Old Testament scholar Tremper Longman sees five phases of Yahweh war in the Bible. 4:28 NIV). . On an individual basis, when a father sinned, his son wasnt to be punished for it. Leviticus 27:29 says very plainly that every person devoted to destruction was to be killed. Humans do not have the right to do whatever we want. This is why it is so important for us to get our doctrine of humanity right. God had warned them against that (Deut. God, as judge, used Israel to carry out His judgment on these people. Bestiality. Claiming Have you ever felt like an alien in your own culture? We must keep in mind, also, that Israel did not decide to exterminate the Canaanites, God did. Gods first inclination is to save Canaan rather than destroy it. At first, the Israelites tried to compromise and worship God the way the Canaanites worshiped their gods. 4:1314; Ezek. When Joshua led the people across the Jordan River into Canaan, he was fulfilling this promise. What God commanded Israel to do to the Canaanites wasnt genocideit was capital punishment. Bible Based.We believe in solo-scriptura. God had decided to judge Nineveh because they were evil (Jonah 1:2). The Canaanites were an evil, depraved people who had to be judged to fulfill the demands of justice. It seems from God's promise to Abraham that they were wicked and idolatrous people. If Ananias and Sapphira were new Christians/immature Christians then we might have asked why they did Not have a chance to repent( i.e., some kind of gracious period of time to repent). All rights reserved. God gave us life, and He has the right to take it away. 33:11). Tugis life was full of dignity and worth. The Hebrew word means to devote something to total destruction.. the people of Sodom, surrounded the house, both young and old, the entire populace from every end[of the city]. Why Did God Command the Israelites to Destroy the Nations in the Land Paul Copan, Is Yahweh a Moral Monster?, Philosophia Christi 10, no. We all recognize this when we accuse some authority who presumes to take life as playing GodGod is under no obligation whatsoever to extend my life for another second. Generation after generation of Canaanites continued in the same evil practices. God had given the Midianites, Amalekites and other Canaanites 400 years to repent of their unbelievably evil practices (sacrificing children on red-hot idols being one of them), and they hadn't (Genesis 15:13-16). There had been a patient waiting from Abrahams time for the sin of the Amorites[to reach] its full measure (Toward Old Testament Ethics, Walter Kaiser, Jr., p, 267,Zondervan, 1983). A special thanks to Joseph Gorra for his many helpful suggestions and to my wife, Jean E. Jones, for her extensive reading of ANE primary and secondary sources and for years ago explaining to me much of the Old Testament. What are the major signs of the last days? These twentieth-century examples were basically people killing people simply because they hated them and/or wanted their land. Thus, the Lord said to Abraham in Genesis 15:16, "the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure." In Luke 20 Jesus told the Jews the parable of the tenants and the vineyard. 16:9; cf. In both Testaments we see that God hates sin and will punish it. If we see humans as being basically good or innocent, then of course we will react with indignation to the Bibleseremlaws. Can these be put together? The Canaanites took seriously the testimony of the Old Testament witness of Yahweh and His revelation, if for no other reason than intentionally to transform the scriptural depiction of Yahweh into a castrated weakling who likes to play with His own excrement and urine.4. It has been suggested that such obliteration language was hyperbolic.{10} Commands to destroy everyone are sometimes followed by commands not to intermarry, such as in Deut. the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (6:12). Peter Singer Heavy Petting: Review of Midas Dekkers, Dearest Pet: On Bestiality (London, 2000), Nerve.com, 2001, http://www.nerve.com/opinions/singer/heavypetting/main.asp. The fertility of the land was believed to be directly connected to the sexual relations of the gods and goddesses. The Canaanites were the only people God commanded the Israelites to destroy Israel was not allowed to treat other nations as they treated the Canaanite cities. The question has been raised whether God really intended the Israelites to kill all the people. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. 11:31; Jas. What place should they have in our preaching and practice? Did the Canaanites Have a Chance? 18:28; Deut 4:2329, 8:1920). Consider one basic example of how new atheist rationalizations echo the propensities of Canaanite sin, and indeed, echo the rationalizations of the human heart. What does it mean that "the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its Israel was not commanded to deal with all other nations the same way they dealt with the Canaanites. 12:4, 30, 31). In regard to the Canaanites, God commanded, "In the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. About UsContact UsPrayer RequestsPrivacy Policy, Latest AnswersBible LessonsBibleAsk LIVEOnline Bible. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them. (Deut. As a result, they eventually received the same judgment the Canaanites experienced (Deut. The part that concerns us herethe real culmination of Yahweh waris called herem. 18:7-8 ). God's patience on the Canaanites The skeptics illogical arguments Skeptics have claimed that God was unjust when He ordained Israel to destroy the Canaanites. However, the verses that follow, namely verses 16-18, disallowed the same offer to be given to Canaan. According to the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament), when God called forth his people out of slavery in Egypt and back to the land of their forefathers, he directed them to kill all the Canaanite clans who were living in the land (Deut. . 1. James B. Pritchard, Harry A. Hoffner, Jr., Incest, Sodomy and Bestiality in the Ancient Near East, in. Molech was a Canaanite underworld deity14 represented as an upright, bullheaded idol with a human body in whose belly a fire was stoked and in whose outstretched arms a child was placed that would be burned to death. Additionally, some ANE manuscripts talk about party-boys and festival people who changed their masculinity into femininity to make the people of Ishtar revere her.17. Memory,. Tremper Longman III, The Case for Spiritual Continuity, in C. S. Cowles, Eugene H. Merrill, Daniel L. Gard, and Tremper Longman III, Show Them No Mercy: Four Views on God and Canaanite Genocide (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003), 185. (The Answer May Surprise You), It was merciful for God to protect the Israelites from idolatry. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad. Also, God made it clear in His conversation with Abraham regarding the Canaanite cities of Sodom and Gomorrah that He knows who would or would not repent, and in the case of those cities, not one person would heed the warning and even Lots family had to be forcibly pulled away from the coming destruction. Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, in his " ", posits that one of the reasons that Sodom was not given the chance to repent was that even their children were wicked. God had warned them against that ( Deut. Some Christians have responded by driving a wedge between the Old Testament and the New, claiming that Jesuss ethics improved upon the brutal practices of ancient Israel. It was merciful for God to allow the Canaanites to remain in the land as long as they did. Driving them out wasnt simply a way of making room for Israel. And its not simply forced eviction we are talking about here; its the slaughter of entire nations, down to the last man, woman, and child. www.probe.org. It may not be altered or edited in any way. [1] Tremper Longman, The Case for Spiritual Continuity, inShow Them No Mercy: 4 Views on God and Canaanite Genocide, ed. Genocide doesn't wait for people to have a change of heart; and certainly not 400 years. 6. From the Canaanite epic poem The Baal Cycle we learn: Mightiest Baal hears / He makes love with a heifer in the outback / A cow in the field of Deaths Realm. God is love (1 John 4:16) and He is also just (Psalm 25:8). Ones background theological beliefs make a big difference in how one sees this. What is right and moral is known to all (Romans 1:18-23), but was rejected by the Canaanites to such an extent that they cut pregnant women open and burned their children as sacrifices to their pagan gods (Leviticus 18:21, 24, 25, 27-30). Canaanite religion, like that of all of the ANE, was a fertility religion that involved temple sex. There is no denying that God, in the Old Testament, commanded the nation of Israel, His chosen people, to exterminate many nations of people. Killing of the Canaanites, Robert Driskell received a Bachelor of Arts degree in both Pastoral Ministries and Biblical Studies from Mid-America Christian University in 1995. He gave them the law so that they may know Him and His ways. note: please see Probes article Do Babies Go to Hell? by Probes founder Jimmy Williams.]. The Canaanites: Genocide Or Judgment? | Bible.org But this sort of response does not fit with Jesuss own view of the Old Testament. Wouldnt that be a more merciful thing to do? Shedding light on this question will actually show that God is merciful and good. Conclusion: What does this tell us about God? God Was God just in destroying the Canaanites? Perhaps what the skeptic is really concerned about is whether the just destruction of the Canaanites is license for Christians to resort to killing the wicked. God had warned them against that (Deut. He begins with the Christian worldview and Rick Wade explores the meaning of the word defense in 1 Peter 3:15, suggesting that all Christians can do Rick Wade provides an expanded discussion of the issues around the Israelites battles against the Canaanites. They are insisting that God and Christianity are in fact poisonous and must diligently be resisted and defeated.
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