Did God really tell the Israelites to wipe out the Canaanites?

From Part 3, we know that God uses people to accomplish his purposes, and that even if his purposes included killing other humans, his human instruments would be justified in doing so – and even bound to do so. But countless people over the centuries have claimed to have received revelation from God to kill people, and committed atrocities as a result. The Crusades and the Inquisition come to mind, not to mention many smaller  lashings-out from people bearing the name of YHWH. Were the Israelites deluded just like them? Was their leader Moses, who told them to do these severe deeds?

Let’s also assume for our argument that the Bible reflects the true revelation of God. If you don’t agree, check out this article, which evolved as a bubble off of the current article. Now, from scripture, did the Israelites have reason to believe that God was really speaking to them through Moses when Moses told them to kill the Canaanites? Quite a lot of reason, in fact. The whole period was loaded to the brim with miracles!

• Moses performed the 10 signs – the 10 plagues on the Egyptians – which made even hard-hearted Pharaoh acknowledge that God’s power was behind him
• God appeared to Israel as a mysterious of cloud by day and fire by night
• Israel had just experienced the Parting of the Red Sea (!)
• Moses received the law on top of a smoking mountain atop which thunder and lighting crashed, and his face was glowing when he came down
• God provided manna and quail for them to eat in the desert
• God made water come out of a rock when Moses struck it (at Meribah)
• Israel defeated the attacking Amalekites whenever Moses was raising his arm, but lost whenever he dropped his arm
• God sent a plague among the Israelites after they made the golden calf
• Israel would have remembered the promise to their father Abraham that they would return to Canaan (Genesis 15).

Etcetera etcetera. The whole exodus and redemption of the Israelite nation, and the formation of God’s covenant with them, had been filled with incredible miracles and signs. So Israel had every reason to believe that God was really speaking to them through Moses – not that Moses or any human contrivance was responsible for the command to kill the Canaanites. Therefore, if we have accepted the Biblical narrative as part of our faith in God, it follows that God really was responsible for the command to the Israelites, and that many miracles and signs affirmed this to the Israelites themselves. They and we both have reason to believe that they heard the divine voice giving them the solemn command to invade and “devote to destruction.”

Can God use people to kill other people? 

Say (from Part 2) that God is just in killing the Canaanites. But what about the Israelites themselves? Was it wrong for THEM to kill the Canaanites? Isn’t murder wrong, period? Shouldn’t God have used some non-human means to wipe out the Canaanites, like a plague, and then had His people enter the promised land peaceably?

God Used Israel
First of all, it is immediately and abundantly clear that, throughout history, God uses people to accomplish his divine purposes. For example, all of the prophets, the Levitical priesthood (who were the ministers through which God interacted with man in the OT) and the New Priesthood of the Church (Christ’s Body and manifestation, through which he continually interacts with the world). Israel was nationally part of this, as part of God’s promise in the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants. So, it is clear from the Biblical narrative that God was using Israel in a special way to accomplish his purposes.

It’s Possible for Killing to be Just
There’s no real conflict with “God can use people to accomplish his purpose”…unless his purpose is killing others.  Is it wrong for people to kill other people? Ethics provides a decisively indecisive answer. Although some in the Categorical or Deontological ethical camps would haggle with wording, the vast majority of people consent that, in some of the most extreme circumstances, administering death to a fellow human is the best possible course of action. For example, if a policeman happened upon Sandy Hook Elementary in the middle of the Newton, CT massacre, he would have been justified in stopping the massacre by shooting the gunman. The same would be true of the slaughter that happened in 2006 on the very campus where I sit writing this (Virginia Tech). Isn’t killing out of self defense sometimes acceptable (for example, resistance against a military invasion)?Furthermore, when we think of certain extremely corrupt parties, killing seems more justified: Consider the “Lord’s Resistance Army” that has forcibly conscripted children for several decades. If you were in a village when that army was raiding, abducting, killing and raping, would just men not be rightly inspired to fight back? The point is, killing is wrong for certain reasons, not absolutely or inherently. What are those reasons?

What Makes Killing Wrong?
This is the most fascinating part of this argument to me. What, fundamentally, makes the taking of human life right or wrong? Human life is valuable and protected under morality because it is a God-given right. From Genesis we see that we were made in God’s image, and that brings with it a sacredness. From the covenant with Noah we see a reinforcement of this:

Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God He made man. (Gen. 9:6)

When David killed Uriah and took his wife Bathsheba, he uttered this:

Against you, you only, I have sinned and done what is evil in your sight… (Psalm 51:4)

How can killing a man be a sin against God, not against that man? Well, as we established in Part 2, man has no right over his own life. But God does. Human life is sacred because it is given by (and patterned after the image of) YHWH, the God of Life. Therefore, killing is wrong because it usurps God’s authority to give and take the breath of life. The Noah verse explains why it is justifiable to kill the VT or Newton gunmen, etc. God has decreed that he has appointed the right to take a man’s life to his neighbor, should that man himself take innocent life. So in those cases, God’s right has been delegated, not usurped.

Presumption vs. Obedience
But what about a different circumstance: What if God tells man to take a life of a non-murderer? In that case, the One who has the right to take the life is still consenting to the act. In fact, he is initiating the act by direct command, instead of perennial decree, which makes it even more binding. One may object, “But a man hasn’t got the right to take another man’s life! You just said it was God’s right, not man’s.” Maybe, but it is not presumptuous to obey a command to do something that one has no authority to do on his own. If Bobby is playing videos games, and Johnny comes in and unplugs the game console, he acts presumptuously, because the video games are the property of their dad, and their dad has by default given both boys the right to play the game. Therefore Johnny violates the right that his dad has given to Bobby. However, if their dad told Johnny to unplug it for some reason (say an electrical emergency) and Johnny unplugs the console, he acts lawfully. Furthermore, he does not even have to fully understand the reasons that their dad had. His moral responsibility is to obey.

Therefore, the Bible clearly claims that God was using the Israelites to accomplish his purposes. It is not unequivocally wrong to kill: it is wrong to kill whenever you rob the right to give and take life from God. Thus, if God sanctions it, the normal moral rule doesn’t apply. This removes another chunk of ground from the objections to the killing of the Canaanites. In Part 4, we’ll look at the question of whether the Israelites really did receive a command to annihilate from God (or, in particular, whether they had sufficient reasons to believe that they had received such a command).

Was God wrong to want the death of the Canaanites?

This post examines the first of the four conditions under which we could judge the killing of the Canaanites to be wrong. The thesis is this: God desired the death of the Canaanites, and he did so justly. First of all, the doctrine of Total Depravity says that all mankind is polluted by sin, and “the wages of sin is death”. Death entered the human race through Adam, and we are subject to it now, as part of the natural order.

Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins. (Ecclesiastes 7:20)

Therefore, no one has a right not to die. This applies even to children.

Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,
And in sin my mother conceived me. (Psalm 51:5)

This is not the same as saying that all children go to hell. Only that all children are subject to death. As Copan reminds us:

If any infants or children were killed, they would have entered the presence of God. Though deprived of earthly life, those young ones wouldn’t have been deprived of the greatest good–enjoying everlasting friendship with God. (p. 189)

Besides, let’s not forget that it is God who may require our lives of us whenever he wants – he decided to give us life, and he decides when it’s over. I have never understood the indignant attitude that some people feel when God takes a life early. He gives you life, and then suddenly it becomes your possession, and he is obligated to let you retire, or see your grandchildren, or some other rule that you impose upon him? Homicide, abortion and euthanasia are wrong because in them, man is usurping God’s right to end life. But when God exercises this right, he is not wrong.

It is also important to understand that Canaanite culture was perverse. In Genesis, when God was making covenant with Abraham, he he predicted that although Abraham himself would not take ownership of the land, his descendants would 400 years later, when “the sin of the Amorites is complete.” God was patient for 4 centuries with the Canaanites. Finally, when he sends Israel back to take possession of it, he says:

It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but on account of the wickedness of these nations, the Lord your God will drive them out before you, to accomplish what he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. (Deuteronomy 9:5-6)

Various passages in the Bible describe the kind of immorality practiced in Canaan, and the Law warns against it. The Canaanites openly affirmed child sacrifice, both heterosexual and homosexual adultery in temples and on high places, and bestiality. What’s more, as Capan points out, these things were part of Canaanite worship and theology: their gods practiced these things. Like gods, like worshippers. For example, when the fertility god Baal had sex with his consort Anath, patroness of both sex and war, his semen is the rain that brings fertility to the land. By the way, Anath is described as joyfully wading in blood and decorating herself with disembodied human heads and hands. Wow.

Lastly, sin exists in cultures, not just in individuals. Evil practices have a way of polluting a culture from the roots up. Sodom and Gomorrah, for example, had thousands of citizens, but their sin was so great that there were not even 10 righteous men in those cities. That’s pervasive pollution of hearts! God often judges and saves people as family units (Abraham and his family…Achan and his family…Cornelius and his family…). Western culture is not very aware of the social bleed-over of righteousness because we are very individualistic, but God reveals himself in the Ten Commandments as “visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me,” (Exodus 20:4). So, in the Canaanite question, it is quite in keeping with truth for God to judge the societal sins of the Canaanites not just their individual sins. I’m sure that each will be judged individually on Judgement Day.

Therefore, the Almighty and Righteous Judge of the earth was not only lawful, but utterly good and just, in killing the Canaanites. Why did he choose to wipe them out, and yet deal with other pagan nations differently? Is that favoritism? Unfortunately, such questions exceed the question of morality, or the realm of human knowledge in general. The Parable of the Workers reminds us that we cannot act like children and make comparisons with God. “Well, HE got TWO pieces of cake!” doesn’t work. As the landowner says,

Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’

We all deserve death. The question is not why some receive death, but why we still have life. So yes, if God’s secret intentions for the redemption of the world involved the death of the Canaanites, he is just to bring it about.

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! (Romans 11)

In the Old Testament, God commands the Israelites to possess the fertile crescent and wipe out its inhabitants. This has been called “genocide” and smells rancid to the modern conscience. It is a bit of an embarrassment in a society that champions tolerance, peace, and religious coexistence. Prominent atheists call the God of the Old Testament ruthless, and point to the invasion of the Promised Land as nothing but barbarism: “indiscriminate massacre and ethnic cleansing”. The war passages are not the favorites of most Christians either. How many Bible study application questions have you heard like, “What does the total annihilation of the Canaanites mean for your relationship with your neighbors?” Many Christian traditions object to war outright (like my wife’s family’s denomination, the Brethren in Christ). What then do we do with a God who orders the mass destruction of an entire ethnic group? What do we do with verses like this?:

However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. (Deuteronomy 20:16-17)

We believe in an unchanging, loving God. He is Love, so much that he incarnated himself in Immanuel to offer the free gift of salvation to all peoples. So what do we make of the killing of the Canaanites? Some considerations, leaning very heavily on (and inspired by) Paul Copan’s book Is God a  Moral Monster?, might help to justify the destruction of the Canaanites.

Semitic Exaggeration Rhetoric: How Brutal Was the Invasion?

Some cultural and linguistic evidence shows that the invasions of Canaan were probably not as brutal as we think at first glance. The account of the conquest of Canaan is filled with the language of “total destruction”, for example, from Joshua 10:

So Joshua subdued the whole region, including the hill country, the Negev, the western foothills and the mountain slopes, together with all their kings. He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all [haram] who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded.

But Copan points out the problem: later in Joshua and Judges, the very same people that were totally destroyed appear again! The Jebusites appear again (Judges 1:21), and the Anakim appear again in the hill country (to be driven out by Caleb) even though “there were no Anakim left in the land…they were utterly destroyed in the hill country” (Joshua 11:21-22). In Judges 1-2, God says that he will “stop driving out” the people before Israel because of their sin: so the destruction was a gradual process of smothering the Canaanite culture and religion, not a once-and-done massacre. How? The “total destruction” language isn’t literal. Rather, it is using exaggeration as a rhetorical style. It was common ancient Near Eastern culture to exaggerate conquests using obliteration language, similar to how one boy today would say to another, “Dude, you totally destroyed him.” For example, Copan says:

Egypt’s Tuthmosis III (later fifteenth century) boasted that ‘the numerous army of Mitanni was overthrown within the hour, annihilated totally, like those now not existent.’ In fact, Mitanni’s forces lived on to fight in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC. (p. 172)

This kind of hyperbole can also be found in the records of the Hittite Mursilli II, the Egyptians Rameses II and Merneptah, the Moabite Mesha, and the Assyrian Sennacherib.

The fact that haram might not necessarily mean killing everyone is evident in Deuteronomy 7. In verse 2, God tells them to utterly destroy (haram) the seven Canaanite nations, but then, as Copan points out, he tells them not to intermarry with them. How can you intermarry with dead people? The whole context of Chapter 7 shows that God is primarily creating a ban on Canaanite thinking and culture – they are to be shunned and debased as unclean. The focus is on destroying their religion: verse 5 continues with, “Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God.” Copan cites scholars that haram is thus focusing on obliterating political/military strongholds, desecrating religious symbols (high places, temples, etc.), and “driving out” or dispossessing the people of the land. In other words, the focus of the ban was on wiping out the corrupted Canaanite identity and culture, and above all their idolatry, not so much on taking the lives of the Canaanites themselves.

A last note is that the Old Testament commonly refers to “driving out” and “dispossessing” the Canaanites, as opposed to killing them. Presumably this meant that all those who would flee were allowed to. Only those who resisted and fought would be killed.

If Some Women and Children Did Die

Despite this significant down-tone of the brutality of the occupation of Canaan, suppose we still have to admit that some women and children were killed. The text isn’t clear, so we should be ready to deal with a worse-case scenario. For example, Deuteronomy 20 commands the “destruction of everything that breathes” among the Caananites in contrast (“however,” v. 16) to nations outside the promised land, from which the Israelites could keep the women, children and livestock as plunder (v. 14). So, presumably, Canaanite women and children couldn’t be kept as plunder. What then was their fate? More subjectively, scriptures such as Joshua 1 seem to express God’s displeasure when devotion to destruction (harem) is not complete, and we see that when the Israelite Achan is cut off from Israel and stoned after he took objects under the ban during the battle of Jericho, his wives and children are stoned with him (Joshua 7:24-25). The point is that God’s command was intended to be very severe and that noncombatants and families weren’t necessarily exempt from punishment in the ancient Semitic conscience. So we are still faced with the possibility that God commanded, and the Israelites executed, the death penalty for both combatants and noncombatants in those Canaanite lands. Is this the Bible committing moral suicide? Not so fast: let’s think it through. The Israelites would have committed a moral atrocity by killing the Canaanites if and only if any of the following scenarios were true:

(1) It was wrong for God to desire the death of the Canaanites. That is, the Canaanite women, children, etc. were innocent and not worthy of death.

(2) Human hands were not a legitimate means for God to accomplish the death of the Canaanites. That is, although Providence might have desired their death, it is always wrong for men to kill other men, so it is impossible for them to be the agents of God’s judgement (at least when it comes to the death penalty).

(3) Even though it would have been possible for God to have ordered Israel to execute his justice, Israel did not receive the command. Perhaps the God who ordered the death of the Canaanites was only an invention of religious leaders to accomplish their political conquest – not the True God.

(4) Even if Israel had indeed received a divine command, they were motivated not by this command, but by selfish motives for invading Canaan (greed for the land, xenophobic hatred, etc.), and thus did the right thing for the wrong reason. Similarly God acted with unloving, wantonly wrathful motives, not demonstrating love for the Canaanites.

I think that all four of these conditions are false, and therefore, by indirect reasoning, the Israelites did NOT commit a moral atrocity. If none of the above conditions is true, then God rightly desired the death of the Canaanites and lawfully delegated the task to Israel, who, accordingly, received a true revelation from God and acted in faith and holy fear. There is nothing ignoble anywhere in the equation. My next four blog posts will aim at these four points, and will, I hope, show us how we can gladly accept God’s war on the Canaanites as a triumph of his justice, love, and strength, not as something to be ashamed about.