In Deuteronomy chapter 7 God orders the Israelites to completely destroy the 7 nations of Canaan, without mercy, and so the conquest of Canaan began at Jericho, with the killing of every man, woman and child in the city.
In 1 Samuel 15, God orders King Saul to kill every man, woman, child and even the animals of the Amalekites. In 2 Samuel 8 David kills thousands of his enemies in war, apparently under God’s sanction.
But why all the killing?
I want to start by placing the question of Old Testament violence in its context: the Old Testament world. Because this is where the things we are thinking about took place. Again, this does not answer the question we are asking, but it will colour in the lines. We need to see the picture a little more clearly before we start asking what is going on in that picture.
Now, we live in a western culture that, for the most part, hates war. It is to be avoided except in the most dire of circumstances (and even then a great many people would say that no circumstance justifies war). But no Israelite would have looked around and wondered why there was so much violence in the world around him.
Violence and war was a reality of the world in which the ancients lived. Quite literally it was often kill-or-be-killed. Peoples and nations, as a matter of course, either fought to expand their territory, or fought to defend their territory. War was not constant, and for the most part people lived relatively peaceful lives in their own homes on their land. But neither was warfare uncommon.
Also, in a time when gods were local, and each people had their own patron gods, and gods were honoured only when they proved to be more powerful than other gods. This is the reality behind, for example, the plagues in Egypt: When Pharaoh asked, ‘Who is the LORD (Yahweh) that I should obey him? We have dozens of gods. Never heard of Yahweh!’… God proceeded to hold up the Egyptian gods to ridicule, one by one, ending with the ‘god’ Pharaoh himself, until Pharaoh was forced to concede that the God of Israel was more powerful than the so-called gods of the Egyptians. Then Pharaoh knew who Yahweh was, and he at last obeyed and let the Israelites go. So, too, among the nations that would surround Israel, God would be serving notice that the God of Israel was the God above all other gods. When Israel got to Jericho, Rahab, a resident of Jericho, told the two Israelite spies that everyone knew what God had done in Egypt, and as a result were melting with fear.
These were the raw materials with which God would work out his plan to establish his covenant people in the midst of pagan nations.
Perhaps people 1000 years from now will look back on our era and say, ‘They took the land of the natives, either by force or by squatters’ rights, they all drove one or more cars and built factories that poisoned the air, they lived lives of unparalleled luxury while 100’s of millions across the world were starving… How could God have possibly been present in such a society? How could he have blessed at that time?’
And yet this reality and the people who live here and now are the raw materials in which God works. And his kingdom advances.
This is not, of course, an answer to our question, but it at least provides some of the context in which the question we’re asking is set: violence, and a recognition of a god’s worth only by the power it excercised were the reality in which God was at work.
So, from there, we can begin to talk about the question: why all the killing in the Old Testament?
There are a number of factors at play in considering the violence of God in the Old Testament.
The first is divine judgement and divine goodness.
How can I say ‘goodness’ when talking about this kind of thing?
Chemotherapy or radiation treatment is brutal on a body. But what is that treatment designed to do? Kill the cancer. Sometimes a doctor will do violence to our bodies in order to do good.
We live in a society that seeks to be just. We have officers to enforce certain laws that we deem necessary to live in a secure and civilized manner with one another. So if someone breaks one of those laws, they are judged. Violent crimes – armed robbery, assault, rape, murder – are judged particularly harshly when the system is just. Those judgements we make because we agree that it is good for the rest of us to have such a person removed from society. And the one who hands down the sentence we even call a ‘judge’.
God is a just judge, and every act of violence that God either ordained or carried out himself was an act of divine judgement. But it was not just judgement for its own sake. God’s judgement was always for the sake of good.
Now, the command for Israel was to eradicate from Canaan the people that lived there: genocide on a mass scale. Centuries before, God had covenanted to give this land to Abraham and his descendants. Now those descendants, a nation themselves, have left slavery in Egypt and have made their way to the land God had promised them. But there were already people living there. Now what? They are to conquer the land.
But is God simply giving the Israelites living space: ‘kill the inhabitants so you can live here’?
When the Israelites did at last arrive at the borders of Canaan, the land of the Amorites, the sin of the Amorites was complete. Their sin had reached its full measure. The time had come to judge, and Israel was to be the instrument of that judgement.
In its world, the wicked paganism of Canaan was unparalleled. John Wenham, in his book ‘The Goodness of God’, writes:
The Old Testament directs its bitterest venom against Baalism and the cult of Molech. Baalism was a fertility cult in which sexual licence was glorified as something religious and meritorious. There were ‘holy’ prostitutes, male and female, for the gratification of the worshippers.
The wife of the god Baal, named ‘Anath’, loved war. This from a poem about her:
Ðeciding on a massacre, she smote and slew from seacoast to sunrise. Filling her temple with men she barred the doors and hurled at them chairs, tables and footstools. Soon she waded in blood up to her knees – nay, up to her neck. Her liver swelled with laughter, her heart was full of joy. She then washed her hands in gore and proceeded to other occupations.
This is a ‘goddess’ killing for the sheer pleasure of it, and this is a goddess worshipped in Canaan.
The worship of the god Molech included child sacrifice. The arms of the hollow idol were held in front in a kind of cradling position. A fire was kindled inside the idol, and when the arms were redhot, a child was placed in his arms as a sacrifice. Even today, when someone tortures a child, we would all say, ‘There is no punishment too great for this kind of crime!’ What about a nation that makes this a regular part of their worship?
This was the religious life of the Canaanites. These were the people who inhabited the land to which Israel came.
And whatever we think of the nature of the judgement God visited upon them, let us at least not see them as a nation of innocent farmers upon whom the hordes of Israel descended like Attila’s Huns.
So here we have cases of God’s judgement and goodness: judgement of sin, and goodness toward his people.
The second factor we consider is an extension of that last statement: the preservation of Israel.
Israel was the unique people of God. God had entered into a covenant, a solemn, contractual promise. God had said that through a nation of Abraham’s descendants he would bring blessing to the world.
God reaffirmed that covenant at Mount Sinai in what had all the protocols of a covenant making ceremony. There God promised that he would be Israel’s God, and Israel promised that they would be his people. It is through this nation that God would reveal himself to the nations and bring blessing.
What would you do for those dearest to you? If the life of your best friend, or spouse or child was threatened by someone’s violent intent, how far would you go to save their life? What if you had to do it in a society and time in which there was no law: no law to protect, no law to restrain? That was precisely Israel’s situation and the context in which God acted. So God fought for Israel, and against Israel’s enemies.
And so God took upon himself the responsibility of caring for and protecting his people. His commitment to that responsibility quickly became self-evident: in Egypt, from the Amalekites, food and water in the desert, and so on. In that culture of war and dog-eat-dog nationalism, there were periodic and extreme threats to Israel’s very existence as a people.
But beyond even the physical preservation was their moral preservation.
God was establishing in the land a holy nation that would be a visible expression of the holy God. This nation would be a nation unlike any other, a light for the Gentiles in a dark world: the joyful but reverent worship of the one God, not the violence and orgies of the worship of many gods… the ethical life reflective of the character of God, not the sacrifice of children to appease the gods or earn their favour.
If Israel’s life enmeshed with that of the Amorites, Amalekites and others, there would be an inevitable influence that would decay the moral and holy centre of God’s people. And God’s directive to remove that cancer showed both the monstrosity of Canaan’s sin, and the lengths to which a holy God would go to protect his people from that moral cancer. So what if Israel shared that cancer?
The tragedy is, however, that Israel weakened in their resolve to follow God’s directive. They willingly and repeatedly jumped into the pagan religion and culture of the Canaanites.
This became so much a part of their story that centuries later, kings of Judah like Ahaz, burned his son as an offering, according to the despicable practices of the nations whom the LORD drove out before the people of Israel (2 Kings 16:3) and his grandson Manasseh, who did the same things, and also erected altars for Baal (2 Kings 21:3).
Israel’s history was one long breaching of their covenant. And though God remained almost fanatically faithful, jumping to rescue and to bless whenever they showed the barest glimmer of repentance, he also would not them continually violate his holiness and his reputation. And when their sin had reached its full measure, he then judged them as well.
So, so far we’ve considered the judgement and goodness of God, and God’s commitment to preserve Israel physically (which they always wanted), and morally (which they resisted).
The third thing worth thinking about is this: in mandating Israel’s wiping out of the Canaanite people, specifically, what choice did God have? I don’t want to make it sound like God is helpless in the face of any circumstances, but it is good for us to look at the other options against God’s actual decisions.
Maybe God could have converted the Canaanites en masse, rather than acting so severely to judge them for their wickedness. Could he have? To do that he would simply be overriding the inclinations of their hearts. He honours our ability to choose, an ability he gave us in the first place, but he does not interfere with the consequences of our choices, either. ‘You make choices,’ he says, ‘but know that your choices have consequences and will impact other people.’
If I have a bad day, and I’m so angry that on my way home I decide that I’m just going to take it out on someone and run over a pedestrian, God will not make it so that once I’ve hit him and run him over, he just gets up unhurt, brushes himself off and carries on. Then my choices no longer matter, do they? I can do what I want with impunity, with no worries that my actions may have a negative impact.
But we can’t have it both ways. God cannot and does not override our bad choices but not our good choices. He does not magically convert, or change the inclinations of the hearts of a nation, either. He does not make a nation suddenly choose differently. Then they would not be choosing at all.
None of wants a God who, in essence, says, ‘I know you chose this, but that doesn’t matter. You’re going to do that.’
So instead, Canaan’s whole culture becomes the sum of its choices over the years, until it was time to judge. God’s choices were: to remove their ability to choose, to let their evil continue to increase, or to judge. He judged.
Maybe God could just have pushed them out of the land to make room for Israel. Why kill them? Well, we’ve seen the necessity of judgement. But also, they then would have been a people in need of a land. So they would have had to take it from someone else, and there would have been slaughter. Either way, God’s choice to judge or evict leads to the violent deaths of a nation.
Maybe God could just have killed them more humanely, having them quietly die in their sleep or something. Maybe. This I find difficult to answer, and perhaps I don’t have to. God is sovereign and needs no defense. But if he had killed them all humanely, that wouldn’t necessarily solve our problem. People would still be horrified at a God who would kill tens of thousands of people at one stroke. Had a nation in our day killed a massive number of people, no matter how humanely, we’d be horrified. Had God done it, we would be no less horrified, and we’d be asking the same questions.
Everything I have said to this point is only part of the equation, and truth be told, it is the least part. It is the tip of the iceberg, of which 90% lies below the surface, beyond what we can see. There is mystery here, a part of God’s character and actions and motivations that we cannot see. We Christians have always been mystified at God’s good actions and love toward us.
We don’t know why he loves us. Sometimes we pray, ‘Thank you that you considered us worthy…’ He didn’t. That’s the point of grace: we were not worthy, but he loves anyway. We don’t know why except that it was, to use the Biblical phrase ‘according to the pleasure of his will’. From our perspective it’s irrational. And yet we are so grateful for that love.
Well, there is as much mystery on the other side, too. We don’t understand his love, or judgement, either. (Though, for myself, I understand his judgement more than I do his grace. I’m just not sure why the judgement is less severe than my sin, at least, warrants. It’s not a surprise to me that I would be judged. It’s more a surprise to me that I have received mercy. So the real question is: Why haven’t we got what we have earned by our sin?)
But at the end of the day God is God. He created. He owns. He gives and takes away as he sees fit. From the vantage point of our own situation and worldview (which is unique in all of history), it is not for us to make God the defendant and ourselves judge, jury, and prosecuting attorney.
As I alluded to earlier, in the Bible, where people have tried to put God in the defendant’s seat for God ‘unfair’ treatment of people, only twice is there a response.
One is the Book of Job. Job laments his own suffering, and pleads with God: ‘This is unfair! I have always worshipped you. I have lived a righteous and generous and wise life (which, by God’s own testimony, was true). What have I done to deserve this?!’ God’s answer to Job is not an answer. God shows up and, in the longest as rebuke we find in Scripture, says in essence: ‘Do you want to tell me when I am acting rightly or wrongly? OK, let me ask you something: who built the oceans and set its boundaries? Who put the stars in place? Who invented horses, and whose the one who knows exactly when the deer has her babies? Who invented wind? Who decided there should be clouds? Is it you?’
A man was mocking a street preacher who was speaking to the crowd about the power of God as exercised in Creation, when out of the earth God formed all the creatures that walk across the land. ‘So what’ the man said. ‘I can make a rabbit. Watch this…’ and he bent over and started to pull together handfuls of earth. But the preacher said, ‘Hey! Make your own dirt.’
‘Job, can you make dirt?’ In other words, ‘Until you, Job, can run the physical universe, don’t tell me how to run the moral universe.’
Job’s response? – ‘I’d heard about you, but now I’ve seen you, and I take it all back. I had no idea who I was dealing with!’
The answer was not an answer. Job challenges, ‘You have to tell me why?’ God says, ‘I don’t have to tell you why.’
The other place is in Romans. Paul puts this argument in the mouths of some ‘devil’s advocates’: If God chooses for his people some and not others, even before they are born and haven’t done anything.. if God hardens Pharaoh’s heart and then judges him for it… then how can it possibly be right for him to find fault and to judge at all?’
This has been a theological argument for years: Did God choose me or did I choose God? Did God elect or did I convert? Because if God chose you and not me, then God is unjust and capricious, isn’t he?
The Bible’s answer is that God doesn’t owe anyone an answer:
You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” 20 But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” 21 Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?
So for Job and for Paul in Romans, when the question is most pointedly asked ‘Isn’t God treating people unfairly?’, the only response given is ‘Who are you to challenge God and tell him you know better than him what he should be doing?’ That may not be a satisfactory answer, but it is the only response the Bible gives us. The mind of God and its workings are largely unseen by us, and it is not for us to demand that we understand it all.
Yes, we do try to seek and understand him as best we can. It is relationship after all, and relationships are about getting to know someone. But I don’t even know my wife fully. Am I surprised to discover that there are things about God I do not understand?
For myself, I have experienced and seen enough of his goodness to trust him in what appears to be his ‘hard’ side. And it does come down to that: trust.
What about all God’s violence in the Old Testament? I see some things that help me to understand a little bit. But at the end of the day, I say, ‘God is God. He can and does do what he sees fit to do: with me and with his world.’
So at the end of all this, what do we do?
- We consider God’s ‘other’ side. If we focus solely on God’s love and ‘nice-ness’ we have an unbalanced (and therefore wrong) understanding of God. Children’s Bibles do this all the time. Noah’s Flood, ‘God kept Noah safe. Isn’t it great that God keeps us safe?’ So when their parent dies in a car accident, does that child say, ‘I thought God was supposed to keep Christians safe!’ The God they heard about doesn’t exist! And what about all those who perished in the flood?
And then there’s what I heard a children’s pastor say once: ‘David killed Goliath, and the God that helped David is the same God who goes with you onto the playground tomorrow!’ So a child goes onto the playground and gets laughed at and beaten up. He thinks, ‘This God I heard about either doesn’t exist or doesn’t care about me.’
And so on…
If this sounds unduly critical, let me say this to you parents and teachers, and I can’t emphasize this enough: we cannot show our children a one-sided picture of God, and then expect them to love him when they grow up. They could justifiably say: ‘They lied to me about God!’
The thing most important to me as a parent is that my children grow up and, with adoration, surrender their lives to God. But I want it to be God as he is that they adore and surrender to. I do not want them ever to think that I deceived them about God by leaving things out.
Now, does that mean that when I read the Bible with my 7-year old, I use words like ‘slaughter’ and ‘massacre’? Do I need to show them a picture of David holding Goliath’s severed head dripping with blood? Well, maybe. But I do use words like ‘judgement’, ‘death’, ‘punishment’, and so on. When we talk about the Flood, we do talk about those who died, and why.
As my children grow, I will seek to colour in their understanding of God’s ways.
The Bible says, ‘Note the kindness and the severity of God’.
Focusing on the severity of God’s judgement, it makes us even more astonished at God’s grace. Were God to kill me, I’d only be getting what my sin deserved. I deserved the sword, I’ve been given forgiveness. I deserved divine wrath… his wrath was poured out on Jesus instead. I don’t understand it, but there it is. And whatever was going on in the heart and mind of God, I at least am glad it was going on!
And it makes our ministry so much more urgent. So many people around us are standing in the path of God’s just wrath and don’t know it, or don’t care.
Who is it around you who is facing judgement? Who are you being the fragrance of Christ to? Who are you praying for… and praying for an opportunity to speak Christ to?
We lift up Jesus and the cross and say, ‘The wrath has been poured out here already and will not be poured out here again. Why stand in the place of coming judgement when you can stand with Jesus, in the only place where you are safe from judgement?’
Does this mean we button-hole every person we meet and say, ‘Turn or burn’? No, of course not.
But it does lend significance to the living of our lives, the relationships that we have, and our interactions with others.
We know what it is like to stand in the safe place. We want others to know that same reality.
Note the severity of God.
- And so again we don’t only consider God’s other side. We consider his kindness. We do consider his love and grace. We think about it. We cannot only consider his judgement! But it is only when seen side-by-side with his judgement, his grace is seen for what is: amazing, more amazing than we would otherwise know. We do not know grace until we know judgement. We don’t know health unless we know sickness. We don’t know satisfaction until we’ve known hunger. We don’t know forgiveness until we know sin.
Who is the God you know? Is it God? Or is it an airbrushed God? Does he only carry a lamb in his arms, or does he also wield a sword? Is he just nice, or does he love?
Let us know, worship, and serve God as he is.
Romans 11 ends with these words: Oh the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgements and how inscrutable are his ways.
For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?
Who has given a gift to him that he should be repaid?
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever.
Amen.