This is a difficult question, and one that has bothered Christians from the early church to the present day. As a result, we need to have some response to the question, both to strengthen our own faith and as an answer to the questions of others. The very basic response to the question of how we read these passages is that we need to read and understand them better as part of the Bible and its message.
As an example, we will look briefly at the conquest of Canaan as one particularly difficult set of passages where God seems to command extreme violence. We will look at two ways to read it better: by paying attention to genre and to wider biblical context. Genre The Bible is full of different types or genres of material: laws, stories, poetry, prophecy and so on.
To understand a passage properly, we need to know how to read and understand its genre. The conquest is commanded primarily in Deuteronomy, which has the style of a sermon.
It exhorts the Israelites to do whatever is necessary to carry out the first commandment - to show total loyalty to God in the land that he is giving to them. As part of this, Deuteronomy uses high-powered rhetorical images to motivate the Israelites. Therefore, Israel must remove that danger by destroying the Canaanites and particularly their worship from the land.
As an example, Deuteronomy seems to suggest that the Canaanites should all be wiped out, but verse 3 commands the Israelites not to marry Canaanites. If verses are understood literally, there is no need for verse 3. There is no danger of marrying corpses! The conquest is portrayed primarily in Joshua chapters One characteristic of this material is that it uses hyperbole exaggeration to make a point.
When we read about the total slaughter of the Canaanites, this is probably an exaggerated way of describing highly successful military campaigns. This exaggeration is not deceitful, because the initial readers would have known what it meant. This is a justifiable killing. If someone breaks in your house in the daytime and is unarmed and either puts his hand up or runs away and you shoot and kill that person that is murder.
There are times when soldiers in war and police officers must kill, but there are also times when they kill wrongly as well. Always remember we must be wise in all situations. There is a time for everything and sometimes there is a time to kill. What does the Bible say? Whoever kills an animal that belongs to another person must give another animal to take its place.
The same kind of injury a person gives another person must be given that person. Whoever kills an animal must pay for the animal. But whoever kills another person must be put to death. This is because I am the Lord your God. Revelation Outside are the dogs , those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.
Ecclesiastes There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.
The extreme sin of the Canaanites was connected with their religious practices. Leviticus 18 gives details of many of the sinful religious practices of the Canaanites, which included child sacrifice to the god Molech, incest, bestiality, homosexuality and cultic prostitution.
This is why it was so vital to God that Israel start off their life in the Land without the influence of false religions that would lead them away from Him. This involvement in Canaanite religions is already evident in the book of Judges, but reaches its peak in the period of the kings.
Because of their lack of faithfulness to God, which meant that they lost their distinctiveness b. Because they developed a nationalistic sense of their own superiority, which led them to be disinterested in bringing truth about God to other cultures on the basis that God and His blessings should belong only to them. The book of Jonah provides a classic example of this.
Perhaps the church today can learn a lesson from these twin dangers that may lead to a failure to be effective in mission. Effective mission depends both on distinctiveness and cultural engagement. An obvious objection to the idea that God was judging the Canaanites is that it would be unfair for Him to do so if they had no opportunity to repent and be saved. Based on the Biblical evidence, however, this objection dissolves away for two reasons:.
At the time of Abraham there is evidence that the Canaanites had some knowledge of the true God:. His faith in God should have been a witness to the Canaanites. He must surely have taught his people about the true Creator God Genesis It seems that over the period from Abraham to Joshua, the Canaanites had gradually rejected what they knew about God and moved deeper into sin.
It was only when their sin reached a certain level of severity that God decided to use the Israelites to bring judgement on them. However, even at the time of Joshua, the Canaanites had heard about what God had done for the Israelites in delivering them from Egypt and giving them victory over the Amorite kings east of the Jordan Joshua , yet they did not repent and turn to God. She even became an ancestor of king David and, eventually, Jesus Christ!
Sadly, she is the only Canaanite we read of coming to faith in God, although surely others had the opportunity. This question comes to the heart of the matter by asking exactly what God commanded. The Biblical accounts are quite different. God gave the Israelites strict rules about proper conduct in war against other enemies who did not live in Canaan, including:.
They must leave the fruit trees belonging to the city standing verses The restraint embodied in this code of conduct is remarkable for that period of history, and against this background the command to wipe out the Canaanites stands out as a special case. It was a focused, targeted campaign, not an uncontrolled rampage.
There is a range of verbs used in the commands to Israel concerning how they should treat the Canaanites. Some of these clearly speak of extermination, but others speak of driving them out see Deuteronomy 7. In the case of those kings and cities that refused to do so, there was no option but annihilation. There is no suggestion that Canaanites who left the land must be pursued; rather the commands to annihilate are connected only with people in the cities of the land.
Presumably if Canaanites had left Canaan they would then have been treated like all other nations and the Israelites could have made treaties with them and would have been bound by the more general codes of conduct in warfare given in Deuteronomy 20 see 1. So, this was not so much a case of genocide the extermination of an ethnic group but rather forced removal from the land of Canaan.
As we read through Joshua and Judges this appears to be born out, as the extermination of the Canaanites is never fully implemented. The judgement against Israel, when it came, was not annihilation but exile from the land. Joshua 12 lists 31 kings who were defeated by Joshua and whose cities were therefore wiped out at this time the Canaanites lived largely in independent walled city-states. The average population of each walled city at the time was probably around , with many cities having no more than around people.
The 31 cities conquered by Joshua probably had a combined population of around 70, Many of these people may have fled before the Israelites attacked, but even if we assume they were all killed, this is only around 3. The remaining As already mentioned, when the Israelites adopted the religious practices of the Canaanites, God judged them just as He had done the Canaanites. He exiled them from the land to purify them, so that those who returned under Zerubabbel, Ezra and Nehemiah would be a remnant of people who would worship only Him.
At this point it is vital to say that this case in Scripture is quite unique and that there is absolutely no Scriptural basis for any justification of similar actions today. Christians are not promised an earthly kingdom or a land and Christ commanded mission to all nations rather than judgement on some. We are, however, still left with the unavoidable fact that according to the Old Testament texts the God of Israel ordered the annihilation of a whole culture.
Three further questions arise: Why did God use people as the agent of His judgement? What about the innocent Canaanites especially children? Is this God of Israel really the God Christians worship?
In the cases of the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah and the Egyptian firstborns, God acted directly or through the agency of an angel to bring judgement. Some people struggle with how He could have used sinful people to judge other sinful people and with how he could have expected people to be able to carry out an act of brutality, especially against innocent children.
Deuteronomy 9, where God commands the annihilation, is helpful in this regard.
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