A Note on Violence in the Old Testament

In the Old Testament, there are many instances of violence done by God and/or his people, both to the Israelites and the surrounding nations. It may seem difficult to square these events with the idea God’s main goal is our healing and restoration, but it is helpful to keep the following points in mind:

• God's rescue plan was always leading towards Jesus
• Jesus needed to be born as a human (for reasons discussed in the Cure articles)
• Jesus needed a community that could understand the significance and implications of his life, death, and resurrection
• Jesus eventually visited the dead to offer them his healing

For the corruption of sin to be defeated, and for humans to be made whole again, completely free to experience the fullness of life for which God made us, God needed to actively protect his people at times. If ancient Israel had been destroyed or derailed, by internal or external causes, then God’s plan for redemption would be lost with them. They needed to continue on until at least the time that they were able to diagnose their condition, recognize Jesus as the cure, and share about the healing Jesus offered to the rest of the world.

As such, any people that attempted to hurt ancient Israel, or get in the way of God’s promises for them, were really harming themselves and jeopardizing their own chance at future restoration. This also helps us understand some of the harsh penalties in the Old Testament Law. Any actions that threatened the continued existence of Israel from within its community needed to be highly discouraged.

Looking Forward

When reading these passages, it is also important to remember that death is not the end of a person’s story. This life on Earth is a short introduction to the grand narrative that God has for us in the New Heaven and New Earth. This is true for us, and it is also true for those who died before Christ. With all of these ideas in mind, it would be wrong to read God’s violence in the Old Testament as that of an angry, egotistical maniac. God’s actions would better be compared to a doctor inducing a coma in a patient that is intent on harming themself and others until a cure for their sickness can be developed.

Of course, it might be more appealing to our present sense of morality if there was no violence done against anyone. We can be confident saying that God would have preferred that too. But once corruption entered into human nature, that option was out of the picture. When you have a group of people intent on destroying themselves, and you want to stop them, some amount of violence is going to be needed in your intervention.

Fortunately, there was a limit on that violence built into the rescue plan. Once Jesus came, ancient Israel’s main goal was accomplished. There was no more need for violence, as the primary purpose of Israel’s preservation was fulfilled. Jesus cured his diseased human nature, and his healing is offered to all. Anyone who has used the Old Testament to justify their violence in the time since Christ has been wrong. They’ve missed the point of the story entirely.

Genocide of the Canaanites?

One episode of violence in the Old Testament that is worth discussing explicitly is the Israelites’ settlement of Canaan. These events have been used by Christians to justify conquest of land and people groups, and it has been used by both Christians and non-Christians to denounce the moral character of God in the Old Testament, with many going as far as claiming that it is an endorsement of genocide. With all of the above context in mind, there are a few additional points to make.

We can start out by noting that God was not against the Canaanites for ethnic reasons. God reaches out to Canaanites and invites them into Israel at many points in the Bible:

• Abraham (then Abram) rescued the people of Sodom from occupying kings (Gen 14)
• Judah married Shua (Gen 38:2)
• Tamar (Gen 38:6) gave birth to Judah’s children
• Shaul (Ex 6:15)
• A “mixed multitude” joined Israel in their escape from Egypt (Ex.12:38)
• Caleb (Num 32:12) was one of Moses’ two lieutenants
• Rahab (Jos 6:17 – 25) became an ancestor of Jesus
• God used Jonah to reach out to and convert the people of Nineveh (Jonah 1-3)
• Jesus’ interaction with the Canaanite woman (Matt 15:21-28) shows that his blessings were for faithful Canaanites as well as for the Jewish people.

If God's problem with the Canaanites was not their ethnicity, then what was it? If we are going to take the stories about ancient Israel’s settling of Canaan seriously, then we have to take the Bible’s framing of the stories seriously as well. For example, take Leviticus 18:24-28:

Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, for by all these practices the nations I am casting out before you have defiled themselves. Thus the land became defiled, and I punished it for its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. But you shall keep my statutes and my ordinances and commit none of these abominations, either the native-born or the alien who resides among you (for the inhabitants of the land, who were before you, committed all of these abominations, and the land became defiled); otherwise the land will vomit you out for defiling it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you. (emphasis added)

From this passage, we can see that it is not so much the Israelites, but God and the land that are responsible for kicking the Canaanites out. The phrases “driving out” and “vomited out” point to displacement rather than the death of the people. And that displacement is a natural consequence of their own actions. Because they had defiled the land, the land vomited them out. You can imagine a farmer who doesn’t take care of the land and is forced to move because the land won’t grow any food. That may not have been what was happening physically with the Canaanites, but it was happening spiritually. The Canaanites were engaging in dangerous, self-harming spiritual practices. For instance, they used sexual assault to express dominance over strangers and conquered peoples. They practiced incest, which leads to genetic problems. They practiced human sacrifice, including children. It’s very possible that the more progress Israel made into Canaan, the more desperate the Canaanites became, which would have led to more human and child sacrifice to appeal to their gods (with negative effects for their population). The Bible’s implication is that their sinful practices caused their numbers to implode apart from anything the Israelites did.

Even so, a skeptic might point out that there are many battles that the Israelites have with the Canaanites in Scripture. The book of Joshua describes conflict at Jericho, Ai, and other cities, for example. Fortunately, archaeological evidence, such as Canaanite inscriptions and the types of objects found, points to the fact that these were military outposts with little to no civilian population. That might seem to be contradicted by verses like Joshua 6:21, which reads “They utterly destroyed everything in the city [of Jericho], both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and donkey, with the edge of the sword,” but these verses are likely exaggeration. We know this from comparison to other ancient literature, which describes military victory in similar ways. Consider Egypt’s Tutmoses III (fifteenth century BC), who boasted “the numerous army of Mitanni was overthrown within the hour, annihilated totally like those (now) nonexistent,” when we know that Mitanni’s forces lived on to fight in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC. Similarly, Moab’s king Mesha (840/830 BC) bragged that the Northern Kingdom of ‘Israel has utterly perished for always,’ though it continued on for more than a century prior to its devastation by the Assyrians in 722 BC. In Mesha’s case, he also boasted of killing women and girls in the battle.

There are many instances of such hyperbolic language being used to describe military victories in the ancient world, so these Bible verses should not be taken at face value given the cultural context. Neither should they be taken at face value in the biblical context. For one, commands like Deuteronomy 7:3, which prohibited intermarrying with neighboring populations (which, the next verse explains, would lead to Israel worshiping other gods–a threat to God’s plan for human restoration, as outlined above), assumed that there would be some Canaanite populations left after the settling of Canaan. Later verses in Joshua, such as 23:12, show that there were still Canaanites after Israel settled the region. And Joshua 11:19 implies that the Israelites made an offer of peace to many Canaanite cities, and that at least one city accepted.

Putting everything together, we can see that the Conquest of Canaan, like other instances of violence in the Old Testament, is consistent with the restorative work that God does throughout Scripture. The Canaanites lost their prominence in the land due to the natural consequences of their actions, including self-destructive cultural practices and threatening God's salvation plan for all of humanity. God led the Israelites into the land so that they could both bless the Canaanites who were open to a new way of life and have the space to develop and mature as part of God's plan. This involved violence against those who were in opposition to God's plan, but upon the fulfillment of that plan through Jesus, salvation was made possible for them as well.

Conclusion

God's love is the same for all. God's actions always serve his restorative purposes. Though there isn't space here to address every instance of violence in the Old Testament, this article has provided you with the basic tools necessary to analyze other instances that you might come across. It is possible to respect and honor Scripture without using these stories to justify Christian violence historically and in the present. It is our hope Christians would look first and foremost to emulate God's restorative justice and love that is present throughout the Bible, including the Old Testament, and especially in the life of Jesus.