Grace Presbyterian Church

Martin Luther once wrote to Erasmus, “Your thoughts about God are too human.”

Luther meant that we need to understand God’s love and justice according to God’s own revelation of himself in Scripture and not according to our own (fallen) ideas about what God’s love and justice ought to look like.

That’s a good reminder when we think about the whole issue of the conquest of the Canaanites. This is a large and difficult subject that requires humility and careful thought, but here are a few comments.

1. The conquest of the Canaanites was not “genocide.”

Genocide implies racial hatred. But when we read about God and Israel in the Old Testament, we discover a much different attitudes toward foreigners. Israel was chosen by God to be a blessing to the nations (Gen 12). Israel was called by God to show loving concern for strangers and aliens in their midst (Dt 10:18-19). God gave foreigners living in Israel the same rights that natives had (Lev 24:22). We could add other verses to the list, but it is clear that God did not endorse racism and xenophobia.

2. The conquest of the Canaanites was about sin, not race.

God did not give the land to the Israelites because of their race or superior righteousness. Deuteronomy 9:4-6 says “Because of the wickedness of these nations the Lord your God is driving them out from before you…” Canaanite idolatry made the land ripe for judgment. God is a divine warrior who takes sin seriously, but he is also gracious and his mercy was available to any Canaanite who turned to him in faith (i.e. Rahab). By the way, read the rest of the Bible and see that God is just as opposed to Israel’s idolatry as he was to the Canaanites.

3. The conquest of the Canaanites was a unique event.

The conquest was not a model for Israel’s relationship to the nations. Unlike the concept of jihad, the Bible presents the conquest as a unique salvation-historical event limited to a particular time and place (cf. Dt 20, which prohibits Israel from waging the same kind of warfare on enemies who are outside the land). The conquest foreshadows the final judgment when the wicked will have no inheritance in the new heavens and the new earth.

4. The conquest of the Canaanites uses hyperbolic language.

Upon first reading, you might get the impression that the Israelites killed every living thing and demolished every city. But language like “all,” “young and old,” “utterly destroyed,” “no survivors,” etc. is the rhetoric of warfare and contains hyperbole. So on the hand Joshua 10:40 says Joshua struck the whole land and left no one, but Judges 2:21 refers to all the nations which Joshua left when he died. This is not a contradiction; it is a recognition that sometimes the Bible uses language which shouldn’t be pressed too literally (like when I beat someone at cribbage by 3 points and exclaim with glee, “I trounced you!”). Keep in mind that in Dt 7:22 God said that Israel would take possession of the land gradually over time, “little by little” and “not all at once.”

5. The conquest of the Canaanites is part of the story that leads to the cross of Calvary.

There are many scriptures, such as Psalm 87 and Isaiah 19, that talk about God’s inclusion of the nations that opposed Israel. God’s ultimate plan is to bring all nations into the orbit of his salvation, not by bringing judgment but by bearing it in the cross of Christ for us. Here is a wonderful quotation from Chris Wright’s book, The God I Don’t Understand:

But at some point I have to stand back from my questions, criticism, or complaint and receive the Bible’s own word on the matter. What the Bible unequivocally tells me is that this was an act of God that took place within an overarching narrative through which the only hope for the world’s salvation was constituted.

Within that overall biblical perspective, the road to Canaan was one small stretch along the road to Calvary. From that point of view, I cannot do other than include it among the mighty acts of God for which all his people are called to praise him. I have to read the conquest in the light of the cross.

And when I do set it in that light of the cross, I see one more perspective. For the cross too involved the most horrific and evil human violence, which, at the same time, also constituted the outpouring of God’s judgment on human sin. The crucial difference, of course, is that whereas at the conquest, God pour out his judgment on a wicked society who deserved it, at the cross, God bore on himself the judgment of God on human wickedness, through the person of his own sinless Son – who deserved it not one bit.

…note once again that humble submission to the biblical teaching on the sovereignty of God on the one hand, along with robust reflection on the mystery of the cross of Christ on the other, combine to strengthen our faith in the midst of things we do not understand.

One of the prominent New Atheists contends, “The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans.”

Let’s be clear: debt servanthood in the Old Testament is not the same thing as slavery in the antebellum South, even if your English Bible typically translates the Hebrew word ebed (servant) as slave. Anyone who takes the time to read the Old Testament carefully should see this.

Here is my summary of Paul Copan’s overview of the subject in Is God is a Moral Monster? (You can read earlier posts here, here, and here.)

“Chattel slavery,” the kind practiced in the antebellum South and also around the Ancient Near East, was characterized by three things:

1. A slave was property.
2. The slave owner’s rights over the slave’s person and work were total and absolute.
3. The slave was stripped of his identity—racial, familial, social, marital.

By contrast, note several things about debt servanthood in the Old Testament:

1. Debt servanthood was a voluntary measure induced by poverty, not man-stealing.

The Old Testament actively sought to prevent poverty. There were gleaning laws where farmers had to leave the edges of their fields unharvested for the poor. There were laws commanding Israelites to lend freely to those in need and not hold back. There was the institution of the Jubilee, where every 70 years all debts were cancelled so that every generation could get a new lease on life.

But for those who still couldn’t escape poverty, there was debt servanthood. This was a voluntary institution. Copan likens it to the indentured servitude of colonists who were able to travel to America by promising to work for several years to pay back the cost. An Israelite who had no land to sell could “sell himself,” that is, voluntarily enter himself or his family into a contractual arrangement to sustain the family through economically difficult times.

Servanthood existed because poverty existed. This is very different than the idea of kidnapping and enslavement, which were considered capital offenses in Israel:

“He who kidnaps a man, whether he sells him or he is found in his possession, shall surely be put to death.” (Exod. 21:16)

“If a man is caught kidnapping any of his countrymen of the sons of Israel, and he deals with him violently or sells him, then that thief shall die; so you shall purge the evil from among you.” (Deut. 24:7)

2. Debt servanthood was temporary.

Debt slavery in Israel was never intended as a permanent or lifelong condition. An important passage on this whole subject is Deuteronomy 15:1-18. Read the passage carefully, especially verses 12-14:

“If your brother, a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you, he shall serve you six years, and in the seventh year you shall let him go free from you. And when you let him go free from you, you shall not let him go empty-handed. You shall furnish him liberally out of your flock, out of your threshing floor, and out of your winepress.”

Servants could not serve more than six years, even if they hadn’t paid off all their debts. And when they were released they were not sent back into poverty. They were provided for liberally so they could pursue their own livelihood and live debt free. Lifelong service was prohibited except in once case: if a servant loved the head of the household he was serving, he could voluntarily choose to stay (Deut 15:16-18, Exod. 21:5-6).

Copan notes, “The overriding, revolutionary goal expressed in this text is to totally eradicate debt-servanthood in the land: ‘there will be no poor [and therefore no debt servanthood] among you’ (v. 4).”

3. Debt servants had dignity.

Servants in Israel were given radical rights in comparison to the status of slaves in the rest of the Ancient Near East. The Anchor Bible Dictionary’s essay on “Slavery” notes, “We have in the Bible the first appeals in world literature to treat slaves as human beings for their own sake and not just in the interests of their masters.”

Part of the dignity of servants was, for example, that they could not be mistreated. If they were, their debt was cancelled and they were released from their financial obligations. (Ex 21:26-27)

Moreover, while fugitive slave laws in the South required runaway slaves to be returned to their masters, Israelites were legally obligated to help runaway slaves who were mistreated and escaping abusive masters:

“You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped from his master to you. He shall dwell with you, in your midst, in the place that he shall choose within one of your towns, wherever it suits him. You shall not wrong him.” (Dt 23:15-16)

4. One more thing…

I think it’s important to add this: many laws in the Old Testament are not ideals as much as protections. They are not the ceiling, the moral perfections we are attempting to reach, as much as the floor below which society sinks into complete barbarism. This is the way Copan reminds us we ought to view laws about debt servitude in Israel:

“Israel’s servant laws were concerned about controlling or regulating—not idealizing—an inferior work arrangement. Israelite servitude was induced by poverty, was entered into voluntarily, and was far from optimal. The intent of these laws was to combat potential abuses, not to institutionalize servitude.”

Is Old Testament law barbaric, nasty, and brutish?

Do you want to live in a society where people are stoned at the city gate for being drunkards or for picking up sticks on the sabbath day?

Paul Copan points out several principles we should keep in mind when reading Old Testament law:

1. Old Testament law reflected that in Israel the theological, the social, and the economic were intimately intertwined. The land (the economic) is a gift of God (the theological) to his covenant people (the social). Israel, unlike every nation today, was a theocracy where social and economic crimes were religious offenses and where religious offenses received civil punishments.

2. Old Testament laws were not given in a vacuum. They reflected their ancient near eastern social contexts as well as presented a moral improvement over them. We must understand the world to which these laws came.

3. Certain Old Testament laws and punishments were inferior to God’s creational ideals established in Genesis 1-2. God didn’t immediately banish every fallen social structure and establish moral ideals that sinners could never keep. God was incrementally moving his people back toward these ideals in a way that took account of their actual (fallen) condition.

4. Mosaic law was never intended to be a permanent, universal standard of behavior for all nations. It was a temporary measure that was part of a larger, unfolding movement of redemption.

While Copan doesn’t state it as a principle, here is another one I think he lays out: please make sure you are reading the Bible correctly before you condemn it as being barbaric! For example, consider the famous law of retribution (lex talionis), “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Copan notes:

Following on the heels of the lex talionis passage of Exodus 21:23–25 comes, well, Exodus 21:26–27! And it illustrates the point we’re making quite nicely: “If a man hits a manservant or maidservant in the eye and destroys it, he must let the servant go free to compensate for the eye. And if he knocks out the tooth of a manservant or maidservant, he must let the servant go free to compensate for the tooth” (NIV). We don’t have a literal eye or tooth in view here, just compensation for bodily harm. Scholars such as Raymond Westbrook note that the lex talionis as a principle of compensation wasn’t taken literally. The point of lex talionis is this: the punishment should fit the crime.

Another example would be the drunkard of Deuteronomy 21. This is not a teenager who comes home from his first kegger smelling like Coors. According to the text, he is someone whose compulsive and reckless behavior has profoundly destructive effects on his family. He cannot be corrected though everyone has tried. Because he is a son/heir, he will squander the family inheritance and plunge his family into financial ruin and debt-slavery. Moreover, the parents don’t carry out vigilante justice but bring him to the civil authorities to make a judgment. We don’t need to defend this is an ideal for all times to recognize how in Israel’s historical context God was providing a last resort for a very tragic situation.

One helpful insight I found in Copan was the need to distinguish between the legislated punishment and its actual implementation. Just because a maximum sentence was legislated does not mean it was always carried out in practice:

There were some sixteen crimes that called for the death penalty in the Old Testament. Only in the case of premeditated murder did the text say that the officials in Israel were forbidden to take a “ransom” or a “substitute.” This has widely been interpreted to imply that in all the other fifteen cases the judges could commute the crimes deserving of capital punishment by designating a “ransom” or “substitute.” In that case the death penalty served to mark the seriousness of the crime.

Caricatures and misrepresentations of the Old Testament isolate verses from their ancient social and redemptive contexts. Old Testament laws were a gradual improvement over Israel’s neighbors. They were also part of a redemptive movement that leads from theocratic Israel to Christ in whom we can be fully restored to God’s image and creational ideals.