Evolutionary Ethics: Contextualizing the Biblical Laws of War and Herem

Though many of us would prefer to continue believing in the myth of the "noble savage," anthropologists in recent decades have led us to a more sober assessment of human nature. See Lawrence H. Keeley, War before Civilization (Oxford University Press, 1997); Steven A. LeBlanc, Constant Battles: Why We Fight, (Macmillan, 2004).

Svante Pääbo, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes (Basic Books, 2014).

Richard Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution (Vintage, 2019); Sylvain Lemoine et al. “Parochial Cooperation in Wild Chimpanzees: A Model to Explain the Evolution of Parochial Altruism,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 377, no. 1851 (2022).

Stephen Stich, “The Quest for the Boundaries of Morality.” In The Routledge Handbook of Moral Epistemology (Routledge, 2018), pp. 15–37. Using a descriptive approach will enable us to circumvent the temptation to assess the morality of texts written over 2500 years ago according to our modern context and values. This analytical distance bears the caveat that seeking to understand sympathetically the views represented in an ancient text should not be taken for defending them.

Jane Goodall, Chimpanzees of the Gombe (Belknap Press, 1986), p. 505.

A tragic contemporary example is the Rwandan genocide, where Tutsi women were targeted, raped, impregnated, and later killed to erase any possibility of cultural survival or mixed (hybrid) identities. See Tracy M. Lemos, "Dispossessing Nations: Population Growth, Scarcity, and Genocide in Ancient Israel and Twentieth-Century Rwanda." Ritual violence in the Hebrew Bible (2015): 27-66.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press. 1976), Chapter 11 (“Memes: The New Replicators”).

Alex Mesoudi, Andrew Whiten and Kevin N. Laland, “Towards a Unified Science of Cultural Evolution,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29, no. 4 (2006): 329–47; Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (University of Chicago Press, 2008).

See also discussion in Mordechai Cogan, “Deuteronomy’s Herem Law: Protecting Israel at the Cost of its Humanity,” TheTorah (2022). This notion is not limited to Deuteronomy, but appears elsewhere in the Torah as well:

^{שמות לד:יב} הִשָּׁמֶר לְךָ פֶּן תִּכְרֹת בְּרִית לְיוֹשֵׁב הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַתָּה בָּא עָלֶיהָ פֶּן יִהְיֶה לְמוֹקֵשׁ בְּקִרְבֶּךָ. ^לד:יג כִּי אֶת מִזְבְּחֹתָם תִּתֹּצוּן וְאֶת מַצֵּבֹתָם תְּשַׁבֵּרוּן וְאֶת אֲשֵׁרָיו תִּכְרֹתוּן. ^לד:יד כִּי לֹא תִשְׁתַּחֲוֶה לְאֵל אַחֵר כִּי יְ־הוָה קַנָּא שְׁמוֹ אֵל קַנָּא הוּא.

^{Exod 34:12} Beware of making a covenant with the inhabitants of the land against which you are advancing, lest they be a snare in your midst. ^34:13 No, you must tear down their altars, smash their pillars, and cut down their sacred posts; ^34:14 for you must not worship any other god, because YHWH, whose name is jealous, is a jealous God.

Following this evolutionary logic, the religious motive for total annihilation represents a transition from the "selfish gene" (biological survival) to the jealous meme, i.e., the survival of the Israelite culture.  

^{שמות לד:טו} פֶּן תִּכְרֹת בְּרִית לְיוֹשֵׁב הָאָרֶץ וְזָנוּ אַחֲרֵי אֱלֹהֵיהֶם וְזָבְחוּ לֵאלֹהֵיהֶם וְקָרָא לְךָ וְאָכַלְתָּ מִזִּבְחוֹ. ^לד:טז וְלָקַחְתָּ מִבְּנֹתָיו לְבָנֶיךָ וְזָנוּ בְנֹתָיו אַחֲרֵי אֱלֹהֵיהֶן וְהִזְנוּ אֶת בָּנֶיךָ אַחֲרֵי אֱלֹהֵיהֶן.

^{Exod 34:15} You must not make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, for they will lust after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and invite you, and you will eat of their sacrifices. ^34:16 And when you take wives from among their daughters for your sons, their daughters will lust after their gods and will cause your sons to lust after their gods.

A similar rationale governs the divinely mandated war against the Midianites (Num 31). Citing the actual precedent of the seduction of male Israelites by female Midianites to worship Baal Peor, Moses is outraged that the soldiers have spared female captives. Even more strikingly, Deuteronomy 13:13–19 calls for the utter destruction (ḥerem) against an apostate Israelite (!) city. See discussion in Ada Taggar-Cohen, “The Subverted City (Ir Hannidahat) in the Context of ANE Vassal Treaties,” TheTorah (2020).

See Tracy M. Lemos, Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Comparative Contexts (Oxford University Press, pp. 28–60.

The fuller context reads as follows:

Libya is captured, while Hatti is pacified.
Canaan is plundered, Ashkelon is carried off, and Gezer is captured.
Yenoam is made into non-existence; Israel is laid waste, its seed is not;
and Hurru is become a widow because of Egypt.

For the idiom "having no seed" as a reference to total annihilation, with numerous examples from Egyptian, Akkadian and biblical texts, see Anson F Rainey, “Israel in Merenptah’s Inscription and Reliefs,” Israel Exploration Journal 51 (2001), 57–75.

For the text and interpretation, see Kent P. Jackson, "The Language of the Meshaˁ Inscription," in Studies in the Mesha Inscription and Moab (ed. A. Dearman; Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989), pp. 96–130; Shmuel Ahituv, HaKetav VeHamiktav (2^nd ed.; Jerusalem: Bialik, 2012), pp. 377–393 (Hebrew); André Lemaire, "The Mesha Stele: Revisited Text and Interpretation," in Epigraphy, Iconography and the Bible (eds. M. Lubetski and E. Lubetski; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2022), pp. 20–39.

For more on ancient Near Eastern ḥerem laws, see Ada Taggar-Cohen, “War at the Command of the Gods,” TheTorah (2022).

See also Num 21: 22–23; Deut 2:34; 3:26; Josh 8:26.

Alexander Rofé, Deuteronomy: Issues and Interpretation (T&T Clark, 2002), pp. 149–167.

Yair Hoffman, "The Deuteronomistic Concept of the herem," Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 111 (1999), 196-210.

See Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 200–205.

The images of the conquest of Canaan in the Bible are varied. See Mordechai Cogan, “Israel’s Incomplete Conquest of Canaan,” TheTorah (2022).

Kenton Sparks writes aptly, "Even in its most ethnic guise—'kill the Canaanites'—Deuteronomic identity was concerned primarily with religious identity rather than ethnic purity." Sparks, Kenton L. Ethnicity and identity in ancient Israel: prolegomena to the study of ethnic sentiments and their expression in the Hebrew Bible (Eisenbrauns, 1998), p. 234.

As Carly Crouch writes: "In its own moment the deuteronomic text is engaged in a battle—literally unto death—over what it means to be an Israelite." Carly Lorraine Crouch, The Making of Israel: Cultural diversity in the southern Levant and the formation of ethnic identity in Deuteronomy, vol. 162. (Brill, 2014), 6.

For example, see the volume K. Berthelot, J.E. David and M. Hirshman (eds.), The Gift of the Land and the Fate of the Canaanites in Jewish Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). At the same time, these texts can remind us that that tribal animosities are hardly a thing of the past. Unfortunately, history has shown – and contemporary experience has reminded us – that idealists yearning for peace are often the first victims of the tribal animosity of neighbor societies.

Editor’s note: For some discussions of how to deal with ethically problematic texts in the Bible, see Eliezer Finkelman, “Can We Pass Moral Judgment on Torah?” TheTorah (2022); Gili Kugler, “Joshua’s Conquest: A Cultural and Pedagogical Dilemma in Modern Israel,” TheTorah (2021); Norman Solomon, “Relating Truthfully to Morally Problematic Torah Texts,” TheTorah (2017); Zev Farber, “Can the Torah Be a Moral Authority in Modern Times?” TheTorah (2021).