Wars of Extermination

The enemy has come to an end in everlasting ruins, and You have uprooted the cities; the very memory of them has perished.  Psalm 9:6  NASB

Memory – What was the ultimate objective of the victor in military conflict in the ancient Semitic world?  In a word: extinction!  It’s not surprising that David praises God for wiping out the very memory of his enemies.  Assimilation was never the goal.  David knew very well that if you let the enemy survive in any form you will have to face him again.  The only way to prevent future conflict was to exterminate everyone, to remove them from the history books, to make sure no one would ever remember who they were.

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Our modern sensitivities and inherited Christian ethics reject this kind of thinking.  We still believe in victory, but our version of the defeated enemy is a truce, cease fire, a political agreement.  We even have qualms about Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb.  “Peace at any price” seems to be the modern version of military strategy.  It hasn’t worked out very well.  Ask all those who perished under dictatorships or in pointless battles for territory.  The Twentieth Century was perhaps the most brutal of all human history—and it doesn’t appear to be getting better.  No one today seems to understand the perspective of the ancient biblical world.  Or perhaps they just don’t have the will to do what our ancestors did.

The view of the Tanakh expressed in this psalm has led to a full-scale rejection of the so-called “God of the Old Testament,” a god who is vicious, revengeful, and angry.  But painting YHVH in that way simply ignores the culture of the ancient world and the character of the God of that ancient world.  There was a perfectly rational explanation for the desire to see the enemy wiped away.  Peace!  But not peace at any price.  Lasting peace, because all traces of the enemy were removed.  Everything and everyone who could start the conflict over again were exterminated.  Jericho is the perfect example.  No influence left over.  No enclave of resistance remained.  It’s Carthage after Rome plowed it under.  A peace that lasts requires more than forced assimilation.  It requires elimination.

David understood.  We don’t.

Topical Index: memory, zākar, assimilation, war, peace, Psalm 9:6