Peetem wrote:
Given that a great many people committed a great many sins back then, as they do today, if those punishments were applied as written, it would be safe to say we would have had almost no Jews survive until Christ was born.
And that is one of the reasons why scholars are increasingly coming around to the view that a lot of the violence in the Bible is not literal. If you execute for every little crime, you're not gonna have many people left after a generation or two.
There is a lot of evidence to support my claim that a lot of the violence described is not literal. For example, we have discovered inscriptions made by Egyptians which describe the outcome of the battles they fought, and in every single one, it is claimed both that the people were 'completely exterminated' and that the survivors were all enslaved. But wait, how can there be survivors to enslave if the enemy was completely exterminated? That doesn't make any sense.
And there is also the fact that, if the Egyptians really did enslave as many people as they claimed, then the foreign slaves would have outnumbered the native Egyptian freeman by a ratio of about 10,000 to 1. How on Earth could the Egyptians possibly have kept that many slaves and prevented them from revolting? How would they feed and house such a vast population of slaves? It makes no sense. It is implausible on its face.
And by the way, one of the strongest proofs we have that the Egyptian inscriptions about their supposed victories could not possibly be completely literal is that among the peoples that Egypt claimed to have 'completely exterminated' are the Jews. One such inscription describing a victory over Israel says that 'his seed is no more', which sounds like a pretty definitive statement until you read the next inscription right next to it which describes ANOTHER BATTLE with Israel a few years later!
It even seems likely that this kind of language may have been formalized and stereotyped, so that all victories are described using the exact same language. In an oral culture, stereotyped language is really useful to help people remember long lists of information.
The same thing happens in the Hebrew Bible, where it says that entire races of people, such as the Amakelites, were 'completely exterminated' by the Jews, but then after making this claim, there are still casual references hundreds of years later to Amakelites living in Israel.
This makes no sense unless we make the assumption that when orders such as 'exterminate all of them, including the women and the children and do not allow a single one to live' must not have been intended literally but must have been like the rhetoric of General Patton in World War II, intentionally exaggerated for the sake of motivating his troops by stirring up an urge to fight, while still understanding that orders such as 'shoot the enemy in the back when they run away' were not intended to be taken seriously. If you take General Patton's rhetoric seriously, then he was urging those under his command to commit horrific war crimes, war crimes such as slaughtering an entire battalion of German troops that were in the process of trying to surrender, war crimes that never actually took place, despite Patton's supposed 'encouragement.' Precisely no serious World War II historian thinks that General Patton's supposed 'orders' to commit what could only be described as war crimes were ever intended to be taken literally. He knew his troops wouldn't actually do any of the things he said, but he said them because he knew that they were all just a bunch of young kids who were deathly afraid of battle (and they were afraid because being afraid is completely sensible and rational!) and so he used stirring rhetoric about how many Germans they were going to kill and how much damage they were going to inflict to inspire them to fight.