THE KILLING OF THE CANAANITES
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How do we answer the charge that is often made that “The Old Testament God is a beast?” Those who make this indictment usually start with God’s command to destroy the Canaanites.
In The Age of Reason (1794), Thomas Paine wrote, “Whenever we read the obscene stories…the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which…the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent if we called it the work of a demon, than the word of God.”
Even so-called “Christians” are making this charge. Evolutionist and former co-head of the Biologos Foundation, Karl Giberson, charged:
∑ “In The God Delusion [evolutionist and New Atheist Richard] Dawkins eloquently skewers the tyrannical anthropomorphic deity of the Old Testament—the God that supposedly commanded the Jews to go on genocidal rampages and who occasionally went on his own rampages, flooding the planet or raining fire and brimstone on wicked cities. But who believes in this deity any more, besides those same fundamentalists who think the earth is 10,000 years old? Modern theology has moved past this view of God.” http://biologos.org/blog/exposing-the-straw-men-of-new-atheism-part-five/
Many other people of faith are embarrassed by these OT portrayals of the God in whom they trust. It is therefore imperative that we try to attempt a defense for our God:
• …but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect. (1 Peter 3:15 ESV; Jude 3; 2 Corinthians 10:4-5)
But how? I don’t think that it is enough to simply say, “This world belongs to God. Therefore, He is perfectly free to do with it as He wishes.” Although it is true that God, who has given life, is perfectly justified to take life away at His good pleasure, this alone makes God seem arbitrary. In a similar way, the artist is free to destroy his painting, whether he likes it or not, since it is his creation and belongs to him.
However, our God declares Himself holy and righteous in regards to His creations. How can this be in regards to His order to thoroughly destroy the Canaanites or to condemn the unrighteous to hell? Let me try to offer several considerations:
EVIL OF THE CANAANITES
In the Christian Research Journal, Clay Jones tries to justify God’s judgments:
∑ The “new atheists” call God’s commands to kill the Canaanites genocide,” but a closer look at the horror of the Canaanites’ sinfulness, exhibited in rampant idolatry, incest, adultery, child sacrifice, homosexuality, and bestiality, reveals that God’s reason for commanding their death was not genocide but capital punishment.” (“Killing the Canaanites,” vol.33/#4, 31)
Indeed, God had nothing good to say about the Canaanites. Instead, He continually warned Israel against their practices:
∑ “Do not have sexual relations with your neighbor's wife and defile yourself with her. Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech, for you must not profane the name of your God. I am the Lord. Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable. Do not have sexual relations with an animal and defile yourself with it. A woman must not present herself to an animal to have sexual relations with it; that is a perversion. Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled.” (Leviticus 18:20-24)
Jones’ own research agrees with the Biblical assessment of the Canaanites:
∑ Like the Ancient Near East (ANE) pantheons [of gods], the Canaanite pantheon was incestuous. Baal has sex with his mother Asherah, his sister Anat, and his daughter Pidray, and none of this is presented pejoratively…There should be no surprise that bestiality would occur among the Canaanites, since their gods practiced it…There was absolutely no prohibitions against bestiality in the rest of the ANE. (32)
If their gods were their role models, we shouldn’t expect that the Canaanites would be at all motivated to rise an iota above them, either sexually or according to any other moral measure. These revelations also support the Biblical account of the entire male population of Sodom attempting to rape Lot’s two male visitors (Genesis 19). In Genesis 18, we were told that if God had been able to find just 10 righteous people in that town, He wouldn’t have destroyed it. Evidently, they weren’t present! (The deceiving and numbing power of sin is so powerful that when Lot tried to warn his “sons-in-law” regarding God’s immanent destruction of Sodom, they thought he was “jesting” - Gen. 19:14. Evidently, to them, Sodom wasn’t such a bad place, not one which would warrant divine judgment. It was home! Indeed, we eventually become complacent, even to the most blatant and destructive forms of criminality!)
GOD GAVE THEM AMPLE WARNING AND TIME TO REPENT
However corrupted the Canaanites might have been at this point, God had informed Abraham that He would give them an additional 400 years repent, “for the sin of the Amorites [Canaanites] has not yet reached its full measure" (Genesis 15:16). Meanwhile, despite all of the miraculous evidences that this just and righteous God had manifested to Canaan and the surrounding nations, none of these nations ever confessed and repented of their ways.
God had performed wondrous miracles in Egypt “that I might show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” (Exodus 9:16). And the whole “earth” did hear about what had taken place and also of the Israelite conquests before entering into the Promised Land. However, rather than leading them to reassess their sinful lives and to confess their sins to the God of Israel, they formed military alliances to resist the God-mandated Israelite onslaught. However, one prostitute in Jericho did respond appropriately to the evidence and was rescued. Rahab confessed that:
∑ “We have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to Sihon and Og, the two kings of the Amorites east of the Jordan, whom you completely destroyed.” (Joshua 2:10)
In light of this, Jones is right. It wasn’t a matter of genocide but of capital punishment meted out to a hardened and unrepentant people. It was a matter of justice and not meanness. In fact, there is no account in the entire Bible of an individual or a people who sought God’s forgiveness but was refused! Consequently, Rahab and her family were not only saved in the midst of the destruction of Jericho, but Rahab was honored as one of the progenitors of the coming Savior of the world.
Israel’s God had another reason to not wait any longer in bringing judgment upon the Canaanites:
TO PROTECT THE INNOCENT FROM CORRUPTION
∑ "Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land; for when they prostitute themselves to their gods and sacrifice to them, they will invite you and you will eat their sacrifices. And when you choose some of their daughters as wives for your sons and those daughters prostitute themselves to their gods, they will lead your sons to do the same.” (Exodus 34:15-16)
We should understand this. We throw away the rotten potato before it makes the others go bad. Sadly, Israel didn’t always take this danger seriously, even after seeing God’s judgments, and brought upon themselves what had happened to the Canaanites, as their God had warned:
∑ Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord. They served the Baals and the Ashtoreths, and the gods of Aram, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the Ammonites and the gods of the Philistines. And because the Israelites forsook the Lord and no longer served him, he became angry with them. He sold them into the hands of the Philistines and the Ammonites. (Judges 10:6-7)
WE CANNOT COHERENTLY JUDGE GOD
Generally, at this point, the atheist will complain that a real god wouldn’t be so punitive because human beings don’t deserve such punishment. However, we cannot blame God, when we too justly punish. How can we blame God for being judgmental as long as we are judgmental! Perhaps, once we find a better way of dealing with our murderers, kidnappers, and rapists, we can point the finger at God. However, it seems that we still need our courts, jails, and police. This is made painfully clear to us, when our police go on strike or are issued stand-down orders and brutality explodes. Besides, the reality of warfare is attested to by human history. It will not go away through love, meditation, or by any other means. Nations need to be protected from other nations. The innocent need protection against their oppressors.
There is also another reason that the skeptic scoffs at the judgments of God. Peter explains that the scoffers of his day “deliberately forget” about God’s judgments (2 Peter 3:3-8; 2:4-9), sensing in them their own doom. They are willfully ignorant and discount their moral culpability in a number of ways:
• Denial of Freewill
• Just a Product of Nature and Nurture
• Need for Therapy not Punishment
• Concepts of Justice and Morality are merely Human Inventions
Nevertheless, they still know right from wrong because God has wired these stubborn truths into their minds and consciences. Consequently, when they bring indictments against the God of the Bible for His horrific judgments, they are also indicting themselves and their own nature, since they have been created in the moral likeness of God. They therefore understand that a people can become so utterly sinful that they deserve the severest judgment:
• Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. (Romans 1:32; 2:14-16; 6:21)
However, they cannot live with the knowledge that they deserve judgment, and so they harden their consciences against this knowledge and become increasingly corrupt and hate those who don’t.
The morally relative skeptic is also in a muddle. To bring charges against God (or against anyone else), he needs an absolute moral standard, in the same way that a math teacher needs absolutely correct answers in order to grade a test. However, he believes that right and wrong are simply ideas that he has dreamed up. If he is to live consistently with these beliefs, he cannot coherently bring his moral charges against anyone. At best, he can only say, “I don’t like this.”
However, there’s a more difficult problem. The Canaanites had babies, who hadn’t yet done evil. Doesn’t their destruction violate God’s claims of being a just God?
We can respond with another question: “Is justice truly served if God tells the Hitler’s of this world that He will not allow the implications of their crimes to touch their children?” In fact, life itself teaches us that children have to suffer for the follies of their parents (Num. 14:33). This knowledge should make us all the more diligent to do right!
As a probation officer for 15 years, many probationers would understandably tell me, “I now have a wife and children, and so I have to get my life together for their sake!” Perhaps it is according to the wisdom of God that our children’s fate should be so closely tied to our own! Perhaps our understanding of justice is too truncated?
God had even promised to lay upon the children the sins of the parents. Anyone can see the consequences of this promise. We inherit the sins and weaknesses of our parents through an invisible process of osmosis (Exodus 34:7). Perhaps by unlocking the secrets of epigenetics, we will find the mechanism of this transfer.
These are not explanations but suggestions why God had also ordered the destruction of infants. I must admit that I don’t fully understand and can only hope to offer possibilities. However, those who have learned to trust our Lord, trust Him enough to know that He will reconcile everything justly and lovingly! In fact, He has an eternity to do so:
• For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. (Romans 8:18)
Our Savior wouldn’t be so punitive if there was no hope, no remedy for evil. One pastor, Carlton Pearson, claimed that he had turned away from the Biblical God because He thought that God lusted after the destruction of the wicked. Instead, the opposite is true:
• “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, O house of Israel?” (Ezekiel 33:11).
THE NEED FOR JUSTICE AND PUNISHMENT
• Our hearts require justice. They long for it to such an extent that it becomes difficult to go on with our lives without it. If justice is just an invented idea, we would feel guilty about insisting on justice being done.
• If justice is a reality because there is a God, then justice is able to make sense out of our lives, where we experience guilt, shame, and a satisfaction when we see that justice is done.
• Without a holy, righteous, and just God, our only rationale to resist evil and injustice would be pragmatic – the harm it causes us. However, the aggressor could just as easily also appeal to pragmatic considerations to justify his own criminality. After all, didn’t the survival-of-the-fittest make us into the superior species that we are today? Consequently, pragmatic considerations alone are not an adequate basis for morality.
• Likewise, if it is true that the idea of justice is no more than a human invention, then any form of punishment is just a matter of imposing our will (or the will of the majority) upon others – a sure prescription to breed justifiable cynicism and contempt for any such system.
• A world without consequences for our evil is a meaningless and undesirable world. It is also a world where people will not learn or change. Why bother if there is no reason to! Consequently, our children would grow up as barbarians.
• The fear of eternal punishment motivates many to live rightly. So to the example of the Canaanites.
• God’s temporal judgments must be more than a slap-on-the-hand. If there is an ultimate judgment resulting in heaven and hell, it seems reasonable that we should be warned of this by compelling temporal punishments.
• We look forward to heaven because it is our eternal home where all injustice and hatred will be eliminated in favor of love. Therefore, we are glad that our just God will remove those who would cause pain.
We cannot answer all of the relevant questions. However, these gaps should not become a reason to reject what we do know, what is plain to us. Similarly, science cannot even answer the most basic questions like, “What is light? Matter? Space? Time?” However, these perplexities do not lead us to reject what we do know through science. Likewise should this same principle
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