Jehovah's Plans for Conquest

(Exodus 23:20 - 23:33)

I will assign to you one of my lieutenants who will conduct you safely to the land I have prepared for your people.  Respect him and do what he says.  Don't oppose him, for he will not brook disobedience, as he is under my orders.  If you will faithfully follow what he bids you and abide by my instructions, I will be an enemy to your enemies and do battle with those who attack you.

When my lieutenant leads you into the land of the Amorites, the Hethites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites (all of whom I will expel and annihilate), you must not adore their gods or serve them.  Do not adopt their forms of worship.  Tear down their altars and smash their idols!  If you worship Jehovah as your only god, he will bless you with ample food and drink and banish sickness from among you.  There, in this land, your women will never be infertile or suffer miscarriages.  I will see to it that you all live long and full lives.

Ahead of you, I will instigate a reign of terror.  I will throw into confusion the peoples that stand in your way, and all your enemies will take flight in fear.  Before your arrival, I will afflict the Hivites, Canaanites, and Hethites with pestilence.  However I will not drive them all out in a single year, in case the land would become a wasteland overrun with animals.  I will expel them gradually until your numbers have increased until they are sufficient to take full possession of the land.  The boundaries of your country I will establish as extending from the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea to the Palestinian shore of the Mediterranean Sea, from the desert of the Sinai to the Euphrates River of Mesopotamia.  I will deliver into your hands the native inhabitants, and you will chase them out.  Make no treaties with them or with their gods.  And do not allow them to remain in your land, for they will induce you to reject me and lure you into worshiping their idols.

Notes
1.  The person referred to as the one who will guide the Israelites to the Promised Land is usually translated as "angel," but this is very misleading, as angel only means messenger, in the sense of emissary or agent.  I have used here the word "lieutenant" as it seems more fitting in this context, since the "angel" is to fulfill a military function in driving out the native inhabitants from the land the Israelites are to occupy.  The lieutenant has his orders from Jehovah with the implication that he has little latitude in interpreting them and no power to pardon Israelites who fail to follow his orders.

2.  Again, in the promise to destroy or expel all those who inhabitant the lands Jehovah has promised to the Israelites, we detect Jehovah's relish for the use of destructive power, mass murder, and ethnic cleansing.  To him, people who are not his "chosen people" have no rights, sometimes not even the right to exist, but seem to be merely vermin to be exterminated to make room for his crew of primitive nomads.  Some universal God he is!

3.  Jehovah's greatest fear seems to be that the Israelites will worship other gods.  It’s his primary concern.  He is constantly harping on the subject and seems to be the only god in the ancient world so hung up on receiving exclusively devotions.  The Israelites (like modern Islamic jihadists) are not taught to respect other people's beliefs and forms of worship -- quite the contrary: they are commanded to destroy the altars and idols of other religions.  Jehovah is ever at war with other gods.  If the ancient gods were extraterrestrial beings, one might easily conclude from Jehovah's animosity toward his fellow deities that he was a reviled outcast, a rebel, even -- and this is suggested by his sociopathic behavior -- an exiled criminal.

4.  Jehovah, like a politician, makes promises he can't possibly fulfill, such as when his people get settled in the Promised Land nobody will get sick and no woman will be barren or have a miscarriage.  Everybody will live a long and healthy life.  Yeah, right.

5.  Many translations, particularly the older ones, have the Hivites et al afflicted with “hornets.”  The Hebrew is uncertain here, but if the meaning is really “hornets, then it is probably not meant literally.  When we say “raining cats and dogs” we don’t mean that tabbies and calicos, poodles and pit bulls are actually falling from the sky.  It is likely that “hornets” is used figuratively and means pestilence or terror.  I have chosen the former, since terror has already been mentioned and would be redundant, (although, in fairness, redundancy is very common in the Bible).  --- That hornets would be employed as a weapon of war to expel a large population from a fairly vast country is scarcely practical -- and patently ludicrous.  Would the hornets all drop dead as soon as the Israelites show up?  (Biblical translators so frequently seem to abandon all common sense when faced with what they are deluded into thinking is holy scripture!)