One of many arguments towards the God of the Bible is the form of God we discover within the Bible—particularly, a God who can look like an ethical monster. Living proof? Let’s take the divinely directed slaughter of the Canaanites. It’s what some have known as probably the most tough and bloody a part of the Bible; the one which on the floor is probably the most ethically troubling.
The narrative is discovered within the Previous Testomony ebook of Deuteronomy. God had led the folks of Israel out of slavery and out of Egypt. He was not solely forming them into a brand new folks and a brand new nation, but in addition taking them to a brand new land that will develop into often called the Promised Land. But it surely wasn’t simply to be given to them. They needed to take it, possess it and, at instances, conquer it. And that’s what brings us to one of many bloodiest scenes within the Bible—the slaughter of the Canaanites by the Israelites on the directive of God Himself. There are a number of locations the place that is referenced within the Bible. Right here’s an outline description:
“As you strategy a city to assault it, you need to first provide its folks phrases for peace. In the event that they settle for your phrases and open the gates to you, then all of the folks inside will serve you in pressured labor. But when they refuse to make peace and put together to combat, you need to assault the city. When the Lord your God arms the city over to you, use your swords to kill each man within the city. However it’s possible you’ll hold for yourselves all the ladies, kids, livestock, and different plunder.
(Earlier than you learn on, let me simply parenthetically add that this was not a license to rape and pillage. It was later detailed that if an Israelite took considered one of these girls, it meant that they had been going to need to take them as their spouse and deal with them with all of the respect and decorum that got here with that marriage.)
The passage continues:
“You could benefit from the plunder out of your enemies that the Lord your God has given you.
However these directions apply solely to distant cities, to not the cities of the nations within the land you’ll enter. In these cities that the Lord your God is providing you with as a particular possession, destroy each residing factor. It’s essential to utterly destroy the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, simply because the Lord your God has commanded you.
“This may stop the folks of the land from instructing you to mimic their detestable customs within the worship of their gods, which might trigger you to sin deeply towards the Lord your God.” (Deuteronomy 20:10-18, NLT)
So, was that an indiscriminate bloodbath, an ethnic cleaning alongside the strains of Hitler and the Jewish Holocaust or Saddam Hussein’s slaughter of the Kurds? One thing that deserves not solely common condemnation, but in addition a whole rejection of the God of the Bible? Or is there one thing extra right here?
First, this was extra than simply an invasion or conquest. This was God’s deliberate punishment of the folks of Canaan for his or her methods, lengthy within the making and within the coming. Sure, God was displacing them from the land to provide it to the folks of Israel. However that displacement got here due to their ferocious, recurring, unrepentant wickedness. And I do imply wickedness. The Canaanites had been marked by the worst attainable facets of slavery (Not that there’s something good about slavery however consider taking slavery to the darkest place that you could probably take it.), spiritual prostitution and sexual cults. Students have known as the Canaanite cult faith probably the most sexually wicked of any within the historical world. That they had given themselves over to each form of sexual depravity, together with incest and even bestiality. At their worst, their orgiastic worship of idols even included human sacrifice—each of kids and adults. There’s imagery of their cult sexual practices of bathing themselves in blood.
The Bible says that God had been tolerating this for greater than 400 years. Their wickedness stored rising and rising and God stored enduring it. 4 hundred years of restraint and persistence. Why? As a result of it doesn’t matter what you’ve heard, judgment is all the time God’s final resort. However the wickedness reached a degree the place Scripture talks about how God couldn’t abdomen it anymore and He vomited them out of His mouth. What stands out within the Bible will not be God’s acts of justice, however somewhat how a lot He’s marked by mercy, by restraint. However this was a time when God decided that there was no different recourse however divine judgment.
Second, this was a divine, God-ordained motion. In different phrases, it was God’s name to make. Not solely the punishment, but in addition the possession of the land and who He was going to provide that land to. Israel didn’t have an inherent proper to the land. Neither did the Canaanites. However God did. He might give it to whomever He wished. So, if somebody says, “I can’t imagine God kicked the Canaanites out and gave away their land.” What do you imply “their”? Israel had no inherent proper to it. The Canaanites had no inherent proper to it both. This was God’s land. He made it. He might do with it no matter He wished to do. Israel would by no means have been justified in doing this had God not ordered it. However God did. So don’t take into consideration this as a easy invasion of 1 nation into one other. Or a powerful military beating a weaker military, as if power or need provides anybody the best to be aggressive. You’ll by no means discover that within the Bible. This was God saying: “I’m telling you this land is now yours. It’s not theirs.”
However there’s a 3rd level to make right here, and it’s about that phrase “destroy each residing factor” within the cities. You learn one thing like that, and also you suppose that sounds excessive and pointless even for divine judgment. However as we learn, this was for the cities, not the outlying areas. It is a important level. Within the tradition of the traditional close to East, most individuals lived in outlying areas, not the cities. The cities had been army fortifications for troopers and army officers. It’s not the place the ladies and youngsters, farmers and laborers lived. So by way of warfare, this was not about civilians. Additionally, by way of the traditional language of the day, even destroying everybody within the metropolis was widespread hyperbole. It wasn’t about actually taking each life, however guaranteeing that the warfare was received, the enemy defeated, the duty achieved. Suppose how in our day we speak about how a workforce blew their opponent away, or slaughtered them, or annihilated them. It’s a type of rhetoric. While you examine the language of the traditional close to Jap cultures, this was quite common. They might speak about how they destroyed each man, after which later speak about what they had been going to do with their survivors. In different phrases, destroying every little thing meant profitable decisively, not actually destroying every little thing. This was extra about purifying than purging.
That brings up the ultimate level to recollect in all this—one that’s unavoidable. It’s the concept of God’s wrath. And that could be what bothers us probably the most. That God is a God who’s offended with evil, at warfare with evil. He’s furious with evil. However why does that hassle us a lot? I as soon as learn some penetrating phrases on this from Yale theologian Miroslav Volf. He was born in Croatia and lived by means of the nightmare years of ethnic strife within the former Yugoslavia—a time that included the destruction of church buildings, the raping of girls and the murdering of innocents. He as soon as thought that wrath and anger had been beneath God, however he mentioned he got here to appreciate that his view of God had been too low:
I used to suppose that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be past wrath? God is love, and God loves each individual and each creature. That’s precisely why God is wrathful towards a few of them. My final resistance to the concept of God’s wrath was a casualty of the warfare within the former Yugoslavia, the area from which I come. Based on some estimates, 200,000 folks had been killed and over 3,000,000 had been displaced. My villages and cities had been destroyed, my folks shelled day in and time out, a few of them brutalized past creativeness, and I couldn’t think about God not being offended. Or consider Rwanda within the final decade of the previous century, the place 800,000 folks had been hacked to loss of life in 100 days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly style? By refusing to sentence the massacre however as a substitute affirming the perpetrators’ primary goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely offended with them? Although I used to complain in regards to the indecency of the concept of God’s wrath, I got here to suppose that I must insurgent towards a God who wasn’t wrathful on the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful regardless of being love. God is wrathful as a result of God is love.
Sure.
James Emery White
Editor’s Word
This weblog was initially revealed in 2020, and the Church & Tradition Workforce thought that you’d be focused on studying it once more.
Sources
Tailored from James Emery White, Christianity for Individuals Who Aren’t Christians (Baker).
On the depravity of the Canaanite cult faith, see “Canaan, Canaanites,” Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible, Vol 1, ed. by Walter Elwell.
Miroslav Volf, Freed from Cost: Giving and Forgiving in a Tradition Stripped of Grace.
