"Utterly destroy them" - does it apply?

Torah (the Law) clearly commands Israel to exterminate the people of Canaan when they come into the land.  Moreover, the Jewish theologian Jesus of Nazareth affirmed that not one stroke or dot of the Law will pass away until all is fulfilled, so Christians may not escape this by mumbling "Old Testament, Old Testament," as their father Marcion the heretic used to do.

Still, if it applies today, how could it be written in the Psalms, "Rejoice, O nations, with His people?"  The nations can hardly rejoice with His people if His people are killing them or otherwise pushing them around!  Again, what was Uriah the Hittite doing among David's mighty men?  Wasn't he supposed to be annihilated along with the other Hittites?  But when David did get him killed, God was far from pleased!

Christians and Jews find these commands embarrassing when men fling them in our faces, but at other times some Israeli Jews and American Christians, especially those who want to justify Israel and the USA in all that they do, find them quite convenient - desiring to justify American genocides past and present and Israel's colonial war in the occupied territories.  Forgetting their shame the last time some atheist used these commands to prove to them how evil the Bible is - how they tried somehow at that time to squirm out of their plain sense - they scurry to these same words, so lately used to put them to shame, to escape the plain sense of the deeds they wish to excuse!

To decide what God thinks of American and Israeli conduct before we decide what God says about genocide, and especially where His word at least seems to approve, is like setting the timing on a car before we install the new timing belt.  Instead of continuing to limp between the two opinions, like Israel in the days of Elijah, let's give Torah a closer look.

The order to annihilate was given to (1) certain people, (2) meeting certain conditions, (3) concerning certain people (4) for certain reasons, (5) and as confirmed by God's miraculous intervention.  The Law does not permit us to add to or take away from what is written.  To do so in regard to any commandment to put anyone to death is certain to result in applying the commandment where not intended, in short, to lead to murder - which is definitely forbidden.  Let's take a look at these conditions:

1)  The people given this command were the people of Israel capturing the land under the leadership of Joshua.  After the initial conquest the generation that followed failed to obey God fully, specifically in making deals with the Canaanites instead of driving them out, so in the book of Judges God said at Bochim, "I will no longer drive them out before you."  God's specific complaint was, "You have not listened to My voice."  This brings us to the next point.

2)  This applied only if the people were listening to God's voice - not just in whatever they felt like, but in everything.  It won't do to obey in putting to death the inhabitants of the land while spurning the rest of God's commandments, notably the Ten Words!  In particular, it is written, "You shall not covet."  When even one man in Israel coveted and stole from Jericho, God was prompt to say that he would not be with the entire nation to destroy the peoples.  Any covetousness completely disqualified the entire nation from executing this judgment against the people of Canaan.

In particular, the land was promised to the sons of Abraham: to be a son of Abraham is to be in his image and likeness, to be doing like him.  Esau was of Abraham by fleshly descent, but he did not receive the promise.  In particular, Abraham did not receive the land by grabbing it and insisting on his rights at another's expense, as do the Israelis of the West Bank settlements.  When it grew too crowded for him and Lot, he gave his nephew his pick and took what was left, and God responded to his faith by confirming again His promise (Genesis 13:8-17).  But to greedy people who say, "Abraham was one and inherited the land.  But we are many; the land has been given to us as a possession," Ezekiel the prophet says, "I don't think so!" (Ezekiel 33:23-29).

3)  The command to exterminate was given concerning certain people, namely the Canaanite nations.  Torah gives no warrant for extending this word to anyone beyond whom it addresses: the Canaanites, Girgashites, Hittites, Hivites, Amorites, Perrizites, and Jebusites which it names.  There is in addition the commandment to blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven - a most essential commandment which I will return to in a moment.

Even among these nations, Rahab the harlot of Jericho and the Gibeonites are to be spared during Joshua's conquest.  Afterwards, Uriah the Hittite and Araunah the Jebusite are found among the people with God's hearty approval, and it is strictly forbidden to oppress them in any way.  How much less, then, those who are not Canaanites, whom God never put under the ban.

4)  The nations to be destroyed were to be destroyed for a certain reason: that Israel might not join in their idolatry.  The problem was not that the foreigners were in the land and needed to be pushed out of the way because the Israelites needed Lebensraum (German "living space"), which is the evident motivation of those trying to establish a greater Israel.  The problem was Canaanite idolatry and the danger of sharing in it.  But modern Israel's idolatry is learned far more from the Americans, from whom they have learned the consumer culture and the worship of weapons of destruction, than in any way from the Palestinians.  The war for the settlements is not about avoiding idolatry but about avoiding the need to trust in the God of Israel so as to obey His commandment to love the strangers in their midst.  Its effect is to make Israel totally dependent on the Americans diplomatically, economically, culturally, and even militarily, because without a vast American subsidy Israel could never support the military establishment it does.  In this way, Israeli Jews have become just as helpless in the hands of the Americans as Theodor Herzl found the French Jews to be in 1895.   In order to exercise colonial dominion over the Palestinians, Israel has abandoned the essence of why Herzl and the founders of the Zionist movement wanted a Jewish state - to be independent of the Gentile nations.  To hold down the Palestinians, Israel pays the price of being at America's mercy as surely as Ahaz became the slave of Assyria.  How does any of this shield Israel from idolatry, as God intended?

5)  In the record, the annihilation of the Canaanites is to be accomplished through divine intervention.  Thus the walls of Jericho fell down when Israel marched around them, and the kings who attacked Gibeon were struck by great hailstones while Israel was helped by a long day.  If God is not showing up for you in this manner, how do you know you have the same approval?  Notice that for this purpose it makes no difference whether you believe that these miraculous events really took place.  If these events did not take place as written, the text is false in these claims, and such a text cannot be trusted when it tells you to kill or dispossess people.  If these miracles did happen, and that's how the conquest was accomplished, then you need for God to show up in the same way for your project, lest you be found in the place of the Egyptians and Assyrians as you rely on the worldly power they trusted in.  Either way, in the absence of such divine intervention, you are not free to proceed.    

Finally, Israel is commanded to blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven because God will have war against Amalek from generation to generation.  Now here is a commandment which remains in force to eternity, unlike the commandment to do away with the Canaanites.  We'd better do it, but who are the Amalekites?  You don't want to slip up in identifying people if you're going to blot them out from under heaven!

There's always doubt about genealogies, but there's one way to recognize Amalek for sure.  Who acts like Amalek?  So long as anyone under heaven is acting like Amalek, Amalek's memory is not blotted out from under heaven, because whoever acts like Amalek is certainly reminding God and man of him.  The first step, therefore, in blotting out his memory from under heaven is to learn never to act like him.

What is the offense of Amalek?  It is, as we read in Exodus 17:8-16 and Deuteronomy 25:17-19, to fall upon the weak and stragglers, those who are faint and unable to defend themselves.  The sons of Amalek, therefore, are those who prey upon the weak, who oppress strangers, who distress widows and orphans for the sake of gain, who grind the face of the poor, who rob and plunder because they are strong and their victims are unable to resist.  We're not blotting out the memory of Amalek from under heaven until our behavior stops bringing his name to the mind of God.  And those who do these things have the promise of God that He will have war against them from generation to generation.

Following is a short internet debate that clarifies certain points, mine in blue:

I stumbled across one of your comments while reading "An Atheist Manifesto" on truthdig.com. As an as-of-yet-undecided seeker of truth who grew up in the American Christian tradition, and then rejected it whole-heartedly, I found the point of your comment appropriate. You seemed to say that although the overwhelming majority of religious actions in history have been atrocious, the true essence of, in particular, Christianity, denounces these atrocities just as the atheist does.

After reading that, I followed the link to your page and enjoyed some insightful comments you made in your book Facing Antichrist Today. I like your interpretation of scripture and particularly the spirit of the antichrist.

Then I stumbled onto your essay entitled, Utterly Destroy Them? -does it apply...

What a disappointment to find out that you are no different from the rest of these callous-hearted Christians who, in claiming biblical inerrancy, support genocide, albeit in narrowly-defined terms.

How can you support genocide? Under any terms? Are you kidding?

This is the point on which I agree 100% with the atheists. Anyone who claims the Bible is inerrant and is aware of the God-mandated massacres of innocent people is not a person who is both honest and moral. The atheists are being given the moral upper hand -served to them willingly on a platter by people like you. Any honest and morally decent Christian must admit the Bible had to have been altered at some point in history (probably by some war-mongering king) in order to lend support to some perverted vision of militaristic dominance.

A God of Love simply wouldn't order a massacre. And if the God of the Bible ordered massacres then He is not a God of love and therefore the numerous passages in the Bible referring to Him as such are contradicted.

My opinion, having renounced a belief in Christ-as-savior and likewise in biblical inerrancy, is that the Bible is full of inspiration and wisdom, Jesus was a gifted profit of God, like many others who were inspired and saw truth, and that the Bible is a useful tool unless it is taken literally or taken to be infallable. Then it becomes a destructive tool and I see no way around this as your "Utterly destroy them" article makes quite clear.

Please respond.

Your points do seem reasonable, but let me begin with this: Jesus and the prophets, who gave the only coherent basis for rejecting genocide specifically but also its more general foundation of devouring the "useless eaters" from the earth - did so from a position of biblical inerrancy, fully accepting the authority of the passages you have trouble with.  And no one else in the earth has ever done so.

To deny that God has the right to destroy nations when that is just at the same time affirms that those whose deeds earn that sentence ought to go unpunished.  Effectively, that leads to the position that what they do is OK, if for them to go unpunished is the right thing.  I notice, though, that when God does leave them unpunished, the same who require this leniency are often swift to find fault because He lets the wicked get way with it!

A specific instance of how Jesus applied the Bible teaching on annihilating the Canaanites is the woman caught in adultery in John 8.  Because those executing judgment on the Canaanites had to be free themselves from covetousness and robbery, those intending to stone the woman had first to be without sin themselves.  And it was precisely because they knew the Law on this point that they had to walk away, instead of arguing that the law commanded this regardless of their own condition.  Take note: the censorious position of the Pharisees here, electing themselves to kill this woman because she was a sinner, did so on the same finger-pointing spiritual foundation as the Nazis, the Stalinists, and the American messianists.

The Bible often avoids outright prohibitions on certain behaviors because what is needed instead is to reveal and reprove the underlying foundation.  An example is slavery, which Moses does not prohibit.  Instead, he says that if a slave runs away from his master to you, you are in no way to return him to his master but must instead let him live among you where he wants.  That makes slavery impossible, revealing at the same time that slavery is not what certain masters do.  It's what the society does as a whole, just as torture is not what certain brutes in Guantanamo and elsewhere do; it's what the American people do as a whole, who condone it and support those who do it in their names.

Genocide is strictly forbidden to any "whose justice and dignity proceed from themselves" (Habakkuk 1:7, 17).  The Bible is making the point that the real problem, of which genocide is a symptom, is people electing themselves judge and therefore appointing themselves to execute judgment.  If you don't deal with that - which is also the problem of our atheist friends - you'll get genocide and lots of other stuff like it.  They oppose it when sponsored by today's American Christoids, because they oppose the particular parties doing it, but they have no consistent foundation for such opposition.  Thus Bertrand Russell, who advocated nuclear disarmament in the 1950s, favored preemptive nuclear bombing of the Soviet Union in 1948, having seen in Hiroshima and Nagasaki just what he was calling for.

If your justice and dignity don't proceed from yourself, you won't do any of the massacres we've grown accustomed to these past hundred years.  You can't do anything unless God is doing it.  On one particular occasion, God sentenced to destruction nations that were burning their own children in the fire to their gods, whose rich men bought babies from the poor for such sacrifices, because for people to be able to go unpunished forever for such things ensures that they will be done without limit.  On other occasions, God has answered his servants by sending drought or other such chastisements.

It seems to me that atheists should be very comfortable with the Bible's teaching on these matters.  If it's never to be done except through the manifest power of God, it is always forbidden if this God is really never around.  Our common experience bears out at any rate that it should not happen often, because when do we ever see God manifestly showing up?  The atheists say that this is because He just isn't there.  The testimony of the Bible is that He's slow to anger and hates actually inflicting punishment, as seen in how He'll promise destruction for outrageous behavior and then put up with it for another 300 years before bringing Himself to do what He said.  This is in keeping with Revelation 11, in which those with power to strike the earth with plagues as often as they will are clothed in sackcloth - qualified to inflict punishment only because they mourn.

These are big questions, and I'm glad you want to pursue them.  I'm still working on them myself, and I'm seeing more clearly that my own impatient wish to see the wicked punished is what has made me slow to understand these things.

But you should clearly understand that to oppose these things on the basis that the Bible is full of errors does not convince those that want to do them to throw the Bible away.  It just confirms to them that the Bible approves their doings and makes them wise in their own eyes.  If you want to oppose American genocide and torture, you have to take the Bible away from those that want to do these things as Jesus did, not assure them that the Bible supports them, as the atheists do.

Thank you for your well-thought-out response.

I agree with you that if our audience is the Bible-thumping, Pharisee types then we must use the Bible to argue against them. That is the only source of credibility in their eyes and arguing from any other standpoint is futile (very futile).

Having pointed this out, I do want to thank you for taking the time to research and reason out the biblically-based response to these "Christians". I have many of these people very close to me and realize that if I am ever going to change their opinions I will need as much biblical evidence as possible.

To avoid despising people, it helps to know that this principle is general.  To get anywhere with anyone, including you and me, always requires submitting to that person's canon of scripture, whatever it is, and reasoning within that.  Because no one is entirely without the light of truth, there is always something therein to work with, and nothing else ever works.

All of us read and obey the word of God written in daily life, on which the Bible in particular rests its authority.  This is especially obvious in the Proverbs and Job, but it's really everywhere else too.  This is the body of scripture, not the Bible itself, which Jesus commonly preached from in his parables.

And whatever truth we find always testifies to other truth.  The Bible thumper can be shown in his Bible that holy scripture is what the Bible says it is, and that's the word of God written for all in creation.  Take him through the Proverbs, pointing out how the appeal is so often to authority outside the Bible, and he will have to agree in order to remain faithful to the Bible.  Point out that that authoritative revelation is his only way to preach to "every creature," including those who do not recognize the Bible, and he may be glad to adjust his thinking.      

Between rational human beings who have not yet denied the god-given blessing of reason, however, I still find your argument troubling on two points.

One, I'm not sure I agree with you yet on the point that "destroying a nation" (which I take to mean murdering every single human being living there) would really balance out morally. Killing every living human would mean killing the exact same children God was supposedly trying to save (in the example of the nation which killed its own children as a sacrifice to their god). I'm not quite ready to say that killing an innocent person (a child, in my opinion, is not capable of being anything but innocent, even though they act up sometimes) can be justified if only the murder was committed in order to save enough other people.

Here too you make a good point.  In fact, what was commanded in Moses and Joshua was by no means intended to be universal.  Rahab the whore, because she saw how it was and trusted herself to the God of Israel, saved herself and her entire family.  She came up in the world too, becoming the wife of Salmon the prince of Judah.  It's a pretty common theme in scripture that unconditional orders are given to put all of a certain category to death - idolaters, adulterers, sorcerers, and such like - but then God Himself lets them slide for quite a while and spares them if they repent.

What is not OK is to spare people because you just don't care about their wickedness.  It looks outwardly the same in the action taken, but the root is evil, and so the fruit is horrible.  Jesus getting the adulteress off and the US letting war criminals like Henry Kissinger, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld walk at liberty are entirely different types of leniency - and they don't smell the same.  

And secondly, your argument that Christians do not have the authority to commit genocide unless God manifests himself as he did in Jericho seems over-ripe for abuse. How many Christians do you know personally who claim to have seen angels, visions, or heard words from God? I know plenty. If the only safeguard against biblically-sponsored genocide is a sign of God manifesting himself, we are in deep trouble I'm afraid.

You're right about this, but that's how the truth is.  It's corruptible.  When we try to fence it around so people can't abuse it or corrupt it, we wind up only with lies, and the dangers we sought to avoid overtake us anyway, or worse.  The Pharisees making rules to keep people from abusing the law show how this works precisely.

But the conquest of Canaan was not on the basis of claims to have seen visions or heard words from God.  God showing up means God actually doing something undeniable.  The walls fell down.  The sun stood still.  The Jordan parted so that they walked over dry-shod.  This type of intervention, stuff which cannot happen through what men alone can do, is the warrant the Bible gives for killing people in wars of conquest.

You need not believe that any of this happened, of course.  There's no need to settle that question, because if these things didn't happen, then the whole account is crap and there's no authority to do the things it says there to do.  But if the account is true and therefore authoritative, then such signs from God did happen and are normative for those who want to do today as Joshua did, and without them therefore, there is again no authority to act.

More generally, Moses writes that when you go out to war, you shall keep yourself from every evil thing.  This is less a command than a promise: if God sent you, the power by which he sent you will likewise be keeping you from doing evil.  But if you are doing evil, exercising wanton cruelty, plundering, and lying, then God certainly did not send you.  On this basis, I wrote to my local paper in February 2003 that because this war was based on lying and the appeal to cowardice, rooted in the self-exaltation that made Americans feel qualified to boss inferiors around, it would inevitably cause the invaders to do evil and be abased in shame, revealed to the world as torturers and barbarians.  I didn't say this because I was a prophet; it's just what the Bible assured us had to be.  Colonial wars are always the filthiest, because they are based on the conceit that prompts men to elect themselves overseers of the affairs of others, thereby becoming also evildoers, murderers, and thieves (1 Peter 4:15).  Much more than in the States, American soldiers abroad walk in every kind of filth - their bases surrounded by whorehouses and the local people subjected to all sorts of criminal behavior.  Their demonic mission of dominating the earth is revealed in their godless and demonic behavior out there, in contrast to their behavior at home, where they belong.

This teaching of Moses, by the way, is the foundation of the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, which the end of Matthew 4 reveals to be his answer to people who wanted to know the secret of the authority over demons and sickness that Jesus exercised.  In short, the power to make cripples walk is the same power as the power to walk in his steps.  This the Roman centurion understood. 

I don't know what the answer is but I appreciate you sharing your thoughts and allowing me to sharpen my Christian-debating skills with you.

People who ask hard questions and want to know are the nobility of the earth.  It's a high honor to be able to serve you in this matter.  I hope to give the best possible.  I'm not doing you any favors or giving you anything you don't deserve - far from it.

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