I said I would kick off with one the areas I find most difficult and that is with the treatment of peoples such as the Canaanites in the Hebrew scriptures.
To put my cards on the table (in case it helps anyone understand my perspective) - I am a Christian, believing that Jesus, the Christ, was God-incarnate, come to bring the new Kingdom with Him. I treat scripture as inspired, though I see it as coming through the colouring lens of the minds and words of men. I do not see the Bible as akin to how Muslims see the Q'ran (as the dictated word of God). I see the 'Church', the body of believers, as the fallible, and often weak, followers of Christ, always being called onward to better understand and follow Jesus. If anyone is into their Christian theology then you'll find me allied more to the 'Christus victor' and 'Moral influence' schools of atonement rather than the more popular (in the West) "Penal substitution" or "Satisfaction/Substitutionary" schools of atonement.
So onto the passage that I will discuss as a starting point for conversation....
Only in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them: the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the Lord your God has commanded you, so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the Lord your God. (Deut. 20:16–18)
So how might a Christian look on this passages? Or perhaps more accurately, how do I look at this passage? Let me consider a few angles, borrowing quite a bit from the thoughtful book "Is God a moral monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God" by Paul Copan (Baker Publishing Group).
1) What is the meta-narrative in which we find this passage?
When considering anything in scripture I always first remember the meta-narrative of scripture. I’m not going to go in depth at all, but let me just say that the meta-narrative is that God creates, man rebels, and God enters into creation in the person of Jesus Christ in order to redeem a fallen world. God, in Jesus, stands in the path of violence and returns it with blessing and a call for forgiveness. He leads the way of a path of love, sacrifice and forgiveness. I hold on to this larger narrative when looking at other passages.
2) Did God command xenophobic ethnic cleansing?
According to Richard Dawkins, the killing of the Canaanites was an act of ethnic cleansing in which “bloodthirsty massacres” were carried out with “xenophobic relish.” So is God xenophobic, demanding ethnic cleansing? When we look at wider scripture I would say ‘no’. There are many passages in Deuteronomy itself about welcoming foreigners, giving them the same rights as the Jews, and it is clear that within ‘Israel’ (the people) there were a mixture of races. Indeed in the proclaimed genealogy of Jesus we have the foreigners Ruth, Rahab, Tamar and Bathsheba. God had promised to bless "all the families of the Earth" through Abraham (Gen 12:3), so clearly God is not against those outside of Israel just because they are ‘foreigners’. Indeed at other times Israel herself are the ones expelled from the promised land - God does not favour Israel indiscriminately.
So why the extreme measures against those currently in Canaan. The view of scripture was that the evil of the people had been growing – earlier the people had been spared because “the sin of the Amorite [a Canaanite people group] has not yet reached its limit” (Gen. 15:16). But these people, we are told, were a people who sacrificed children to their God (Lev 18:20-30).
I find this harsh judgement against people difficult, even against evil people, but perhaps I am biased because I have led a soft life. Here is an extract from Paul Copan’s "Is God a Moral Monster?"
Yale theologian Miroslav Volf was born in Croatia and lived through the nightmare years of ethnic strife in the former Yugoslavia that included the destruction of churches, the raping of women, and the murdering of innocents. He once thought that wrath and anger were beneath God, but he came to realize that his view of God had been too low.
Here Volf puts the New Atheists’ complaints about divine wrath into proper perspective:
I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.
Perhaps wrath against utter evil is right? It’s a view I find challenging, but I can see merit in it. Could it be that the Canaanites had passed the point of no return in this life? Perhaps I try to make God too ‘tame’, too ‘gentle’ when actually evil sometimes requires a stronger response.
3) Men, women and children? All destroyed?
Paul Copan puts forward an argument that the passages describing the warfare against the Canaanites uses a form of writing common at the time, a form using hyperbole. Copan argues that it is clear the language is one of hyperbole by looking elsewhere in scripture where we find that the people ‘utterly destroyed’ are actually still living in Israel. ‘Men, women and children’ he suggests is a dramatic way of saying ‘all’ or 'many' when the same scripture has those people recurring in scripture and clear examples of women, such as Canaanite Rahab, who play a role in the redemptive plan. Indeed Jesus himself uses a Canaanite woman to teach that faith trumps ethnicity (Matt 15:22-28), so we know the Canaanites were still around, and were blessed by Jesus when they put their faith in Him.
Copan gives other contemporary examples of similar styles of warfare writing, and suggests we must read the scriptural passages with this style of literature in mind...
* Egypt’s Tuthmosis III (later fifteenth century) boasted that “the numerous army of Mitanni was overthrown within the hour, annihilated totally, like those (now) not existent.” In fact, Mitanni’s forces lived on to fight in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC.
* Hittite king Mursilli II (who ruled from 1322–1295 BC) recorded making “Mt. Asharpaya empty (of humanity)” and the “mountains of Tarikarimu empty (of humanity).”
* The “Bulletin” of Ramses II tells of Egypt’s less-than-spectacular victories in Syria (around 1274 BC). Nevertheless, he announces that he slew “the entire force” of the Hittites, indeed “all the chiefs of all the countries,” disregarding the “millions of foreigners,” which he considered “chaff.”
* In the Merneptah Stele (ca. 1230 BC), Rameses II’s son Merneptah announced, “Israel is wasted, his seed is not,” another premature declaration.
*Moab’s king Mesha (840/830 BC) bragged that the Northern Kingdom of “Israel has utterly perished for always,” which was over a century premature. The Assyrians devastated Israel in 722 BC.
* The Assyrian ruler Sennacherib (701–681 BC) used similar hyperbole: “The soldiers of Hirimme, dangerous enemies, I cut down with the sword; and not one escaped.”[/list]
4) A prescriptive example?
Some over the years have justified battle based on the battles passages in scripture. This, I would suggest, is to confuse the “descriptive” with the “prescriptive”. Rob Bell in his book “What we talk about when we talk about God” keeps coming back to the phrase “God is with us, God is for us, God is ahead of us”. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, similarly, in his series “Covenant & Conversation” argues that man is progressively recovering the ideal that God showed the Jews in the Sabbath. What may be necessary in one time may be utterly inappropriate at another. The bronze age world of the middle east was clearly a violent place with many ‘King’ warriors and tribal conflicts. If warfare was needed at that time to secure a place for the people of Israel then Israel is called to subsequently set the example of welcoming strangers (though not embracing any sinful ways). Today many understand the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah not as a sexual sin per se, but as an example of the antithesis of welcoming the stranger. Moses calls on the people of Israel “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt” (Ex 22:21).
5) Do we see the whole story?
A fundamental belief of Christians is that life continues after this life. In Jesus’s narrative of The Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) Lazarus, who had a poor life, is seen being comforted. Old wounds are being soothed and healed. Warfare always seems to carry the risk of injuring innocents, but I trust God will soothe and heal misfortune in life hereafter with him. The narrative of Job is concerned with how we deal with suffering that we cannot understand. Job’s ‘comforters’ that Job’s suffering must be punishment for something he has done wrong. Job, and the reader, know otherwise. But the reason for the suffering is never explained to Job – he is called to trust God and not think that he (Job) himself can understand all that goes on. A cop out? I would say ‘no’ – it is a reminder that we haven’t seen the full picture yet, just as a young child does not understand why her parent has handed her over to have a needle plunged into her arm.
6) A last bit of final personal reflection (at least for now).
I describe myself as a pacifist. I believe Jesus ushered in a new Kingdom based on His example of standing in the path of violence and returning it with forgiveness and blessing. I struggle with the warfare passages in the Hebrew scriptures. I don’t see them as xenophobic genocide, for the reasons given above (God is against sin, not ethnicity, and Israel were sometimes at the sharp end of that). I view these passages as probably using a good deal of hyperbole, and also as somehow necessary for their time. The evangelist John teaches that ‘Salvation is of the Jews’ (John 4:22) so Israel was needed to bless ‘all families of the Earth’. No Israel, no Jesus, no new Kingdom, no salvation. But where I do struggle personally is with the questions “Did it need to be that way at that time? Couldn't another way have been better?”. To be honest I can’t say I fully understand the ‘why?’ (though the thoughts outlined above have helped me somewhat). But I do trust that God is good.
In peace,
Micahel