...sometimes in reading through the Bible people are puzzled when they come upon God’s orders to the ancient Israelites, as they entered Canaan, to drive out the inhabitants of that land and in certain cases, completely exterminate them – an act that included the killing of men, women, and children.

Psalm 100:5 tells us of God’s goodness:

Psalm 89:14 declares God’s righteousness and justice:

Revelation 4:8 affirms the holiness of God:

Any believer in the God of the Bible readily acknowledges these truths about His nature. Yet sometimes in reading through the Bible people are puzzled when they come upon God’s orders to the ancient Israelites, as they entered Canaan, to drive out the inhabitants of that land and in certain cases, completely exterminate them – an act that included the killing of men, women, and children.

I cannot in a single session address every question that might be raised in this area, but I would like to focus on one that is often raised as representative of others: How could God, given the characteristics of His nature that we just stated, order the complete extermination of the Canaanites?

Before Joshua led Israel into the Promised Land, Moses gave these orders in Deuteronomy 7:1-5:

Not the most "multi-culturally sensitive" message, is it?

Joshua gave the following report in Joshua 6:21 after they attacked the city of Jericho:

How are we to understand these passages in light of the earlier ones we read about God’s goodness, righteousness, justice, and holiness?

Let me begin by saying that there is more to this story than simply one nation invading another in order to take away their land.

A reoccurring fault of those who criticize the God of the Bible in areas like this is that they often don’t expend much time and effort in trying to understand the situations they are criticizing.

Hundreds of years before God gave orders through Moses and Joshua to destroy the ancient Canaanites, He called Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees sent him to Canaan.(1) As Abraham passed through the place, God told him that He would give the land to his descendants whom He would build into a great nation. However, God did not give Abraham any land in his lifetime. The Patriarch never owned a square inch of Canaan except the Cave of Machpelah which he bought to bury his wife, Sarah. The land belonged to various Canaanites nations who lived there. The reason for the delay is found in Genesis 15:13-16:

Standing between Abraham and the time God would give this land to his descendants was 400 years of slavery for his future people, along with God’s ultimate judgment upon their slave masters, the Egyptians. Abraham would be long buried by the time his descendants took possession took possession of Canaan. Why the delay? Verse 16 says, "For the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete."

"Iniquity" is lawlessness or unrighteousness. The "Amorites" were people making up one of seven principle nations living in Canaan that God would ultimately mark for total destruction. Abraham could not possess the land of Canaan in his lifetime because they had not reached a point where their lawlessness was so offensive that God would destroy them. Presumably, God was giving the Amorites time to change their ways.

From this passage at least four things are implied:

He knew ahead of time that there would be a time when the iniquity of the Amorite was complete and He would give their land to others.

This is born out elsewhere. Isaiah 46:9-10 says, "I am God, and there is no one like Me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things which have not been done…."

God can do this. We cannot. So it is sometimes difficult for us to understand some of the ways God does things.

Proverbs 14:34 says, "Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people."

Psalm 9:17 says, "The wicked will return to Sheol, even all the nations who forget God."

This is an often repeated and often carried out principle in the Bible. In Old Testament times, frequently one nation was used to punish another for its collective sins.

We see this very clearly here. Though God knew what was coming, He was giving these people time to turn around before it was too late.

I think of the ancient city of Nineveh and the prophet Jonah.(2) God told him to go to the city and preach that if they didn’t repent they would be destroyed. He was giving them time. Jonah, in his arrogance, didn’t want them to be saved, so he refused to go – refused that is, until God gave him a little three day Mediterranean cruise to help him reconsider.

While we are not given details of God’s dealings with nations that do not touch the Bible story, I would venture that God has always given adequate warning to nations He destroyed along with time to repent.

Presumably, at some point, people who make up an increasingly wicked nation pass a "point of no return," where they have become so wicked that it is impossible for them to turn around. Such nations are destroyed and there doesn’t appear to be any exception to this. Please note this: Not even Israel escaped this retributive justice. Here are Jesus’ words to Jerusalem roughly forty years before the city was destroyed by the Romans:

Luke 19:41-44

So God wasn’t inadvertently destroying one nation with another. In fact, in the days of Moses God told Israel that if they turned away from Him the time would come when they, too would be destroyed. Deuteronomy 8:19-20 says:

The nations of Canaan were destroyed because they had become so wicked that God had decreed their judgment. Their iniquity had become "full."

This judgment can be seen elsewhere in Biblical history involving nations that were not directly related to Israel. For instance, Daniel gave a stern warning to the Chaldean king, Nebuchadnezzar, in Daniel 2 (the king dreamed of a metallic image – Daniel interpreted the dream) that his kingdom would fall to the Medes and Persians. Later in Daniel we read the description of the night it happened.

Daniel 5:5-6 records the action:

Then just a few verses later, in Daniel 5:25-28, these words:

This is again the judgment of God on a nation (Babylon) only this time the scourge of judgment is another pagan nation (Medo-Persia).

So the Canaanites were under the judgment of God. But for what?

Until about 1930 most of what was known of the ancient Canaanites was what could be gleaned from the Bible. This is when archeologists discovered the Ras Shamra religious epic literature from Ugarit in North Syria. Thousands of clay tablets stored in what seems to be a library between two great Canaanite temples dating from the fourteenth or fifteenth century B.C. give a full description of the Canaanite religion.

Much of what was unearthed in this library would be "X-rated" even by today’s standards. The New Unger’s Bible Dictionary gives a sanitized description of "lewd nature worship with immoral gods, prostitute goddesses, serpents, cultic doves, and bulls. El, the head of the pantheon, was the hero of sordid escapades and crimes. He was a bloody tyrant who dethroned his father, murdered his favorite son, and decapitated his daughter. Despite these enormities, El was styled "father of years" (abu shanima), "the father of man" (abu adami, "father bull"), i.e., the progenitor of the gods. Baal, the widely revered Canaanite deity, was the son of El and dominated the Canaanite pantheon. He was the god of thunder, whose voice reverberated through the heavens in the storm. He is pictured on a Ras Shamra stela brandishing a mace in his right hand and holding in his left hand a stylized thunderbolt. The three goddesses were Anath, Astarte, and Ashera, who were all three patronesses of sex and war. All were sacred courtesans. Other Canaanite deities were Mot (death); Reshep, the god of pestilence; Shulman, the god of health; Koshar, the god of arts and crafts. These Canaanite cults were utterly immoral, decadent, and corrupt, dangerously contaminating and thoroughly justifying the divine command to destroy their devotees."(3)    "

If this was their religion, one has to wonder what they did on Saturday night when they really wanted to cut loose!

Another writer said of the Canaanites:

The "brutality" this author mentioned included sacrifice of their own infants to their "gods," forcing their children to pass through fire in order to appease their deities. Grave yards containing pottery with the charred remains of infants sealed inside have been unearthed.

Listen to the stern words of Leviticus 18:24-25 about these things:

"So why destroy them all?" someone asks. "Surely there must have been someone worth sparing!"

You might remember that Abraham asked a question like this before God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. In Genesis 18:23-24 the Patriarch asked God, "Wilt Thou indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; wilt Thou indeed sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous who are in it?" God said He would spare the place if there were 50 righteous people in it.

Abraham said, "What about 45?" God would spare it if there were 45. "What about 40? What about 30? 20? 10?" Then we read of the two angels that were sent to get Lot and his family out. (I have long believed that had Abraham not interceded when he did, Lot and his family would have been destroyed along with the residents of Sodom.)

The point is this: Often we, like Abraham, are relative newcomers on the scene. Without considering the point where God is with people, or their history, we say, "How can You say You are just when You have determined to destroy all these people?" We forget that God is the very Author of justice and righteousness. When a situation gets so far that it has to be ended, you can be sure it has gone beyond hope.

But what about the children living in Canaan? Surely they were innocent. Doesn’t the Bible teach that they don’t inherit the guilt of the sins of their parents?

The Bible does teach that children are innocent. You can look it up in Ezekiel 18:20.

So God killed the innocent children of Canaan right along with the wicked then?

If you are only thinking temporally then this looks like a tragedy. But think beyond the moment. In the case of the terminal generation of Canaanites, would it be better for those children to grow up and be infected by the Canaanite perversions or be spared an upbringing that would condemn them to the same judgment? Further, I believe a case can be made that these children might well have been spared for eternity, though the Bible doesn’t say so.

No, I’m not suggesting that it is better to kill babies before they grow up. God’s word would forbid such an act. But in the event of a situation where God is being berated because it appears He is killing innocent people, we have to take into account that His perspective is different than ours.

So was this extermination policy something that went on through Israel’s history or was it something temporary that pertained only to those seven Canaanite nations God was judging? Very interestingly, a little more study of the Scriptures shows that this was not a policy that was to be continued. It applied only to those nations under the judgment of God as Israel came into the land. The instructions for other times of war (wars of self-defense) were these in Deuteronomy 20:10-13:

The passage goes on to instruct them to spare the animals and non-combatants, including women and children.

Once the conquest of Canaan was over, the wars they were involved in were acts of self-defense with enemies who had attacked them.

But didn’t King David later in their history lead Israel into battle many times – so much so that God wouldn’t let him build the temple because he was a "man of bloodshed?" Yes, David was a warrior. But his wars were either battles with those remaining Canaanites that that Israel failed to exterminate in the beginning or those who had continually attacked Israel, which was located in the midst of many warring nations.

Therefore, the concept of "Holy War" - the idea that it is always right to "kill the infidel" and "rid the land of the unbeliever" employed first by Mohammed and later by the Roman Catholic Church in the Crusades - has absolutely no Biblical merit in the events surrounding the conquest of Canaan. The actions of Israel during that time seem to have been temporary and under the direct command of God in a one-time event.

 Conclusion

God has not ordered such extermination of or by any nation on the earth under the revealed terms of the New Covenant. There is no one nation that is a "Christian nation," that is, no single nation that fully espouses His cause. The Gospel has gone forth to all nations. While God may still providentially guide so that one nation is punished for its sin by another, it seems that there will never again be a parallel with the case of the extermination of the Canaanites where the leaders of a nation are told by God to exterminate another nation.

Before leaving this subject we would do well to realize that there are a couple of principles in all of this that are still valid for us today. They are:

Proverbs 14:34:"Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people."

Psalm 9:17: "The wicked will return to Sheol, even all the nations who forget God."

We do well, for the sake of our nation, to do all we can to preserve righteousness in ourselves and others. Christians are to be the salt (preservative) of the earth.

Footnotes: Please use your back button to return to your place.

1. Genesis 12:1-3
2. Jonah chapter 1
3. The New Unger's Bible Dictionary. Originally published by Moody Press of Chicago, Illinois. Copyright (c) 1988.) Under "Canaan."
4. Source unknown

Dave Redick is Minister of the Hwy 20 Church of Christ in Sweet Home, Oregon and Editor of The Preacher's Study. He may be reached at pstudysupport@comcast.net.

Copyright © 1996-2008 by The Preacher's Study. Permission is granted to subscribers to use this document in total or in sermon preparation in the context of the local congregation only. Publishing it in a book, on the Internet, or anyplace beyond the local congregation is prohibited.

All Scripture quotations and references are from the New American Standard Version unless otherwise stated.

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