Quote:
Originally Posted by NatCh
The other passage you refer to (since it's not referenced, I'm having to kind of guess where exactly it occurred), is dealing with what amount to military marching orders, and those directives were to be carried out after all of the inhabitants of the land in question had been killed: men, women and children (another practice that historically has not been limited to any one party). As such, breaking down the trappings of those other religions was also under the heading of the believers keeping themselves faithful to their beliefs.
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Another point to bear in mind is that, in the ancient world, warfare was "total", and the losing side could expect what today we'd call "genocide". If a city was sacked, the "standard operating procedure" was that all the men and teenage boys were killed, and the woman and very young children taken by the victors as slaves. When we read in the Bible what amounts to clear instructions for genocide, in the book of Joshua, for example, we need to remember than this was simply a reflection of the prevaling culture of the day, and NOT something unique to (and a bad reflection of) the religion of the people involved. It's what EVERYBODY did at the time.
Another standard view in the ancient world was that the only way you could lose a war was if your god had turned against you - and hence, in a very real sense, ALL war was "holy war" - a "my god is more powerful than your god" type of contest. The fact that you'd lost was "proof" that you'd sinned against your god.