The slaughter of the Canaanites – was it justified?

One consequence of preaching through the Bible book by book, as our church does, is that you can’t escape considering the difficult passages.

And so last Sunday we considered Joshua, chapters 8-12. That’s the bit that deals with the slaughter of the Canaanites.

In Joshua 8 Israel attacks the city of Ai and kills ‘12,000 men and women…’, ‘ all the people of Ai’.

In chapter 10 Joshua kills five Amorite kings – from Jerusalem, Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, and Eglon – and hangs their bodies on five trees before throwing them into a cave.

Then he proceeds to destroy the cities of Makkedah, Libnah, Gezer, Lachish, Eglon, Hebron and Debir, on each occasion leaving ‘no survivors’.

The accounts of similar military victories continue throughout chapter 11 and 12, which end with a list of 31 Kings West of the Jordan who (along with the residents of their cities) Joshua put to the sword.

Two summaries of these battles within these chapters leave us in no doubt that it was God himself who ordered this destruction:

‘So Joshua struck at the whole land: the highlands, the arid southern plains, the lowlands, the slopes, and all their kings. He left no survivors. He wiped out everything that breathed as something reserved for God, exactly as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded.’ (Joshua 10:40)

‘So Joshua took the whole land, exactly as the Lord had promised Moses. Joshua gave it as a legacy to Israel according to their tribal shares. Then the land had a rest from war.’ (Joshua 11:23)

So the inescapable conclusion is that the Bible teaches both that these cities were wiped out with no survivors left and that it was God who authorised it.

Many people say that they could never believe in nor worship a god who would authorise these sorts of ‘atrocities’. Richard Dawkins, in his book ‘the God Delusion’ describes the god of the Old Testament as a ‘control freak, ethnic cleanser and malevolent bully’.

But it is not just atheists who reject these passages. Steve Chalke, in an article published in Christianity magazine last week (longer version here), cites these incidents as one of the reasons that he no longer believes that the Bible is the Word of God.

So how do evangelicals, who believe that the Bible is literally ‘God-breathed’, explain these scriptures?

We were reminded last week that the story of the Canaanite conquests gives us one mistake to avoid and three characteristics of God to understand.

We should first avoid thinking that the Canaanites were innocent and neutral.

On 16 October 1946 a man called John Clarence Woods killed ten men and got off scot free. Woods was a United States Army Master Sergeant who, with Joseph Malta, carried out the executions of ten former top leaders of the German Third Reich after they were sentenced to death at the Nuremberg Trials. These men were directly responsible for the horrors of the Nazi holocaust.

Was Woods a mass murderer? Some might say so, but many would say he was just an instrument of justice doing what justice decreed had to be done. At the time it was argued that these men deserved to die. 

The Bible argues that the Canaanites also deserved to die. Leviticus 18 and Deuteronomy 18:9-13 outline the ‘detestable ways’ of the Canaanites - sorcery, witchcraft, idolatry, every kind of sexual immorality and child sacrifice on an industrialised scale. In the eyes of God these were sins equivalent in severity to those of the authors of the Nazi holocaust.

This tells us first that God is a god of justice. He does not tolerate evil for ever but stamps it out. On this occasion it involved wiping these nations off the face of the earth. The instrument he used was the nation of Israel. This does not mean that Israel was good and these nations bad. The Bible makes that abundantly clear in passages like Deuteronomy 7:1-11 and 9:1-6.

‘It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but on account of the wickedness of these nations, the Lord your God will drive them out before you’ (Deuteronomy 9:5).

Israel was simply the means God used to execute his justice. John Woods was not perfect either. But he was the means of justice when it came to the Nazis. It is not a virtue to tolerate evil. Justice must be done and someone acting under authority has to administer it.

Second it shows us God’s patience. The Canaanites ‘detestable ways’ were not some momentary departure from a life of virtue but an established pattern that had persisted unchanged for centuries without any indication of coming to an end. Thousands of innocent children had been slaughtered and the real cause of this was these nations’ idolatry. God had delayed his judgement for this period giving them every opportunity to change, but they had opted not to. In fact his extreme patience had led him to leave his own people Israel as slaves in Egypt for over 400 years out of mercy to the Canaanites. As he said to Abraham hundreds of years earlier:

”Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and ill-treated there… In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure”. (Genesis 15:13-16)

Third it displays God’s grace in that he gives us what we do not deserve. Just as God delayed judgement on the Canaanites out of mercy, so also he gave Israel the land of Canaan which they did not deserve. And with Israel he preserved some of the Canaanites, like the prostitute Rahab from Jericho, who ended up being absorbed into the Israelite nation and becoming a human ancestor of Jesus Christ himself (Matthew 1:5). That’s grace!

So the slaughter of the Canaanites was not ethnic cleansing motivated by racial discrimination. It was rather the careful, fair, settled action of a God of justice, patience and grace.  

But we also need to be clear that the slaughter of the Canaanites was a one-off event never to be repeated. The usual pattern Israel was to follow in war (Deuteronomy 20:1-20) was to make their enemies an offer of peace (20:10). War ensued only if this was rejected. The slaughter of the Canaanites is not justification for some kind of Jewish, let alone Christian, jihad.

If war is ever judged necessary it must be waged justly. And Christians as individuals are called to love their enemies, to pray for those who persecute them and to carry the Gospel of peace. This passage is absolutely no precedent for genocide nor a justification for people claiming a divine right to similar actions today. Jesus told his disciples to put away their swords.

Finally, if we look at this story in the wider context of salvation history (the big story of the Bible) it begins to make sense.

In reality none of us is innocent. All human beings are sinners who fall short of God’s standards and deserve his judgement (Romans 3:23). Justice must be done, but God’s mercy (delaying judgement) and grace (giving us what we do not deserve) lead him to look for a better way that both deals with sin and also preserves us.

If you can see any justification at all in the slaughter of the Canaanites then you are starting to understand something of the seriousness of sin and the justice, mercy and grace of God - key starting points for considering what is the real heart of the Christian faith.

But that is to bring us back to the deeper question of why Jesus Christ had to die on a Roman cross, a question that I deal with elsewhere on this blog. 

See also, 'Ten things we can learn from the slaughter of the Amorites in the Old Testament'.