When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them:  ...  But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire.  For thou art a holy people unto the Lord thy God:  the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.

The records of this Jehovah are full of similar horrors.  He sent his chosen people out to destroy the Midianites, and they slew all the males, but this was not sufficient, and Moses was wroth, and commanded them to kill all the married women, and to take the single women “for themselves”.  We are told that sixteen thousand single women were spared, of whom “the Lord’s tribute was thirty and two!” In the Book of Joshua we read that he had an interview with a supernatural personage called “the captain of the Lord’s host”, and how this captain had given to him a magic spell which would destroy the city of Jericho.  The city should be accursed, “even it and all that are therein, to the Lord”; every living thing except one traitor-harlot was to be slaughtered, and all the wealth of the city reserved to the priestly caste.  This was carried out to the letter, except that “Achan, the son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took of the accursed thing”—­that is, he hid some gold and silver in his tent; whereupon the army met with a defeat, and everybody knew that something was wrong, and Joshua rent his clothes and fell to the earth upon his face before the ark of the Lord, and got another message from Jehovah, to the effect that the guilty man should be burned with fire, “he and all that he hath.”

And Joshua, and all Israel with him, took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver, and the garment, and the wedge of gold, and his sons, and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had:  and they brought them unto the Valley of Achor.  And Joshua said, Why hast thou troubled us? the Lord shall trouble thee this day.  And all Israel stoned him with stones, and burned them with fire, after they had stoned him with stones.

We have no means of knowing what was the character of the unfortunate inhabitants of the city of Jericho, nor of the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and all the rest of the victims of Jehovah.  To be sure, we are told by the Hebrew priests that they sacrificed their children to their gods; but then,