Now, I have not in any way, ever said that God has commanded, or could command,
genocide; that's an unsympathetic misrepresentation of what I said. What I
was dealing with are these narratives in the Hebrew Bible concerning God's
commands to Israel to go into the land of Canaan, or the modern-day land of
Palestine, and to drive out the Canaanite clans, or tribes, that were inhabiting the
land. And in the Hebrew Bible, God commands Israelites to go in there and
to slaughter any of the Canaanites that opposed them; whether man, woman, or child,
they are to be exterminated. Now anybody who takes the Bible to be historical has
got to wrestle with these difficult texts. The question is, how could a God
who is all loving, all good, and all holy issue such commands? And why would he do
so? Is there some kind of internal inconsistency here? And what I
argued was that when you look into these in the context of the narrative, you find
that God held his people Israel in Egypt for 400 years before bringing them into
the land of Canaan because he said the iniquity of the Canaanites is not yet
complete. These people were not yet so debauched, so reprobate, that God would
judge them. And so he held his people in abeyance until the iniquity of these
Canaanite tribes was so pronounced, so vile and so evil, that God
finally used Israel as his means of bringing judgment upon these tribes in
the same way that God would later use pagan nations like Babylon and Assyria to
judge his own people Israel by allowing them to come in and sweep through the
land and conquer the people, so that this represented God's judgment upon
these Canaanite tribes. And when you read the ancient non-biblical literature
about these tribes, this was a culture that was incredibly evil. Clay Jones has
written an article on this in Philosophia Christi in which he looks
at some of these ancient texts, and the sort of... the bestiality, and human
sacrifice, and the mockery of God that characterized this culture was really
really vile and it raises the hair on your neck to read these texts of
what these people were like. And this story of the conquest of Canaan only
comes after the story of God's judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah, and you may
remember in that story, Abraham argues with God and says God, if there are fifty
righteous people in these cities, will you destroy them? Will you
destroy the good along with the unjust? And God says no; for the sake of the
fifty I will not destroy them. And then like a middle-eastern merchant Abraham
bargains with God; well God if there are 40 in the city will you destroy it? God says
no; for the sake of the forty righteous people, I will not destroy it.
And Abraham says oh God don't be impatient with me, but if there are
ten righteous men in the city will you destroy it? God says no, for the sake of
the ten I will not destroy it. And Abraham doesn't dare to argue any further with
God. But the purpose of this story which comes in the narrative prior to the
conquest of Canaan I think is to emphasize that God is not going to judge
these people until they are utterly, utterly deserving of judgement because
they are so debauched, so that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is
illustrative of why God held his people for 400 years before bringing them into
the land, and when he brought them into the land
to judge Canaan, what was that judgment? It was not to commit genocide; that is an
utter misrepresentation. There was no racial war here, there was
no command to pursue and hunt down the Canaanites and exterminate them all. What
was the command? The command was to drive them out of the land. The land is what is,
was, and remains, so all important to these middle-eastern people; who has the
land? And what God was doing was destroying these Canaanite petty
kingdoms as nation-states. He was destroying these nation-states, in effect,
by dispossessing them of their land and bringing in the Israelites and
giving the land over to Israel as the Land of Israel, the Promised Land. And if
these Canaanite tribes had simply fled before the advancing armies of Israel, no
one would have been killed. There was no command to hunt down the
Canaanites, no intention to kill them all off and eliminate them; it was only those
who stayed behind to fight that would be killed. And in fact there is nothing in
the narrative to suggest that any women or children were killed. There is no
narrative whatsoever that says that anybody other than combatants were
killed in this cleansing of the land, and we really don't know how many actually
were killed. This was apparently a gradual sort of dispossessing of the
land that these tribes occupied. So the question is then well how could a God
who is all holy, and just, and loving command such a thing? And I think you can
make sense of this through a divine command morality, which says that our
moral duties are constituted by God's commands so that when he issues commands
to us, these become our moral duties. So Israel and the armies of Israel became
in effect the instrument by which God judged these Canaanite peoples. The
adults deserved the judgment that they received if they stayed behind.
Now the more difficult promised the children. How could God command that the
children be killed, because these are innocent? And I think what I would want
to say there is that God has the right to give and take life as he sees fit.
Children die all the time; every day people's lives are cut short. God is
under no obligation whatsoever to prolong anyone's life another second. So
he has the right to give and take life as he chooses. Moreover, if you believe as
I do in the salvation of infants, or children, who die, what that meant was
that the death of these children meant their salvation.
They were the recipients of an infinite good as a result of their earthly phase
of life being terminated. The problem is that people look at this from a
naturalistic perspective and think life ends at the grave, but in fact this was
the salvation of these children and would be far better for them than
continuing to be raised, say, in this reprobate Canaanite culture. So I don't
think God wronged anybody in commanding this to be done; he didn't wrong the
adults because they were deserving of capital punishment. He didn't wrong the
children, if there were any that were killed, which we don't know, because God
has the right to take their lives, and in fact they were the recipients
of a great good. So I don't think there was anybody that was morally wronged in
this affair. So it seems to me that it is possible for God to do so. I think only
one thing needs to be added and that is that God had morally sufficient reasons
for issuing such an extraordinary command. It needs to be understood as how
extraordinary and out of the ordinary that this command was. It is associated
with the conquest of Canaan and the dispossession of the land and giving it
to these people, and God I think had morally sufficient reasons for doing
this because these people were due for judgment, and by issuing so harsh an
object lesson to Israel, by using them as his instruments for bringing judgment in
this way, he emphasized to them as nothing else
could do how they were to be a holy people set apart for God himself, and not
to follow after the pagan deities of Israel's neighbors, not to betray their
faith and apostatize and follow these Canaanite gods like Bale and Moloch and
others. This was an object lesson to them to preserve Israel and the
salvation of these people, through which, of course, the instrumentality of Israel
he would eventually bring the Christ into the world and affect the salvation
of the entire world through Christ. So I think God had morally sufficient reasons
for doing such an extraordinary thing, which is really unique, and not something
to be repeated or expected in any other time or age.