sodom of the East, New York City, kills ALL their babies, well that is fewer babies to be raised to be godless men and women. Which with a tiny number of exceptions they all would be. As much as it may hurt our more tender feelings, G-d's prescription for the godless and wicked is death.

Death, that saves future generations of humanity from the curse of evil. Death, that cleanses the world to be inherited by future generations of the righteous. It may hurt our hearts to say that, but that is clearly the prescription of the Tanakh, what Christians call the Old Testament. From that point of view, the more babies that die in New York City, the fewer babies grow up to be wicked and to spread the disease of wickedness.

It's not their fault, it's their parents fault, and far be it from me to say that they SHOULD die. The thought of it hurts my heart. I am saying we should not prevent them to the point of force from doing it. Up until recently, I was of the opinion that terrorism against abortion clinics and abortion providers was absolutely justified.

Now I believe that if the Canaanites insist on murdering their own, we should tell them the truth, try to save what few we might, but not resist them to the death if they don't listen.

What about places like Texas, where abortion is on the verge of being abolished? We should fight tooth and nail, through political means, to make sure that it IS abolished. What is called for here is vigorous and if need be ruthless political action to make these few states the first states in which abortion is legally or de-facto ABOLISHED. Here, we don't need violence: we're winning.

It is far too late to make America a godly nation. We can still save some godly States though.