Her name means life in Hebrew but this Jewish Israeli-American infant had few precious days on this earth before the monster destroyed her and scarred her family forever. Her last moments were at the Western Wall, where this picture of Chaya Zisel Braun was taken. The three-month old girl was thrown from her stroller as the Hamas terrorist’s car made “a [deliberate] hit-and-run terror attack” killing the baby and injuring eight others.
In the Bible, the Book of Judges is considered a particularly gruesome and violent book. In it one learns that the Canaanites burned children on altars as sacrifices to their gods. And as such, these actions needed to be halted. The culture of depravity would not change of its own accord and it was destructive to those around it as well as to the purveyors.
And so the Israelites are told to “destroy every man, woman, and child.” It is a chilling tale. In essence, why does the author of Joshua have God command the Israelites to destroy all the Canaanites whom they fought — even the children? Surely the latter are innocent.
The following passage from the Book of Genesis explains.
Know well that your offspring shall be strangers in a land not theirs…. And they shall return here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete (Gen. 15:16).
The name Amorites refers to all the inhabitants of Canaan, not just to the group officially called Amorites. And herein, lies the answer. The Canaanites will be conquered and lose their land because they are sinners. For they “even offer up their sons and daughters in fire to the gods” (Deut 12:29-31). And this tradition seems to have no end.
No one is held to a different standard. If the Israelites will sin, they too, will be destroyed. Thus, they are reminded that they must make moral and ethical choices of the highest order.
And, yet so many centuries later the conundrum continues. Present-day Israelis are continually dealing with the descendants of the Amorites who persist on destroying their own offspring and the little ones of other people.