Did God Command Genocide?
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We’re going to turn to a difficult text. Let’s turn to Deuteronomy chapter 20. All right. I’ll just cut to the chase here in verse 16 to 17, and won’t read what precedes, but I’ll just jump in here, which gets to the nub of what we want to talk about. It says only the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them. The Hittites and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the Lord, your God has commanded you, in order that they may teach you to do according to all their detestable things, which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the Lord, your God. So that’s one of the texts. There’s another one in Deuteronomy chapter seven, which says something similar and will come to that in a little bit.
But what I want to do in talking about the question that you perhaps have heard, did God command genocide? How could a good God command that? Well, we need to unpack this. And of course the answer to the question, did God really command genocide is no. So just be upfront about that, let you know. And I would also encourage you, it’s not out yet, but I’ve co-authored a book with Matthew Flannagan and it is a book entitled Did God Really Command Genocide? It’s coming out in October and it goes into a lot of detail offering philosophical, even legal arguments in light of human rights abuses and for example, in the former Yugoslavia and charges of genocide and ethnic cleansing and so forth. So we actually look at the biblical text and what is going on there in comparison to rulings by the International Human Rights Commission and offering perspective on that. Because if you are using the term genocide, what we argue is that it actually doesn’t even match up toe even the worst case scenario, doesn’t match up to what human rights cases are saying today in our modern day.
So anyway, just to give you a heads up on that, that’ll be coming out, as I said, with Baker Books in October, and it’ll be a very comprehensive treatment. We’ll do things, even cover in that book. Actually justification in part for the crusades, we argue that the crusades were actually more defensive. There was abuses, but more defensive and protective rather than aggressive and abusive. So anyway, that’s what we argue. Also deal with just war and pacifism, dealing with the question, does religion cause violence. Also dealing with comparing Islamic texts to the biblical text. So it’s a very wide ranging book. So hopefully you’ll be able to pick that up down the road.
What I’d like to do first is look at some preliminaries, like to talk about some of these issues in a broader context, and then in the latter part of my talk, look at some of the specific text that are so troubling to so many. Well, if you’re going to understand anything about the ancient Near East, it’s that war was standard fare. If you didn’t engage in warfare, you didn’t stick around. You were going to be gobbled up by the more powerful or more aggressive nation nearby. So that’s part of what is going on here in the, we’re living with actually the benefits of the Christian worldview that has impacted us in terms of pursuing peace and so forth. And you do see certainly that emphasis that even David, for example, can’t build a temple. Why? Because he’s been a man of war, that was just part of what you did in those days. You battled it out, you protected your borders, et cetera.
But again, we are often going back in time and foisting modern day expectations upon the biblical text. And we have to be careful about doing that. And a lot of people are, same thing is true about slavery as we saw yesterday. So we need to understand a little bit of that and we’ll come to other assumptions that people have when they read the text. And we’ll explore some of the misunderstandings in those assumptions.
It’s also important to keep in mind, as we look at these commands, that not all commands are alike in the scriptures. Sometimes God gives commands with great joy. Other times there are commands that come with a grieved heart because human beings have rebelled against God’s ways. They have despised God’s laws. They have suppressed their conscience. And we read about this, for example, in Amos chapters one and two, where these pagan nations surrounding Israel should have known better. They didn’t have the law of Moses, but still you don’t tear open pregnant women to expand your borders. You don’t break treaties that you have made. You don’t deliver a vulnerable people over into the hands of their enemies.
And so God says, because of this, he’s going to send fire. He’s going to bring judgment upon these peoples. But again, the earth was wicked in the days of Noah. And so God sent a flood, again, a universal destructive flood affected all humanity. And again, there weren’t any righteous people around except for Noah. And so God reluctantly, he is grieved to punish humankind. It’s not what God desires. In fact, we read in Ezekiel 18 and 33, that God doesn’t desire the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked turn from his evil ways and live. And he says, why will you die oh house of Israel? God is reluctant to bring judgment. God does not desire that. And we certainly see that in the book of Jonah, where Jonah doesn’t want to go to Nineveh. Why? Because he knows that God is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness. And when they finally do repent, he says I knew that this would happen. That’s why I didn’t want to come here. That’s just who God is. He is gracious and compassion. Yes, just, he doesn’t leave the guilty unpunished, but God desires for the wicked to turn from their evil ways to repent and to find grace.
We also need to remember this about some things in the law of Moses and in the history of Israel, that there are some inferior conditions. We’re not talking about 21st century democracies here. We’re talking about thug nations. We’re talking about corrupt social structures. They’re around today too, of course, but we are basically seeing that God often issues commands, not because these are ideal, but because as Matthew 19:8 says, because of the hardness of human hearts. So we’re talking about a situation that is less than ideal. And so God is often meeting his people part way, pushing them toward the ideal, and certainly raising them above the fallen, social and moral structures of the ancient Near East around them.
Now, a lot of people will make this sort of an inference. They will say, “Well, if God could command the Israelites to kill Canaanites, well, then what’s to say about other people saying God told me to wipe this people out.” In our book, Did God Really Command Genocide, we talk about the scenario where someone raises this criticism. He says, “Well, what if there’s this Texas governor who discovers that there’s this polygamous sect. They’re doing all sorts of kooky things in his state. And he tells people, ‘Well, God told me to wipe them all out.’ Well, what would we say? How could you protest that?” Well, we make a number of qualifications there. For example, does this guy have any prophetic qualifications to make that sort of a statement? For one thing, the biblical canon is closed. The books from the apostolic time are locked in, so to speak. And so you don’t have the kind of apostolic authority or even prophetic authority like Isaiah and Jeremiah or the apostle Paul, later on in the New Testament times, you don’t have that sort of credibility. You don’t have that sort of authority. And so therefore for any old governor to say this, again, it just doesn’t mesh with scripture itself.
But even beyond this, we see that in the flow of salvation history, as God is working out his purposes, as he is bringing judgment upon the Canaanites and also providing a land for his people to dwell in that he had promised to them, again, that God did not do it immediately. Why he had to wait over 400 years, because as God tells Abraham in Genesis 15:16, the sin of the Amorites, one of the Canaanite peoples, the sin of the Amorites had not yet been filled up. It had not reached the maximum. So God waited. And again, this meant Israel’s being enslaved in Egypt. So God waited a long period of time. And finally, when their sin was fully ripe and they were ready for judgment, that is when God stepped in and used the Israelites to bring about that judgment.
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