Why Jews are smarter (as a group) than most groups.

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But Christ actually lived that motto,along with loving his enemies, and turning the other cheek. Even Moses and Abraham proved they were incapable of such virtues. I don't know if any of us - Gentile of Jew - could.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

pure free will means that your behaviors are not caused by outside forces; if outside forces statistically alter a subpopulation's behavior, then their free will cannot be pure.

Please use http://www.breslov.com/bible/ - It is more closer to the text then what you posted.

Avenge is not used in the torah when it is demanded by God, so this isn't vengeance or animated by vengeance, but making justice. Redress past wrongs or retribution is what God demanded and closer to the text. The Midianites caused a plaque that has killed thousands of jews. You can't wipe out a large enough group of God's vehicle for ethical monotheism, and not expect God to make things right.

Moses' message to prepare for the campaign is that this is a campaign to destroy those who tried take you, God's vehicle for ethical monotheism, away from our ways and to the ways of Polytheism. There are no other specific commands from God then that, so most of what then takes place is entirely Moses.

Did moses act in accordance to God? We can't say either way, but what we do know is that he was hardened from his experience... understandably. Take for example in Deuteronomy when Moses speaks on slavery, and that you are not allowed to kidnapp another human being for slavery, he specifies Israelite, which he shouldn't have just limited it to just Jews, whereas in Exodus, it is stated outright that it is a capital crime no matter who the person is, where they are from or what their ethnicity/nationality does not matter. His specification from NO ONE is allowed to be kidnapped for slavery to just Israelite suggests the difficulty of his experience with principle, and practicality.

Moses SHOULD NOT have ordered the deaths of the Midianite children. If there is one reoccurring message in the text, you are only responsible for your own sins, not the sins of your parents, or the sins of your children.

God said seek retribution

Moses tells his men to seek retribution (and married to a Midianite women himself, does not participate in the campaign)

The men seek retribution and kill only the males.

They bring back all the female and children, correctly, under the assumption that all is demanded is to seek retribution, so carry out a "normal" military campaign, kill only the men, and bring back the female and children.

Moses is the weak and tragic link in this series of events. Everybody got it right, except for Moses. Perhaps he was trying to also show everyone that despite my marriage to a Midianite women, I will not be swayed by this. Moses is very old, he's very upset. He's facing his mortality. The medianites have killed 40,000 of his people off. The Jews have been animals, he's fought them time and time again to maintain the ethics he's commanded to maintain without much help from the people. And before all of this, Moses observed a prostitute seduce a Jew and have sex with him right in front of Moses, and moses did nothing about it, and may have caused him to see them as the problem... which is why he spares the virgins, because they have not taken part in the prostitution that continually weened Jews away from monotheism to the pagan Gods.

We have no proof that any genocide took place. The torah is very strict in its wording, every word specifically chosen to communicate specific instruction, no where else in history has a book been so carefully constructed.

And the wording is specific.

Moses makes the command.

The torah doesn't state that the men did so... whereas every other instruction given by moses is followed by who/what then carried out that instruction.

Was it done?

We don't know, the implication is NO.

DId the jews enjoy Midinite prostitutes too much? Who knows, but the torah doesn't say that they did that. Was Moses leadership losing sway? Absolutely. The next versus show Elezaer taking leadership, he's losing his temper all the time and Eleazer rises to take lead.

At least the Hebrews of Moses' time and after believed God had ordered the slaughter of whole populations. I suppose that sort of justification allowed them to sleep at night.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Actually, I don't think its all that complicated. Jewish people tend to be in parts of cities and in communities because they look for quality schools, even sending their kids to private schools if necessary. That is, make education a priority. Now my parents were health care professionals (not Jewish) and thought education was important but unfortunately, they moved into a crummy school district and when we would tell them about not learning much they were in denial because "We can't afford to move there". Maybe a Jewish family would move heaven and Earth to move to better schools. They may also do more home studying too instead of watching TV all the time after work, as my parents did.

Some communities are like the one I lived where you don't need math and science if you are going to work in a mill, have a bunch of kids, the wife sells real estate and you have an Amway business and your kid plays Little League. Its kind of hard to stay smart when other people are not.

Well you have the text, you have scholarship available to you I'm sure, I'd like to see your case for why in fact it was a genocide. Where else in the torah does it support your reading of Numbers 31?

I use Jacob Milgrom, one of the premier experts on Numbers who the Jewish Publication Society assigned to write its commentary on Numbers, and a number of commentaries ranging from Nahum Sarna to Gunthar Plaut, and many rabbi's from orthodox to reform. It is an uncomfortable line of text, but are we to close to reading it correctly because Ramban and Rashi have made up their mind? The text doesn't say what happens after moses gives those instructions, it just has Eleazer rise up and take over leadership, obviously from Moses's losing of control and his frustrations.

The Hebrews went out of their way to massacre all the Middianites, with the extent of killing everyone save the virgins. Sounds like genocide to me. While the fact of the matter is, it's impossible to kill everyone of a specific tribe or race - it's still genocide. I believe the Middianites reappear later in the Bible.
Also, an Egyptian monument had been found on which it boasts how one Pharaoh had destroyed all of Israel, saying that their seed was obliterated - obviously not.
Later in his Germania , Tacitus had claimed that a Germanic tribe called the Bructeri, living along the Ems river, had been destroyed by their neighbors. In fact, the Bructeri reappear a few centuries later across the Rhine from Cologne, and part of the Frankish confederation - which also included the tribes that had tried to destroy their ancestors.
In more modern times, The Turks had tried to wipe out the Armenians. There are still Armenians, despite not lack of trying by the Turks.
The Nazis had whole murder factories set up to destroy Europe's Jewish and Gypsy populations on an industrial scale. Even after all that, there are still Jews and Gypsies.
My long winded point being - while there have always been concerted attempts to destroy whole populations, something of them manages to survive, and even thrive. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't genocide, as the intent, and body count, reveals the fact of the matter.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Kraichguar, I'm only asking from within the text evidence of a genocide. I've read this over and over and there is not an ounce of evidence proving or disproving a genocide. Jacob Milgrom's point “if this account of Israel’s victory over the Midianites were not in the Torah it would have to be invented.” arguing that the campaign in fact was real. But Milgrom also points out that the text does not go on to describe a genocide, which is odd considering how comfortable the Torah is in showing the Jews as imperfect, from the patriarchs to the matriarchs to the heroins of the text.

http://www.breslov.com/bible/Numbers31.htm#1

Here's the fairest translation in accordance to the text. But it always adds in the Torah, "and they did as Moses commanded" or "and they did as God commanded" or "And as God commanded, they did X or Y" and in detail -- It never has a commandment in the text, where it leaves it up in the air what took place. The text is very specific as I've said, it has patterns that it rigidly follows unless it is trying to communicate something completely different.

On Intent, I've already posted why Genocide is not the intent. Retribution is the intent, and I already explained that. And the text is very specific on what that ment to the Jews via their actions prior to returning to Moses. They understood it only as killing the men.

On the body count, there isn't any given following this account. There is only details on anything regarding body counts following this military campaign.

Notwithstanding all of that, the ancient Israelites (of biblical times) were as bad ass as Muslim Jihadi extremists. However the Israelites eventually became urbanized and thus became more docile. What cured the Israelites (and subsequently the Jews) was having the sh*t kicked out of them and being forced to settle in strange lands. This did not have the intended effect of eliminating Jews and their culture. Jews managed to adapt to hostility, survive as a people and even prosper in strange lands. And this is still true today. Judaism was detoxified by exile, conquest and the rabinnic talmud tradition.

ruveyn

Absolutely. They had to be. Establishing the first Republic based on Ethical Monotheism was a monumental task, it envolved marshall law and frankly, they were not sheepish about reality, be it sexuality, or dealing with others who are not like you. They acknowledged every major human problem, from animal cruelty, to divorce, and their dealings with the issues lead to more human revolutions per page then any other text that has ever been produced.

They are pure pagans at the beginning of the exodus. The battle to keep Judaism pure was an ongoing one, and they deviated quite often from it. It is odd that you say this(emboldened above), because I feel that it is something that is lost on Jews for centuries. How can one love the resident alien and treat them as one would like to be treated if all or their practices were so specific to them, alienating themselves off from aliens who dwelled among them. It's also been a Jewish problem to only inculcate with ones people not because of outsiders, but in order to keep the practices alive. It was because of this reality that it is commanded that the Jew behave ethically to the non-jews who dwelled amongst them. It is reminded to them several times that they themselves were once strangers in the land of Egypt, and if there is anyone who should know about slavery, mistreating those who are not like you, clanism based on race or ethnicity, it should be you of all peoples.

They've been the inspiration of two of the worlds largest religions, which I guess somewhat fulfills the calls to be a priest amongst nations. But the problem with Jews today is that they have remained religious, but have carried that religiosity off to secular movements. From Marxism to Feminism, the Jewish leadership in spearheading these movements is unparalleled. Which I don't mind by the way. I have no problem with that at all. What I do have a problem with is that they 1.) fear the American Right more as what could potentially cause the most harm to Jews, and 2.) do not seem to take radical elements in Islam seriously.

Yes, 9/11 have awoken the Jewish people up in a way that no event has since the holocaust. But the reaction of the Left in Judaism has been to make moral equivalents between islamic fundamentalists and christian fundamentalists, and fundamentalists in general, and that we shouldn't judge or single out, what is to them, an amorphous villain that we are to just view as fundamentalist. But another mass killing of Jews will not come from Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh. It will come from the Left who naively put down their guard in the name of multiculturalism and equality, and from Islamist fanatics do not think there should be a Jewish state in their corner of the world.

God's chosen people or not, anyone living at the end of the bronze age/beginning of the iron age is going to be bloodthirsty, xenophobic, and violent. I believe such actions as those against the Middianites had more to do with the character of the Hebrews (or anyone else of that time period) than with anything God had actually commanded. No where was it said that God commanded the Hebrews to kill just a certain number of enemies; rather, they were told to do them all in. The virgins were spared because that was common practice in those days among any victorious army.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

I found this in a biography of Hitler... the Ian Kershaw Nemesis one. This incident took place in mid-1943.

But if the selection process between the strong and weak is a good thing, then isn't he saying that the Jews perform a useful function and must be kept around?

Many of our American Indian tribes had a similar history: getting the s**t kicked out of them, having their homes burned to the ground and being force-marched into exile, etc. They certainly learned humility. Many underwent depression and alcoholism.

As Jews developed a reputation for being good at making money, many modern Indians are certainly raking in the dough with their casinos.

I don't think so.

Why keep around a living reminder of your "assumed" inferiority. One of the points of his Jew hatred was that the Germans could do what the Jews did without the Jews. If we think we are already superior in so many facets of life to began with, but could be even stronger in the areas that the Jews dominated, ie finance, remove our slight weakness in that area of life by killing our dependency on the parasites ability to provide those services, and we will evolve those capabilities ourselves.

Progress has a linear trajectory, we Germans have progressed further then any other race, the Jews now exist only to make us aware of our shortcomings in this struggle to become the dominant species, and getting rid of our dependency on them will give us, the germans, the ability to evolve those strengths for ourselves, faster. Or at least that was my reading of what you posted above, and of Hitler's beliefs in the master race's genetics.

My long lost cousins in Germany lost the Second World War, had their cities devastated, they were turned into an international pariah when the genocidal actions of their discredited totalitarian government were made known to the world, and their country had been spit into two for almost half a century. The Germans were left to reexamine their recent history, and change themselves and their country for the better.
There's a joke in Germany that goes:
An amazing thing has happened! The Jews have become soldiers and heroes, while the Germans have become businessmen!

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer