The People of Ancient Israel and Judah, However, Were Not Followers of Judaism.

The people of ancient Israel and Judah, however, were not followers of Judaism; they were practitioners of a polytheistic culture worshiping multiple gods, concerned with fertility and local shrines and legends, and not with a written Torah, elaborate laws governing ritual purity, or an exclusive covenant and national ...

Thornton has pointed out that hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people perished during wars with the Europeans.  the toll from official wars, the total number of violent deaths is certainly much higher.46 Counting the Dead 11 In addition to the deadly impact of diseases, wars, and genocide, Thornton has emphasized that many Indigenous nations in what is today the United States were “removed, relocated, dispersed, concentrated, or forced to migrate at least once after contact with Europeans or Americans.”47 And he has observed that the forced removal of over 100,000 Indigenous people to areas west of the Mississippi River during the first half of the nineteenth century directly resulted in significant loss of life.48 Moreover, such removals and relocations destroyed Indigenous people’s ways of life, which resulted in substantial additional loss of life.49 Other devastating assaults on these ways of life included the Spanish missions in California, Florida, and Texas; the U.S. government’s attempts to make Plains Indians into cattle ranchers and southern Indians into American farmers…efforts by churches and governments to undermine Indian religious, governmental, and *kinship* systems… the often-deliberate destructions of flora and fauna that American Indians used for food and other purposes…the near extinction of the buffalo…50 Widespread starvation and malnutrition, the deleterious effects of forced labor, alcoholism, demoralization and despair, declining fertility, and other factors also contributed to the Indigenous Holocaust.