The Conquest of Canaan: Did God command murder?
Few Christians these days seem able to explain the ethics of the conquest of Canaan to unbelievers. In a recent exchange with CAIR associate Nadir Ahmed, he informed me that Jesus advocated genocide. The logic works as follows:
It is important to point out that Christians believe that Jesus is God( Islam teaches that Jesus is NOT God, rather God’s Messenger). Christians also believe that God inspired the Bible. Therefore, if God = Jesus, then it was Jesus(God) who inspired this commands to go commit genocide against this nation of people as we read in 1 Sam 15:3. These are Jesus Christ's words. What is even more demented, is that Jesus Christ ordered the killing of babies! There can be no explanation offered that could make sense of such commands.In order to avoid re-inventing the wheel, I'll allow this apology of the conquest of Canaan to do the heavy lifting in terms of answering Ahmed. In order to fill in a few things Gonzales left out in the above article, I'll add this by further way of justification for God's divinely sanctioned herem (holy war) against the Canaanites:
"As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him. Then the LORD said to Abram, ‘Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for yourself, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. *And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.*’" Genesis 15:12-16Later on in redemptive history:
4 After the LORD your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself, "The LORD has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness." No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is going to drive them out before you. 5 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, to accomplish what he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Deut 9:4-5What were these detestable practices? Mostly child sacrifice and rampant homosexuality. The Canaanite god Molech is mentioned numerous times in Scripture as being a god that required human sacrifice. (Sounds kind of like the American god "Choice", doesn't it?) Other gods, such as Baal and Ashtoreth, are also mentioned in Scripture, including Baal and Asherah worship by Israelite men. Baal and Asherah also demanded, in addition to child sacrifice, fornication and homosexuality as the gods of fertility:
"... Baal worship apparently had its origin in the belief that every tract of ground owed its productivity to a supernatural being, or baal, that dwelt there. The farmers probably thought that from the Baalim, or fertility gods, of various regions came the increase of crops, fruit and cattle ... The worship of Baal was accompanied with lascivious rites (1 Kings 14:24), the sacrifice of children in the fire by parents (Jer.19:5), and kissing the image (1 Kings 19:18; Hos 13:2). Baal was often associated with the goddess Astoreth (Judg.2:13), and in the vicinity of his altar there was often an Asherah. (Judg.6:30; 1 Kings 16:32-33,R.V.)"
So we can clearly see that the Canaanites were engaged in the same detestable practices as the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, whom the Lord destroyed by fire. The Israelites were to kill every Canaanite man, woman, and child as tools of God's divine judgment. Really, the only way one could have an ethical problem with the conquest of Canaan, as the Bible describes it, is to believe that God has no right to punish wickedness and to judge sinful men. No Muslim would ever make such an argument.
Divine judgment is a recurrent them throughout Scripture, evidenced by the Flood, Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, the conquest of Canaan, and the various conquests of the Israelites by heathen peoples as a sanction against Israel's wickedness. These Old Testament judgments serve a typological purpose, to wit, they point ahead to the coming day of judgment. Jesus gave various warnings about this during his time on earth and in John's Apocalypse. Christians today don't engage in herem because Jesus fulfilled the redemptive purpose of Israel as THE true Israel:As Bob Strimple (the former president of Westminster Seminary California, and now professor emeritus of systematic theology) points out in a lecture he often gives on this very topic, there are a number of reasons why Israel’s role in the Old Testament was preparatory to the coming Christ, and can therefore cannot serve as the hermeneutical center of Scripture. The fact is that Christ comes to fulfill (literally) all of the Old Testament promises, not to temporarily put them aside, only to return to them in a future millennium. Strimple bases his view that Christ is the true Israel on the following biblical arguments:
1). Isaiah’s servant songs have a double referent that has long baffled Jewish commentators. On the one hand, they refer to Israel, God’s chosen one and servant (41:8-9; 44:1-2, 21; 45:4; 49:3). On the other, they seem also to refer to some individual (42:1-4). These prophesies are interpreted by the New Testament as referring to Christ (Matthew 8:17 and Acts 8:30-35)
2). Matthew sees a double referent in Hosea 11:1, ("Out of Egypt I called my son")
3). Paul identifies Christ, not physical Israel, as Abraham’s seed (Galatians 3:16). Galatians 3:7 and Romans 4:11, 16, moreover, identify the church as Abraham’s offspring.
4). Henceforth, we are in Christ the true Israel: Galatians 3:26-29, Romans 2:28-29, and Philippians 3:3.
5). The Old Covenant is obsolete, having been superseded by the New: Hebrews 8:8-12 identifies the new covenant with Israel (Jeremiah 31:33-34) with the covenant instituted by Christ with the church. Most importantly, Hebrews 8:13 declares the old covenant obsolete and passing away. This makes impossible the dispensational view of Ezekiel 40-48 as a reinstitution of temple sacrifice.
6). The upshot is that the Old Testament did not see how its own prophesies were to be fulfilled - indeed, it could not prior to Christ. The New Testament authors were able to interpret the Old Testament in the light of His coming of the new covenant that He instituted. So should we.
As Strimple points out, this means that Jesus is the true Israel, and that all Scripture–especially its prophetic sections–must be read through a Christ-centered hermeneutic, not a dispensational one which centers upon national Israel.
So the redemptive purpose of Israel has been fulfilled in Christ, whereby people of all nations have been brought into God's covenant through Jesus. The purpose of Israel has now expired, as have the commands to engage in herem. Ultimately, the latter will find their fulfillment in the day of judgment, where Christ will return to "judge the living and the dead."
PRCalDude
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Reader Comments (4)
Excellent post. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I went to Jihad Watch and read the Nadir crap. Nadir comes to his Jesus=God comment secondhand. We see snippets of Jesus in the OT, but there is no "Hey guys, here's Jesus" moment in the OT. Using only OT scripture Jesus=God is not possible. To equate Jesus=God in an OT setting can only come about with a NT reference. We see the references now only because we have another vantage point. Nadir's claim of Jesus as a genocidal maniac is just stupid. God answers to no man. His ways are not our ways. He can do as He pleases. He had every right as righteous God to cast man from Eden, destroy man via flood, confuse tongues, call Abraham, chose Isaac, reject Ishmael, annihilate the Canaanites via Israel, enslave Israel in Egypt etc. Mankind's ingrained sin is the ultimate reason for man's suffering. Adam made a bad choice and his progeny deserve the results of his bad choice because we are just like Adam.
Archaeoligists tell us that if we could read the hieroglyphs of such cultures as the Philistines and Canaanites, we wouldn't ask "Why did God do that", but rather "What took God so long?" Great article, P.R..
This is an argument we will never win with unbelievers.
We know that God decides when we die and by what means. But unbelievers want to believe that death is caused by any number of other reasons.
In their mind, any death for any reason other than accidental natural causes is murder.
For us, murder is any death that is caused by an individual taking God's decisions into their own hands.
What this means is that it wasn't murder on the part of the Jews when God ordered them to eliminate the Canannites. Just as it isn't murder when your military commander orders you to kill an enemy. Just as it isn't our decision to dictate to God what is or is not appropriate for ending the lives that He creates.
Bottom line is that accusing God of murder is just another way that unbelievers use to make themselves feel superior to God.
Lawrence, you got that right. What was that Paul wrote..."For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel- not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power." (I Cor. 1:17). "I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God." (I Cor. 2:1) All the good debating in the world is worthless without preaching the Gospel under God's anointing to convict men of sin and bring them to repentance. I've never found it a fruitful excercise to try to argue folks into the Kingdom.