God’s command the Israelites to destroy their? How to justify

HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO JUSTIFY GOD’S COMMAND THAT ISRAEL DESTROY THE CANAANITES?

While it may be understandable for us to wonder at God’s command that issued such destruction, it is always helpful to look at the event in question in context. This command was given to the people of Israel by God at the end of their 40 years in the wilderness. As they were about to enter the Promised Land, they were told: “When the Lord your God brings you into the land where you are entering to possess it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and stronger than you, and when the Lord your God delivers them before you and you defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to them” (Deut. 7:1—-2; cf. Ex. 23:32-33; 34:12-16; Deut. 20:15-18).

God’s command for Israel to utterly destroy the Canaan-ites is one of the most commonly raised objections to the God of the Bible as a just and loving God. Atheist Richard Dawkins charges, ‘The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalo-maniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.’ Dawkins’s words are clearly over the top, yet they echo the concerns of many.

The Lord’s requirement that Israel annihilate the Canaanites certainly raises serious issues about the mercy and love of God. How could He tell the Israelites to “show them no mercy” (Deut. 7:2 CSB)? To be blunt, there are no easy answers to this question, but there are several perspectives that help resolve the moral questions raised by the destruction of the Canaanites.

NOT A GENERAL PRINCIPLE BUT AN ISOLATED CIRCUMSTANCE

The commanded destruction of the Canaanites was not a general principle of war and conquest in Scripture; this ap-pears to be an isolated circumstance. Israel was not told to destroy every other nation they were to encounter. In fact, as a general rule, the Lord told Israel that when they went to war, they were to offer the enemy “terms of peace” (Deut. 20:10).

God's command to destroy was limited to the seven nations of Canaan (Deut. 7:1-2; 20:17). Clearly, this command was not a general rule for Israelite warfare in every place and every battle. Rather, it was limited in scope and time only to the conquest of Canaan, a one-time event.

NOT AN ETHNIC GENOCIDE BUT A DIVINE JUDGMENT

Generally, genocide stems from the ethnic hatred between tribes or nations. But in the case of this one-time destruction of the Canaanite nations, it was not driven by Israel’s ethnic hatred for these nations or because of their pent-up desire to murder and destroy.

It wasn't ethnic cleansing at all that motivated these actions but divine judgment by the Lord God Himself. The Lord had decided the time had come to judge the Canaanites for their debauchery. This act should not be viewed as genocide but a case of capital punishment, applied on a national scale.

God gave this as His explanation for His actions to Israel, declaring “the land has become defiled, therefore I have brought its punishment upon it, so the land has spewed out its inhabitants” (Lev. 18:25). We must remember that God is just in His judgments and so He demanded, in this case, that Israel be the instrument of His judgment on Canaan.

Similarly, acting as a righteous judge, God would bring judgment on Israel and Judah through the Assyrians and Babylonians. As human beings, we tend to object to God bringing His just judgment on ourselves or on anyone else. At those times, we must remember that He is God and we are not. His acts of judgment may not be clear to us from a human perspective; nevertheless, they are just.

NOT ETHNIC IDENTITY, BUT EXTREME WICKEDNESS

God declared, “It is because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord your God is driving them out before you” (Deut. 9:5). As mentioned earlier, God was acting in righteous judgment against the wickedness of the Canaanites. But were they really that bad? Actually... yes. Even by ancient standards, the Canaanites were especially morally depraved.

Their idolatrous fertility cults led to debauched sexuality to the extreme. If you visit the Israel Museum's archaeology wing, you will see, the display of ancient Canaanite idol figurines, both male and female, with grotesquely enlarged genitalia. The worship of these false gods produced all sorts of sexual perversity, including adultery, temple prostitution, pederasty, bestiality, and incest.

They also practiced divination, witchcraft, and human sacrifice. These sins were so severe that God said He would spew them out of the land as a consequence (Lev. 18:19-25). When God commanded Israel to destroy the Canaanites it was not because they were an unfavored people group or because of Israel’s ethnic hatred for them. It was the God of justice coming to the end of His patience with these morally corrupt peoples and finally bringing them to judgment.

NOT IMPATIENT OR INTEMPERATE, BUT LONGSUFFERING PATIENCE

Was God impatient or intemperate with the Canaanites, suddenly exploding with rage without expectation or warning? Certainly not! If you go back to God’s confirmation of the Abrahamic Covenant in Genesis 15, the Lord told Abraham that his descendants would spend 400 years in Egypt prior to their return to the Promised Land. God could easily have granted Abraham possession of Canaan immediately. He did not do so because, as He told Abraham, “the iniquity of the Amorite” is not yet complete” (Gen. 15:16).

God would patiently tolerate the sins of the Canaanites until Abraham’s descendants would bring retributive justice upon them with the conquest under Joshua. The longsuffering patience of God is similar to His attitude toward pagans found in Romans, saying that “God gave them over” to their lusts, to degrading passions, and to a depraved mind (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28).

In this case, God did not launch immediate judgment but rather tolerated their dreadful behavior, allowing them to go farther and farther into sin than was even imaginable. An impatient or intemperate God would have destroyed all the Canaanites when Abraham entered the land. His patience allowed them to expand their revolt against the Lord until their iniquity was complete, hundreds of years later.

NOT DIVINE VINDICTIVENESS BUT DIVINE PROTECTION

Despite God’s patience, some might object that He could have granted Israel access to Canaan without necessarily destroying the Canaanites. Couldn't they have simply shared the land? Perhaps so, but God was concerned about protecting Israel and keeping them from the ungodly influence of the Canaanites’ sins.

He told Israel that His policy of destroying the Canaanites was “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. 20:18). The legitimacy of this concern is evident in that the Israelites did not obey the Lord and “did not drive out the inhabitants” of the land (Judg. 1:27-33).

The horrific consequences of this were that “the sons of Israel lived among the Canaanites ... and they took their daughters for themselves as wives, and gave their own daughters to their sons, and served their gods. The sons of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and forgot the Lord their God and served the Baals and the Asheroth” (Judg. 3:5-7).

Israel's failure to carry out the Lord’s command led to the very danger from which the Lord sought to protect them. As a result, the Canaanization of Israel led to the disasters of the days of the judges, when “every man did what was right in his own eyes” (Judg. 17:6; 21:25). But why destroy the children? As painful as this must have been, it was a needed protection for Israel. First, because these children would grow up, pursue the same abominable practices as their parents, and then influence Israel to abandon the Lord. Second, it was necessary because as adults, they would pursue vengeance against the people of Israel for having carried out the destruction of their parents. God was protecting Israel from nations of men who would live to execute vengeance against the nation that killed their fathers.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Old Testament scholar, Walter C. Kaiser Jr. suggests one last thought about the destruction of the Canaanites. He says all prophecies or forecasts of doom have “a suppressed ‘unless’ attached to them.”? When Jonah proclaimed, “Yet forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown” (Jonah 3:4), there was an implied “unless you repent” appended to that prediction. And repent Nineveh did, so “when God saw their deeds, that they turned from their wicked way, then God relented concerning the calamity which He had declared He would bring upon them. And He did not do it” (v. 10).

The Canaanites, like the Ninevites, were warned of their impending doom. Had they responded as Rahab did (Josh, 2:8-14), with faith in the God of Israel and repentance for their abominable deeds, there certainly would have been a better out-come for them. Just as Rahab, along with her family, was spared in the destruction of Jericho (Josh. 6:25), it’s likely that there would have been a brighter and better end for the Canaanites.