Violence in the Old Testament

The popular form of the objection is familiar. Richard Dawkins opened the second chapter of The God Delusion (2006) with a string of insults against the God of the Old Testament, among them that he was an ethnic cleanser, and the conquest of Canaan was his main evidence. That form is easy to dismiss because it is rhetoric. The serious form is not rhetoric, and it is made by careful philosophers who have read the texts. Wesley Morriston's article 'Did God Command Genocide? A Challenge to the Biblical Inerrantist', in the journal Philosophia Christi in 2009, is a good example, and the Oxford volume Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham (2011), edited by Michael Bergmann, Michael Murray and Michael Rea, puts Christian and sceptical philosophers in direct argument with one another.

The serious form runs like this. First, it is always wrong to intend the killing of non-combatants, and especially of children, as a means to some further end. Second, the Old Testament says that God commanded Israel to do exactly that: 'you must not leave alive anything that breathes' (Deuteronomy 20:16), and of Amalek, 'put to death men and women, children and infants' (1 Samuel 15:3). Third, therefore either God is not good, or God did not command it and the Bible is wrong where it says he did. The argument presses hardest on those who hold scripture to be without error, because they cannot take the second option, and it presses on everyone else because they have to explain how scripture can be authoritative while it is mistaken about the character of God.

Two further facts give the objection its weight. The first is that the church has felt it from the beginning. Marcion in the second century rejected the Old Testament and its God because he could not reconcile them with Jesus, and the church rejected Marcion without ever pretending that his problem was imaginary. Origen in the third century wrote that unless the wars of Joshua figured spiritual wars he did not think the apostles would have handed these books to the churches. The second fact is that these texts have been used. Some Puritan preachers in seventeenth-century New England compared Native American peoples to the Amalekites and Canaanites. Afrikaner nationalists read the Great Trek of the 1830s as an exodus into a promised land, though historians debate how early that reading took hold. Wherever a group has wanted land, someone has found Joshua.

For a student in much of the global south, the objection is not academic. Many of you live in countries that have known ethnic massacre in living memory, or among neighbours who have. A Muslim friend may point out that the Bible contains commands harsher than anything he was taught. A young person who has watched violence done in the name of a tribe or a religion may simply ask whether the God of the Bible is any different. A minister who answers lightly, or who says there is nothing here to trouble anyone, will lose that hearer, and deserves to.

Begin by reading without cushioning. The commands are clear: 'you must devote them to complete destruction. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy' (Deuteronomy 7:2), and in the cities of the land 'you must not leave alive anything that breathes' (Deuteronomy 20:16). The reports are clear too. At Jericho 'they devoted to destruction everything in the city - man and woman, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys' (Joshua 6:21), and across the south Joshua 'devoted to destruction everything that breathed, just as the LORD, the God of Israel, had commanded' (Joshua 10:40). The narrator approves: Joshua left 'nothing undone of all that the LORD had commanded Moses' (Joshua 11:15). This is not a story of soldiers exceeding orders. The command is attributed to God, and any honest reading starts there.

Then notice the reasons the texts give, because they are not the reasons the objector usually assumes. The anchor verse denies that Israel is being rewarded for its righteousness, and says so three times in three verses (Deuteronomy 9:4-6). The stated grounds are the wickedness of the nations and the promise to Abraham. The wickedness is named: 'They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods' (Deuteronomy 12:31). The stated purpose is to prevent Israel learning that worship: 'so that they cannot teach you to do all the detestable things they do for their gods' (Deuteronomy 20:18). And the judgment waited four centuries, because 'the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete' (Genesis 15:16). Whatever else this is, the text does not present it as a race war or a land grab.

Then notice what the same books report against a literal reading of their own summaries. Rahab the Canaanite and her household are spared (Joshua 6:17), and she enters the line of the Messiah (Matthew 1:5). The Gibeonites make a treaty and Israel keeps it (Joshua 9). The Anakim survive in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod (Joshua 11:22). 'Very much of the land remains to be possessed' (Joshua 13:1) while Joshua is old. Judges 1 is a list of Canaanites who were not driven out. The Amalekites whom Saul was told to destroy completely are still there for David to raid in 1 Samuel 27, and in 1 Samuel 30 they raid and burn Ziklag. The vocabulary also shifts: alongside the language of destruction stands the language of driving out, gradually: 'Little by little I will drive them out ahead of you' (Exodus 23:30). Any reading must account for both kinds of evidence.

The archaeology of the conquest is complicated, and the Old Testament Survey track sets it out in the lesson The Conquest Problem, which covers the excavations at Jericho, Ai and Hazor and the four models scholars use for how Israel came to be in Canaan. That lesson also lays out the major readings with their price. This lesson does something narrower. It asks what the apologist can say to the objector, and so it concentrates on three readings that are most used in that conversation, with the critics each faces from the sceptical side and from the Christian side. Notice that the readings below are not exclusive; many Christians combine two or all three.

The first reading holds that the language of total destruction is the conventional hyperbole of ancient war reports, and that the command was in substance a command to drive the Canaanites out and to destroy their religious life, not to exterminate a population. Its foundation is K. Lawson Younger's Ancient Conquest Accounts (1990), which showed that Egyptian, Hittite and Assyrian royal inscriptions routinely claim the total annihilation of enemies who survived and fought again. The stele of the pharaoh Merneptah, around 1208 BC, says that Israel is laid waste and its seed is not, which was obviously untrue. Paul Copan, in Is God a Moral Monster? (2011), and Copan and Matthew Flannagan, in Did God Really Command Genocide? (2014), argued the case at length for a general readership, and the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, in his essay 'Reading Joshua' in Divine Evil?, argued that the book itself signals that its summaries are not to be read literally.

Its texts are the friction in section 2. The ban on intermarriage in Deuteronomy 7:3, beside the command to destroy in 7:2, assumes survivors. Joshua 10:40 says no one was left, and Judges 1 says many were. The commands to drive out little by little (Exodus 23:29-30; Deuteronomy 7:22) are not commands to kill. Copan argues that phrases like 'man and woman, young and old' were stock expressions for the whole of a place, and that the cities named were often military strongholds rather than villages full of families. The strength of this reading is that it explains the internal tension of the books better than any rival: the texts seem to contradict a literal extermination because they never meant one. It also lets a reader take the text as truthful, since hyperbole is a recognised way of telling the truth, as when Jesus says to hate father and mother (Luke 14:26).

Critics on the sceptical side reply that hyperbole softens the report but not the command. Morriston and others observe that even if many fled, the command still intends that those who remained, children included, be killed. Deuteronomy 20 is the hardest text for this reading: distant cities may be offered peace, and if they fight, their women and children may be spared (20:14), while the cities of the land may not (20:16). That reads like a statute that deliberately withholds a mercy, not like a war song. Critics also ask whether the hyperbole reading is driven by the text or by the modern reader's discomfort, since the ancient parallels show that inscriptions exaggerated, not that their kings refrained from killing.

Critics on the Christian side make a different complaint. Some conservative scholars hold that the narrator means the reports at Jericho and elsewhere to be taken as what happened, so that a hyperbole reading, pressed too far, makes scripture say what did not occur and does so for reasons the text never gives. Others, such as Randal Rauser, a Christian philosopher who rejects the view that God commanded the killing, argue that the hyperbole reading reduces the number of victims without answering the moral question, which is whether God could command the death of even one child. Defenders of the reading answer both: it is the text's own internal evidence, not modern taste, that signals the genre, and reducing the scale changes what is being asked of the reader even if it does not remove the question.

The second reading holds that the conquest was a unique act of divine judgment on a particular society at a particular moment, carried out through Israel as God's instrument, as the flood and Sodom were carried out without one. Its texts are the ones the books themselves give: the iniquity of the Amorites reaching its full measure after four centuries of delay (Genesis 15:16); the land vomiting out its inhabitants for their practices (Leviticus 18:24-28); the burning of children (Deuteronomy 12:31) and the occult practices of Deuteronomy 18:9-12; and the anchor verse, which denies Israel any merit and names the nations' wickedness as the cause. Christopher J. H. Wright, in The God I Don't Understand (2008), argues a careful version, stressing that the conquest is presented as limited in time and place, never repeated as a pattern, and announced as judgment rather than as ethnic hatred. Clay Jones, in the same 2009 issue of Philosophia Christi, argued that modern readers struggle with these texts partly because they do not take the gravity of the Canaanite practices seriously.

Its strengths are real. It is the explanation scripture itself gives. It is even-handed, not tribal: the same sentence is pronounced on Israel in Leviticus 18:28 and Joshua 23:12-13, and 2 Kings 17 says it was carried out when Israel walked in the customs of the nations the LORD had driven out. It allows for mercy to those who turn, which is exactly what Rahab, who confessed that 'the LORD your God is God in the heavens above and on the earth below' (Joshua 2:11), and the Gibeonites received, and it fits Jeremiah's principle that if a nation God has warned turns from its evil, 'then I will relent of the disaster I had planned to bring' (Jeremiah 18:8). It also places the conquest beside other acts of judgment in scripture, including the destruction of Jerusalem, which Jesus foresaw with weeping: 'They will level you to the ground - you and the children within your walls' (Luke 19:44). William Lane Craig adds that God, as the giver of life, has a right over it that no human being has, and that children who died were received by God and not lost.

Critics on the sceptical side say that this answers the question by assuming it. A sentence on a society still falls on infants who did nothing, and the question is precisely whether a just judge may impose a corporate sentence that kills children. They add, with some force, Abraham's own principle from lesson 2: 'Far be it from You to do such a thing - to kill the righteous with the wicked' (Genesis 18:25). If God would spare Sodom for ten, why not the Canaanite children? And the sins named, child sacrifice among them, are sins Israel itself later commits without a command to destroy every Israelite child.

Critics on the Christian side worry about what the judgment reading licenses. If God may command the killing of children as judgment, how is anyone to recognise a false claim that he has done so again, and what remains of the recognisable goodness that Abraham appealed to? Craig's appeal to divine prerogative in particular has been criticised by other Christians, Rauser among them, for emptying God's goodness of content we can understand. Defenders reply that the judgment reading itself supplies the limit: the conquest was announced by God through Moses for one time and place, never repeated, never extended to the church, and closed by the coming of Christ, whose kingdom does not advance by the sword (John 18:36). Whether that limit is enough to answer the worry is exactly what critics and defenders dispute.

The third reading begins from Jesus rather than from Joshua. If 'Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father' (John 14:9), and the Son is 'the exact representation of His nature' (Hebrews 1:3), then the crucified Christ is the clearest picture of God there is, and every other picture must be read in his light. Jesus tells his disciples to 'love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you' (Matthew 5:44). When James and John want to call down fire on a Samaritan village, as Elijah had, 'Jesus turned and rebuked them' (Luke 9:55). On this reading the conquest texts are to be read through the cross rather than the cross through them, and the question is what that means.

Its defenders answer in different ways. C. S. Cowles, in the multi-author book Show Them No Mercy: Four Views on God and Canaanite Genocide (2003), argued that Jesus reveals a God who did not in fact command the killing, and that the texts reflect Israel's own understanding at that stage. Eric Seibert, in Disturbing Divine Behavior (2009), argued that Christians should distinguish the textual God from the actual God and judge violent portrayals by the God revealed in Jesus. Greg Boyd, in The Crucifixion of the Warrior God (2017), tried to keep the texts fully inspired: he argued that as God at the cross allowed himself to be portrayed as a cursed criminal, so in the conquest texts he allowed his people to portray him in the violent terms of their culture, stooping to bear their misunderstanding. Older forms of the Christ-centred reading are found in Origen, who read Joshua, whose name in Greek is the same as Jesus, as a figure of Christ's war against the vices of the soul. The strength of this family is that it makes Christ the measure of scripture in fact and not only in principle, and it refuses to defend a text at the cost of the character of God.

Its critics are just as serious. The other contributors to Show Them No Mercy replied to Cowles that Jesus himself treats the Old Testament as the word of God and says of the Law and the Prophets, 'I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them' (Matthew 5:17). Jesus also speaks of judgment: he warns cities that it will be more bearable for Sodom than for them, foresees Jerusalem's destruction, and in Revelation the rider called Faithful and True 'judges and wages war' (Revelation 19:11). The cross itself, critics add, is not a refusal of judgment but the place where God's judgment on sin falls, so that God might be shown 'to be just and to justify the one who has faith in Jesus' (Romans 3:26); read that way, the cross confirms rather than dissolves the reality of divine judgment. And once a reader may set aside a portrait of God on moral grounds, he needs a careful account of why his own moral sense is a trustworthy judge of revelation, which is the question Marcion never answered. Boyd's critics add that his reading requires inspired texts to misrepresent God, which they think the texts cannot bear. Defenders reply that reading the Old Testament through Christ is what Jesus himself taught his disciples to do (Luke 24:27), that his coming already reorders how parts of the Law apply, as when Mark notes that his teaching made all foods clean (Mark 7:19), and that the real question between them and their critics is how far that reordering reaches, not whether it happens.

There is a sense of the cross as key that almost every Christian accepts, and it should be distinguished from the contested one. Whatever the conquest was, it is not a model for the church. The kingdom of Christ is not of this world, and he tells Peter to put his sword away (Matthew 26:52). The people of God are now a multinational body with no territory to take, and the enemies the New Testament tells them to fight are not flesh and blood. A Christian in a land where the practices of Deuteronomy 18 are common must never conclude that his neighbours are Canaanites under a ban; the church's weapons are the gospel, prayer and love. On that much, the hyperbole, judgment and cross-centred readings agree.

Gather up what is settled, and keep it narrow, because it is narrower than either side wants. It is settled that the text attributes the command to God, and an honest Christian does not pretend otherwise. It is settled that the same books report many Canaanites surviving, so whatever the command meant, the books do not describe a completed extermination. It is settled that Israel's scriptures apply the same judgment to Israel, so the conquest is not presented as favouritism. It is settled that the canon moves: Rahab is in the genealogy of Jesus, a Canaanite woman's faith is called great (Matthew 15:28), and the prophets foresee a day when nations 'will beat their swords into plowshares' (Isaiah 2:4). And it is settled that no Christian may use these texts to justify violence now.

What is not settled is the central question: whether, and in what sense, God commanded the killing of Canaanite children, and if he did, how that is consistent with the goodness revealed in Christ. Each reading in this lesson pays a price at that point, and you should be able to name it. The hyperbole reading has to carry Deuteronomy 20. The judgment reading has to carry the children and Abraham's question. The cross-centred reading has to carry Jesus' own view of the Old Testament and the place of judgment in his teaching. Say to the objector which reading you find strongest and what it costs. He will trust you more for the second sentence than the first.

This week, add the third sheet to The hardest objections. On the first line, write the objection in the three steps given in section 1, in your own words. On the second, write how it is actually raised where you live: by a sceptic, a Muslim friend, a survivor of violence, or a young believer who has just read Joshua for the first time. On the third, write each of the three readings in two sentences that its own defenders would accept, and mark the one you find strongest. On the fourth, write that reading's price in one honest sentence.

On the fifth line, write Deuteronomy 9:5 in full, and beside it Joshua 6:17 on Rahab. On the sixth, write when you will stop arguing: for instance, when the person asking has lost family to ethnic violence and needs first to hear that God hates what was done to them. Then read Joshua 2 and Joshua 6 aloud with one other believer, and ask each other what the story of Rahab does to the way you hear the rest of the book. Write down one sentence from that conversation that you would want to say to the objector.