A reader writes to ask my thoughts on the stories in the Biblical Old Testament that recount God's commands to the Israelites to slay every man, woman, child, and animal of the Canaanites (e.g. see Deut. 20:16: "[I]n the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave anything alive that breathes."). Nothing could be more unChristian, more contrary to the God that Jesus reveals in the Gospels, than the behavior God commands in this passage. How, a lot of people wonder, can we reconcile this savagery with the Christian view of God?
This is the toughest question, in my opinion, with which a skeptic can challenge a Christian. I don't know that there's any satisfactory reply, and every answer of which I'm aware has serious shortcomings and/or implications. Consequently, the tendency is to simply push the problem out of one's mind. Few preachers discuss it in their sermons, and, I suppose, many laypersons simply ignore those parts of the Bible which describe the horrific killing that God ostensibly commanded of His people as they prepared to occupy the Promised Land.
I don't have an answer, at least not a good one, to the question of how to reconcile the Old Testament Yahweh with the God revealed in Jesus, but for those who are interested here are some of the explanations on offer from theologians. Perhaps one of them is correct:
1) The Old Testament record is, in this respect at least, inaccurate. The Israelites claimed to be acting on the command of God as a way of rationalizing their atrocities, but they were either mistaken about God's will in this matter or they were deceitful. God did not, in fact, ordain this behavior.
The problem with this approach is that it entails that the Old Testament, or at least parts of it, are not inspired and inerrant in the sense that Christians have traditionally believed.
2) God is sovereign and can do whatever He wants.
This is certainly true, but it doesn't address the problem. The question that cries out for an answer is why a good God, the God revealed in Jesus Christ, would want to do something so cruel and why He would have human beings participate in the brutality.
3) The Canaanites were so wicked that they deserved death and the Israelites, God's chosen people, were simply the agents of His judgment.
But what could be just about slaughtering terrified women, children, the aged, and the infirm? Did they "deserve" death? John Wesley declared that to attribute such atrocities to God is an outrage against His character and makes Him "more false, more cruel, and more unjust than the devil."
And why would God use human beings to execute such cruelties? What effect did it have on Israelite soldiers to put children to the sword? Why did He not simply handle the chore Himself or send plagues as He did against the Egyptians just a few decades earlier?
Moreover, if anything is absolutely wrong, i.e. wrong regardless of circumstances, it's genocide, but if God authorized the complete elimination of a race of people then all moral and ethical absolutes are relativized and all distinctions between good and evil become meaningless.
4) We only know part of the story. If we knew all of the details God's reasons would be more comprehensible.
This is an attractive option and it may be the truth, but it carries at least the scent of a cop-out about it. We are given no reason to think that there's more to the story than what we're told, at least no more that would change the moral complexion of it.
Moreover, its hard to imagine what additional facts there could be that would make God's command more comprehensible and more compatible with the God of justice, love and mercy that the New Testament portrays.
5) There's no answer. It's an inscrutable mystery. Just trust God and don't worry about it.
This is an appeal to fideism, or blind faith. No matter what the difficulties might be we're urged to ignore them and refuse to allow them to crowd into our noetic structure. I find this suggestion difficult to heed. I don't think God gave us minds merely to have us disengage them whenever we encounter tough questions.
Perhaps there are other possible explanations that readers could come up with for Deuteronomy 20 and passages like it. If so, please feel free to send them along via our Feedback page.
RLC
