(Before you begin reading this article itself, I suggest you read through the following short summaries of crucial concepts from ALBERITH's glossary: Cherem (ḥerem), Clean & Unclean
One of the most—if not the most—morally and ethically perplexing questions of the Old Testament is how a holy God of love can command the Israelites to annihilate the Canaan populations in the land when they conquered the Promised Land. This commandment is most forcefully and clearly stated in the book of Deut 7:1-6 & 20:15-18, while Israel's half-hearted obedience of these instructions is reported in the books of Joshua and Judges (in biblical context 'half-hearted obedience' is, of course, synonymous with 'total disobedience.')
R. W. L. Moberly rightly calls this "arguably the single most morally and theologically problematic aspect of the Old Testament."1 In dealing with it some, in near furious anger, labels it "divine genocide" and turns away from a God whom they think is no better than the suicidal jihadists who bomb innocent civilians. Still others explain it away. We cannot but take a hard and "as honest as we can be" look at this difficult question.
Let me begin by removing some of the proposals for which we have no use, because they do not take the Bible or the command seriously and, therefore, try to explain them away rather than explain them. First is the view by G. Braulik, who claims that "historically, there never was any conquest of the land that took place amidst imperialistic terror and according to a military strategy of destruction. Such a conquest is an ideal construct. The deuteronomic ḥērem-command and the accounts in the book of Joshua about the wars of conquest were written more than half a millennium after the emergence of Israel."2 As it is Braulik claims at the same time to know too much (that the conquest never happened?) and to know nothing (that the accounts were written so late there is nothing useful or truthful they can tell us).
An alternative solution comes from John Goldingay in his otherwise masterful work.3. First he dismisses the ḥērem as nothing more than a mere theological principle: "The ḥērem was always a theological principle rather than a practice. It constituted an assertion that Israel must not allow itself to be led astray by the traditional religion of the land."4 This he accomplishes, first, by waving the ḥerem away into Israel’s misty irrelevant past: ". . . for the average Israelite these events are long past. The First Testament [Old Testament] locates Israel's wars, and in particular its application of ḥerem, to the distant past . . . The events in Exodus-Joshua belong to the supranatural marvellous beginnings of the people and are not a pattern for repeating."5 Next Goldingay drives a wedge, after the fashion of A. D. H. Mayes, between the various commandments in Deut 7:1-5.6 Then, he dismisses the story of Achan with frightful nonchalance: ". . . as far as we know, Israel never treated the Achan story as a precedent for its treatment of individuals or families. Indeed, the story is another told in the terms of a worship event rather than a historical one."7 Finally, Goldingay drives in another wedge between what Moses commands and what Yahweh requires: "Only Deuteronomy 7 and 20 commission the devoting of these people, and even then it is Moses, not Yhwh, who does so." Moses’ words, of course, have Yahweh’s implicit approval, but "Yhwh is still distanced from the command that contrasts with the previous declarations and commands. Yhwh goes along with rather than initiating [sic] it."8 Goldingay, it is obvious, is prepared to go a very long way—ironically, by resorting to numerous exegetical short-cuts—to skirt around this morally disturbing commandment. But it is also somewhat surprising; Mayes is too competent an exegete to resort to this kind of exegetical frivolity and Goldingay too sharp a scholar to fall in with it.9.
Yet another approach is to shout rather than explain it away. I have in mind here those who rather prefer to call the command "divine genocide."10 Here we find presumptuousness of the worse possible kind; the thought that we can judge (and genocide is nothing if it is not a judgement) God by our standards of morality, as if He stands on the same plane as we do and is to be measured as one of us. Now, whether ancient Israel may, or may not, have been guilty of genocide is a valid question, one which we should keep an open eye. To call Yahweh's commandment 'divine genocide' is just crass presumption which we don't need. It lacks entirely the humility, awe, and sense of God's holiness which must attend all authentic theological reflection.
So where can, or should, we begin to find or frame an honest view of this challenging question post by the commandment? I suggest we begin by reviewing the matter of the value of human lives from God's perspective. This is, I believe, vital in this particular instance because we are dealing with human lives, and many of those involved at the other end of Israel's swords, like the women and children, are people whom we might think of as 'innocent,' guilty of nothing more than being born Canaanites at that time. This exercise should provide us with a broad view against which to view all the other elements of the event.
It is immediately obvious to anyone, even someone only vaguely familiar with the Old Testament, that the human life is precious to God. Humans alone of all creatures, Gen 1 & 2 tell us, warranted God's special consideration in their creation, alone among all creatures to be made in God's image, and alone given God's breath of life. These, we often forget, are the fundamental tenets that gave root and shape to the modern concept of the "sanctify of human life."11 While atheists and followers of non-theistice religions uphold this view of the value of human live as well, it is only this Judeo-Christian doctrine of man that provides a sufficient foundation for the tenet. In fact human lives are so precious to God that, given only ten slots to summarize what He reckons are the most important instructions that those who wish to please Him should so, He listed among them the proscription against the unauthorized killing, i.e., murder, of another person. This is, of course, the Sixth Commandment. If that is not enough, He added a whole string of other supplementary rules to protect human lives in various different situations (see, e.g., Deut 4:41-42; 9:1-7; 22:8). That said, we must also remember that the Bible holds this affirmation of the value of human life in healthy tension with the teaching that, without God, humans are simply dust; he has no intrinsic value in and of itself. Taken together, this means that if God should take away any number of human lives, it is no more than a potter deciding to remove a roomful of pots he has made. As the Maker of Heaven and Earth, and author of all human lives, He alone has the authority to decide who lives and who dies,12 and He has no need to explain or answer to anyone. This is a fact that we must place square at the forefront of everything we say and think as we work our way through this discussion.
But how often does Yahweh in fact decides directly, or commands someone specifically, to take another human life or lives? Many of us, I suspect, have the impression that the Old Testament is full of it. Impressions, however, are notoriously unreliable witnesses. A careful survey shows how constrained such occasions actually are. Of the twenty-five certain occassions (apart from the commandment to annihilate the Canaanites) when Yahweh demanded the death sentence, nearly two-thirds of them belong to this particular period—the Exodus-Wandering-Conquest—of Israel's history. Of these only on five occasions do we find non-Israelite invovled (The Egyptian firstborns and Pharaoh's army, the Amalekites, the king and armies of Arad, and the Midianites). Yahweh restrained His wrath far more than we suspect or have to right to expect.
So why then did Yahweh "single-out" the Canaanites—"the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you"—for destruction? If we were to go though each of the occasions listed in our survey above, we quickly notice that sin is never absent from the context in which Yahweh calls for such judgmet. So did the Canaanites sinned a sin that merited such a severe sentence of a cherem? The answer is 'yes' and this is a bit of background that is sadly almost always ignored in modern discussion of the Canaanites' annihilation. Perhaps it is felt that it too belongs to Israel's misty past.
Gen 15 recounts the great covenant God established with Abraham, and among the proceedings is God's reaffirmation of the promise to give the land of Canaan to Abraham's children. But then the Lord also tells the patriarch that his "descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and ill-treated four hundred years." But He promises that that enslaving nation shall be punished and his descendants will return to possess the land He has promised. And the reason for the delay? "For or the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure" (v16). God is not arbitrary in what He does. He does not—though He could have and no one can say nay to Him—just take what belongs to the Amorites and give it off the hand to the Israelites. If He should disenfrenchise the Amorites He makes sure He does it with just cause. There would come a time when the Amorites/Canaanites would have chalked up enough iniquities, its 'full measure,' to warrant their loss of their land. The Amorites/Canaanites in fact had four hundred years of grace to do right! In Israel's act of conquest and the commandment to exterminate the Canaanites, therefore, we see a convergence with, and the means of, God's fulfilment of His promise to Abraham and His act of judgment on the Canaanites.
It may be appropriate to look at a number of other fact attending this commandment to annihilate the Canaanites.
1. While modern English translations such as the NIV and ESV consistently add a note in the bottom margin to explain that cherem means "set apart (devoted) as an offering to the Lord (for destruction)," destruction is not its primary meaning, even if the verb is used most frequently as such in the contexts of wars sanctioned by Yahweh. The term involves the irrevocable and definitive offering to God, so that what is offered becomes "most holy (qodesh qadashim) to Yahweh" (Lev 27:28). In the case of Israel's enemies in the land they were conquering, how else could they be made irrevocably set apart to the Lord other than their complete destruction. Because the right to life belongs to God alone, only He can authorize it. He alone can weight the hearts of men. In this sense, the commandment to annihilate the Canaanites is, ethically, not different from God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac (Gen 22; an act that, strangely, hardly ever causes any moral or theological controversy).13 It was an act of faith, trusting not on Israel's sense of right or wrong, but on the person of God, He who does no wrong. We must not, therefore, confuse the cherem with, or place it on the same plane as, the xenophobic suicide-bombings of Muslim extremists or the ignorance-driven genocides in the name of God of the Crusaders and Conquistadores, the progroms of Jews-haters, or the siezure of Palestinian lands by extremist Zionists.
2. The act of cherem could not be waged by Israel on anyone anywhere she fancied. Unlike the "holy war" mentality of Islamic jihadists, the cherem was not a broad and encompassing tradition but a clearly and clearly circumsscribed by Yahweh. Deut 20:1-15, e.g., commands that the people who lived beyond the bounds of the land promised to Israel were not to be subject to such destruction. With regards to them, Israel had to make an offer of peace and war may be prosecuted only if that peace offer was rejected, and there was to be no wholesale destruction. This fact was so clearly understood that even the Hivites from Gibeon, who would have been subject to the cherem, knew about it. It was based upon this knowledge that they resorted to the ruse they used to get Joshua to make a covenant of peace with them (Jos 9). The success of their attempt was based on convincing the Israelites that they had come from far away.
3. The commandment does not preclude the possibility of grace and escape for those so designated for destruction. Jericho and all her inhabitants were designated for such destruction. Rahab, by her acknowledgement of Yahweh's sovereign power and the help she rendered to the scouts, escaped the fate of her fellow Jerichans. If she and her family had been the only known case of reprieve, her case would have proven the principle that grace was a real option in the cherem. The additional case of the un-named man of Bethel (Judg 1:24-26) suggests that such graces may have been more common than we are wont to think.
4. The commandment to destroy the Canaanites was not a matter of Yahweh acting with unfair favourtism towards Israel and in hatred towards other peoples. Yahweh exacts the same stringent price on Israel as He does on non-Israelites when she acted scornfully towards Him. Achan's decision to appropriate to himself the articles under cherem illustrates the case. That the book of Joshua should devote a chapter and a half out of 24 chapters (more than 6%) of the book to the incident alone suggests, contra Goldingay, that Achan was intended to serve as a clear warning against taking the cherem lightly.14 It should also be noted that the strongest language used for the destruction of any group of persons in the Old Testament are reserved for the Israelites. As Moses comes to the end of his recall of Israel's journey through the wilderness, he reports how God had destroyed everyone of those Israelites who had come out of Egypt as adults (I refer to them as GA in my commentary on Deuteronomy15). Let me repeat my comments from that work:
Three times GA’s elimination is mentioned, using different, though resonant, forms of the same verb—tom, tummam, and tammu—which essentially means "complete," "total."" Each turn of this repetition is qualified by the location of their eradication: "from the midst of (miqqereb) of the camp/people" (2:14, 15, 16). Then set at the core of this repetition is a categorical assertion—stressed by the assonance of wegam, bam, hummam, and tummam—that their elimination was the result of a deliberate act by Yhwh:
A. . . . until all that generation of fighting men had perished completely (tom) from the midst of the camp, as Yhwh had sworn to them, v14.
B. Yes (wegam), Yhwh's hand was upon them (bam) to confound them (hummam) until he had completely eliminated them (tummam) from the midst of the camp, v15.
A'. . . . when all the fighting men had perished completely (tammu) in death from the midst of the people . . . v16.
Both the chiasmus and the chain of assonating words (which, of course, is effective only when they are heard) rattle the audience into a hightened sense of awareness of what is being said. Here in Deuteronomy the absolute displeasure of the Lord with that generation cannot be missed. He would delay His fulfillment of His promise for a whole generation just to make sure that all of those rebellious men were 'totaled' and none would not see the Promised Land. And these were men of the election nation. His hatred of sin is not to be trifled with. Not with the people He has called to Himself, and certainly not with the Canaanites. And the Canaanites had four hundred years of grace!
Ultimately, and ironically, Israel's failure to carry out the command to annihilate the Canaanites was a act of moral failure; the failure to deal with a long and unyielding evil for which God had to issue a specific command for its treatment. The command was not, as moderns like to think, a morally questionable idea but a radical solution to a specific problem of sin. To even liken it to anything having the shade of, say, Hilter-style genocide is to fail to read the Old Testament in the most ultimate way. Only God can see evil for what it trully is, and Israel's failure was a act of moral cowardice.
I come now to the end of this long essay with just two comments. First, the command to totally destroy the Canaanites was never easy either for the Israelites to obey it or for us to appreciate it. But let it never be said that God was in any way unkind, unfair or questionable in His dealing with men. However deep His grace may be, His holiness is not to be trifled with. Israel would have had a far 'happier' history if she had harkened to the commandment. The bulk of her sorrow as a nation traces to her indifference to it. The effect of this great sin would resonate through the remainder of her history in the land. Reading the commandment in its full historical and cultural context what we see is a God who acted and commanded as He did because He understood the ways of men, whether Israelites or Canaanites, better than they themselves did, or we do. Second, the commandment to totally destroy the Canaanites was a specific commandment for a specific time. It was never intended to be a general principle of war for Israel. It can never be recalled as justification for any other war that Israel would make, and there is no record of Israel ever given another such command in her subsequent history. When the leaders of the quasi-Christian Taiping Rebellion justify their violent actions that cost twenty million lives on the basis of Joshua, or modern Christain Zionists their support of modern Israel's illegal apprpriation of Palestinian land on the assumption that the Palestinians are the equivalent of the ancient Canaanites they are, in fact, extorting Scriptures to give what is not there or their's to give. We must hear what Scriptures say and add no more. Failure to do so can cost the precious lives of those for whom Jesus had paid with His death.16
Preaching Relevance - Can one really preach a sermon involving this topic? My answer is yes, because this subject is ultimately about God's holiness. But you have to be—as in any sermon you preach—know your material well, and this subject is a difficult one. It certainly is not for relatively inexperienced preachers or those whose presentational skills a not at their sharpest. It is not a challenge to be undertaken lightly when, in a sermon especially, confusion does more damage than nothing. An wiser alternative in most cases would be rather to discuss it, where there is more room for discussion and opportunities for clarification and reflection.
Low Chai Hok
©Alberith, 2021