I call Mayes's reading of Deut 7:1-5 frivolous because, given his competence, he could not have been unaware of such a thing as "emphatic language." It is the nature of emphatic language not to make conventional sense; indeed, numerial contradition is often a key feature of it. Often inchoate, even conflicting, statements are piled on one another to effect a barrage of sensory assaults, just as we find in Deut 7:1-5. Take this real-life case, for example.
The church's Sunday School had organized a day picnic for the children. As evening drew, the parents arrived at the church car park to pick their children. The bus arrived and began to disgorge the children. While a couple of parents at the further end of the car park waited for their children to locate them, a Sunday School teacher walked pass towards her car. "How did it go?" one of the parents asked. "O, it was a nightmare. As soon as the bus arrived at the park, half of the children rushed off to the playground while the other half made off for the lake, and the rest were fighting at the back of the bus," she replied.
Now, would the parent, thinking after Mayes, conclude thought about it and concluded that nothing much really happened; if half of the children rushed off to the lake and the other half make for the playground, what children are left to fight in the bus?
An more sensitive person would have empathized with the shakened Sunday School teacher and understood how serious the situation must have been for the six teachers with seventy children on the edge of anarchy.
If Mayes is right, then Deut 7:1-5 has to be the first and possibly the only place in Scriptures where such strong emphatic language like this is deliberately used to water down the seriousness of the command it is trying so hard to enforce.
As it is, these additional "rationally inconsistent" commands that Mayes dismisses with such nonchalance turned out prescient. Israel failed to obey the commandment to annihilate the Canaanites and the remnants of them were permitted to live, though pressed into forced labour, in their midsts (Judg 1:22-2:5). Before long we hear that Israel, living among "the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites . . . took their daughters in marriage and gave their own daughters to their sons, and served their gods. The Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD; they forgot the Lord their God and served the Baals and the Asherahs" (3:6-7). It looks like the Israelites had jumped the gun on Mayes in his reading, and reasoned after him that "if the Canaanites were totally destroyed, who would be left with whom our children can take in marriage. Nay, the commandment can't possible be meant to be taken seriously." It was a tragic mistake—as all disobedience of Yahweh inevitably turns out to be—whose bitter fruit the remainder of the Old Testament narratives seek to warn and to destroy.
©ALBERITH
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