MARCH 10, 2015
MEETING GOD IN OLD TESTAMENT HOLY WAR
A PASTORAL APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM OF THE CANAANITES
MATTHEW SCHULTZ
“Samuel also said unto Saul, ‘The Lord sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over
Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord
of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when
he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and
spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and
ass.’”1
“Devout readers of the Bible have found these passages to be morally unpalatable and
theologically challenging ever since antiquity...Some have questioned the goodness of God (e.g.
Marcion), others have called for a re-evaluation of our moral intuitions (e.g. Augustine), yet
others have insisted that the killing of humans is not God’s intended message to Christian readers
of these texts (e.g. Origen).”2
1
2
1 Samuel 15:1-3, King James Version
Christian Hofreiter, “Genocide in Deuteronomy and Christian interpretation,” in Interpreting Deuteronomy, ed.
David Firth and Philip Johnston (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012), 242-243.
Contents
A Barbaric, Genocidal Deity? ........................................................................................................................ 3
Historical and Modern Approaches to Old Testament Holy War Texts ........................................................ 7
Christian Critical Approaches to Old Testament Holy War ......................................................................... 11
Does the Bible Condone Genocide? ........................................................................................................... 19
Did God Really Command Genocide? ......................................................................................................... 25
A Western Problem? ................................................................................................................................... 32
The Problem of Empathy ............................................................................................................................ 39
God and the Land ........................................................................................................................................ 46
Can We Really Come to Terms with the Canaanite Punishment? .............................................................. 55
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................ 60
A Barbaric, Genocidal Deity?
In the book of Deuteronomy we find one of the most troubling set of commands issued
by God, one that has been condemned as laying the groundwork for countless acts of violence,
even genocide:
10 When
you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it.11 And if it
responds to you peaceably and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it
shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. 12 But if it makes no peace with you,
but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. 13 And when the Lord your God
gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword, 14 but the women and the
little ones, the livestock, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as
plunder for yourselves. And you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which
the Lord your God has given you. 15 Thus you shall do to all the cities that are very far
from you, which are not cities of the nations here. 16 But in the cities of these peoples that
the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that
breathes, 17 but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the
Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as
the Lord your God has commanded, 18 that they may not teach you to do according to all
their abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and so you sin against
the Lord your God.3
A fundamental tenet of modern society is that we respect, support and defend individual
autonomy. From this we ground values of religious freedom and cultural tolerance, among other
key social goods. These values are further enmeshed with anthropological expectations that
conflict can be resolved primarily through diplomacy or other nonviolent means, and that
education can rehabilitate even the most hardened of criminals or societal malcontents.
3
Deuteronomy 20:10-18, English Standard Version.
Deuteronomy 20:10-18 cuts against these cherished Western beliefs and expectations. That a
split ethic toward distant and local enemies allows one to be treated “better” than the other does
little to alleviate the fact that the ethical continuum of this passage appears to range from slavery
to genocide.
Many in our secular society are outraged by these and similar Old Testament passages.4
Perhaps then it is no surprise that an overwhelming majority of the recent Christian literature on
this subject is heavily focused on apologetics. Christian scholars have spent a great deal of time
and energy issuing responses to prominent secular critics of Christianity, such as Richard
Dawkins or Sam Harris, and helping lay Christians formulate coherent objections to these critics.
My intent in this paper is not to rehash these arguments; many of these apologetic approaches
maintain a commitment to inerrancy that, while good and true, often leave the believer with cold
comfort, a rhetorical approach that might be best characterized as “deal with it.” Rather, I intend
to focus on what I might call pastoral concerns, such as how Christians within the church, who
wish to hold the Bible as a true and reliable guide to understanding God and living spiritual and
moral lives, can come to terms with a text like Deuteronomy 20 in way that does justice to their
theological framework without causing undue suspicion of God’s motives. This idea of pastoral
has reference to the spiritual life of the local church and its individual believers. (I do not mean
to suggest that such an approach avoids rational discussion or deliberation. Far from it.) While
much could fit under this rubric (such as attitudes during public worship, inner prayer life,
corporate deeds of mercy, etc.), perhaps one of the most important is fostering trust in God’s
character—his goodness, wisdom, mercy and glory—and the obedience to his commands that
naturally flows from such trust. Not only do I think that pastoral concerns are generally neglected
4
E.g., Numbers 31:12-18 and 1 Samuel 15:1-3.
in the available literature, I find that those books or articles5 that attempt to offer some semblance
of pastoral comfort often do so at great expense, sacrificing critical hermeneutical principles, or
even the historicity of the Pentateuch itself, in exchange for short term emotional gratification.
These approaches generally require that the believer to heavily qualify (or completely jettison)
the moral authority of much of the Old Testament, leading to a kind of spiritual confusion where
God is refashioned in such a way as to conveniently align with modern sensibilities. Yet a
principle task of this paper is to demonstrate that our moral intuitions—our moral outrage—is
neither necessarily objective nor universal in its deliverances. It too is fallen and is not always
the most reliable guide to judging whether some set of beliefs or actions are right and good.
On the one hand, liberal approaches to the problem of Old Testament morality are
presented as an authentic wrestling with the Bible, a kind of liberating pilgrimage where we meet
the true God by challenging our staid and moribund traditions. On the other hand, conservative
approaches tend to act as if all it will take to overcome the deep challenges of Old Testament
judgment passages is to develop and understand one particular set of arguments or ideas, as if
grasping some proposition will make it possible for us to rest easy in the fact that God ordered
his people to exterminate thousands of Canaanites. For the Christian who wishes to take the
Bible seriously and treat it as a reliable guide to faith and practice, neither of these approaches is
sufficient. The liberal is right to identify a journey as a necessary component in understanding
God, but his process inevitably undermines any confidence in what God himself has revealed
about his character. However, the conservative approach, while recognizing the need for facts
5
For example: Douglas Earl, Reading Joshua as Christian Scripture, Journal of Theological Interpretation
Supplements, No. 2 (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2010); Eric Seibert, The Violence of Scripture:
Overcoming the Old Testament’s Troubling Legacy (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2012);
Randal Rauser, “Let Nothing that Breathes Remain Alive: On the Problem of Divinely Commanded Genocide,”
Philosophia Christi, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2009: http://randalrauser.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Rauser11.1.pdf
(accessed 1/8/15); Victor Reppert, “Amalekites, Canaanites, Theo-Utilitarianism, and Skeptical Theism,”
http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2011/10/amalekites-canaanites-theo.html (accessed 3/10/15).
and a robust theological framework, fails to account for the profound ways in which people rely
on intuition and community, instead of just arguments, in deciding moral matters.
There are no such magic bullets, no clear or easy arguments that will give us the comfort
we want when faced with the wrath of God. And any approach to the Old Testament grounded in
emotional preferences, rather than the reliability of Scripture, leads to a god who conforms to our
sensibilities, which is really no god at all. The only way people can come to terms with moral
values alien to their tradition is to first empathize with practitioners of those moral values. This
empathy gradually allows someone to see how the alien framework operates, and this leads to an
appreciation of the good goals it seeks to obtain. It is only by entering into the life of the church,
which shares with the Old Testament Israelites the same goals and hopes of a restored earth free
from sin, that we can come to understand the moral rightness of the Canaanite judgment.
Historical and Modern Approaches to Old Testament Holy War Texts
Historically, many Christians have wrestled with the Old Testament warfare passages and
sought to harmonize them with Christian principles and beliefs. Such Christians have tended to
take one of three mutually exclusive approaches. These seem to match the ideas of three
historical Christians, suggesting that responses to the Canaanite extermination have remained
consistent over the centuries: the Marcionite approach, where the goodness of the Old Testament
God is questioned and a strong dichotomy is drawn between the Old and New Testaments, often
at the expense of the former; the Origenian approach, which takes a symbolic or mythological
approach to the text; and the Augustinian approach, where we critically examine our own moral
intuitions and submit them to God.
However, few people follow these approaches today. In contrast to previous eras of
church history, modern Christian approaches to these texts can be categorized in two ways. The
first is to treat these texts as God’s Word; the Christian reads the Old Testament as actually
representing the ideas, beliefs, words and/or speech of God. Here Christians treat the text as
historically accurate and morally justified (even if sometimes emotionally difficult), or they have
interpreted it allegorically, where Israel represents a spiritual struggle against sin (or some such
thing). In both cases, the holy war accounts are viewed as God’s Word and attempts are made to
incorporate them into a holistic theological and ethical understanding of God and the church.6
Some modern proponents of this approach include those who tend to treat the Bible as inerrant,
such as William Lane Craig, Paul Copan and Matthew Flanagan.7
6
7
I would place dispensationalism here, rather than locating it in the second approach. This is because the second
approach makes no effort to harmonize holy war with New Testament ethics and sees them as in conflict to at
least some extent. To my knowledge, strong dispensationalists do not view the Old Testament as ethically
deficient or bankrupt, even if they do not view it as morally relevant to Christian living.
Copan and Flannagan’s position can be found in Did God Really Command Genocide? Coming to Terms with the
Justice of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2014), which I respond to in detail below. For William Lane
The second approach tries to moderate the Old Testament by discounting it as
authoritative for the life of the Christian. This is done by either claiming the holy war texts are
not a legitimate part of the canon or, perhaps less radically, that these texts were nothing more
than an accommodation to an ancient people who had no other moral or cultural categories by
which to understand the divine. Functionally, I find that these variations end in the same place,
where one part of the canon is dismissed as morally insufficient to serve as any sort of useful
guide to modern ethical or theological practice.
A Brief Word on the Allegorical Approach
In contrast to inerrant or critical approaches, the allegorical approach does not seem to
hold much sway in popular Christian culture. But a brief word on the allegorical approach is
necessary in order for Christians to know that it remains a live option. A recent example of an
allegorical interpretation of holy war is Douglas S. Earl’s The Joshua Delusion. Earl’s book
“emerged out of [his] concern to understand what it means to read the Bible well as an
evangelical Christian who wishes to take the implications of historical and ethical difficulties in
the Bible with full seriousness in the context of ‘faith seeking understand.’”8 Earl confronts the
problematic Canaanite texts directly. Following Origen’s approach, he finds meaning in the
conquest texts in something other than its historicity.9 For Origen, this meaning was primarily
ethical, or spiritual, wrapped up in our furious struggle against sinful impulses and tendencies.
While Earl seems to make the case that this kind of allegorical approach was popular within the
early church, it does not seem to be a common choice in evaluations of the Canaanite judgment
8
9
Craig’s approach to the Canaanite problem, see his article at Reasonable Faith, “Slaughter of the Canaanites,”
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/slaughter-of-the-canaanites (accessed 2/17/15).
Douglas Earl, The Joshua Delusion: Rethinking Genocide in the Bible (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke & Co,
2011), xii.
Ibid., 8.
passages today.
A Modified Augustinian Approach
I fall somewhere in the third camp and will be proposing a modified Augustinian
approach; my aim in this paper is to revive the Augustinian perspective as a viable response to
the problem of the Canaanites. I have no intention of blazing a radical course of action, one that
suggests we can transcend the traditional framing of the text. On the contrary, a major part of my
project is to recognize that, as culture-bound creatures raised in the individualistic,
Enlightenment-drenched West, we will likely continue to struggle with the problem of holy war
until the return of Christ. While I will make a concerted effort to show why God was justified to
take the actions he did (especially given how ancient near Eastern pagans interpreted the world
and God accommodated their religious and moral assumptions), we need to have realistic
expectations about the Canaanite eradication: it might be the case that we never fully empathize
with or appreciate the Old Testament moral system, even if we can still genuinely trust and obey
the Lord in our daily lives. The principle message of the Canaanites is not one of racial genocide,
but of the judgment that God will inevitably bring on all who refuse to repent of their sin. This
cuts directly against everything our society teaches about the values of individual choice and
personal expression. A realism about our cultural and emotional limitations is a necessary first
step to the (very real) possibility that we will come to see and appreciate the internal moral logic
of the Old Testament, including the most difficult holy war passages.
But before I discuss my own approach, let me review two books I believe are
representative of the popular, intellectually plausible ways that Christians have responding to the
Canaanite extermination. I think both works can be classified as belonging to the Christian
tradition, broadly construed to include those who profess some sort of Christian allegiance or
heritage. The first book claims to be a journey of discovery and freedom from old, tired and
constrained views of God. I see it as representative of the liberal approach I described earlier.
The second is a robust defense of the Canaanite judgment by two Evangelical apologists, which I
see as representative of the kinds of conservative approaches used to defend the Old Testament
today.
Christian Critical Approaches to Old Testament Holy War
Peter Enns’ The Bible Tells Me So is a useful work inasmuch as it popularizes critical
views of Old Testament morality by liberal or mainline Christians.10 My review of his book
focuses primarily on the first third or so, since it deals directly with the conquest accounts. While
his explicit comments on genocide occupy a smaller portion of his material, it is necessary to
discuss the larger interpretive framework he brings to bear on the Canaanite annihilation
passages; Enns’ denial of inerrancy lays the groundwork for his dismissal of the Old Testament
as largely irrelevant to Christian moral living. As America becomes increasingly secularized, it is
likely this approach will become ever more popular with Christians seeking to avoid the
criticisms of a culture that finds the Old Testament, at best, deeply embarrassing, and, at worst, a
catalyst for religious violence. Furthermore, Enns’ approach to these topics—as a kind of
spiritual journey—seems to give it significantly more narrative credibility than purely rational
approaches.
Enns’ critical attitude to Old Testament morals is clear throughout his book. For example,
he has no qualms identifying the conquest accounts as clear acts of genocide:
It’s hard to appeal to the God of the Bible to condemn genocide today when the God of
the Bible commanded genocide yesterday. This is what we call a theological problem.
And it’s a big one, not only because of the whole Canaanite business, but because
violence seems to be God’s preferred method of conflict resolution.11
After painting a picture of the Old Testament God as characteristically (and unnecessarily)
violent, he continues:
10
11
Peter Enns, The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It (New York, NY:
HarperCollins, 2014).
Ibid., 30.
I take this portrait of God in the Bible seriously, but I don’t accept it as the final word.
Whatever we do, we certainly can’t hide under a blanket and wish this away. Only in
wrestling with this portion of scripture, in accepting its challenge, will we see how
scripture itself is pointing us forward, to journey beyond these stories and see a much
larger and far richer landscape beyond.12
In fact, Enns views the cursing of Ham, who is the father of the Canaanites, as merely a piece of
“propaganda—a story to justify, not explain, hatred of the Canaanites.”13 Such backstory serves
to justify later acts of indiscriminate violence and pillaging, where God “will stand watch as [the
Israelites] run their swords through every living thing in Canaan: men, boys, infants, someone’s
grandmother, or pregnant wife, and even livestock. God will be with the Israelites, pleased as
they level town after town, deaf to screams and cries for mercy.”14 These harrowing accounts
take Enns’ “breath away,” and he treats this portion of the Bible with disparaging sarcasm and
barely concealed contempt.
Enns seems familiar with common, popularized defenses of the Canaanite annihilation,
although he dismisses these as merely the product of an “owner’s manual mentality,” a
simplistic, traditionalist view of the Bible.15 Some of his arguments against these defenses are at
cross purposes, such as when he suggests Rahab converted out of fear rather than genuine faith
(as if these were necessarily opposed or one could not lead to the other), yet how can we know
what really happened when Enns already dismisses the text as inaccurate propaganda? These
early chapters were disappointing. They relied on emotional posturing rather than serious
argumentation, as if any disagreement with his views was rooted in pathology rather than
12
13
14
15
Ibid., 31-32.
Ibid., 34.
Ibid., 37.
Ibid., 41.
principles.
In order to make sense of the Israelites’ morally unconscionable acts, Enns employs a
popular tactic that dismisses the judgment texts as an accommodation to the Israelites. The
biblical writers believed that “God is a warrior waging war against the enemy and acquiring land.
He doesn’t buy into the system reluctantly. War brings him honor and glory.”16 In fact, Enns
believes that God never commanded the Israelites to kill the Canaanites—they only believed he
did.17 Furthermore, Enns thinks the weight of archaeological evidence all but requires us to
believe that the events of the Bible, and the Canaanite extermination, did not happen as they are
recorded.18
Whether the archaeological evidence does in fact suggest as much is open to some
considerable debate, not the least because many archaeologists are secularists who are (perhaps
unconsciously) biased against the supernatural claims of the Old Testament. However, as a
theological concept, Enns’ appeal to accommodation is not necessarily wrong. It is difficult to
see how God could relate to us without some form of, as John Calvin put it, “divine
accommodation”19; God is invisible to us and we cannot experience his essence apart from
mediation.20 The problem with Enns’ approach is that he functionally dismisses God’s Old
Testament accommodation as both immoral and inaccurate. (I will have more to say about
accommodation later.)
The dismissal of these texts as both morally backward and non-historical is the natural
16
17
18
19
20
Ibid., 45.
Ibid., 54ff.
Ibid., 60.
Institutes 2.11.13. This idea is sometimes referred to as “condescension”; for example, see Charles Spurgeon’s
use of the term (“condescends”) in his sermon, “A Door Opened in Heaven,” preached August 22, 1896,
http://www.spurgeongems.org/vols13-15/chs887.pdf (accessed 3/10/15)
As stated or implied in Exodus 33:20; Job 9:11; John 1:18, 5:37; Romans 1:20; Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 11:27;
1 Timothy 6:16; 1 John 4:12; etc.
outworking of Enns’ rejection of the historical, orthodox doctrine of inerrancy, which he
describes as follows:
Many Christians have been taught that the Bible is Truth downloaded from
heaven, God’s rulebook, a heavenly instruction manual--follow the directions and out
pops a true believer; deviate from the script and God will come crashing down on you
with full force.
If anyone challenges this view, the faithful are taught to “defend the Bible” against
these anti-God attacks. Problem solved.
That is, until you actually read the Bible. Then you see that this rulebook view of
the Bible is like a knockoff Chanel handbag--fine as long as it’s kept at a distance, away
from curious and probing eyes.
What I discovered, and what I want to pass along to you in this book, is that this
view of the Bible does not come from the Bible but from an anxiety over protecting the
Bible and so regulating the faith of those who read it.
Why do I say this? The Bible tells me so.
...
When you read the Bible on its own terms, you discover that it doesn’t behave
itself like a holy rulebook should. It is definitely inspiring and uplifting--it wouldn’t have
the shelf life it does otherwise. But just as often it’s a challenging book that leaves you
with more questions than answers.
For one thing, you don’t have to go beyond the first two books of the Bible,
Genesis and Exodus, to find stories that are hard to take at face value and read more like
scripts for a fairy tale.21
Enns proceeds to reference some of the most famous stories of the Pentateuch: Adam and Eve in
the Garden, the crossing of the Red Sea, God visiting with Abraham (presumably), etc. Of these
21
Ibid., 3-4. Layout original.
stories, he claims: “If we read these sorts of episodes outside of the Bible, from another ancient
culture, we wouldn’t blink an eye. We’d know right away we were dealing with the kinds of
stories people wrote long ago and far away, not things that happened, and certainly nothing to
invest too much of ourselves in.”22
From a pastoral perspective, my concern with Enns’ approach is that it is all too
American, too influenced by the dominant modes of Western (mostly academic) thought. He acts
as if it is only conservatives who bring extra-Biblical assumptions to the Bible, yet it should be
no surprise that certain segments of our highly secularized society would find claims of the
supernatural to be patently ridiculous. His approach takes for granted that our intuitions about
these texts are mostly reliable. And so Enns’ view is inherently imperialistic, rooted in a
provincial mode of Enlightenment discourse. Why automatically privilege our Anglo-Saxon
ideas of what counts as outlandish over those of a Viking in the eighth century or a Jew in the
Second Temple period? Given that the Bible claims what it does, we should not read such texts
exclusively on our own terms. We should be instead ready to critically examine our
epistemological and hermeneutical approaches to the Word of God. In other words, my concern
with Enns is not so much that he criticizes conservative approaches (even though there are
difficulties with these), but that he is inconsistent in applying his own methodology.
Furthermore, who exactly is Enns’ target? I know of no Biblical scholars, or even any
laypersons, who take this input-output approach to the Bible. While I imagine people like this
exist somewhere, it seems unfair to characterize proponents of traditional inerrancy in this way,
especially since Enns should be familiar with what these proponents actually believe given his
time at Westminster Theological Seminary. The rhetoric is almost political, where vague
22
Ibid., 4.
descriptions become placeholders for the readers’ imagined stereotypes, the kind of exercise that
is meant to reinforce existing prejudice rather than promote meaningful analysis or dialogue. And
Enns takes a similar approach to the laws of the Old Testament:
Another challenging part for Christian readers who see the Bible as an unerring rulebook
is the many laws God gave the Israelites on Mount Sinai (with Moses as the go-between).
These laws are at the heart and center of Israel’s story, the Old Testament, which makes
up three-fourths of the Christian Bible. But for Christians many of these laws are
completely out of touch with their day-to-day spiritual reality, and it’s hard to know
whether we should take them seriously or move along without making eye contact.
Animals are sacrificed on a regular basis to appease God, with very specific instructions
given by God about what kind of animals and when to sacrifice them to keep him calm.
Other laws are just plain weird. Wet dreams, contact with mold and bodily discharges,
and eating pork, dolphin, and lobster make you “unclean,” an ancient notion about being
unfit to be in the company of God and fellow Israelites. The blind, disfigured,
hunchbacked, dwarfed, and those with crushed testicles (I suppose it could happen) are
barred from the priesthood. Strictly speaking, the Americans with Disabilities Act is
unbiblical.23
These are the sorts of comments you would expect to resonate with a millennial raised in
a nominally Christian home or an atheist who gets his information about Christianity from the
rarefied discourse of an Internet blog; they seem irresponsible coming from someone as educated
and experienced as Enns. There are many Christian scholars who have demonstrated how these
laws, or the principles behind them, apply to modern Christian contexts; the whole discipline of
Christian ethics seems to frequently handle this subject. Furthermore, many of these laws would
23
Ibid., 5.
have made sense in an ancient near Eastern context, particularly because they directly modified
or overturned standard ancient near Eastern moral and social expectations. (This is to say nothing
of how their fulfillment brings about a deeper appreciation for the life and ministry of Jesus.)
Enns’ approach to Old Testament law suffers the same Anglo-Saxon privilege as his approach to
its narrative accounts. It does nothing to overcome the initial shock we have with the Bible’s
weirdness. Ironically, this reinforces ignorance of the Pentateuch, rather than supporting Enns’
goal of freeing people to understand it in a more meaningful and fulfilling way. Enns shackles
the Bible with provincial cultural expectations as much as any staunch conservative might.
This approach is beset by yet another difficulty: it seems increasingly likely that
demographic challenges to Christianity will result in a Western world that judges the
Resurrection of Jesus an absurd violation of the laws of physics. Should we privilege those who
think the Resurrection is “just plain weird” or immoral and not worth the investment?24 We
should not let cultural expectations of Scripture determine our interpretations of it, for we may
quickly find there is hardly any Bible left to interpret.
The whole book strikes me as a false dichotomy. It is an illusion to think that moving
from orthodoxy to liberalism leads to a vibrant, exciting journey with God, as if conservatives
never question and liberals are the only ones on, as it were, an adventure with God. (What does
Enns make of books such as The God I Don’t Understand by Christopher J. H. Wright?) Liberal
views of the Bible are not new; to take a phrase from politics, “Today’s liberals are tomorrow’s
conservatives.” With some exceptions in evangelical circles, the majority of Christian
scholarship today already holds Enns’ nineteenth century view of the Bible. The results of taking
24
Consider ancient Greek objections to the Resurrection grounded in a low view of the physical body. For an
opposing opinion on classical Greek views of body, soul and resurrection, cf. Outi Lehtipuu, Debates of the
Dead: Constructing Early Christian Identity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), 61ff.
this scholarship seriously have proved to be disappointing. It is not always clear how Christians
can best obtain spiritual vibrancy. But whatever we might say on this subject, draining the Bible
of its orthodoxy is of no help.
Both the Bible and sociology make quite clear that we are the product first of our families
and then of our friends. Regular gatherings with other Christians, in a context that reinforces the
values and beliefs of Christianity, are essential to maintaining a strong prayer and devotional life.
I would suggest that much of the liberal scholarship on offer by Enns has led to the end of
meaningful Christianity, rather than its revitalization, as God is softened and all his offensive
parts are blunted, ignored or washed away. It leads to the functional deism so well described by
sociologist Christian Smith.25 In appealing to myth to neutralize his moral qualm with the Bible,
Enns trades one difficulty for a system beset with them.
There is a more basic problem with Enns’ evaluation: it is not even clear that the Old
Testament accounts can be rightly dismissed as genocide.
25
Christian Smith, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 2005).
Does the Bible Condone Genocide?
Before we can evaluate whether the Bible promotes genocide (and for the moment I will
sidestep knotty questions of historicity and rhetoric and assume the holy war texts are accurate in
what they claim to command and describe), we need to determine just what we mean by the
term. Genocide is terrible. However, there exists some variance in the definition, both in popular
use and scholarly articulation. This can lead to difficulties in evaluating whether the Old
Testament actually contains episodes of divinely sanctioned genocide. Far from a technicality, an
overview of important definitions is necessary to determine whether Christians can differentiate
between the Israelite annihilation of the Canaanites and Hitler’s attempted eradication of the
Jews. Let us review three important scholarly approaches to classifying genocide.
(1) The Lemkin Definition
One of the first major studies of genocide was conducted by twentieth century scholar
Raphael Lemkin.26 (An attorney by trade, Lemkin fled Warsaw during World War II in order to
escape the holocaust. Much of his family did not survive: forty-nine family members, including
his parents and brother, were murdered during World War II.27) Lemkin defined genocide as a
two-phase phenomenon:
Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group;
the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn,
may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain or upon the
26
27
For a collection of his edited works, see Lemkin on Genocide, ed. Steven L. Jacobs (Plymouth, United Kingdom:
Lexington Books, 2012). Lemkin is also credited as the first person to use the term “genocide.” See also William
Schabas, “Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” 1,
http://legal.un.org/avl/pdf/ha/cppcg/cppcg_e.pdf (accessed 2/3/2015).
Ibid., viii.
territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization by the oppressor’s
own nationals.28
Lemkin goes on to identify several ways in which national patterns can be imposed, based on the
example of Nazi Germany’s conduct toward conquered European countries: the right to self-rule
is revoked, replaced with an external government; local laws and courts are abolished in favor of
a foreign system of justice; local language is banned or restricted; schools are forced to teach
curriculum in keeping with foreign standards; the populace is subjected to economic hardship to
reduce the number of undesirables; policies supporting mass extermination are promoted and
implemented; religious buildings and authorities, which are viewed as ideological competitors,
are marginalized or destroyed; individual and selfish pleasure is promoted (through pornography,
alcohol, etc.) to prevent or deter nationalistic fervor or social pride.29 It is nothing less than the
systemic destruction of a group’s cultural preferences at every conceivable level.
(2) Cultural Genocide
Another definition of genocide is found in Lawrence Davidson’s work studying the
causes of cultural genocide:
When we speak of cultural genocide we are not referring to the global nature of the fastfood industry, the homogenizing of clothing styles along Western lines, or the apparent
persistent desire of millions of people of non-European backgrounds to migrate to the
United States or the European Union. Rather we are interested in purposeful destructive
targeting of out-group cultures so as to destroy or weaken them in the process of conquest
or domination...Culture is a bounded paradigm that flows from the customs and traditions
28
29
As cited in Rebecca Frey, Genocide and International Justice (New York, NY: Facts On File, 2009), 162.
Ibid., 162-166.
of local and regional venues.30
Davidson see cultural genocide as distinct from physical genocide and offers several examples of
what he considers the destruction of an out-group’s culture: American treatment of the Native
Americans; Russian treatment of Jews during the nineteenth century; the modern conflict
between Israel and Palestine; and the Chinese assimilation of Tibet. I have included this
definition of genocide because not all people use the term in a strictly legal sense.
(3) International Law
Finally, Article II of the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide (ICPPGG) defines genocide as:
any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnic, racial or religious group, such as: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing
serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the
group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in
part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly
transferring children of the group to another group.31
Did the Israelites Engage in Genocide?
As is apparent, whether the Bible can be charged with genocide depends on how the term
is defined. For example, Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan, two prominent apologists, have
attempted a defense of the Old Testament by appealing to the ICPPGG definition and relevant
30
31
Lawrence Davidson, Cultural Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 1, 5.
“Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CrimeOfGenocide.aspx (accessed 2/3/2015).
legal background.32 Their approach is based primarily on whether condition (c) of the statute
applies due to the intent of the Israelites. They claim that legal definitions of genocide require a
“double intention” whereby not only must one of the listed acts be committed, but it must be
done so with intent to physically destroy the targeted group, in part or in whole.33 Their appeal to
the legalities of intention, which seems prima facie successful, is predicated on a particular
rhetorical understanding of the Canaanite massacre where the text does not actually advocate the
physical annihilation of any group, but rather seeks to mitigate the criminal influence of the
Canaanites. While I will critique this strategy in greater detail below, it is sufficient to note that
the question of genocide also turns on how the texts themselves are interpreted. There is no
automatic presumption that any two people will interpret them in the same way.
Craig Blomberg is another scholar who denies that these accounts teach genocide.34 He
argues that the only offensive war Israel ever fought was to enter the Promised Land; all others
were defensive. He also notes that recent archaeological discoveries show that of the few cities
targeted by Joshua, most of them were actually military encampments, similar to modern military
bases. This seems to negate the idea that Israel’s intent was simply to destroy every Canaanite in
existence and that they regularly annihilated entire communities.
In addition to the archaeological evidence, the narrative of the Pentateuch is complicated
with the celebration of Rahab, the Canaanite prostitute who aided the Israelite spies (Joshua 2).
The fact that a Canaanite (who was sexually impure by the standards of the Mosaic covenant)
and her family were spared indicates that the Israelites were not targeting the Canaanites for
32
33
34
See the discussion in Copan and Flanagan, Did God Really Command Genocide?, 126ff.
Ibid. 126-127.
Craig Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible: An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions
(Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2014), 3.
some intrinsic racial trait. If the targeting was due to intrinsic attributes, there would have been
no action available to Rahab to avoid annihilation. It is also clear from several places in the
Pentateuch that the Israelites were to treat foreigners living in or traveling through their lands
with the same standards of justice with which they were to govern themselves.35 There is no hint
of racial or ethnic superiority, no proto-Israeli Ubermensch, which seems to be a necessary
historical precursor to genocide.
Can Genocide Be Indiscriminate?
Perhaps the most difficult challenge to anyone mounting a charge of genocide is that the
Israelites were later given the same treatment as the Canaanites. God exiles the Israelites in a
manner quite similar to how the Israelites “exiled” the Canaanites from the land, and for the
same reason: sin and unholiness. Is it possible for systemic actions of genocide to target
members of the same race or ethnicity? This seems false on the face of it.
Given these facts, is it still possible to say that the Old Testament accounts are genocide
proper? Even on a strict reading that does not exempt the account from large scale destruction, it
seems difficult to do so. Perhaps the best case would be to appeal to definitions that require the
elimination of culture, since Canaanite life was inextricably linked to its religious beliefs and
practices and the Israelites are commanded to eradicate foreign idol worship from the land. But
this seems significantly weaker than what is usually implied by the use of a term like genocide.
As Westerners, we might find it distasteful to eliminate the religious practice of a group from our
lands, and doubly so when it involves killing those who resist, but that seems hardly the same as
eliminating an entire population or people group because aggressors view them as racially
35
Blomberg cites, among others, Exodus 20:10; 23:9-12; Leviticus 16:29; 17:8-15; 19:33-34.
inferior. If the term genocide is expanded to include ever more situations where some group is
eliminated, regardless of the size of the group or the motivations behind the elimination, it leads
to a kind of lexical bloat where morally troubling examples of actual genocide are conflated with
less troubling or, perhaps, simply morally ambiguous cases of military or civilian conflict (or
even cases of conflict where no physical violence takes place.) (Consider how the elimination of
radical jihadists, which likely few in the West find morally objectionable, could constitute
“cultural genocide.”) Like the overuse of the term racism in modern politics, ever expanding
definitions of genocide will have a pernicious effect on public discourse and moral reasoning.
Simplistic or inaccurate uses of the term will conflate unlike cases, diminishing the usefulness of
the word genocide in describing true evil.
However, even if it can be proven conclusively that the Old Testament holy war accounts
are not instances of genocide proper, it hardly obviates the moral difficulties of these passages.36
Whatever term we choose, we are left with accounts that describe the complete and utter
destruction of entire communities (even if small ones), including their material possessions.
36
Some critics have also suggested that the Israelite action counts as ethnic cleansing. The Oxford Handbook of
Genocide Studies compares ethnic cleansing with genocide; its definition does not fit the Canaanite accounts
simply because the goal was not ethnic homogeneity: “In October 1992, the UN Security Council requested that
the Secretary General appoint a Commission of Experts to investigate reports of expulsion, deportation, and
violence against individuals and property in the former Yugoslavia and especially in Bosnia Herzegovina. The
Commission in a first interim report in February 1993 determined: ‘Considered in the context of the conflicts in
the former Yugoslavia, “ethnic cleansing” means rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or
intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.’” Benjamin Lieberman, “Ethnic Cleansing versus
Genocide?” The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 44.
Did God Really Command Genocide?
Recent conservative attempts to respond to God’s commands to the Israelites concerning
the Canaanites have focused on the language of the text, particularly the nature of the rhetoric
behind the extermination language. These are approaches that assume the general reliability of
the text; they attempt to interpret and respond to the Canaanite extermination accounts by
discerning authorial intent. Perhaps the best treatment of this subject is the recent monograph by
Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide?37 A detailed and
scholarly attempt to address whether the God of the Old Testament commanded genocide against
the Canaanites, it builds on Paul Copan’s previous title, Is God a Moral Monster?38 This is one
of the most thorough treatments of the moral difficulties associated with the Canaanite conquest
and it enjoys heavyweight endorsements (Tremper Longman III, William Lane Craig, Gordon
Wenham, John Goldingay, and Christopher J.H. Wright, among others). Like Enns’ title, I will
not be reviewing the entire work, although it should be obvious that much of Copan and
Flanagan’s defense of the Old Testament holy war passages is directly relevant to our concerns.
Copan and Flannagan open part one of their book by outlining and reformulating atheist
philosopher Raymond Bradley’s argument (a reductio ad absurdum which they take to be
representative of arguments of this type) against using the Bible as a reliable guide for moral
choices. Bradley bases his argument on the principle that it is “morally wrong to deliberately and
mercilessly slaughter men, women, and children who are innocent of any serious wrongdoing.”39
He then claims that the Bible does in fact tell us to do exactly that, and that this command is
tantamount to genocide.
37
38
39
Did God Really Command Genocide? Coming to Terms with the Justice of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker
Books, 2014).
Is God a Moral Monster: Making Sense of the Old Testament God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2011).
Did God Really Command Genocide?, 17.
Copan and Flannagan’s response is quite detailed but can be split into two distinct
approaches (this categorization is my own). The first is focused on what I would call the internal
critique, where the arguments are meant to show how, on a broadly Christian worldview, the
extermination of the Canaanites is morally compatible with Christian beliefs about God’s
goodness. Copan and Flannagan marshal several arguments toward this end, although I find their
most important contribution is fundamentally a rhetorical strategy: discussing the nature of
divine speech-acts and how ancient near East conquest rhetoric functioned in practice. They also
argue that there are extreme situations in which it is appropriate (if still deeply troubling) to kill
innocent people.
The second approach deals with what might be called an external critique of Christianity.
Here critics are concerned with whether the violence of the Old Testament can justify similar
violence in the modern age. I am less interested in the second set of concerns mainly because
they seem mostly directed toward non-believers and skeptics, and only indirectly serve the
pastoral function of nurturing the spiritual lives of believers.
Divine Speech-Acts and Ancient Near Eastern Conquest Rhetoric
In their rhetorical strategy, Copan and Flannagan first make modifications to Bradley’s
argument by distinguishing between the human and divine authors of Scripture. Drawing on
comments from Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Copan and
Flannagan make a distinction between what one author of Scripture might have said and what
God means to express thorough that author. A paradigmatic example is Psalm 137, where the
author longs for the violent death of his enemies’ infant children. Drawing on William Lane
Craig’s discussion:
Such a psalm reminds us about honestly expressing our emotions, such as rage or despair,
in our prayers about where we should look for justice. And while psalmists may utilize
hyperbole and strong speech in the midst of their white-hot rage, they are expressing the
very biblical desire for justice to be done--that God repay people according to their deeds,
as martyrs do in Revelation 6:9-10. However the believer approaches such psalms,
Craig’s approach nicely illustrates how God’s being the author of the Bible does not mean
he endorses everything that the human author expresses.40
Further distinctions are employed through Wolterstorff’s speech-act theory, which
identifies three modes of speaking: (1) locutionary act, which is essentially the phonetic artifacts
or written symbols associated with language; (2) illocutionary act, an action encased in the
speech, such as giving a command or asserting a proposition; and, (3) perlocutionary act, which
constitutes the response to the illocutionary act.41 On this model, God is seen as speaking
through illocutionary acts. The discussion then continues to the mechanics of God’s speech-acts
as realized through a double agency discourse model. Here God delegates certain agents to speak
on his behalf, as well as appropriates an agent’s language for his own purposes.
Much of this discussion is to lay groundwork for Copan and Flannagan’s defense in
subsequent chapters, which claims that the rhetoric of extermination was part of standard ancient
near Eastern conquest hyperbole. There is not too much to disagree with in this initial discussion,
since the principle of distinguishing between divinely recorded human action and divinely
approved human action is clear in other parts of the Old Testament, such as where the patriarchs
or monarchs of Israel engage in morally dubious behavior which is explicitly condemned by God
(e.g., 2 Samuel 12:1-15). It is even present in the New Testament where Jesus interprets some
divine commands as accommodations rather than strict reflections of approved moral principles
40
41
Ibid., 22.
Ibid., 25.
(e.g., his comments on divorce in Matthew 19:8). However, while philosophically astute, I am
unsure how much of this discussion is necessary to reach the critical issues surrounding the Old
Testament “genocide” texts. Perhaps this is just the nature of the subject, which may require
touching on a number of related fields (theology, ethics, philosophy, history, etc.) in order to do
justice to one main issue (genocide), but this approach raises a number of thorny hermeneutical
issues, such as how we can determine when and to what extent God approves of appropriated
speech-acts, as well as how we can apply these approvals to modern life (difficulties which
Copan and Flannagan acknowledge). It might have been sufficient to state that broadly orthodox
Christian theology makes distinctions between what the Bible records and what God commands,
rather than diving into concepts such as Wolterstorff’s categories of speech-act theory.
I also do not understand how this appeal functions on a strategic level; it is not as if the
apparent genocide commands change if we note that God does not always endorse what his
divinely appropriated agents speak or write, for it appears that God really does issue these
morally problematic commands. Passages like Deuteronomy 20:10-18 appear in the context of a
rather clearly approved set of divine speech-acts, and so seem unaffected by this approach. It
seems that the only way in which this distinction can be successfully employed is to claim that
the author(s) of passages like Deuteronomy 20:10-18 were mistaken in attributing these
commands to God or that the recorded events are a mythological crust which overlay the
(perhaps inaccessible) historical events of what we now call the exodus and conquest narratives.
For all the conceptual machinery on offer here, we are still left with the very difficult fact that
God commanded the extermination of entire communities.
Conquest Rhetoric and Hagiography
The main force of Copan and Flannagan’s rhetorical strategy comes in chapters seven
through nine. Here the argument centers on the use of ancient near Eastern conquest rhetoric,
where broad, sweeping statements of extermination or annihilation are hyperbolic as opposed to
literal. This approach is attractive inasmuch as it suggests Christians can hold to the inerrancy (or
general historical reliability) of the Old Testament while also avoiding the charge of “genocide.”
Copan and Flannagan draw heavily upon philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff in this
section. They begin with his observation that there exists a tension between earlier parts of
Joshua, which utilizes broad extermination language to describe the defeat of the Canaanites in
various geographical locations, and the latter half of Joshua and the early part of Judges, which
describe the Canaanites continuing to occupy some of the same areas.42 While critical scholars
interpret this discrepancy as a contradiction, Copan and Flannagan instead see the tension as the
result of ancient near Eastern conquest rhetoric:
Joshua as we have it today, then, occurs in a literary context in which the language of
“killing all who breathed,” “putting all inhabitants to the sword,” and “leaving no
survivors” is followed up by a narrative that affirms straightforwardly that the Canaanites
were not literally wiped out or exterminated in this manner. Moreover, the text of Joshua
itself mixes and juxtaposes these two pictures of the entrance into Canaan. If one reads
the whole narrative as a sequence, these are not subtle contrasts; they are, in
Wolterstorff’s words, “flamboyant” ones.43
So while the accounts in Judges appear as “down-to-earth history,” the passages in Joshua
referring to “leaving alive none that breathes” and “putting all inhabitants to the sword”
appear in contexts full of ritualistic, stylized, formulaic language. It therefore looks like
something other than a mere literal description of what occurred...Judges should be taken
literally, whereas Joshua is hagiographic history, a highly stylized account of the events
42
43
Ibid., 85ff.
Ibid., 89-90.
designed to teach theological and moral points rather than to describe in detail what
literally happened.44
As I understand it, Copan and Flannagan make the following exegetical observations:
 the rhetoric of Joshua is a (qualified) hagiography with theological and rhetorical
qualities that are not intended to be historically precise
 this rhetoric is intended to bring about fear and obedience in Israel’s enemies
 this exaggeration applies to (among others) the recorded numerical counts of the
deceased, implying not everyone was eliminated
 the death toll can be further reduced when we understand that the “cities” to be destroyed
were actually (small) strategic military centers with tiny populations
At this point I have to wonder whether this rhetorical strategy actually accomplishes all
that much. If the purpose of these exaggerations is to engage in a kind of (qualified) hagiography,
doesn’t that suggest the author valued a land cleansed of the Canaanites? For in hagiography we
attempt to draw a portrait which reflects the best qualities or accomplishments of the subject.
Would the author or editor of Joshua exaggerate an outcome he did not value? (And how is this
morally distinguishable from propaganda?) Furthermore, it seems that Israel was to serve as a
sacred space where God’s presence would dwell, a microcosm of heaven in which absolutely no
unholiness would be tolerated, including the sinful religious beliefs and practices of the
Canaanite population. On this view, the distinction between hyperbole and literalism loses much
of its force, for the values expressed by the text on either reading include a vision of the world
where the ideal is religious exclusivism and theocratic rule.
44
Ibid., 95.
It seems unlikely that this approach can overturn the deep moral concerns many
Westerners have with this text. Imagine a man burns down a maternity ward. As he is being
dragged to the police car, he catches sight of a group of wailing mothers. Full of glee, he boasts
how he “roasted every damn baby in the place.” Would anyone find him less revolting if it turns
out he only killed a third of them?
I am not suggesting that Copan and Flannagan provide the rhetorical approach as some
kind of silver bullet. Yet I do not think it can provide even modest help if we consider the values
reflected in these rhetorical exaggerations. The values expressed by the text seem almost entirely
the same whether or not everyone was actually annihilated.
A Western Problem?
A major difficulty with our reading of these texts—by which I mean both our intellectual
grasp of its content and an emotional appreciation for its order, beauty and justice—arises from
our cultural distance to the Old Testament. We live in a highly stable, materially prosperous era
of history. Consider how different my life, as a Westerner, is from that of someone living in the
ancient near East:

Instead of potentially spending hours each day finding fresh water, I can turn on
one of several faucets inside my home.

The amount of clothing I own is such that my outfit selections are governed by
aesthetic rather than survival concerns.

Electricity provides my home with both a regular temperature and consistent
lighting.

I have so much food in my refrigerator I can choose what I want to eat and freely
dispense of what I don’t. I do not fear famine, pestilence or weather ruining my
crop output. I do not even have to farm for my own food.

In the event I “run out” of food, I can drive less than a mile to replenish my stock
from hundreds of agricultural products from all around the world.

Medicine has progressed to the point where I can avoid most diseases and almost
all treatment is relatively painless.

I do not fear my wife dying in childbirth or half my children dying before the age
of five.

I may lock my doors at night, but I never fear roving bandits who might at any
time kill me, plunder my home and take my wife and children as slaves.

I do not wonder which of many local deities needs to be appeased in order for my
crops to grow or see my enemies defeated.
We live in a world where the most difficult moral choices range from how to respond to
someone who cuts me off in rush hour traffic to what trinket, gadget or toy I will spend my next
paycheck on. We do not face the constant threat of poverty, famine, disease or war. And perhaps
this is why we have some difficulty understanding the morality of the Old Testament. We do not
know what it is like to make (sometimes gut wrenching) decisions within such a context, let
alone how God might best govern a people living in such circumstances.
How do people organize themselves when there is a constant threat of poverty, famine,
disease or war? Consider three stories that illustrate how such cultures handled conflict and
violence:
In present day [1984] Montenegro, homicidal feuds are common and can be triggered by
a single insult or argument. After a first killing, members of the victim’s group consider a
retaliation murder not only morally permissible but morally necessary. The target does
not have to be the original murderer or even a relative; it is considered appropriate to kill
any member of the offender’s group, no matter what their connection to the offense or the
offender.
...
The chieftain Hrafnkels, star of the medieval Icelandic saga Hrafnkels, is ambushed at his
farm. A rival named Sam tortures Hrafnkels and steals his farm and chieftaincy. Hrafnkels
moves east and does not retaliate for six years, suffering the mockery of a servant woman
washing clothes by a stream: “The old proverb is very true,” she says, “a man gets more
cowardly as he ages.” Goaded by the woman, he finally retaliates. But his target is not
Sam, the man who tortured him and led the ambush on the farm. Rather, it is Sam’s
brother Eyvind, who has returned to Iceland after being away for seven years. Living
abroad has raised Eyvind’s status; he is considered “greater than chieftains.” Hrafnkels
kills Eyvind and reclaims his farm. When Sam appeals to his patrons to prosecute
Hrafnkels for murdering his brother, they refuse, claiming that the revenge was justified.
Eyvind was a “greater man” than Sam, and was therefore a suitable target for retaliation.
Even though he left Iceland more than one year before the ambush and had nothing to do
with its planning or execution, his kinship with Sam, and his high status, made him liable
for the offense.
...
Agamemnon is playing against a stacked deck. He is a member of the house of Atreus,
which the Gods have cursed because of the actions of Agamemnon’s great-grandfather
Tantalus. During the Trojan War, Zeus sends Ate (extreme emotion) upon Agamemnon,
overwhelming his better judgment and causing him to start a disastrous quarrel with
Achilles. The quarrel leads to many deaths, and the other warriors hold Agamemnon
responsible in spite of his lack of control. Agamemnon himself deems it necessary to
compensate Achilles for having provoked him. But this is only the beginning of
Agamemnon’s terrible moral luck. Later, in order to fulfill the will of Zeus and attack
Troy, he has no choice but to sacrifice his daughter to appease the Goddess Artemis. Once
again, Zeus sends Ate upon him to hasten the event. Nevertheless, Agamemnon is held
responsible by his wife, Clytemnestra, who kills him in a bathtub when he returns
home.45
These moral accounts arise in cultures ordered primarily along on an honor and shame
dynamic (usually identified as “honor cultures”).46 Such cultures, which exist everywhere from
the Middle East to inner city gangs, tend to lack powerful, centralized law enforcement structures
and have limited material goods. Without a strong government and the constant threat of losing
what little resources are available, social stability is maintained through credible threats of
violence; offended parties are pressured by a sense of tribal pride to take swift and effective
retaliatory action against any individual who causes offense (e.g., stealing cattle, murdering a
family member). This retaliation can be directed against not only the offender, but anyone who
45
46
Tamler Sommers, Relative Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 34-35.
Sommers draws on sociological literature to distinguish between honor and shame cultures, and he further
distinguishes shame culture from guilt culture. These distinctions are important for understanding non-Western
cultures, but not necessary for the purposes of understanding the specific cultural context of the Old Testament
holy war texts. For an Evangelical treatment of this kind of sociological phenomenon, see Roland Muller, Honor
and Shame: Unlocking the Door (Birmingham, UK: Xilbris, 2000).
belongs to his family, clan or tribe. Swift, deadly responses could then create a deterrent to future
attempts at murder or theft.
However, it would be a mistake to interpret this behavior along purely pragmatic lines. As
is the case with Hrafnkels, retaliation was not primarily a deterrent, even if it was a byproduct.
Offended parties in honor cultures really do believe some moral violation has occurred and that
this moral violation can be remedied by targeting someone other than the original offender.
It is important to remember that the corporate view of morality described in these stories
is fairly distinct from what the Old Testament necessarily morally prescribes. There is a robust
line of individual responsibility within the Pentateuch (and the Old Testament more generally
contains many strong critiques of ancient near Eastern traditionalist moral practices and
institutions). This is especially apparent in Ezekiel 18, where God, through the prophet Ezekiel,
makes explicit what was already strongly implied throughout the Old Testament: that the
Israelites are not responsible for the sins of their parents (whose particular follies brought
Ezekiel’s audience into exile!), but each Israelite will be judged on the basis of whether he or she
individually responds to God’s call to repentance.47
That said, the corporate way of viewing the world would have been the social context
into which much of the Old Testament was written. Men and women at the time would likely
have had little concern with whether someone who had yet been born could be targeted in
response to some particular sin of their grandparents. As Tamler Sommers observes, in this kind
of culture, “agents need not have control over an act in order to be deemed fair and morally
appropriate targets of blame and retaliation. Consider the practice of collective punishment—
47
For an extensive discussion of divine justice and individual responsibility in Ezekiel 18, see Daniel Block, The
Book of Ezekiel: Chapters 1-24 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 554ff.
retaliation against people who played no part in committing the offense that is to be avenged.”48
We may be aghast at such moral thinking, but we need to ask whether our moral
intuitions are always right. And if our moral intuitions are not infallible, we should be willing to
question at least some of them. For many groups feel quite strongly about their moral impulses,
even though many deeply held moral impulses are incompatible; they cannot all be right. We
must offer sufficient reasons for claiming our moral views as superior to those we are rejecting.
And if we are tempted to fall back on the idea that our moral intuitions are universally binding or
self-evidently true, it turns out that Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic people
(what are known as “WEIRD” people in sociological parlance) are statistical outliers: “they are
the least typical, least representative people you could study if you want to make generalizations
about human nature. Even within the West, Americans are more extreme outliers than Europeans,
and within the United States, the educated upper middle class…is most unusual of all.”49 Unlike
the rest of the world, WEIRD culture is profoundly individualistic and autonomous. This is even
reflected in its main philosophers, Kant and Mill, who “generated moral systems that are
individualistic, rule-based, and universalist. That’s the morality you need to govern a society of
autonomous individuals.”50
Given our demographic status in the world, is there some compelling reason to privilege
our moral view of the world? The Bible tends to hold a fairly strong view of collective
responsibility, one that is compatible (at least in key respects) with a view of justice where some
members of a group can be punished for sins committed by other members of the same group. A
48
49
50
Ibid., 48. Sommers goes on to describe some tribal societies that have engaged in collective punishment /
retaliation.
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York, NY:
Pantheon Books, 2012),112.
Ibid., 113.
prime example of this is the atonement, where Christ, who is innocent, is punished for the sins of
others. Another is the preservation of all of Rahab’s family (Joshua 2), as mentioned earlier. If
we automatically dismiss Old Testament ethical systems as false, we might find it difficult to
believe that Christ took God’s divine wrath in our place, even though he did not deserve this
punishment.51
I am not suggesting that we should emulate honor culture dynamics. Nor am I suggesting
that honor cultures are morally acceptable in every aspect (far from it). In fact, the Bible is highly
critical of the violent cycles of revenge that tend to characterize societies based on dimensions of
honor and shame. Two prominent examples are the negative characterization of Lamech, the
archetype of an honor culture warrior (Genesis 4), and the use of lex talonis (eye for eye) to
mitigate the propensity for honor societies to engage in retaliation (Exodus 21:24). That said,
there might be a space here to have a pluralism about moral systems. It may not be morally
wrong for some societies to order themselves along some limited honor/shame dynamics (as
tempered by the recommendations in the Bible, in particular the ultimate individual
responsibility apparent in Ezekiel 18). Again, this is far from suggesting that we should adopt
honor/shame dynamics. There is clearly something correct in saying we are responsible for our
own sins and that there are some clear conditions where it is wrong for one person to be punished
for the sins of another.52 (A prime example would be a court of law.)
There are many knotty issues here, and I have no intention of unwinding all of them.53
51
52
53
For a standard defense of the atonement, see Steve Jeffery, Michael Ovey and Andrew Sach, Pierced for Our
Transgressions (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007).
I do wonder if moral pluralism on this subject is possible along insider/outsider distinctions, as in Western
societies it seems we are all members of the same in-group through citizenship, so punishing one member of the
group for the sins (so to speak) of another would violate in-group solidarity. But such a discussion is beyond the
scope of this paper.
There is a substantial body of literature on issues of corporate responsibility and it seems most scholars are
against any kind of moral program that allows for the punishment of one individual for the crimes of another.
(And the Bible itself, at least in legal situations where a court is involved, seems to be against this sort of idea.
My purpose is much more limited. Many of the assumptions we take for granted as conditions
for moral responsibility have not been shared by other cultures, including ancient ones. That we
find something repulsive does necessarily mean it is repulsive. Furthermore, our revulsion does
not entail that there is no possible way someone could be responsible for something they
seemingly did not commit. We need to have a certainly humility, even detachment, when it
comes to our moral outrage. Just because we feel some action, situation or outcome could not
possibly be just or moral does not mean it must be unjust or immoral. If we do not take pains to
self-critically reflect on our moral intuition, we risk subjecting the Old Testament to our
ingrained, socially conditioned moral filter.
However, it seems to be the case that our moral intuitions are thoroughly entrenched and
may require a substantial amount of work to modify.
See Proverbs 17:26.) I have included some relevant titles in the bibliography.
The Problem of Empathy
Moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once observed that:
The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to
express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these
disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this just that
debates go on and on and on--although they do--but also that they apparently can find no
terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our
culture....From our rival conclusions we can argue back to our rival premises; but when
we do arrive at our premises argument ceases and the invocation of one premise against
another becomes a matter of pure assertion and counter-assertion. Hence perhaps the
slightly shrill tone of so much moral debate.54
Issued today, MacIntyre’s verdict would be something of an understatement. Modern political
and religious debate is characterized not by the exploration of opposing ideas or the pursuit of
consensus, but of polarization and demonization. In the face of threatening empirical or
philosophical evidence, partisans would rather turn to conspiracy theories than surrender a
cherished political or religious belief.55
Why is it that people engaged in ideological conflict seem imperious to facts and reason?
In his seminal work, The Righteous Mind, sociologist Jonathan Haidt claims this is due to how
we arrive at moral judgments.56 On Haidt’s account, moral judgments arrive intuitively, and only
54
55
56
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2007), 6, 8.
I am not suggesting that there is no transcendent standard, that our response to the Old Testament must be
cultural relativism. As MacIntyre argues in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1988), the liberal, Enlightenment model of moral thinking is insufficient as an objective,
universal standard. Based on MacIntyre’s argument, I believe it follows that Enlightenment morality should not
be used to adjudicate our moral interpretations of the Old Testament. While MacIntyre proposes a Thomistic
approach as a substitute for Enlightenment moral reasoning, I still prefer an Augustinian one.
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York, NY: Pantheon Books,
2012).
after they arise are they justified by rational deliberation. Haidt explains this by way of a
metaphor: an elephant and a rider. The elephant represents our moral intuition, which leans one
way or the other toward something it desires. The rider represents our rational faculty, which
helps guide the elephant toward its goal. The rider exists to serve the elephant, for it is the
elephant sets the general course.
On this view, intransigence is a function of how the mind justifies snap moral intuitions.
People are attracted to certain features in an idea, person or community, after which reason seeks
justifications for this preference. Contrary to classical expectations, the rational faculty is often
primarily a public relations entity rather than a disinterested explorer. It serves to convince
ourselves and others that our views are plausible and respectable. It does not actively seek out
and evaluate evidence that might disprove our intuitive preferences. In other words, we are
driven by confirmation bias.
According to Haidt, older psychological models sought to understand moral reasoning
through Platonic ideals of rationality. On Haidt’s explanation of these older models, “morality is
self-constructed by children on the basis of their experience with harm. Kids know that harm is
wrong because they hate to be harmed, and they gradually come to see that it is therefore wrong
to harm others, which leads them to understand fairness and eventually justice.”57 Drawing on
extensive scientific research, Haidt argues that this model cannot account for how people
actually engage in moral deliberation. In reality, moral actors often employ a kind of Humean
emotivism to arrive at moral beliefs, and are willing to claim these beliefs as true even in the face
of rational critique. (Hume famously argued that reason is the “slave of the passions.”) For
example, one experiment tested whether people would take a sip of apple juice into which a fully
57
Ibid., 29-30.
sterilized cockroach was dipped. Despite there being no risk of disease, many people refused,
citing a strong revulsion to the idea.58
In practice, this means many of the arguments we make about major political, social or
moral issues, which naturally include our evaluations of the Old Testament, are ways in which
we are trying to justify our own moral intuitions, to ourselves or others. Refutations of these
arguments usually fail at changing intuitive preferences, and so people merely search for other
justifications for their preferences. (This is all the more so when the arguments are demolished in
such a way that the opponent becomes suspicious of you or your motives.) Instead of addressing
the “rider,” arguments on controversial or difficult subjects need to “elicit new intuitions, not
new rationales.”59 People change their minds when they see an affectionate presentation, often
through a friendship, persuasion that moves them to sympathize with particular intuitions, so as
to nudge the “elephant” in a new direction. In fact, interpersonal relationships play an enormous
role in directing the elephant, for our moral intuitions are largely the product of our cultural
upbringing.
This is not to say a logical, rational approach to the Canaanite extermination (such as this
paper, which seeks to evaluate certain propositions in light of various historical facts or moral
systems) is necessarily at odds with an intuitive or pastoral perspective. Rational arguments are
critically important and should certainly be part of any meaningful approach to these passages.
However, we should understand the role reasons and arguments play in personal discourse: they
serve to confirm a certain narrative, not generally convince someone that another narrative is
right. Apologetic treatises alone will not move someone from the narrative that the God of the
Old Testament is untrustworthy or morally reprehensible. More is needed.
58
59
Ibid., 43-44.
Ibid., 56.
To reiterate, on earlier (and widely accepted) models of moral reasoning, moral
judgments were primarily the result of rational deliberation. On considering a moral question, the
mind would weigh varying concerns of fairness, harm, justice, etc. after which judgment was
rendered. While factors (such as sympathy) could affect this reasoning process, these were
understood as ancillary and ultimately subject to intellectual processes.60 But newer sociological
research has shown that people have a view of what is right or wrong prior to knowing why they
have that view and experimental data show that people continue to hold certain moral views even
if they cannot find any obvious, rational reasons to support them.
Narrative Changes and Shapes Moral Intuition
One of the most prominent recent examples of this principle at work is in the area of gay
marriage. Proponents of traditional marriage appealed to a wide range of arguments on the
subject, but these were ultimately irrelevant because they failed to grasp how people arrive at
moral judgments. What changed public opinion was a combination of older generations dying off
and younger generations being raised in a cultural and educational context in which gay and
lesbian couples were presented as normal human beings who share with us many of the same,
everyday difficulties and struggles.61 This narrative fit well into a culture that deeply believed in
personal sexual autonomy and increasingly denied the authority of God or the Bible. Attacks on
the rational reasons provided for gay marriage were too far downstream of its intuitive and
socially constructed causes.
Many of the modern, conservative refutations of secular objections to the Bible, including
objections based on the Canaanite passages, seem to appeal purely to rational, propositional
60
61
Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,”
Psychological Review, Vol. 108, No. 4, 814-834: http://www-socpsy.l.utokyo.ac.jp/karasawa/_src/sc1351/Haidt2028200129.pdf (accessed 3/10/15).
Consider the relevant polling data: http://www.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx (accessed 1/21/15)
content. As a strategic matter, this neglects the key sociological facts we have just discussed.
Narrative and rhetoric must play a role in initiating and aiding a journey to a new moral
perspective. This is why an approach like Copan and Flanagan’s can be mildly appreciated for
logical structure, but a popular level book like Enns’ can receive glowing praise simply because
it is better written (emphasis original):
I’m not sure how else to describe this book except to say that reading it is
an experience. Never have I encountered a book on biblical interpretation that manages to
be as simultaneously challenging and funny, uncomfortable and liberating, intellectually
rigorous and accessible, culturally significant and deeply personal. It’s a book that
invites the reader to really wrestle with Scripture, and it’s not for the faint of heart.62
And Enns’ book is an experience. It is filled with effective rhetorical devices, including credible
personal stories and a range of emotions. Until proponents of the moral rightness of the Old
Testament learn better rhetorical skills (i.e., learning to communicate as Jesus and Paul often
did), they risk losing credibility to speak to these issues.63 Christians struggling with the severity
of the Old Testament need a good, plausible, emotionally compelling narrative to serve as the
backdrop for all the good reasons we have to believe the God of the Old Testament is worthy of
worship. And these reasons need to be further grounded in an experiential knowledge of God,
particularly through the Gospel applied in the local church. I will outline what this might look
like at the end of the paper.
Rachel Held Evans, “Canaanites, Reality Checks, and Letting the Bible Out of the Box,”
http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/peter-enns-bible-tells-me-so (accessed 2/18/15).
63
Credibility is a rhetorical matter. I am not suggesting that simply improving presentation will change minds, even
if it might in some cases. Rather, it is a necessary, but insufficient condition of successfully persuading Christians
of the moral rightness of the Old Testament. Another condition is that we are participating in the life of the local
church and using this participation to empathize with the Old Testament’s moral universe.
62
Desensitizing Morals?
At this point someone might raise a common objection or concern: that all I am really
recommending is that we condition ourselves to view genocide as morally acceptable, and that
this (dangerous) attitude will lead consistent Christians everywhere to take up arms against those
who are unworthy of God’s holiness. (I offer this as a Christian objection, not a secular one. In
my personal experience, some Christians do worry about this, although they might not always
articulate it in public as aggressively as a critic of Christianity would.) I would reject that charge
for several reasons, but first let me say that this objection is more reasonable than ridiculous,
even if I do think it ultimately fails. For it is certainly the case that some Christians in history
have taken up arms against external enemies using the holy war texts as a justification (or a
pretext):
This ongoing identification between contemporary situations [e.g., the Crusades, the
elimination of the Native Americans, etc.] and the warring scenes of the Hebrew Bible is
a burden the tradition must guiltily bear. The particular violence of the Hebrew Scriptures
has inspired violence, has served as a model of and model for persecution, subjugation,
and extermination for millennia beyond its own reality. This alone makes study of the war
traditions of the Hebrew Scriptures a critical and important task.64
Now to the objection itself. First, whatever lessons for moral behavior (if any) can be
garnered from these Old Testament texts, it cannot straightforwardly support committing
genocide in a modern context. Past Christians who appropriated these texts were simply wrong.
64
Susan Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford University Press, 1993), 5. Niditch goes on to state that the
authors of the Old Testament did not have a uniform view of holy war. She views the authors of Chronicles and
Jonah, and some early Jewish writers, such as Josephus, as having a less enthusiastic attitude toward warfare.
There are no exegetical grounds for their strong identification with national Israel. Second, I do
not think the mere act of appreciating the moral values and social context of a text requires us to
emulate what is present in that text. Just because I find some action morally defensible and come
to a sympathetic understanding of that action, does not mean that I must therefore be prepared to
engage in that action, or even defend others who engage in that action, in highly similar
circumstances. It could be that the situation I find morally defensible is so unique in terms of its
historical and moral parameters that I do not see any way in which it could be emulated at a later
date. And this is how I view the holy war accounts, for the direction of the Bible makes it highly
unlikely that God will return with pillars of cloud and fire to lead a new nation, one that must
invade a certain part of some country to establish a theocratic state by first eliminating or
displacing unrepentant sinners within the targeted territory.
We cannot dismiss the Old Testament holy war texts simply because some Christians in
the past have gravely misused them. It is still necessary for us to understand the texts on their
own terms.
God and the Land
Any attempt to understand Old Testament ethical concerns, especially in relation to New
Testament practice, must include a careful look at two related issues: the theology of land present
throughout the Old Testament and the centrality of the book of Deuteronomy. Furthermore, as a
matter of basic hermeneutics, there are several steps between reading these text and determine if
they apply to us today; we first need to understand how the Israelites interpreted the holy war
accounts.
Territorial Deities and Divine Acommodation
In the ancient near East, pagan deities were viewed as territorial beings with local and
specific powers over certain people groups or areas. Some classic examples are the gods of
Egypt, which presided over, for example, various aspects of agricultural life. Pagans also
believed that when one city or nation went to war with another, the gods of each respective
people were engaged in a spiritual conflict, the outcome of which was reflected in the results of
battle.65
Rather than simply outright rejecting this land/god framework as false (even though it
was), God used the pagan understanding of spiritual and physical conflict to make statements
about both the deficiency of their idols and the superiority of God’s character and law. Consider
the symbolic and religious import of the crossing of the Jordan and how a pagan would have
interpreted this event:
65
For example, “the fight between Umma and Lagash over the field of Ningirsu was depicted as a struggle
between the main gods of the two cities, Shara of Umma and Ningirsu of Lagash. This may be the earliest clear
example of a holy war, in which the struggle for some agriculturally productive land was depicted as a fight
among gods.” Daniel Snell, Religions of the Ancient Near East (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2011), 33.
In Canaanite mythology, Baal was believed to reign as king among the gods because he
triumphed over the sea god and/or the river god. But I AM, not Baal, is the true God and
lord over the waters (as he was at the Red Sea, at the flood, and at creation; see Ps. 114).
Additionally, in surviving the crossing of the Jordan, I AM demonstrates his rightful claim
to the Land. In the ancient near East, a common way for obtaining the judicial verdict of
the gods was by compelling the accused to submit to being cast into a river. If he
drowned, the gods declared him guilty; if not, the gods declared him innocent (cf. Num.
5:16-28). By entering the Jordan first and then standing in the midst of the riverbed, the
whole time the nation crosses over, I AM passes the trial by water. The triumph of I AM
and of his people in the river crossing prove their claim to the Land. No wonder the
Canaanite kings are fearful (5:1).66
Again, much of this is an accommodation to pagan belief systems. By “accommodation” I do not
mean that God was somehow pagan or that these pagan systems were accurate in how they
portrayed the “gods.” Clearly the Old Testament has no room for suggesting that the pagan
perception of the gods was reflective of spiritual realities. The gods are repeatedly dismissed as
idols both empty and false. Rather, God decides to address the pagans on their own terms,
meeting their religious standards in order to overturn and subvert them, much as he did to the
Egyptians by striking at their gods with miracles designed to refute and humiliate their national
religious preferences.
It is difficult to see how else the ancient world, including the Israelites, could have
understood God’s complete ownership of the land. The imposition and enforcement of God’s law
on his territory was the most effective and clear way for YHWH to convey truth about the world:
66
Bruce Waltke, An Old Testament Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007), 517.
that the pagan idols were empty, ineffective and ultimately false, and that allegiance to God was
necessary to avoid wrath and punishment, as well as to find true meaning and fulfillment. The
power of the old gods had been obliterated, and therefore, so had their credibility as lawgivers;
now pagan rituals were to be abandoned in favor of God’s law. Divine accommodation meant
that the Canaanites had absolutely no excuse for refusing to repent, for God demonstrated his
superiority on their terms. If the Canaanites persisted in their unbelief, then God was required to
punish them to demonstrate that his promises—of both blessing and curse—were credible and
that he indeed did rule over the land of Israel.
Another important lens by which to view the conquest narrative is intrusion ethics. This
theological paradigm is grounded in eschatological categories. Since the fall of Adam and Eve,
God has graciously withheld executing judgment on a deserving world. The destruction of the
Canaanites, who, according to the Pentateuch, were a people who had continuously sinned
against God for hundreds of years, represents a relatively brief suspension of God’s patience and
mercy. On this view, the judgment is an intrusion of divine justice into the world, a window into
the final judgment that will occur when God returns to judge everyone who has ever lived. This
is the reason the destruction is so total and complete.67
By claiming the land as his own, God was free to establish laws that reflected his
character. The enforcement of these laws would then be a sign of his holiness and goodness, a
reminder of his power and control. With this in mind, let return to the text quoted at the
beginning of this paper, Deuteronomy 20.
Deuteronomy 20
67
For a summary of intrusion ethics, see Jeong Koo Jeon, “Covenant Theology and Old Testament Ethics:
Meredith G. Kline’s Intrusion Ethics,” http://www.kerux.com/doc/1601A1.asp (accessed 3/11/15).
While Deuteronomy is neglected in modern preaching, it may be no exaggeration to say it
is one of the most important works in human history. Its theological content reveals, in great
detail, the character and nature of God. Furthermore, the attendant social policies and values of
Deuteronomy, such as the promotion of universal access to education, health and welfare, have
shaped much of Western history. Later prophets called Israel to task for failing to follow its
precepts, mostly notably the Ten Commandments, and Jesus himself quoted Deuteronomy more
than any other book, including three times during his pivotal desert trials. In other words,
Deuteronomy is one of the principle texts by which God reveals himself to the world, including
the Church. Here we discover the character of the invisible God, his glory and beauty, as well as
the relational demands he makes of his creatures, demands he continuously reiterates and
reinforces throughout history in both the prophets and Christ.
As an historical matter, Deuteronomy 20 is concerned primarily with a set of principles,
rather than strategies, governing warfare. In a world where the only question was when (rather
than if) military conflict would occur, it was appropriate for God to provide ethical principles to
address inevitable ethical concerns, such as how to treat prisoners of war or determine who
qualified for military conscription. As Christopher Wright points outs, this section “does not
pretend to be a manual for military operations…Rather, as in the law of the king (which is no
manual for government administration either), it is concerned with fundamental principles,
principles that must govern Israelites at war as in any sphere of life.”68 So the problem is more
acute than a mere one-time administration of tough justice. What we have here is a set of
principles that are to apply to Israel’s conduct throughout the campaign in Canaan.69
68
69
Wright, Deuteronomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1996), 227.
That this remains a live standard is seen, perhaps most vividly, in Samuel’s denunciation of Saul in 1 Samuel
15:1-3.
Was the Conquest Racially Motivated?
The brutal conquest ethic of Deuteronomy 20 is usually explained by way of Israel’s
ethnocentric primacy. This claim lends itself directly to the charge of genocide, as Israel’s actions
would then be interpreted through a lens of racial or ethnic superiority. However, in addition to
neglecting a theology of land, this approach fails to account for the fact that the Pentateuch
explicitly states the conquest was not due to either the moral or racial superiority of the
Israelites, but the depravity of those who lived in the land.70 This is why pagans who renounced
their sinful ways were spared, much as Abraham and Ruth, both former pagans, are allowed
entry into God’s people by faith and repentance.
I have mentioned the case of Rahab before, but it is instructive to view her conversion in
terms of the theology of land and as a way to introduce the critical concept of prophetic
contingency. Her story demonstrates that the conquest of Canaan was motivated by a spiritual
purity (to which the Israelites were also subject!), not racial animus. In his New Testament
epistle, James commends Rahab as a model of faith, comparing her beliefs and actions with the
“faith” of demons. In fact, James argues that the “faith” of the demons is no faith at all, for it is
mere intellectual assent of the kind that produces no good works: the demons know God exists,
but tremble in fear instead of being moved to repentance. This mere assent is directly comparable
to the fear of the Canaanites (Joshua 2:9-11, 24), who instead of repenting at the many signs of
70
“Israel is not displacing the Canaanites because of supposed moral excellence, but rather because of Canaanite
depravity (9:4-5; 12:31; 18:10-12). In addition, the idea of a divine gift of land combined with divine assistance
in the destruction of previous inhabitants is not limited to Israel, but extends to other peoples in the region as
well (2:20-22; cf. Also 2:10-12:23). This does not obviate the moral challenge involved, but should be borne in
mind as one evaluates claims that Deuteronomy is irredeemably ethnocentric.” Hofreiter, “Genocide in
Deuteronomy,” 242. Also consider God’s self-disclosure in Deuteronomy 7:7, where the implication is that Israel
as a people had nothing intrinsic within themselves to count as superior to others. It is only the exterior promises
of God in covenant that lend the nation any value at all.
God’s justice, “work out a scheme of resistance.”71 Whereas the Canaanites are destroyed, Rahab
continues as a model of faith in both the Old and New Testaments.
How is it that someone of (at the time) all the wrong social and moral categories—she
was both a Canaanite and a prostitute—could become a celebrated hero in the Bible? How were
the Israelites not disobeying the command to exterminate all Canaanites in Israel if they allowed
Rahab to live? The solution lies in understanding how Old Testament prophecy operated. Often
God would threaten certain actions or judgments in order to produce a change of behavior and
attitudes. Even if the language sometimes seemed absolute, it was absolute with clearly implied
conditions: if the person or group under threat of punishment repented, God would relent. (The
only exception seems to be if God swore by himself that the intended action would occur.)72 The
sparing of lowly Rahab, and her entire family, meant that any Canaanite could save both himself
and his family if he was willing to acknowledge that God had destroyed his pagan idols and that
YHWH alone was worthy of love. It was spiritual defiance in the face of overwhelming
evidence, not racial impurity, that condemned the Canaanites to death.
Other textual observations lend implicit support to a non-ethnocentric understanding of
Deuteronomy 20:10-18. Despite tolerating warfare, the spirit of the law in Deuteronomy is
against militarization:
There is no attempt to match force with force. There is no competitive arms race. The
whole spirit of this chapter is actually antimilitaristic. Faced with superior technology and
superior numbers...Israel’s response was to announce coolly several exemptions that
71
72
Waltke, An Old Testament Theology, 516.
For details, see Richard Pratt, “Historical Contingencies and Biblical Predictions: An Inaugural Address
Presented to the Faculty of Reformed Theological Seminary,” November 23, 1993:
http://thirdmill.org/newfiles/ric_pratt/th.pratt.historical_contingencies.pdf (accessed 2/18/15).
would actually reduce the size of their own army, and would do so by sending home some
of what were probably the youngest and fittest men! Dependence on Yahweh’s superiority
liberated Israel from dependence on human superiority and thereby freed some Israelites
from military service. The exemptions reflect a very distinctive set of national priorities.73
Even verses 10-18 contain “the element of restraint,” where the preferred treatment of those
outside the Promised Land is to form a peace treaty before armed conflict arises.74 And verses
19-20 demonstrate care for the environment during siege warfare, an ethic in stark contrast to the
scorched earth policies of the surrounding nations.75 Nationalist fervor is usually a necessary
condition of racially motivated genocide. Yet nothing in this text, or the Pentateuch broadly,
contributes to jingoism.
What, then, does Deuteronomy 20 reveal about the character of God? While the rest of
Deuteronomy contains many examples of God’s mercy, grace, forgiveness and generosity to
those who do not deserve blessing, Deuteronomy 20 is a recognition of God’s complete and total
hatred of belief and behavior that does not conform to his standards. This is consistent with the
surrounding chapters, which deal with righteous conduct more broadly. God is a God of both
mercy and justice. Although in the West we prefer talk of mercy (while in traditionalist societies,
the preference is most decidedly on justice), we cannot neglect either and pretend we are fully
appreciating God’s self-revelation.
Pragmatic Considerations
As harsh as it seems to us, the ethic toward those in distant lands has an internal logic
when considered against the backdrop of ancient near Eastern economic and social conditions—
73
74
75
Waltke, An Old Testament Theology, 228.
Ibid., 230.
Ibid.
or what we might call pragmatic, rather than purely spiritual, considerations. What do you do
with a nation or clan that tries to attack and destroy you? After defeating its military forces, how
do you handle a population that deeply hates you—often for irreconcilable differences based on
characteristics of religion and race—and, if left alone, will rise up again to attack? Facile
attempts to dismiss these hypotheticals as unrealistic fail to deal with the hard realities of both
modern and ancient warfare and tend to import philosophical and cultural expectations alien to
the ancient world.
By no means am I suggesting this text is easy or that we should even try to be
comfortable with its recommendations. I suspect our Western intuitions, ingrained by a culture
which strives to negate any talk of holy judgment by theistic entities, are so thoroughly
entrenched that we might emotionally struggle with these passages until the Lord returns. That,
however, is distinct from being able to say that there are sufficient reasons for treating these
passages as moral, even if difficult. Such is often the case with punishment in legal contexts,
where the just action (imprisonment, removal of children from parental custody, etc.) is also a
very hard one with severe and deeply unpleasant consequences for both the offender and the
local community.
While it may surprise us, we face similar ethical situations in the modern world, in both
the domestic prison system and international military conflict. Since we rarely execute prisoners,
especially domestically, and we do not engage in corporate punishment, we must choose between
boring our prisoners to death or letting them work menial jobs for poor pay, all the while denying
prisoners many of the rights and privileges of normal citizens. This is nothing more than a kind
of functional slavery. Even if we vastly improved prison conditions (something I favor), the
range of moral choices would remain largely the same. Additionally, you have some prisoners
who have no hope of rehabilitation: repeat offenders or sociopaths who wish only to commit
crimes and are a constant, irredeemable scourge on society. Such individuals might spend a
lifetime as virtual slaves, with few rights and fewer privileges. Passages like Deuteronomy 20
deal with the realities of the ancient near East, where some enemy tribes or clans were so
entrenched in patterns of violence or nationalism that the only course of action was to conquer its
cities and subject its people to forced labor.
Since genocide seems to arise in a national culture of unfettered jingoism, we would
expect the laws of Deuteronomy to reflect similar bloodthirsty values. Instead, we see a general
stance against warfare and attempts to reduce suffering by dealing as humanely as possible with
the challenging situations of the ancient near East.
Israel and the Threat of Exile
The night before the pivotal battle of Jericho, a commander of God meets Joshua. Not
recognizing the commander, Joshua asks him whether he is for the Israelites or against them.
With his sword drawn, the reply is ominous: neither.76 God’s help was conditional, for it was not
due to some intrinsic characteristic that Israel was to achieve victory over the Canaanites, but
only because they were faithful to obey him. This is perhaps the best argument against the idea
that the Old Testament endorses genocide. The covenant is based on extrinsic conditionals, for
God threatens to eject the Israelites should they fall into the same unholiness which is now
ruining the unrepentant Canaanites (Leviticus 18:24-28).77 This was no idle threat, for we know
that many generations later, as Israel descended into the same wickedness that the Canaanites
once committed, God used the Assyrians and Babylonians to bring about the horrors of divine
punishment on his people, vomiting them out of the land.
76
77
Joshua 5:13-14.
Wright, Old Testament Ethics, 476-477.
Can We Really Come to Terms with the Canaanite Punishment?
As much as it is difficult to alter one’s moral or cultural perspective, change can happen.
Consider Jonathan Haidt’s experience:
On the one hand, I was a twenty-nine-year-old liberal atheist with very definite
views about right and wrong. On the other hand, I wanted to be like those openminded anthropologists I had read so much about and had studied with, such as
Alan Fiske and Richard Shweder. My first few weeks in Bhubaneswar [India] were
therefore filled with feelings of shock and dissonance….In short, I was immersed in
a sex-segregated, hierarchically stratified, devoutly religious society, and I was
committed to understanding it on its own terms, not on mine.
It only took a few weeks for my dissonance to disappear….I liked these people who were
hosting me, helping me, and teaching me. Wherever I went, people were kind to me. And
when you’re grateful to people, it’s easier to adopt their perspective. My elephant leaned
toward them, which made my rider search for moral arguments in their defense. Rather
than automatically rejecting the men as sexist oppressors and pitying the women,
children, and servants as helpless victims, I began to see a moral world in which families,
not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family
(including the servants) are intensely interdependent. In this world, equality and personal
autonomy were not sacred values. Honoring elders, gods, and guests, protecting
subordinates, and fulfilling one’s role-based duties were more important.
I had read about Shweder’s ethic of community and had understood it intellectually. But
now, for the first time in my life, I began to feel it. I could see beauty in a moral code that
emphasizes duty, respect for one’s elders, service to the group, and negation of the self’s
desires….[F]or the first time in my life, I was able to step outside my home morality, the
ethic of autonomy. I had a place to stand, and from the vantage point of the ethic of
community, the ethic of autonomy now seemed overly individualistic and selffocused….The same thing happened with the ethic of divinity. I understood intellectually
what it meant to treat the body as a temple rather than as a playground, but that was an
analytical concept I used to make sense of people who were radically different from
me.”78
Haidt’s account is instructive on several levels. First, Haidt’s change of perspective
occurred within his secular worldview. He did not have to become a traditionalist Hindu to have
a sympathetic understanding of a religious, collectivist worldview. This should caution us against
thinking the only way we can come to terms with the Old Testament is to become ideologically
similar to a Jew living in the ancient near East or that we must jettison an inerrant framework for
a critical one. However, it does suggest that significant immersion into the Old Testament
worldview may be needed to worship the God who gave these commands with all our hearts.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, is that knowledge alone did not bring Haidt to an
appreciation of traditionalist culture. As a highly successful scholar, Haidt has learned more
about cultures alien to him than most other people in the world. Yet it was an immersive
experience in a traditionalist culture that allowed him to appreciate a non-secular worldview. Too
often approaches to Old Testament holy war take an exclusively intellectual approach, neglecting
experiential knowledge. This concedes too much to certain views of Enlightenment
epistemology, or even modern secularized views of the world, where simply studying a subject is
sufficient to understand it.
What is the immersive experience we need to become sympathetic to the Canaanite
punishment? It is the church. Every Sunday we are called to enter the ethical life of the same
God who commanded the judgment of the Canaanites. How can we come to understand and
78
Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 118-119.
appreciate his justice, rather than revolting against his vision of the world? The answer does not
come through merely understanding the social and theological framework of the pagan world or
parsing definitions of genocide, even if these can serve as supporting reasons to believe in his
ultimate goodness. No, we need more than facts; we need a narrative.79
Christians in America are particularly troubled by the Canaanite passages because their
moral intuitions are so conditioned by Enlightenment standards of justice. But God’s Word can
overcome even our deeply entrenched, culturally conditioned moral biases. Pastors need to
preach the book of Deuteronomy. And they must do so with particular boldness, prayerfully
trusting the Holy Spirit to change our affections. They should consider preaching a series on
Deuteronomy that directly addresses the problem of the Canaanites. Sermons in that series
should explain the theological significance of land, the way in which God interacted with pagans
through divine accommodation, the ethical direction of Deuteronomy, and the extensive grace
God shows to the Canaanites before bringing about divine punishment. Most of all, pastors
should emphasize how we deserved the punishment the Canaanites received, and that it is only in
Christ that we avoid such a ruinous end.
In addition to the preaching of the Word, during the series worship leaders should select
songs that proclaim God’s good character—his trustworthiness, and his mercy and grace. Prayers
and confessions should be selected with a similar purpose. During the series, Sunday classes,
weekly Bible studies and community groups should be encouraged to honestly examine the holy
war texts and to discuss and pray through the objections and difficulties that arise. Preaching,
liturgy and community practice must all be employed. This is the only way to begin the slow
79
The idea of finding Christian narrative through liturgical practices is somewhat similar to Jamie Smith’s project in
Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Foundation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic,
2009).
transformation of our moral intuitions.
There Can Be No Paradise Without Justice
The Bible opens with God creating order out of chaos. Through incredible acts of creative
splendor, God forms the universe. It is majestic. And onto one particularly beautiful planet God
places Adam and Eve, who enjoy every emotional delight and physical pleasure in deep intimacy
with God and each other. Every talent and passion is directed toward the joy of others, and every
moment worked for the good of the community in continuous acts of love and glory.
This is what the community of ancient Israel understood to be the goal of Deuteronomy
and what they meant by the term shalom. It was nothing less than universal human flourishing.
In fact, everything in the Old Testament points toward the return of shalom. From the Old
Testament laws mitigating cycles of vengeance and promoting care for the poor to the promise of
a savior who would relieve the world from sin, God has continuously worked to ensure we will
one day live on an earth even more splendid than the glory that was Eden. Yet sin cannot exist in
this paradise. By its very nature it destroys the conditions necessary for human beings to thrive.
This is why God cannot tolerate unholiness and why he will eventually destroy all those who
refuse to return to him, for the unrepentant ruin this earth and spoil its design.
The Lord has not raised the specter of judgment without answering it. Every time we sing
songs anticipating the Lord’s return or offer prayers in praise of God, we are sharing in the
ethical life of God’s people in the Old Testament, who longed for a savior who would come to
restore the world and free them from the tyranny of human sin and the brokenness of the natural
world. We must remember that in Jesus Christ we have been spared the same fate as the
Canaanites. We must pray with gratitude and gather together in worship for what has been
accomplished in the Gospel by our great God. For once we deserved death and exile, but today
we lay claim to an eternal home of blessing, which even now the Lord prepares for those who
love him.
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