Stratos wrote:
Quote:Do you really think that best place for info on a culture that got completely wiped out is the group that committed the genocide?
That would be like asking the Third Reich for a history of the Jewish people, or a Turk about the history of the Armenians.
Well it appears that people are quiet prepared to accept as fact the Biblical narrative that Y.H.W.H. told the Jews to slaughter all animals and humans. Why would the rest of the chronicle not be recognised as a given?
Quote:Actually discussing the Amalekites here, not the Canaanites.
Oh I don't know about that I can see Canaanites every where
Incest. Like all Ancient Near East (ANE) pantheons, the
Canaanite pantheon was incestuous. Baal has sex with his mother Asherah,6 his sister Anat, and his daughter Pidray,7 and none of this is presented pejoratively.
Although early
Canaanite laws proscribed either death or banishment for most forms of incest, after the fourteenth century BC, the penalties were reduced to no more than the payment of a fine.8 In the larger ANE context, it is helpful to consider that in an Egyptian dream book dreams of having sex with your mother or your sister were considered good omens.9
Adultery.
Canaanite religion, like that of all of the ANE, was a fertility religion that involved temple sex. Inanna/Ishtar, also known as the Queen of Heaven, “became the woman among the gods, patron of eroticism and sensuality, of conjugal love as well as adultery, of brides and prostitutes, transvestites and pederasts.”10 As University of Helsinki professor Martti Nissinen writes, “Sexual contact with a person whose whole life was devoted to the goddess was tantamount to union with the goddess herself.”11
The
Canaanites even remake the God of the Bible, El, after their own image and portray Him ceremonially as having sex with two women (or goddesses). The ceremony ends with directions: “To be repeated five times by the company and the singers of the assembly.”12 About this John Gray comments, “We may well suppose that this activity of El was sacramentally experienced by the community in the sexual orgies of the fertility cult which the Hebrew prophets so vehemently denounced.”13
Child sacrifice. Molech was a
Canaanite underworld deity14 represented as an upright, bullheaded idol with a human body in whose belly a fire was stoked and in whose outstretched arms a child was placed that would be burned to death. The victims were not only infants; children as old as four were sacrificed.15 Kleitarchos reported that “as the flame burning the child surrounded the body, the limbs would shrivel up and the mouth would appear to grin as if laughing, until it was shrunk enough to slip into the cauldron.”16
Homosexuality. No ANE text condemns homosexuality. Additionally, some ANE manuscripts talk about “party-boys and festival people who changed their masculinity into femininity to make the people of Ishtar revere her.”17
Let us also remember that the problem with the
Canaanite city of Sodom wasn’t just sex among consenting adults: the men of Sodom, both young and old, tried to rape the visitors (Gen. 19:5).
Bestiality. Probably the ultimate sexual depravity is intercourse with animals. Hittite Laws: 199 states, “If anyone has intercourse with a pig or a dog, he shall die. If a man has intercourse with a horse or a mule, there is no punishment.”18 As with incest, the penalty for having sex with animals decreased about the fourteenth century BC.19
There should be no surprise that bestiality would occur among the
Canaanites, since their gods practiced it. From the [highlight]Canaanite epic poem “The Baal Cycle” we learn: “Mightiest Baal hears / He makes love with a heifer in the outback / A cow in the field of Death’s Realm. / He lies with her seventy times seven / Mounts eighty times eight / [She conceiv]es and bears a boy.”20
There were absolutely no prohibitions against bestiality in the rest of the ANE.21 In fact, in an Egyptian dream book it was a bad omen for a woman to dream about embracing her husband, but good things would happen if she dreamed of intercourse with a baboon, wolf, or he-goat.22 In short, their sexual fantasies involved everything that breathes.