Sirach 10:17

4. Destroyed weak and unfit peoples.

But the northern kingdom did not vanish from history until the king of Israel conspired with the king of Egypt and refused to pay further tribute to Assyria. Then began the three years’ siege followed by the total dispersion of the northern kingdom. Ephraim (Israel) thus vanished. Judah — the Jews, the “remnant of Israel”—had begun the concentration of land in the hands of the few, as Isaiah said, “Adding house to house and field to field.” Presently there was in Jerusalem a temple of Baal alongside the temple of Yahweh. This reign of terror was ended by a monotheistic revolt led by the boy king Joash, who crusaded for Yahweh for thirty-five years.

7. Enslavement of captives — they either adopted or massacred them.

Almost five thousand years later, as the Hebrew priests in Babylonian captivity sought to trace the Jewish people back to Adam, they found great difficulty in piecing the story together; and it occurred to one of them to abandon the effort, to let the whole world drown in its wickedness at the time of Noah’s flood, and thus to be in a better position to trace Abraham right back to one of the three surviving sons of Noah.

When the tribal council of the Andite elders had adjudged an inferior captive to be unfit, he was, by elaborate ceremony, committed to the shaman priests, who escorted him to the river and administered the rites of initiation to the “happy hunting grounds”—lethal submergence. In this way the white invaders of Europe exterminated all peoples encountered who were not quickly absorbed into their own ranks, and thus did the blue man come to an end — and quickly.

And so the end of Judah came suddenly. The city was destroyed, and the people were carried away into Babylon. The Yahweh-Baal struggle ended with the captivity. And the captivity shocked the remnant of Israel into monotheism.

Enslavement was a forward step in the merciful treatment of war captives. The ambush of Ai, with the wholesale slaughter of men, women, and children, only the king being saved to gratify the conqueror’s vanity, is a faithful picture of the barbaric slaughter practiced by even supposedly civilized peoples. The raid upon Og, the king of Bashan, was equally brutal and effective. The Hebrews “utterly destroyed” their enemies, taking all their property as spoils. They put all cities under tribute on pain of the “destruction of all males.” But many of the contemporary tribes, those having less tribal egotism, had long since begun to practice the adoption of superior captives.

When Moses turned over the command of the Hebrews to Joshua, he had already gathered up thousands of the collateral descendants of Abraham, Nahor, Lot, and other of the related tribes and had whipped them into a self-sustaining and partially self-regulating nation of pastoral warriors.

1. By destroying the disputed property.

A petty king in Palestine, in building the walls of Jericho, “laid the foundation thereof in Abiram, his first-born, and set up the gates thereof in his youngest son, Segub.” At that late date, not only did this father put two of his sons alive in the foundation holes of the city’s gates, but his action is also recorded as being “according to the word of the Lord.” Moses had forbidden these foundation sacrifices, but the Israelites reverted to them soon after his death. The twentieth-century ceremony of depositing trinkets and keepsakes in the cornerstone of a new building is reminiscent of the primitive foundation sacrifices.