The Continuing Problem Of Jericho

In a 2000 article at Catholic Herald arguing for the immorality of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Edward Feser cites Gaudium et Spes 80:

Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.

But the Almighty approved of Joshua taking this same action after the walls of Jericho came down (Joshua 6:20-27):

20 As the horns blew, the people began to shout. When they heard the sound of the horn, they raised a tremendous shout. The wall collapsed, and the people attacked the city straight ahead and took it.

21 They observed the ban by putting to the sword all living creaturese in the city: men and women, young and old, as well as oxen, sheep and donkeys.

. . . 24 The city itself they burned with all that was in it; but the silver, gold, and articles of bronze and iron they placed in the treasury of the house of the LORD.

25 Because Rahab the prostitute had hidden the messengers whom Joshua had sent to reconnoiter Jericho, Joshua let her live, along with her father’s house and all her family, who dwell in the midst of Israel to this day.

26 On that occasion Joshua imposed the oath: Cursed before the LORD be the man who attempts to rebuild this city, Jericho. At the cost of his firstborn will he lay its foundation, and at the cost of his youngest son will he set up its gates.

27 Thus the LORD was with Joshua so that his fame spread throughout the land.

The city was burned with everything in it; all the living creatures, men, women, infants, and animals, were put to the sword; the land itself was cursed. Sounds a lot like a nuclear attack to me. Under certain circumstances, God not only approves of it, he orders it to be done. But in the case of the cities of the plain, God does it directly Himself (Genesis 19: 1-29):

23 The sun had risen over the earth when Lot arrived in Zoar,

24 and the LORD rained down sulfur upon Sodom and Gomorrah, fire from the LORD out of heaven.

25 He overthrew those cities and the whole Plain, together with the inhabitants of the cities and the produce of the soil.

26 But Lot’s wife looked back, and she was turned into a pillar of salt.

27 The next morning Abraham hurried to the place where he had stood before the LORD.

28 As he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and the whole region of the Plain, he saw smoke over the land rising like the smoke from a kiln.

29 When God destroyed the cities of the Plain, he remembered Abraham and sent Lot away from the upheaval that occurred when God overthrew the cities where Lot had been living.

At one point, I posed the question to Feser in a comment on one of his posts about the immorality of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks asking how he reconciled his view (which had in fact changed recently as of 2020) with the destruction of Jericho, but he didn't answer. In fact, going over some of his posts on this subject, visitors have asked him to explain why he's changed his view, and I have yet to find an answer to those comments, either.

Certainly a good Thomist is going to say that, first, God is perfect. His instructions are perfect, and His own actions are perfect. Scripture is inerrant; neither the stories in Genesis nor Joshua are incorrect. The only way I can reconcile this is with the moral of Job, as outlined in Catholic Answers:

There is a happy ending, and the moral is quite clear, even if Job does not grasp it. But he does realize now that there is no reason why God should have to account to anyone for what he does. Man cannot grasp the mysterious ways of divine providence. In permitting the innocent to suffer and even die and in not punishing the evildoer during his lifetime, God has his reasons, even if man cannot grasp them.

The bottom line is that, contra Just-war hardliners, things aren't that cut and dried. CCC 2309 on one hand lists "rigorous conditions for moral legitimacy", but at the same time, it provides for "evaluation of these conditions" within the "prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good". Would nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki be less grave than the evil to be eliminated, to wit, the millions that would be killed, including innocent civilians, in a land invasion of Japan?

The just-war hardliners propose some sort of negotiation that might have averted both -- but wouldn't that necesssarily involve other compromises like, for instance, allowing Japan to retain some territories it had conquered in China, South Asia, Manchuria, or Korea? It needs to be recognized that any such compromise would allow Japan to continue genocidal policies comparable to those Hitler had imposed in Europe. This is the same fantasy that the Operation Valkyrie conspirators against Hitler entertained -- that eliminating Hitler would allow a negotiated end to the war that might let Germany keep Poland, say, while withdrawing from Russia and France.

But as it applies to Trump -- so far, Trump hasn't ordered a thing. One comment on social media sticks with me: "Trump is giving a lesson in how to actually use our power without resorting to war". Certainly what he's doing now lies well within the province of prudential judgment, including projecting the idea that he might in fact behave irrationally.