The Gaza War 6-19-2024

Could Judaism's Orthodox Fundamentalists be taking Yaweh's genocidal commands literally 6-19-2024

Coming from Christianity, where fundamentalists claim that the Bible must be taken as the direct word of God literally and without interpretation, it does occur to one that Judaism's Orthodox Fundamentalists might be taking the same approach to the Torah.

If they do, Yahweh's direct commands of genocide of the inhabitants of the promised land in the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua create the shocking possibility that some conservative Israeli's might take such archaic commands literally, as evidenced by their settlement movements in the West Bank and their genocidal conduct of the Israeli war on Gaza.

Opinions from serious Jewish sources shed some light on this shocking idea

Rabbi Ishai Held in his powerful recent book, Judaism is about Love, very honestly examines those genocidal passages in the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua and admits that they create a problem for Jewish Torah scholarship because it would be unthinkable that Yaweh would have issued such blatant commands against life. Rabbi Held insightfully proposes an interpretation of the passages as a hyperbolic literary device to indirectly but strongly condemn the widespread abhorrent practices of those conquered populations such as human sacrifice, and others (PDF Chapter 13 The God of Judaism is a God of Love).

After the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas, Nir Avishai Cohen of the Israeli Army was called back to Israel to participate in the invasion of Gaza. He published an article in the New York Times giving his disagreement with the current ultra conservative government of Israel that created the conditions for such a crisis under the hidden intention of wiping out Palestinian territories (Nir Avishai Cohen, I.D.F.Brigade Operations Command Officer).

Thomas Friedman, published his overview of the current Gaza war on 6-18-2024 in an article in the New York Times (Thomas Friedman 6-18-2024 overview on the War in Gaza). In this article Friedman condemns the current policies of the conservative faction of the Israeli government that set up the opportunity for and then led the country into the current war path.