Annihilating the Canaanites

TEXTS OF TERROR (Part 1: Annihilating the Canaanites?)

“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)

How do we reconcile the enemy-love of Jesus Christ with the enemy-destruction that God commanded in the Old Testament? Below, we will consider 20 ‘answers’ I’ve come across in the literature I’ve read on the subject.

BAD ANSWERS

1.      It’s a mystery (don’t even bother thinking about it)

“The ways of God are a mystery. Since we will never completely understand him, we might as well relax with the questions in our minds. [emphasis added]” (Block)

2.      The Old Testament god was a different god

“As we struggle to understand this problem, let’s at least agree that it will never be helpful to set the New Testament antagonistically against the Old. Admittedly, we must take into account the historical dimension of God’s self-revelation.” (C. Wright)

3.      God never commanded it (Israel was wrong)

“If the conquest of Canaan had actually been such a massive and mistaken misinterpretation of God’s will, we should surely read some corrective word later in the Scriptures—if not within the Old Testament itself, then at least within the New. But we find none.” (C. Wright)

4.      It never happened… it’s just an allegory

“The passage purports to be literal; to take it in any other way is to throw oneself into a bottomless pit of subjectivism.” (J. Wenham)

“Their [the passages in question] primary form is simply historical narrative. In other words, we are not really dealing with allegory here at all.” (C. Wright)

CONTEXTUAL CONSIDERATIONS

5.      The Canaanites had time to repent

“These people were given plenty of opportunity to change their ways and to avoid all of this… they had 400 years to repent.” (Geisler)

6.      The Canaanite religious and political institutions were the main target

“The primary concern throughout is the total ejection of their evil religions from the land.” 

(J. Wenham)

“The greater concern was to destroy Canaanite religion, not Canaanites per se.” (Copan)

“The average person isn’t going to pick up on the fact that stereotypical ancient Near Eastern language actually describes attacks on military forts or garrisons, not general populations that included women and children. There is no archaeological evidence of civilian populations at Jericho or Ai.” (Copan)

“Holy War in the book of Joshua is not really a war against Canaan and Canaanites. Except for very general statements, we never read a specific narrative describing the Israelite assault on peasants or farming villages.” (Lawson Stone)

“All the battle narratives name city-kings as the enemy. These kings were all appointed by Egypt to suck every morsel of economic and military benefit out of Canaan for the greater glory of Pharaoh. Joshua’s mission seems to have been to destroy the network of city rulers who controlled Canaan, breaking Egypt’s exploitation of Canaan and defying Pharaoh’s claims to be divine. The battle narratives climax in Joshua 12 with a list not of annihilated populations or destroyed cities, but dead tyrants.” (Lawson Stone)

7.      The Canaanites citizens were allowed to flee, convert, etc.

“The biblical text contains many references to ‘driving out’ the Canaanites. To clear away the land for habitation didn’t require killing; civilians fled when their military strongholds were destroyed and soliders were no longer capable of protecting them.” (Copan)

“There is certainly no obstacle to the individual repentance of a Canaanite, nor even presumably to migration, since the conquest was to be little by little.” (J. Wenham)

“Rahab shows that somebody who renounced the gods of Canaan and came to worship Yahweh the living God was spared. It also shows that there was a way for Canaanites to avoid the destruction, if they chose to.” (C. Wright)

“Let’s remember that mercy was always available to any Canaanite who responded positively to the God of Israel. Although the ban was applied in specific settings, this doesn’t preclude the possibility of sparing people like Rahab and her relatives. The ban allowed—and hoped for—exceptions.” (Copan)

8.      The Canaanites who remained were very sinful

“There is reason to think that the spiritual condition of the peoples in and around Canaan at the time of the Israelite occupation was one of particular filth.” (J. Wenham)

“According to the biblical picture of the Canaanites, these people were extremely wicked, and their annihilation represented God’s judgment for their sin.” (Block)

9.      The Canaanites will be judged as individuals

“It would be quite wrong to assume dogmatically that every Canaanite who perished automatically ‘went to hell’.” (C. Wright)

10.  The Canaanite children would have become evil

“If they [Canaanite children] had continued to live in that horrible society, past the age of accountability, they undoubtedly would have become corrupted and thereby lost forever.” (Geisler)

“If any infants and children were killed, they would have entered the presence of God. Though deprived of earthly life, these young ones wouldn’t have been deprived of the greatest good—enjoying everlasting friendship with God.” (Copan)

“The inclusion of women and children in such judgments is sometimes regarded as the refinement of cruelty. Yet, not only is the family principle itself biblical, but in this case it might also have proved practical and humane… what sort of society would it be for either the women or the children, if (as would have been almost inevitable) they were reduced to the status of foreign slaves and were left with no menfolk of their own nationality to give them support.” (J. Wenham)

11.  The Canaanites wouldn’t have lasted forever

“The Canaanites suffered a fate that ultimately all sinners will face: the judgment of God. The difference between them and other lost peoples is that they met their doom earlier than most.” (Block)

12.  The policy of annihilation was exceptional

“So the conquest of Canaan, as a unique and limited historical event, was never meant to become a model.” (C. Wright)

“God never intended for the Israelites to make the policy of herem as a general policy toward outsiders.” (Block)

“Yahweh’s warfare wasn’t the standard for the other stages in Israel’s history. It wasn’t intended as a permanent fixture in Israel’s story.” (Copan)

13.  The policy of annihilation wasn’t favoritism

“The Israelites needed to know that the conquest was not some charade of cozy favoritism. Israel stood under the same threat of judgment from the same God for the same sins, if they chose to commit them.” (C. Wright)

“The Lord’s commands were every bit as severe with regard to erring Israelites as they were to the Canaanites.” (J. Wenham)

14.  The language of annihilation utilized hyperbole

“But we must also recognize that the language of warfare had a conventional rhetoric that liked to make absolute and universal claims about total victory and completely wiping out the enemy. Such rhetoric often exceeded reality on the ground. Admittedly this does not remove the problem, since the reality was still horrible at any level. But it enables us to allow for the fact that descriptions of the destruction of ‘everything that lives and breathes’ were not necessarily intended literally.” (C. Wright)

“The language of the consecrated ban (herem) includes stereotypical language: ‘all,’ ‘young and old,’ and ‘men and women.’ The ban could be carried out even if women and children weren’t present.” (Copan)

“Scholars of agent military texts remind us that in the ancient Near East battle accounts used very stereotyped extreme language. Nuance was not their strong suit. A king would claim he killed every occupant of the land, and then report how much tribute the presumably dead enemies now had to pay each year. Clearly the claim of annihilation only meant to convey total victory.” (Lawson Stone)

“We should also remember that our modern notions of genocide and total war, come from our knowledge of weapons of mass destruction and our historical experience of genocide by these means. The ancient world for all its ferocity really couldn’t do much better than spears and arrows and swords and catapults. They had no way to envision the literal extermination of whole populations. The language was stock military rhetoric to convey unquestioned uncontested victory.” (Lawson Stone)

POSSIBLE STARTING POINTS

15.  This was a necessary part of salvation history

“The severity of God’s dealings… becomes intelligible when we see what was at stake. It was nothing less than the salvation of the world.” (J. Wenham).

“Even the historical defeat of the Canaanites by Israel will ultimately be seen to be part of an overall history of salvation for which the nations themselves will praise God.” (C. Wright)

“God’s elimination of the Canaanites was a necessary step in the history of salvation. In order for Israel to achieve the goals that God had established for them—that they might declare to the world his glory and grace—they needed a clean slate and a holy land.” (Block)

“If the Israelites hadn’t done serious damage to the Canaanite religious infrastructure, the result would have been incalculable damage to Israel’s integrity and thus to God’s entire plan to redeem humanity.” (Copan)

16.  God (and God alone) has the right to take lives

“God created life and He has the right to take it.” (Geisler)

“Everything turns upon the reality and certainty of the divine calling to do the deed.” (J. Wenham)

“Punishment changes the moral context of violence.” (C. Wright)

 “Perhaps we need to be more open to the fact that some of our moral intuitions aren’t as finely tuned as they ought to be.” (Copan)

“It is simply a theological statement that God, the Giver of all life, has certainly the right to withdraw life or to command that it be withdrawn.” (Craigie)

17.  We’d get mad at a God who never judged evil

“He [God] has got to punish sin and rebellion” (Geisler)

“Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.” (M. Volf)

“Maybe the ideal ‘God’ in the Westerner’s mind is just too nice.” (Copan)

18.  Jesus was wrathful too (no need to reconcile)

“There may be difficulty in squaring the teaching of Deuteronomy with that of some Jesus of modern invention. But as far as the Jesus of the Gospels is concerned, there is an inescapable and indeed a fearful consistency between them.” (J. Wenham)

19.  God accommodated fallen humanity (warring)

“Is there any sense in which God accommodated his will to such fallen reality [war] within the historical earthing of his revealing and redeeming purpose?... We might be dealing with something God chose to accommodate within the context of a wicked world, not something that represented his best will or preference.” (C. Wright)

“The Scriptures reveal a God who works through messy, seemingly inefficient processes—including human choices and failures—to accomplish his redemptive purposes in history.” (Copan)

“One point is becoming very clear: the activity of God in this world, insofar as it involves human beings as agents, must always appear, to a greater or lesser extent, to be associated with sinfulness” (Craigie)

“God participated in the history of ancient Israel primarily through the normal forms and structures of human activity. The state is a form of human organization through which God worked in the times of ancient Israel, and war was a form of human activity inseparably linked to the existence of the state.” (Craigie)

“His participation in warfare… pointed not to his moral being but to his will and activity.” (Craigie)

20.  God used it to show that violence doesn’t work

“We shouldn’t stop with the Old Testament if we want a clearer revelation of the heart and character of God.” (Copan)

“Although not resolving the philosophical issues associated with holy war and a good God’s being involved in so many deaths, the death of Christ does add a new dimension to the problem. Christ takes upon himself the sin of the world and becomes the victim of the holy war that God wages against sin.” (Hess)

“Thus the history of the nation of Israel functions as a parable of warning: political institutions may be essential to the existence of human society, but they cannot be equated with the Kingdom of God.” (Craigie)

“The tragedy of the history of Christianity is that so frequently the Old Testament lessons drawn from defeat in war have been forgotten.” (Craigie)

“But the failure was essential, partly because it demonstrated that redemption was not to be found in the human institution of the state.” (Craigie)

“Whereas the old kingdom was established by the use of violence, the new kingdom was established in the receipt of violence. God the Warrior becomes the Crucified God… over and over again, Christians have forgotten that God the Warrior became the Crucified God.” (Craigie)

Resources:

Christopher Wright                  “The God I Don’t Understand”

Daniel Block                            “The NIV Application Commentary: Deuteronomy”

Greg Boyd                                               “The Crucifixion of the Warrior God” (Coming Soon)

John Wenham                          “The Goodness of God”

Lawson Stone                          “Violence in the Old Testament” (YOUTUBE Videos)

Lee Strobel                              “The Case for Faith” (Chapter interviewing Norman Geisler)

Paul Copan                              “Is God a Moral Monster: Making Sense Out of the Old Testament God”

Peter Craigie                             “The Problem of War in the Old Testament”

Walter Brueggemann                                “Divine Presence amid Violence”