Did God command genocide?

Our cultural memory is scarred by the atrocities of war, where the powerful have slaughtered the weak, often for nothing more than belonging to a different tribe, or for the land under their feet. Think of the Cambodian killing fields, the mass graves of the Tutsis in Rwanda, or the Nazi death camps. For many these wounds are fresh. Some of my own dear friends have been traumatised by the human carnage of the conflict in Nigeria, finding themselves comforting the dying after militants from the north have wiped out peaceful villages.

Surely, if we have any heart left, we weep in the face of such evil. So what on earth are we to make, then, of the trouble texts in the Old Testament? The violent passages where it seems like God commands the genocide of the Canaanites at the hands of Israel’s armies? These stories are seriously hard to swallow, leading many to conclude that, if true, God must be a moral monster.

So how does the Christian story make sense of divine violence?

Did God command genocide?

There is no hiding my extreme discomfort with so many people being killed, being drowned in floods, destroyed by fire, or slain with the sword. As historians like Tom Holland have pointed out, though, precisely why it troubles me so much is because as a society our collective conscience has been so radically shaped by the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.

For it was into a dark and brutal world full of warring gods and dehumanising tribal violence that Jesus celebrated peacemakers, not warmongers. Jesus rebuked his disciples for their violent impulses, inviting his followers to turn the other cheek, to love their enemies, and to pray for their persecutors: a teaching Jesus embodied when he prayed for those who crucified him: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).

So while Jesus does warn of a coming judgment, where he will come back to deal with evil and restore justice on earth, undoubtedly it is Jesus’ legacy of non-violence, and his compassion for all of us as sinners, that makes me so uncomfortable with the trouble texts in the Old Testament.

So what do we make of them?

Let’s take the military conquest of Canaan in Joshua as our test case. In Deuteronomy 20:16-17 the Israelites were explicitly commanded not to leave anything alive in these cities. And the problem for me as a Christian, at face value, is that it seems I need to believe 4 statements are true, when the truth of any 3 of these statements logically invalidates the last one.

What are the four statements?

#1 God is good.

#2 The Bible is true.

#3 Genocide is evil.

#4 According to the Bible, God commands genocide.

Now all 4 can’t be true at the same time, so which one gives? Do I question God, question the Bible, question my moral intuitions, or question my interpretation? And it is walking out these options that we can try and make sense of these troubled texts about Old Testament violence.

Option #1: Is God really good? One possibility is to follow Richard Dawkins, who concludes that the God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction, before going on to call him every name in the ad hominem playbook.

However, along with philosophical theists of various stripes, as a Christian I am persuaded that God is in fact the source of all goodness, which we see in the fullest revelation of God, where the invisible God became visible in Jesus. Which means there can be no wedge between the God of the Old Testament and God of the New Testament. There is only one God. And so because of Jesus, and the broad witness of the Christian story, I’m led to affirm that God really is good. We can trust Him. So to me, option 1 is off the table.

Option #2: Is the Bible really true? Some Christian scholars believe that, because you cannot imagine Jesus presiding over the Canaanite conquest, that we must filter the trouble texts in the Old Testament through the lens of God’s self-sacrificial love on the cross. As such, they conclude that while God may have intended to drive out the Canaanites non-violently, the Israelites, in their own dark sinfulness, misinterpreted God to be sanctioning genocide.

Now while I sympathise with the struggle to reconcile Jesus with these events, I’m not comfortable throwing the Bible under the bus. From his teaching in the gospels Jesus certainly seemed to treat the Scriptures as through they were inspired by God and trustworthy, so it seems to me a slippery slope to start picking and choosing which divine utterances in the Old Testament can be believed, and which must be rejected as human error. So for me, I’m not persuaded #2 is a live option.

Option #3: Is genocide always evil? Other Christian scholars try to justify the Canaanite conquest by challenging our moral intuitions. They argue that while it is wrong for human rulers to play God, as it turns out, God is God. As the author of life, as the judge of all humanity, and as the only one who possesses perfect foreknowledge and wisdom to know when and how to intervene as the best possible course of action, God has the unique right, indeed the responsibility, to execute judgment.

These scholars typically point to moral depravity as justification for God’s judgment, showing how Canaanite culture was brutal on various fronts, even ritually sacrificing their own children to pagan gods. They highlight how God was not swift or rash in judgment, but was patient, warning the Canaanites for 450 years to repent. And when it comes to the difficult question of non-combatants like women, or of innocents like children, these scholars typically appeal to the Christian view of eternity, where in God’s mercy, those who are lost as collateral damage could have their suffering compensated in God’s future world.

Now I think this view has difficulties, and is often poorly parsed out, but I do think there is something to the need for justice, where a loving God cannot forever stand back and watch evil pervert His creation, especially in light of the incalculable costs to future generations.

And finally, option #4: Did God command genocide? There is a growing body of Christian scholars who argue that God’s commands to Israel are better interpreted as a charter to exile the Canaanites for their evil, not exterminate them. Pointing out how warlike hyperbole was a common feature in ancient conquest narratives, and that Israel was no trigger happy bully but rather a puny nation compared to the Canaanite giants they feared, these scholars hone in on Israel’s rules of war to show that, not only were the Canaanites warned of God’s judgment and given passage to leave, but that the Israelite conquest was aimed at military strongholds, not civilian population centres, and that the only non-combatants explicitly mentioned, Rahab and her Tavern keeping family, ended up being saved from God’s judgment amidst Jericho’s dramatic downfall.

So for me this final option, swapping out extermination for exile, certainly helps lessen the force of the question around genocide, even if it doesn’t fully resolve the tension of the Canaanite conquest.

The truth is, honestly, I don’t really have a comprehensive or completely satisfying answer on this question. Christian scholars who love Jesus and the Bible disagree, as we do on a range of things where the Christian story is not as clear. So while right now I lean towards appealing to some mix of options 3 and 4, I wouldn’t die on that hill.

But here’s a couple of things I do know. While some detractors interpret the Canaanite conquest as ethnic cleansing, the Bible teaches that all tribes and tongues are made in God’s image and are deeply loved, such that people are never judged for their skin colour or tribal history, but for their own evil. And if it turns out that the penalty for the Canaanites’ sin was indeed exile from the land rather than extermination, then they faced the exact same judgment as Adam and Eve before them, and Israel after them. God’s justice does not show favourites.

Ultimately, in the end, if we all must be judged then I trust Jesus. I know that as the judge of all the earth He will do what is right. So whilst these trouble texts in the Old Testament are confronting to anyone with a beating heart, and perhaps remain somewhat unanswered, they still happen to be the exceptions in the Christian story, the warnings that punctuate a larger narrative of God’s patience and forgiveness in drawing us towards salvation.

Across the broad arc of the Christian story mercy and grace are God’s native language. And where holy justice must burst forth to deal with evil, God’s heart for us is ultimately made known in Jesus, who at the cross was more willing to fall on His own sword of divine justice in order to save us than to wield that sword against us at the final judgment.