Was ancient Israel guilty of genocide against the ancient Canaanite peoples?

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Just as present-day Israel is accused of committing genocide against the Palestinians, so too ancient Israel of the Biblical era has been alleged to have committed genocide against the people of Canaan, in the ancient Palestine.¹ However, both claims are inaccurate. Regarding the former accusation, I recommend watching a superb interview by Douglas Murray on a South African TV channel and Ollie Anisfeld’s comments regarding the interview. The latter claim has been primarily justified by texts found in the Bible where God commanded ancient Israel to annihilate seven Canaanite nations, including women, children, and even livestock, as a judgment for their centuries-long sins. For Christians, these are often the most difficult passages in the Bible, as they are highlighted by new atheists as examples of the immorality of the God of the Old Testament. However, this is partly based on a misunderstanding of both the nature of God and the texts of the Bible and ancient rhetoric.

World-renowned atheist Richard Dawkins has said:

The book of Numbers tells how God incited Moses to attack the Midianites. His army made short work of slaying all the men, and they burned all the Midianite cities, but they didn’t kill the women and children. This merciful restraint by his soldiers infuriated Moses, and he gave orders that all the boy children should be killed, and all the women who were not virgins. “But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves” (Numbers 31: 18). No, Moses was not a great role model for modern moralists.

The invasion of the Promised Land in general, is morally indistinguishable from Hitler’s invasion of Poland, or Saddam Hussein’s massacres of the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs.

The destruction orders of the Old Testament sound morally very questionable at first glance:

So we captured all his cities at that time and utterly destroyed the men, women, and children of every city. We left no survivor.²
We utterly destroyed them, as we did to Sihon king of Heshbon, utterly destroying the men, women, and children of every city.³

Everything the Bible says the Israelites did does not mean that they always acted according to God’s will (most of the time they just broke God’s commands), but these orders to destroy the Canaanite nations were precisely God’s own commands. For example, the prophet Samuel told King Saul: “The Lord sent me to anoint you as king over His people, over Israel; now therefore, listen to the words of the Lord. This is what the Lord of armies says: ‘I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, in that he obstructed him on the way while he was coming up from Egypt. Now go and strike Amalek and completely destroy everything that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’⁴ Such a command would meet the criteria of genocide in modern terminology.

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The Potter

However, there are a few crucial points to bear in mind when making such criticisms. The command to kill women and children is only problematic because God gives that task to the Israelites. After all, the same God killed the entire human race in the Flood, with the exception of Noah and his family. The same God also killed the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, including their women and children. The sixth commandment “thou shalt not kill” does not apply to the Lawgiver Himself, who is the giver of all life. 1 Samuel 2:6 says: “The Lord puts to death and makes alive; He brings down to Sheol and brings up.” This applies to every mortal person: “Then the Lord said, ‘My Spirit will not remain with man forever, because he is also flesh; nevertheless his days shall be 120 years.’”⁵

Humans are before God as clay in the hands of the potter.⁶ To use a more modern analogy: if a human creates an AI program or a humanoid robot that starts to behave in a way that violates our moral standards, then of course the human has the right to destroy this flawed creation. A father or mother, on the other hand, has no right to kill their child because neither of them is the creator of that child. Rights therefore belong to Him alone, who braided that child together in his/her mother’s womb.⁷ For this same reason, man has not been given permission to terminate a pregnancy, but God alone should have the right to decide the birth and death of every child. In this light, the destruction of the Canaanite nations would not be so problematic if God Himself had destroyed them in the same way that He destroyed the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah through the forces of nature.

In the covenant of Moses, humans were, however, for the first time given divine authorization to carry out the death penalty on those who broke God’s law. The leaders of ancient Israel thus acted as God’s earthly representatives, and they were given the authority to act as instruments of God’s judgments against sinners. But ultimately, God himself judged his people by sending the nations to destroy their land when they had forsaken Moses’ commandments and turned to serve foreign gods. Such divine authorization for the killing of lawbreakers is no longer present in the New Covenant, because Jesus Christ came to fulfill the law and the prophets and to abolish the Jewish religious tribunal, the Sanhedrin, which had become an instrument of tyranny and lawlessness. Jesus Christ lamented upon his arrival in Jerusalem:

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who have been sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling.⁸

Moloch’s demonic human sacrifice rites

According to the Bible, God judged the Canaanite nations for their wickedness because they not only practiced all kinds of sexual immorality, such as incest, homosexuality and bestiality, but also sacrificed their own children to the Canaanite idol Moloch.⁹ The ancient world historian John Day has said:

We have independent evidence that child sacrifice was practiced in the Canaanite (Carthaginian and Phoenician) world¹⁰ from many classical sources, Punic inscriptions and archaeological evidence, as well as Egyptian depictions of the ritual occurring in Syria-Palestine, and from a recently discovered Phoenician inscription in Turkey. There is therefore no reason to doubt the biblical testimony to Canaanite child sacrifice.

In these pagan rites, sexual immorality was practiced as a kind of sacrament to demonic idols, and children born from sexual acts were sacrificed to the gods by being put alive in a fiery horn or split in two as shown in the video below by archaeologist Joel Kramer. The children sacrificed were usually either babies or infants under the age of ten.

The sacrifice of children is confirmed not only in the Bible but also in other ancient sources, which provide further context to the purpose and details of the rite, which horrified even the ancient Greeks, who were not exactly humanists. I quote below some historical documentation:

With us, for instance, human sacrifice is not legal, but unholy, whereas the Carthaginians perform it as a thing they account holy and legal, and that too when some of them sacrifice even their own sons to Cronos, as I daresay you yourself have heard. – Plato, Minos 315, 300s BC.

For from ancient times the barbarians have had a custom of sacrificing human beings to Kronos.” – Sophocles, 400s BC.

“The Phoenicians too, in great disasters whether of wars or droughts, or plagues, used to sacrifice one of their dearest, dedicating him to Kronos. And the ‘Phoenician History,’ which Sanchuniathon wrote in Phoenician and which Philo of Byblos translated into Greek in eight books, is full of such sacrifices.” -Porphyry, 200s AD

And Kleitarchos says the Phoenicians, and above all the Carthaginians, venerating Kronos, whenever they were eager for a great thing to succeed, made a vow by one of their children. If they would receive the desired things, they would sacrifice it to the god. A bronze Kronos, having been erected by them, stretched out upturned hands over a bronze oven to burn the child. The flame of the burning child reached its body until, the limbs having shriveled up and the smiling mouth appearing to be almost laughing, it would slip into the oven. Therefore the grin is called “sardonic laughter,” since they die laughing. – Kleitarchos, 300s BC.

What madness! with full knowledge and understanding they themselves offered up their own children, and those who had no children would buy little ones from poor people and cut their throats as if they were so many lambs or young birds; meanwhile the mother stood by without a tear or moan; but should she utter a single moan or let fall a single tear, she had to forfeit the money, and her child was sacrificed nevertheless; and the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums so that the cries of wailing should not reach the ears of the people. – Plutarch, 100s AD.

This sick ritual continued in the ancient Middle East and Africa for about 1400 years after God commanded Joshua to destroy the Canaanite nations that practiced this ritual. The rite was so repugnant that even the notoriously cruel Roman emperors ordered the priests who practiced it to be crucified, as the church father Tertullianus tells that Tiberius, who reigned during Jesus’ time, did.

In Africa infants used to be sacrificed to Saturn, and quite openly, down to the proconsulate of Tiberius, who took the priests themselves and on the very trees of their temple, under whose shadow their crimes had been committed, hung them alive like votive offerings on crosses; and the soldiers of my own country are witnesses to it, who served that proconsul in that very task. Yes, and to this day that holy crime persists in secret. – Apology 9.2-3

Even the kings of Israel and Judah began to practice this same demonic rite¹¹, which was one of the reasons why God judged His people and delivered them into the hands of the Assyrian and eventually Babylonian kings. God could not be a just and good God if He allowed people to practice such evil and cruelty without intervention and judgment. If the Roman emperors, already known for their ruthlessness, pitied the little children who were victims of this crime, how much more would a holy and righteous God pity them.

Devil’s advocate

However, the devil’s advocate might point out the contradiction of God’s morality at this point. If shedding the blood of innocent children was such an abominable and reprehensible crime to God, which it is, why did He Himself command the shedding of the blood of the Canaanite children. I wrote earlier that as the giver of life, God also has the right to take a person’s life, regardless of age or gender. But one could also look at it from the point of view that the greatest injustice at that point is not so much against the Canaanite children (who went to heaven when they died), but against the Israelite soldiers. Theologian Randal Rauser writes:

Christians have often treated the Old Testament like [historian Samual Eliot] Morison treated Columbus. That is, they acknowledge the violent acts of Yahweh and the Israelites, but they do so with “a certain infectious calm,” as if the stories did not offend our deepest moral sensibilities. Not surprisingly, such behavior from “family values” Christians strikes the new atheists as positively perverse, and they have not shied away from making their incredulity known…

Whatever one thinks of the new atheists, surely they have a point: how does one explain these horrors. When they are not busy defending moral atrocities in the Old Testament, virtually every Christian will express an unqualified and absolute condemnation of horrors like the vicious execution of children in war. Canaanite children would still scream, beg for mercy, cry, and bleed just like Israelite children… Imagine the psychological agony of an Israelite soldier divinely commanded to hack up a Canaanite toddler one day only to bounce his Israelite toddler on his knee the next.

However, the same psychological pain could be said to be suffered by the current Israeli soldiers when Hamas brainwashes Palestinian children to hate Jews and sends them as human shields or incites them to kill Israeli civilians. A soldier whose duty it is to defend the lives of innocent civilians or to protect his own life is faced with the difficult and traumatic decision of ending the life of an innocent child.

What would you do in a situation where you have to eliminate a terrorist who is slaughtering civilians of your people, who takes his own child as a human shield and fires bullets behind him to kill first you and then the innocent Israeli children behind you? In an attempt to protect the lives of the innocent, you have no choice but to eliminate that Palestinian child, even if he cannot be held responsible for the crimes of his fathers. Such traumatic decisions are forced on IDF soldiers every day in their war against Hamas. However, in this case, the blood of an innocent child is not in the hands of an Israeli soldier, but in the hands of the terrorist who used him as a human shield.

The situation of the ancient Israelite soldiers was probably very similar to that of today. If we read the Old Testament out of its historical context and ignore the bigger picture, some people may get the impression that the Israelite hit squad went from village to village, mercilessly slaughtering the defenceless Canaanite men, women and children who begged for mercy and who wanted only to live in peace in their own land, which the Israelites came to plunder under Joshua’s leadership. But this is not the picture the Bible gives us.

First, the Israelites could not just march into Canaanite villages, because these nations were much stronger and more numerous than the Israelites were.¹² Therefore, the Israelites feared these nations more than they feared the Israelites. The cities of these nations were heavily fortified, and some of them were also inhabited by giants, by whose side the Israelites felt like locusts.¹³ For this reason the people murmured against Moses, saying: “We are not able to go up against the people, because they are too strong for us.”.¹⁴ Systematic genocide can usually be carried out by a stronger party against a weaker party, not by a weaker party against a stronger party. The biblical story of David and Goliath is also appropriate to describe the position of Israel as a whole against its more powerful enemies, which it defeated with the help of its God.

Agression or Defensive War?

Another important and often overlooked aspect is that Israel did not go to unprovoked war against these peoples. The Israelites did not knock on the doors of the walls of the enemy nations who were living in peace, tell the guards that God had commanded the destruction of all the inhabitants of the city, down to the children and women, and then begin their indiscriminate slaughter. Genesis tells us that the Amalekites tried to destroy the Israelites before any of the Israelites tried to destroy them:

Then Amalek came and fought against Israel at Rephidim. So Moses said to Joshua, “Choose men for us and go out, fight against Amalek. Tomorrow I will station myself on the top of the hill with the staff of God in my hand.” ¹⁵

Rephidim is located on the Sinai Peninsula, so the Amalekites came from the Levant to oppose the Israelites who had escaped from slavery in Egypt in an attempt to destroy them. Thus, the Israelites fought against them in a legitimate defensive war for the existence of their own people. The context indicates that the Israelites were very weary and thirsty after wandering for 40 years in the Sinai desert. For this reason, the Bible recounts that God also judged the Amalekites for their ruthlessness in fighting against an oppressed people who had suffered first in Egyptian slavery and then for 40 years in the desert.

Remember what Amalek did to you on the way when you came out of Egypt, how he confronted you on the way and attacked among you all the stragglers at your rear when you were tired and weary; and he did not fear God.¹⁶

This is what the Lord of armies says: ‘I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, in that he obstructed him on the way while he was coming up from Egypt… And Saul came to the city of Amalek and set an ambush in the wadi. But Saul said to the Kenites, “Go, get away, go down from among the Amalekites, so that I do not destroy you along with them; for you showed kindness to all the sons of Israel when they went up from Egypt.” So the Kenites got away from among the Amalekites. Then Saul defeated the Amalekites, from Havilah going toward Shur, which is east of Egypt.¹⁷

Notice how God showed mercy to the Kenites among the Amalekites for their compassion. In the case of the destruction of the inhabitants of Jericho, God also showed mercy to a woman named Rahab and her family, even though she was a prostitute, because she had been kind to the Israelites.¹⁸ The situation of ancient Israel has been somewhat similar to the years 1945-48, when the Jews who had survived centuries of persecution and the Holocaust returned to their ancestral land in despair and exhaustion. Despite this, many gentile nations turned their backs on them and did not want to receive them.

Also, the Arabs of Palestine, under the leadership of Grand Mufti Amin al-Hussein, allied with the Nazis and fought against the escaped Jews to prevent them from establishing a Jewish state in British-controlled Palestine. Similarly, the ancient peoples of Canaan fought against the Hebrews who had escaped from slavery in Egypt to prevent them from settling in the land that God had given to their ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In the case of the other Canaanite peoples and their kings, they too started a war against the Hebrews who had fled from the Pharaoh of Egypt, and not the other way around.¹⁹

Moses, a warmonger or a diplomat?

The book of Numbers specifically mentions that the Israelites came against these enemy nations “waving the white flag” in a spirit of peace.

Then Israel sent messengers to Sihon, king of the Amorites, saying, “Let me pass through your land. We will not turn off into field or vineyard; we will not drink water from wells. We will go by the king’s road until we have passed through your border.” But Sihon would not permit Israel to pass through his border. Instead, Sihon gathered all his people and went out against Israel in the wilderness, and came to Jahaz and fought against Israel. Then Israel struck him with the edge of the sword, and took possession of his land from the Arnon to the Jabbok, as far as the sons of Ammon; for the border of the sons of Ammon was Jazer. Israel took all these cities, and Israel lived in all the cities of the Amorites, in Heshbon and in all her villages. For Heshbon was the city of Sihon, king of the Amorites, who had fought against the former king of Moab and had taken all his land out of his hand, as far as the Arnon.

The book of Deuteronomy tells the same thing:

So I sent messengers from the wilderness of Kedemoth to Sihon king of Heshbon with words of peace, saying, ‘Let me pass through your land; I will travel only on the road. I will not turn aside to the right or to the left. You will sell me food for money so that I may eat, and give me water for money so that I may drink, only let me pass through on foot,just as the sons of Esau who live in Seir and the Moabites who live in Ar did for me, until I cross over the Jordan into the land that the Lord our God is giving us.’ But Sihon king of Heshbon was not willing for us to pass through his land; for the Lord your God hardened his spirit and made his heart obstinate, in order to hand him over to you, as he is today. And the Lord said to me, ‘See, I have begun to turn Sihon and his land over to you. Begin taking possession, so that you may possess his land.’²⁰

This gives the reader an entirely different impression than Richard Dawkins’ assertion: “Invasion of the promised land is morally indistinguishable from Hitler’s invasion of Poland or Saddam Hussein’s mass murders of Kurds and Marsh Arabs.” The Hebrews did not request permission from the Amorite king to plunder their homes, property, livestock, or wives, nor did they ask for permission to kill their civilian population. Such a request would also have been contradictory to Moses’ 8th and 10th commandments: “You shall not steal. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male slave, or his female slave, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” ²¹ The Israelites would have quickly noticed Moses’ hypocrisy and double standards if he had started demanding the plunder of enemy nations’ possessions. Someone might argue that by “neighbor,” Moses meant only the fellow Israelites and not members of nations. However, this is not true, because Moses urged the Israelites to love the foreign residents in the land just as much as their own people:

When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.²²

Would the Nazis have said the same about the non-Germans or the Jews living in their country if ancient Israel was morally indistinguishable from Nazi Germany? The essential point here is that the God’s order to annihilate these enemy nations came only after they had first turned their backs on the peaceful intentions of the Hebrews and tried to destroy them instead of agreeing to live with them in harmony and peace. The Bible tells of God Himself hardening the heart of the Amorite king so that He could judge these nations for their centuries of continued evil. The 15th chapter of the Book of Genesis tells of God giving these nations 400 years to repent before their judgment.”²³

God also forbade the Israelites to war against those nations whose territories He had not even given them “a footprint” as their inheritance, i.e., the plundering of foreign lands (imperialism), which gentile nations have done throughout history, was not allowed for Israel.²⁴

Israel, a victim or an oppressor?

The incitement to genocide did not come so much from the Israelis as from their enemies. This is clear from the prophecy of Psalm 83, whose description fits equally well with the ancient as with the current situation in the Middle East:

God, do not remain quiet; Do not be silent and, God, do not be still. For behold, Your enemies make an uproar, And those who hate You have exalted themselves. They make shrewd plans against Your people, And conspire together against Your treasured ones. They have said, “Come, and let’s wipe them out as a nation, So that the name of Israel will no longer be remembered.” For they have conspired together with one mind; They make a covenant against You: The tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites, Moab and the Hagrites; Gebal, Ammon, and Amalek, Philistia with the inhabitants of Tyre; Assyria also has joined them; They have become a help to the children of Lot. Selah Deal with them as with Midian,

Israel did not either oppress the Canaanite peoples, but the Canaanite nations oppressed Israel.

And when the Lord raised up judges for them, the Lord was with the judge and saved them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge; for the Lord was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who tormented and oppressed them.²⁵

Now Samuel called the people together to the Lord at Mizpah; and he said to the sons of Israel, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel says: ‘I brought Israel up from Egypt, and I rescued you from the hand of the Egyptians and from the power of all the kingdoms that were oppressing you.” ²⁶

The Devil’s Advocate again points out at this point that history is written by the victors and we do not have the historical sources of the Canaanites themselves to prove whether they oppressed Israel or vice versa. Perhaps so, but since the entire genocide narrative is derived solely from the Bible, it is also completely legitimate to quote other texts from the Bible as a counterbalance to this narrative. According to the Book of Judges, these Canaanite nations were a thorn in the flesh of Israel even after Joshua’s conquest wars and attempted to commit genocide against the Hebrew people by starving them.

The power of Midian prevailed against Israel. Because of Midian the sons of Israel made for themselves the dens which were in the mountains and the caves and the strongholds. For whenever Israel had sown, the Midianites would come up with the Amalekites and the people of the east and march against them. So they would camp against them and destroy the produce of the earth as far as Gaza, and leave no sustenance in Israel, nor a sheep, ox, or donkey. For they would come up with their livestock and their tents, they would come in like locusts in number, and both they and their camels were innumerable; and they came into the land to ruin it. So Israel was brought very low because of Midian, and the sons of Israel cried out to the Lord. Now it came about, when the sons of Israel cried out to the Lord on account of Midian.²⁷

At this point, it must be asked why New Atheists only condemn the “genocide” of the Canaanites, but not the clear attempts at genocide by the Midianites and the Amalekites. The actions of the Canaanites would at least be defined as a war crime under current international law:

Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC),“intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions”, is a war crime… There is no doubt that denial of food or lack of access to food for persons covered by the article would run contrary to the demand for humane treatment; the prohibition of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, and of the destruction of objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population — including foodstuffs, is a specific expression of the principle of humane treatment. The practice of States and international bodies very widely supports those prohibitions, regardless of the type of conflict involved, and it may consequently be argued that these rules constitute customary international law and their violation a war crime.²⁸

Ancient “Trumpian” hyperbole

Richard Dawkins quoted from Numbers 31, the story of how Moses ordered all the Midianite men, male children and women who had married a man to be killed, and the people of Israel did as Moses had commanded them. However, according to Judges 6, “the power of Midian prevailed against Israel”, and the Israelites were forced to hide from them in caves and caverns, even though these events took place decades or centuries later. So how were the Midianites still alive if Moses had already killed them? We find the same curiosity with the Amalekites. Samuel the prophet said to King Saul, “Now go and strike Amalek and completely destroy everything that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” ²⁹ A few verses later it says, “Then Saul defeated the Amalekites, from Havilah going toward Shur, which is east of Egypt. He captured Agag the king of the Amalekites alive, and completely destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword.”

Samuel rebuked Saul for not obeying God’s commandment and leaving Agag, king of Amalek, alive, and sparing “the best sheep, the fattest cattle, the lambs, everything of value”. However, the passage emphasizes that Saul brought destruction upon the Amalekite people as the prophet had commanded him to do so. How then is it possible that the Amalekites are still alive at the time of King David? Chapter 30 of 1 Samuel tells us that the Amalekites raided the south and Ziklag, burned the city with fire, and took the wives, sons, and daughters of the Israelites hostage, all of whom David eventually managed to rescue. However, just a few chapters earlier it was reported, “Now David and his men went up and attacked… the Amalekites; for they were the inhabitants of the land from ancient times, as you come to Shur even as far as the land of Egypt. David attacked the land and did not leave a man or a woman alive.”

If no man, woman, or child was left alive among the Amalekites by the hands of King Saul or David, how could they then be a torment to the Israelites again in chapter 30? And about 300 years later, in the days of King Hezekiah, the Israelites were killing again last survivors from the nation the Amalekites.³⁰ Persistent bastards when they just don’t die all at once. In light of these examples, it is clear that the commands to destroy nations in the Old Testament are a kind of hyperbole, exaggerated rhetoric, for which Donald Trump is famous, and which was a common way in the ancient world to describe the complete military defeat of an enemy nation. Therefore, it cannot in any way be compared to genocide or systematic ethnic cleansing as it is understood in the context of 20th century events.

Similar rhetoric can be found in the writings of Israel’s enemies, such as the Egyptian Merneptah Stele, the world’s oldest non-biblical writing mentioning the existence of Israel. This hieroglyphic stone tablet from the time of Pharaoh Merneptah in the 13th century BCE boasts: “Israel is laid waste and his seed is no more.” This Egyptian writing is dated to the time of the judges, between Joshua’s conquests and the reign of King Saul and David. It also confirms the biblical description of ancient Israel as a nation oppressed and despised by its more powerful neighboring peoples, whom the enemies of Israel were constantly seeking to destroy. Canaanite nations, such as the Midianites and Amalekites, may have acted as vassals to the Egyptian pharaohs in the destruction of Israel, as the events of the Exodus must have left a lasting mark on the relationship between Israel and Egypt.

If the Amalekites were once the victims of systematic ethnic cleansing by the Israelites, how did they manage to always reassemble their armies to torment the Hebrews? Why didn’t they seek refuge among Israel’s enemies if the Israelites then slaughtered them without mercy? The Bible confirms in many places that such systematic mass destruction of nations has never occurred in ancient Israeli history. The Canaanite nations perished gradually as a result of centuries-long wars, and some of their inhabitants fled to surrounding areas.³¹ Below are a couple of examples of this.

If you say in your heart, ‘These nations are greater than I; how can I dispossess them?’ you are not to be afraid of them; you shall remember well what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt:the great trials which your eyes saw and the signs and the wonders, and the mighty hand and the outstretched arm by which the Lord your God brought you out. The Lord your God will do the same to all the peoples of whom you are afraid.Indeed, the Lord your God will send the hornet against them, until those who are left and hide themselves from you perish. You are not to be terrified of them, because the Lord your God is in your midst, a great and awesome God. And the Lord your God will drive away these nations from you little by little; you will not be able to put an end to them quickly, otherwise the wild animals would become too numerous for you. But the Lord your God will turn them over to you, and will throw them into great confusion until they are destroyed. And He will hand over their kings to you, so that you will eliminate their name from under heaven; no one will be able to stand against you until you have destroyed them.³²

So the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and He said, “Because this nation has violated My covenant which I commanded their fathers, and has not listened to My voice, I in turn will no longer drive out from them any of the nations which Joshua left when he died, in order to test Israel by them, whether they will keep the way of the Lord to walk in it as their fathers did, or not.” So the Lord allowed those nations to remain, not driving them out quickly; and He did not hand them over to Joshua. Now these are the nations that the Lord left, to test Israel by them (that is, all the Israelites who had not experienced any of the wars of Canaan; only in order that the generations of the sons of Israel might be taught war, those who had not experienced it previously)… They were left to test Israel by them, to find out if they would obey the commandments of the Lord, which He had commanded their fathers through Moses. The sons of Israel lived among the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites;

Conclusion

From the aforementioned examples, one can see how new atheists like Richard Dawkins distort the biblical description of ancient Israel’s wars against its enemies. In order for the analogy to Hitler’s occupation of Poland and the Holocaust to be justified, the Israelites would have had to attack weaker nations without provocation, systematically slaughter entire nations in a short period, and plunder their land and property. If this were indeed the case, then the morality of the God of the Old Testament would indeed be justifiably questionable. However, a more extensive analysis shows that Israel itself was oppressed and militarily weak, yet with God’s help, managed to destroy more powerful nations over the course of approximately 500 years of war.

Instead of Israel trying to annihilate its neighboring nations, its neighbors sought to annihilate Israel – just as was also the case in the aftermath of 1948. Rather than the Israelites being merciless and ruthless towards the Canaanites, it was the Canaanites who were merciless towards the Israelites. Instead of the Israelites being violent towards the Canaanites, it was the Canaanites who were violent towards the Israelites. While it is true that God explicitly commanded Israel to show no mercy towards the Canaanite peoples, it was because God knew the violent and merciless hearts filled with hatred of these peoples, and wanted to prepare His own people to fight against them without fear and without the weakness brought by human compassion. If the Allies of World War II had shown too much mercy to the Germans and the Japanese, then the Axis powers would have won the war and plunged the world into a thousand years of darkness.

In this account, I aimed to present a better historical and biblical perspective on the destruction of the seven Canaanite nations, even though this explanation does not entirely negate all morally questionable or difficult-to-explain passages in the Old Testament. I recommend reading more on the subject, however, at Berean Archive, from which I also borrowed a substantial portion of my own article.

A debate between atheist Alex O’Connor and Christian William Lane Craig about the destruction of the Canaanite peoples. William Lane Craig does not exactly bring the historical perspective of the issue that I present in this article, but seeks to justify the destruction of the Canaanites from a moral-philosophical perspective.

The destruction of the Amalekites from the perspective of a Jewish woman.

Footnotes

The name “Palestine” is derived etymologically from Philistine although current Palestinians are Arabs and the ancient Philistines (an enemy of the ancient Israel) were Phoenicians. In history there has been never such nation as Palestine or such people as Palestinians. ↩︎
Deut. 2:34 ↩︎
Deut. 3:6 ↩︎
1 Sam. 15:1-3 ↩︎
Genesis 6:3 ↩︎
Jeremiah 18:6 ↩︎
Psalms 139:13 ↩︎
Matthew 23:37 ↩︎
Gen. 15:16, Lev. 18:24-30, Deut. 9:4, 12:31, 18:9-10, Ps. 106:35, 37-38 ↩︎
The origin of the Phoenicians was in the Levant, in the area of present-day Lebanon, and they became one of the most significant maritime nations in the ancient world, founding the city of Carthage in North Africa. The historian Procopius, who lived in the 6th century, stated that part of the “annihilated” Canaanite peoples would have escaped to North Africa and founded Carthage. This would explain the continuity of child sacrifices in this city until the time of Jesus. This would also confirm that Israel never committed any genocide against the Canaanites. Procopius writes: “In the country now called Palestine there dwelt a multitude of very populous races, the Gergesenes and the Jebusites and certain others, of whom we find some mention even in the history of the Hebrews. When these races saw that the leader of the attack [Moses] was a man who performed miracles which could not be withstood, they left their ancestral homes and migrated to Egypt, which was situated not far from their native land. And as they did not find there a region to support them, because Egypt even from ancient times has remained densely populated, they journeyed on to Libya. There they built many cities and took possession of the whole of Libya as far as the Pillars of Heracles, and they have continued to inhabit Libya down to my own time, using the Phoenician language. They also built a fortress there in the region of Numidia, where now stands the city called Tigisis.” ↩︎
2 Chronicles 28:1-3 ↩︎
Deut. 4:37, 7:1, 9:1 11:23
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The existence of giants is mentioned in numerous ancient folktales and there is also archaeological and palaeontological evidence for their existence. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbljB5l9kCE) ( (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlUJxNFyRBM&t=583s) ↩︎
Numbers 13:31 ↩︎
Exodus 17:8-9 ↩︎
Deut. 25:17-18. ↩︎
1 Samuel 15:2, 5-6 ↩︎
Joshua 6:25, Heb. 11:31 ↩︎
Numbers 21:1, 21-23, 33, 22:6 ↩︎
Deut. 2:26-31 ↩︎
Exodus 20:15, 17 ↩︎
Lev. 19:33 ↩︎
Genesis 15:16 ↩︎
Deut. 2:5 ↩︎
Judges 2:18 ↩︎
1. Samuel 10:17-18 ↩︎
Judges 6:2-7 ↩︎
https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/assets/files/other/irrc-844-pejic.pdf (pages 1099-1100, 1106
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1. Samuel 15:2-3 ↩︎
1 Chronicles 4:41-43 ↩︎
In many places it is said that God drove those nations out of the way of Israel, which refers more to the flight of their inhabitants as a result of wars elsewhere than to the systematic slaughter of women and children. See footnote 10 and the following link: https://bereanarchive.org/articles/history/ancient-israel-morality-of-the-conquest-of-canaan#Driving-Out ↩︎
Deut. 7:17-24 ↩︎