If you’ve been reading along with us in this year-long sermon series that will take us through the whole Bible, you undoubtedly have started to formulate a list of questions—some of them big questions. And chances are that your questions are some of the same ones that have puzzled scholars, faithful folks, and biblical critics for generations. As a pastor, I often get those questions and, quite frankly, have often asked them myself.
And perhaps at this point in our reading there is one question that stands out above some of the others—one that I’ve been asked more frequently in recent weeks. It’s a question that has to do with all the violence in the Old Testament. More specifically, the question has to do with God’s involvement in that violence. How can God be a God of love, as we have been taught, and yet participate in such bloody affairs, even ordering the deaths of whole cities as we read here in this week’s texts. As one person said to me recently, “When I read these passages, I’m not sure that I still want to be a Christian.”
We read a passage like Deuteronomy 20:16-18 and we wince when God says to the Israelites that when they enter the land of Canaan and attack its cities they should “not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them…otherwise they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods…” In these post-9/11 years we here in that command the kind of stuff that jihadist radicals would like to hear. We are reminded of ways in which holy war has been waged by people of all faiths—from today’s Islamic terrorists to the Christian Crusaders of the Middle Ages to the Jewish zealots of the first century—and we cringe. We wonder if atheists like Richard Dawkins aren’t right when they say things like religion is the cause of most of the world’s violence (though, historically, most of the wars of the 20th century were started by secular regimes, but that’s another lecture).
We may wonder those things, but we come to church anyway and we continue to read and use these stories. What’s been interesting to me over the course of my life in the church is that we’ve often simply glossed over these texts or politely ignored the violence. When I was a kid, we would read about the Battle of Jericho and see it played out on the flannel graph and the whole point of the story was that the children of Israel were victorious (we’ve even had our Sunday School kids march around the church when studying this story). No one said much about the apparent slaughter of Jericho’s inhabitants, including women and children. We were encouraged to be strong and courageous like Joshua, but the older I’ve gotten the more I begin to look at these stories from a different perspective. How do we reconcile these accounts with an understanding of a good God?
I think we need to address that question before we go much further, because as we’ll see the rest of the Old Testament is full of war and violence—sometimes perpetrated by Israel as God’s chosen people and, perhaps even more often, that violence is meted out upon Israel herself as a form of God’s judgment. But nowhere are the accounts more in-your-face than they are here in the late part of Deuteronomy and in the Book of Joshua. If we’re really going to read the Bible as a whole, we can’t simply skip over these passages or wave them away as “something we’ll never understand.” Truth be told, I wish these passages weren’t in here, but there they are. We may not ever fully grasp what God had in mind here, but I do believe that we can begin to see how these texts fit into the larger context of Scripture and inform us more deeply about the nature and character of God.
So, what I want to do today is to begin framing some of the ways these passages have been traditionally understood and then offer some critique of those understandings. In doing so, my goal is two-fold: 1) to examine some of the usual arguments about this section of Scripture and, 2) to demonstrate to you a way of doing what scholars call “biblical criticism”—critical and contextual examination of the Bible as a document with literary, historical, and theological dimensions. Then, next Sunday, Palm Sunday, I will move to the next phase and put these texts within the context of the story of Jesus, the climactic story of the whole Bible. I really believe that the only way we can truly understand what’s going on here in the Old Testament is to look at it through the lens of Christ. This week may sound a little more like a lecture than a sermon, but I think it will help lay some important groundwork for your continuing study of the Bible. You won’t want to miss next week, then, to see how it all comes together (actually, I can’t wait to see how it comes together myself!).
I want to begin today by outlining three possible approaches to the bloody accounts of the conquest of Canaan—common arguments that are often used to try and reconcile these accounts and, in some way, preserve God’s reputation as the kinder and gentler deity we’ve all come to know and love.
The first argument is perhaps the most common one and it has to do with the relationship between the Old and New Testaments and their portrayals of God. That argument goes something like this: The Old Testament is full of violence and God comes across as an angry, cantankerous, judgmental God who deals in fire and brimstone more than in love and grace. By contrast, the New Testament is full of peace and love. God himself is love. There is no judgment, only grace. Therefore, we should only take the Old Testament and its violence and judgment with a huge grain of salt, if we take it at all, and focus only on the New Testament concepts of God’s forgiveness and love.
Look at the texts preached in most Christian churches on a given Sunday and chances are they’ll overwhelmingly come from the New Testament. We don’t want the angry God, so we’ll just leave the Old Testament behind because, well, it’s old! These stories, then, are an Old Testament problem that the New Testament somehow puts right. As Christopher Wright says, “Perhaps we might think that God had to do some of that Old Testament stuff at the time, but Jesus has shown that God really prefers to do things differently now. So we allow the New Testament simply to cancel out the Old Testament and consign its most unpleasant parts to the dustbin of history (and theology).”
But there are three reasons why this argument won’t stand up to a full reading of Scripture:
1) The Old Testament has as much to say about the love and grace of God as the New. Remember our trek through Exodus and the number of times that God relents and forgives his people. Most famously we read these words in Exodus 34:6-7 –
"The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation."
Moses shows that the weight of God’s character is toward compassion, grace, and love—he is “slow to anger,” and wrath is not God’s first choice.
The Psalmists also pick up this theme of Gods grace. Look at Psalm 103:8-11:
8 The LORD is compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger, abounding in love.
9 He will not always accuse,
nor will he harbor his anger forever;
10 he does not treat us as our sins deserve
or repay us according to our iniquities.
11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his love for those who fear him;
Time and again, the writers of the Old Testament express the compassion of God as the foundatio
nal aspect of God’s character over and against the manipulative wrath and violence of the pagans and their gods. Remember that from the beginning, God created humans for relationship, not wrath. We need to balance our understanding of the Old Testament with this image of God.
2) By contrast, the New Testament isn’t all about puppies and rainbows and the soft and mushy love of God. The New Testament has much to say about the anger and judgment of God. Jesus talked often about the destruction that was coming upon Jerusalem as a form of God’s judgment for their failure to turn from their nationalistic and self-interested ways. He also talked about Gehenna as a metaphor for hell—Gehenna being the garbage dump outside Jerusalem that smoldered and smoked all the time (it’s now a park). For Jesus, judgment was the other side of grace and his preaching was a constant call for people to repent or turn to God in anticipation of the coming judgment.
Outside the Gospels, God’s judgment remained a constant theme. Read Paul’s letter to the Romans, for example, or the letters of James and Peter (not to mention Revelation). The writer of Hebrews would compare the judgment of God to those prescribed in the Old Testament Law and say, shockingly, that they would be much worse!
“If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," and again, "The Lord will judge his people." It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
3) The New Testament uses examples of Old Testament judgments as a warning. Jesus used the example of the flood (Matthew 24:36-41), and Sodom and Gomorrah (Matthew 10:15, 11:23-24), while Paul used the plagues as a warning from history (1 Corinthians 10:6-10)
Thus we see that the New Testament doesn’t simply portray God as a jolly Santa, but as a God who balances grace and judgment as two sides of the same coin. In fact, the specter of judgment seems to be much worse in the New Testament. In the Old Testament, the judgments were in the form of physical death or exile…in the New, eternal punishment is involved. We may not like that, but there it is!
That brings us to our second argument about the conquest of Canaan and that has to do with the Israelites themselves. This argument says that it was the Israelites, and not God, who acted to destroy their enemies in total. Somehow, this argument goes, they simply misinterpreted God’s commands and went on a bloodthirsty killing spree. Blame them for what happened, not God.
Well, that sounds great, but the rest of Scripture doesn’t support that view. In the rest of the Bible, the conquest of Canaan is always viewed as something that accomplished God’s will as the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham of land and descendants (Genesis 15:18-21). The prophets would view the conquest as a positive thing, a great act of God in Israel’s history and a reminder of God’s provision for the nation (Amos 2:9). Even in the New Testament, the conquest is viewed as an act of God’s sovereignty. In the Book of Acts, the martyr Stephen points to the conquest as the means by which Israel “took the land from the nations God drove out before them” (Acts 7:45) and Paul would preach that God “overthrew seven nations in Canaan, giving their land to his people as their inheritance.”
Clearly, the rest of the biblical writers saw the actions of the Israelites in the conquest of Canaan as being directed by God as an act of God’s sovereign judgment on pagan nations, whose wickedness had reached epic proportions, and as a means of making a home for God’s chosen people through whom the whole world would come to know God. They didn’t wave away these texts, nor did they try to explain them in a way that makes them more palatable. That makes it very difficult for us to do so as well.
There’s a third argument that has emerged in recent years, however, that many have gravitated toward and it has to do with the literary setting of the Bible. With increasing frequency, many scholars have come to view the texts of Deuteronomy and Joshua in particular as being written during a much later period in Israel’s history than the time of the events themselves—perhaps even as late as the period of the exile in the 6th century BC, some 600 years or more after these events purportedly took place.
Deuteronomy, for example, seems reference events in the exile, when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 586BC and carried off the people as slaves. The commands of God to destroy their pagan enemies, then, are projections back on their history—a way of saying, “Had we done this, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” Joshua, on the other hand, may have been written during the reign of one of the ancestor’s of King David, Josiah, who may have been trying to legitimize his claim for reconquering the land after foreign invasion. At any rate, the argument goes, these accounts of the conquest reflect a later projection of writers trying to craft a foundational narrative for their claim on the land.
Some of the historical and archaeological evidence seems to support this argument, at least to a degree. The archaeological record of the Israelites prior to the time of David is sketchy at best. Excavations at cities like Jericho reveal layers of destruction, but the dating doesn’t seem to line up with the Israelite conquest. Even the Bible itself shows that the total destruction of cities and peoples outlined in Joshua didn’t really happen that way. By the Book of Judges, which we’ll get to next, we’ll see that some of these same Canaanite peoples are still alive and well and wicked as ever. Total war, with the leveling of cities and the slaughter of whole populations, was a fact of life in the ancient Near East, but there’s scant evidence that the Israelites were the perpetrators of so much of it.
Not only that, we’ve already seen the biblical writers were fond of hyperbole and exaggeration. We’ve already seen this in some of the numbers and lifespans in the Old Testament. When they say, for example, that “all” the people of a particular city were killed, it’s not designed as a factual statement, but a statement that there was great destruction as is common to war. There may have been battles and skirmishes, in other words, but they were likely more like localized not of the scale that the biblical writers report from the perspective of several centuries later.
There’s a wide appeal for this argument because, in some sense, it does let God off the hook. If these stories are merely later projections, we can breathe easily and know that while God is still sovereign, he’s not a bloodthirsty killer. Problem solved, right?
Well, not exactly. We still have to reckon with the Bible’s clear, unwavering, and consistent view that God is a righteous judge, who judges not only the pagan nations for their rebellious wickedness and idolatry, but Israel herself. Unlike the modern jihadist or the medieval crusader, the Israelites themselves were never to wage a kind of holy war in God’s name, believing that they would be victorious because they were more righteous. Even Deuteronomy warns them of thinking that way:
After the LORD your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself, "The LORD has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness." No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is going to drive them out before you. 5 It
is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but on account of the wickedness of these nations, the LORD your God will Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. 6 Understand, then, that it is not because of your righteousness that the LORD your God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people.
God would later use pagan empires like the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Romans as instruments of judgment on Israel. Violence is part of the whole biblical narrative because it is part of the human narrative.
And perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us. God is holy, humanity is fallen and sinful. Warfare and destruction are the byproducts of human sinfulness, but rather than destroy us all God chooses to operate within the confines of fallen humanity in order to still achieve his ultimate purpose for creation. As N.T. Wright puts it, “Somehow, in a way we are inclined to find offensive, God has to get his boots muddy and, it seems, to get his hands bloody, to put the world back to rights.”
We cannot escape these stories of violence because they are, in a very real sense, the story of humanity and if God is going to work with us then God will somehow need to be involved in the midst of it in ways we cannot understand. I think it’s ok that we’re offended or at least troubled by these stories in the Book of Joshua. I think it proves that we’re humans, made in the image of God. In some sense, I think God himself would have found the whole business offensive, too, however it played out in reality. As God himself said through the prophet Ezekiel, “As surely as I live, declares the sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live” (Ezekiel 33:11)
Wickedness gets played out in our world in a myriad of ways. Perhaps we’d be even more offended if we believed that God ultimately did nothing about it. We’re uncomfortable with a God who judges, yet without judgment we ultimately have no grace and without grace we have no hope. At the same time, we see that God’s first movement in Scripture is rarely judgment—always patience and hoping for repentance. Remember Abraham pleading with God over Sodom and Gomorrah and God relenting from destroying the complaining Israelites in the desert. No, the Scripture seems to indicate that God wants to hold back judgment as long as possible, and that God grieves over the fallenness of humanity.
With God, we grieve that falleness. With God, we grieve over violence, in our own communities, in our nation, and in places like Darfur, Rwanda, and other places where the destruction of whole people groups still is part of human evil. Humanity is in pain because of sin, and somehow in ways we cannot fully fathom God enters into that pain both to judge and to heal.
It’s so easy for us to get hung up on these stories as barriers to faith, but we have to remember that they are only part of the story. Remember, we’re still in Act 3. In Act 4 we will meet God’s ultimate answer to the sinfulness of humanity. We will meet Jesus. But we will not escape stories of violence and judgment in Act 4, either. They will be there in spades and will even be more graphic and bloody and horrible than anything the book of Joshua can give us. God will once again get his boots muddy and his hands bloody in order to set the world to rights.
But in Act 4, the target of violence will not be a nation, be it Israel or another. No, the victim of violence will be God himself in the person of Jesus Christ. And in that violence, God himself will take on the judgment due to the whole world.
That’s part 2 and we’ll talk about that next week as we meet Jesus on the way to Jerusalem.
Sources:
Wright, Christopher. The God I Don't Understand:Reflections on Tough Questions of Faith. Zondervan, 2009.
Wright, N.T. Evil and the Justice of God. IVP Press, 2008.
