Re: [Pan-users] Re: OT: freedomware vs... Was: Building Panon Windows?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:05:59 am Joe Zeff wrote:

> Please note that the Israelites had no problem with the people of
> Edom, Amor or Moab worshiping other gods, because they were
> righteous.  The Amalikites, OTOH, who were in effect amoral, were an
> entirely different matter.  (They had, apparently, no concept of
> Divine Retribution, either now or in an afterlife.)

And because they had "no problem" with them, they waged war on them, 
slaughtered them, made them a vassal state, prohibited Israelites from 
marrying Moabites ("unto the tenth generation"), and King Solomon 
described them as an "abomination".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moab#Moabite_and_Israelite_Relations

The great unnamed protest writer who wrote the book of Ruth even went so 
far as to claim that the greatest Israelite king, David, was part Moab, 
as a protest at the racial policies of Nehemias and Ezra, particularly 
their efforts to re-introduce the old prohibition on intermarriage with 
Moabites and the laws forcing Israelite men to divorce their Moab wives 
and send away their "half-breed" children.

I realise that there are other interpretations of the book of Ruth, but 
it seems to me that the others aren't plausible.




-- 
Steven D'Aprano