How do we reconcile the fact that the God of love commanded genocide? Romans 5:8 states, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” How then do we explain the Old Testament display of God’s militancy against his enemies?

In the second century, Marcion claimed the God of the Old Testament was not the same as the Father of Jesus Christ. The Church renounced this belief as heresy. Jesus himself claimed to be this same God acting through Jewish history and revelation (Luke 24:27).

That still leaves the question on the hook: how do we explain the “God who saves” commanding Israel to destroy nations? How do we show God’s consistent character in both the Old and New Testaments? If you want to get into the historical and textual details, Apologist Paul Copan spends four chapters in his book, Is God a Moral Monster?, addressing this question, and then expands upon that work in his book, Did God Really Command Genocide?. We took a broad look at the issues to give you the “lay of the land.”

God’s justice is his love

First, just because God judges someone, or a nation, for example, doesn’t mean he has ceased to be loving. Love and justice are two sides of the same coin. It is not loving for a father to allow one of his children to continually abuse another. God was dealing with a violent people group (the Amorites) with a force that matched their crime. As an analogy, think of the Sicilian police invading a Mafia stronghold to remove a crime syndicate terrorizing a local population. The end goal of justice is to restore peace and order to the community. Several times, God explicitly states that it was because of the wickedness of the nations that he was using Israel to act out his judgments: “It is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is going to drive them out before you (Deuteronomy 9:4; see also Genesis 15:16).

God’s violent judgment against the Amorites was not arbitrary or unmerited, nor was it prejudiced or impatient. Previously, when God had judged the nations during Noah’s flood, the Scriptures describe the incriminating evidence,

“The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time…Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence. God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways” (Genesis 6:5, 11).

Yet, in the case of Amorites, God was willing to wait 430 years to judge them because “the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure” (Genesis 15:16). God’s judgment is not the product of an uncontrolled temper tantrum; it is the appropriate response to their willful sins. What, then, were the sins of the Amorites?

The Canaanites (one of the Amorite people groups) were known to engage in temple prostitution, bestiality, child sacrifice, and more. In reenacting their divine sex-stories, with animals and relatives, the Canaanites were trying to excite Baal and Anath to respond with their corresponding, fertilizing activities. Anath was the patroness of both sex and war. Listen to William Albright’s description of Anath’s gory glee in battle,

“The blood was so deep that she waded in it up to her knees—nay, up to her neck. Under her feet were human heads, and above her, human hands flew like locusts. In sensuous delight, she decorated herself with suspended heads while attaching hands to her girdle. Her joy at the butchery is described in even more sadistic language: ‘Her liver swelled with laughter, her heart was full of joy, the liver of Anath (was full of) exultation (?).’ Afterwards, Anath ‘was satisfied’ and washed her hands in human gore before proceeding to other occupations” (p.159).

Imagine teaching your daughters to revere and emulate this goddess.

It’s no wonder the people had become corrupt under the theological influence of these demon-gods. Archaeological evidence in Israel has revealed the brutality of the ritual human sacrifices, not just of babies, but the decapitations of children as old as eight and ten years. Copan writes, “The worship of idols wasn’t innocent or harmless” (p.167). Yahweh was engaged in cosmic warfare against the dark powers hostile to his good rulership: “goat demons” (Lev 17:7) and “demons…gods” (Deut 32:16-21; Ps 106:37-38) who represented an antithesis of God’s creation, a sort of anticreation.

Justice for all

A word should be said about God’s unprejudiced justice. God was not targeting a specific ethnic people group out of hatred or prejudice. In fact, God shows his mercy to Ninevah, a nation of enemies, in a similar situation. It was the Amorite crimes he was confronting here. He warned Israel not to “imitate the detestable practices” of those nations (Deuteronomy 18:9). “They will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods, and the Lord’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you” (Deuteronomy 7:4). The government and laws that were being enacted under Israel’s leadership were unbiased toward foreigners living among them, “You are to have the same law for the foreigner and the native-born” (Leviticus 24:22). God’s goal was justice, the same standard by which he judged both Israel and other nations. His goal was to eliminate the destructive fusion of idol worship manifesting in perversity and violence.

Copan makes the case that God’s command to “destroy” the Amorite nations was a one-time command not to be repeated at any other point. “Without God’s explicit command, attacking the Canaanites would not have been justified” (p.169).

It should not surprise us that God, the judge of all the earth, has, throughout history, used human instruments to act out his authority to judge.  

God…  

• Uses imperfect humans to judge other imperfect humans (Exodus 21:23; 2 Chronicles 9:8; Romans 13:4)
• Uses nations to judge other nations (2 Kings 18:25)
• Uses morally corrupt people to judge less morally corrupt people (Habakkuk 1; Psalm 79)
• Provides defined boundaries and limits for judgment (Genesis 4:15; Isaiah 10:5-19; Exodus 21:23-25)

Softening the Scope of Violence

Old Testament scholar Richard Hess takes a more aggressive approach in arguing that God was not seeking the total obliteration of the Amorites. The Canaanites targeted for destruction were political leaders and armies rather than noncombatants (p.175). It was the complete destruction of all warriors in battle that the text was describing, attacks on military forts or garrisons, not general populations that included women and children (p.175). Jericho and Ai, for example, were strategic military strongholds. The Israelites were loosening the iron grip of the oppressive Canaanite feudal cast over the land. Repentant towns and individuals such as Gibeon or Rahab were given a prominent place of protection in Israel’s story.

For example, what looks like annihilation in Joshua 10:40 is clearly not. In the opening pages of the next book (Judges), the Israelites hadn’t driven out the Jebusites (Judges 1:21, 27-28). After claiming that all the Anakites had been destroyed (Joshua 11:22), Caleb later asked permission to drive the Anakites out from the hill country (Joshua 14:12-15; 15:13-19). Indeed, the archaeological evidence seems to support this idea that a wholesale genocide never actually took place. At the end of the book, Joshua chides the Israelites not to mix or intermarry with the Canaanite peoples whom they had supposedly and totally destroyed.  

Much scholarship has also embraced the idea that the text of Joshua employed an exaggerative language common in the ancient Near East, a sort of bragging. Just as we might say that a sports team “blew them away,” or “annihilated them,” the book of Joshua was doing the same thing. We see corollary examples of these propaganda reports in Egypt, Hittite lands, Moab, and Assyria. In contrast to the other nations, the goal of Israel’s conquest, as Gary Millar states, was “to see Israel established in a land purged of Canaanite idolatry.” The people themselves weren’t the target, but “their idolatrous way of life” (p.173).

Final Thoughts

Though this brief article could not possibly address the magnitude of details needed to have a thorough opinion on this matter, it should cause us to pause, step back, and recognize that the situation was much more complex than critics like to suggest. As we wrote in last week’s article, Is God a Moral Monster?, often in the modern era, we judge the strangeness or severity we find in the Bible without respecting the gritty context of human depravity that these details emerged out of. We’ve turned around and judged the God who brings justice instead of judging the moral depravity of the people doing evil. That’s a perversion rooted in our own prejudice or ignorance.

As both Father and Judge, God stoops down to deal with our immaturity. Even in his judgments, he demonstrates his love by resisting evil and destroying the oppressive systems we’ve created. God does not delight in punishment and destruction. “I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live” (Ezekiel 33:11). His goal is justice, peace, and restoration for repentant persons. Though we will never fully understand his choices, we can trust that the “God who saves” knows better than anyone how to judge correctly.

Citations: Copan, Paul. Is God a Moral Monster? Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011.

Tags: judgment, justice, habits, demons, idols, depravity, destruction, violence, abuse, morality, polytheism, genocide, pagan, monster, harm, near east, peacesalvation