Atheists Love The Old Testament Command To Kill The Canaanites

New Atheist Richard Dawkins marshals his arguments against believing in God by using His Old Testament command to kill the Canaanites:

            The Bible story of Joshua’s destruction of Jericho, and the invasion of the Promised Land in general, is morally indistinguishable from Hitler’s invasion of Poland .... The Bible ... it is not the sort of book you should give your children to form their morals .... Joshua’s action was a deed of barbaric genocide.”[1]   

            Dawkins goes on to call God a moral monster: “What makes my jaw drop is that people today should base their lives on such an appalling role model as Yahweh—and even worse, that they should bossily try to force the same evil monster (whether fact or fiction) on the rest of us.”[2]

God’s predominate acts of mercy

            What Dawkins glaringly overlooks is God’s predominate acts of mercy and compassion throughout the Old Testament. For example, God commanded Zechariah to tell His people: “Oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger (immigrant or refugee), nor the poor” (Zechariah 7:10). God’s people were to help the marginalized. When Nineveh repented under the preaching of Jonah, God spared the entire nation from judgment. Jonah responded by affirming God’s loving nature: “I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity” (Jonah 4:2).

            The provision of receiving pardoned from judgment was built into every message and prophecy of judgment in the Old Testament because God is merciful and full of compassion according to Jeremiah 18:8: “If that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it.” Jonah did offer pardon to the Ninevites, but because the offer of pardon is automatic as stated in Jeremiah 18:8 when Nineveh repented on their own, God was merciful and did not judge as Jonah predicted.

Evangelicals disagree on the solution to this ethical issue

            Evangelicals also explain away what appears as the plain meaning of the command to exterminate the Canaanites. Douglas Groothuis in Christian Apologetics rejects the idea that God commanded the killing of Canaanites in the conquest. He contends that all the cities that Joshua “utterly destroyed” were military forts. The nations listed in Joshua 11:1-5 first attacked Israel and Joshua and his army were only defending themselves.

            He writes that “the Israelites did not target nor did they kill noncombatants ... the biblical text of Joshua nor that of Judges supports any genocide. The attacks on Jericho and Ai were assaults on military targets. The major wars that Israel fought were defensive.”[3] Old Testament scholar Gerhard Von Rad in his book Holy War in Ancient Israel disagrees with the view that Israel’s war was only defensive: “The author conceives of the holy wars as predominantly wars of religion, in which Israel turns offensively against the Canaanite cult which is irreconcilable with the faith of Yahweh .... In Deuteronomy 20, Israel was to offer peace to the enemy and if the peace was rejected then the Israelite army was to ‘smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword’ (Deuteronomy 20:13).”[4] This does not sound like defensive warfare.

            Gerhard von Rad writes about “The Manual of War” in Deuteronomy 20.[5] The Manual of War was in two parts.

  • The first part was called the Manual of Ordinary War in Deuteronomy 20:1-15 which describes how Israel was to attack cities outside of the Promised Land. For example, Deuteronomy 20:10-11 states that when the Israeli army “comes near to a city to fight against it, [and] they proclaim peace unto it, and it shall be, if it makes you answer of peace, and opens unto you, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto you, and they shall serve you.” If these foreign cities refuse peace, then only the men are to be killed because the likelihood of intermarriage with women in the cities far away is unlikely. The army of Israel is the initiator of these battles.

  • The second part is called “The Holy War Manual” in Deuteronomy 20:16-20, instructing how to attack cities inside the Promised Land. These cities are to be “utterly destroyed” because of the possibility of turning Israel away from the one true God. In Deuteronomy 20:19, the Manual gives instructions for besieging a city. Again, Israel is the aggressor and not the defender.

            Sometimes the argument made against God’s command to kill the Canaanites cannot be accurate because God could not make up His mind on the subject. C. S. Cowles states that God “kept changing his mind about his genocidal will.”[6] That was not the case. Deuteronomy 20 illustrates that God had different commands for totally different circumstances (whether the city was within or without the Promised Land), the needs of Israel, and the degree of wickedness of the nations.    

            Evangelical Paul Copan elaborates on the argument that Israel only fought against military fortresses in which there were no elderly, women, or children.

  • He bases his argument on Ancient Near Eastern practices of hyperbolic language such as “utterly destroyed” when all were not eliminated.[7] If Joshua used the ANE practice of exaggeration in Joshua 10:40, he did not use it consistently or he qualified it in 23:7 where Joshua states the real situation that all the Canaanite nations were not annihilated. Joshua notes because they did not fully obey the Lord’s command, now Israel will have to avoid worshipping the Canaanite gods.  This use of exaggerated speech doesn’t mean many were not put to death as recorded by Joshua 6:21.

  • Copan also notes that the description of “utterly destroying” the women and children was another example of Ancient Near Eastern embellishment to mean only that the military in the city was defeated.

            The major problem in Canaan was idolatry that could only be eradicated through annihilation and the overwhelming majority of Canaanites were guilty (Deuteronomy 7:1-5; 20:16-18). The idolatry in Canaan was not limited to the military. Idolatrous women had already led Israelite men into gross immorality and the worship of false gods as recorded in Numbers 25:1-3. In Numbers 25, Phinehas killed the Israelite man and the Midianite woman in the very act of immorality and God said that Phinehas “has turned away my wrath away from the children of Israel” (Numbers 25:11). This is a case in point why God gave the command to annihilate the sexually deviant Canaanite women.

            Richard Hess argues similarly with Groothius and Copan: “The text refers to Rahab with her family. She is involved with the inn. However, no other noncombatants are singled out .... All of this coincides with the portrait of a small and militarized center.”[8] The reason Rahab is singled out is that she alone exercised faith in the Lord which inducted her into the Hall of Fame chapter of faith in Hebrews 11. This does not prove she was the lone noncombatant which is an argument from silence.

            Cowles, however, believes that another way to explain away the offense of the command to kill the Canaanites was to reject it as literal. Cowles approves of Duane L. Christensen’s use of allegorizing these texts: “It is this spiritual battle to which this text speaks.”[9] Dawkins refuted this argument to reinforce his attack on the Bible.[10] Gerhard von Rad believed the Yahweh wars in the Old Testament were literal, historical events when he outlined the references and common characteristics of the Holy War in the Old Testament in his book Holy War in Ancient Israel.

            Here are some of the characteristics of these literal holy wars according to Gerhard von Rad. What these characteristics show is that God used a ragtag army of amateurs who did not use the military tactics of the surrounding nations whose victories came from the Lord.

            1) Holy Wars commenced with the blowing of the trumpet (Judges 6:34-35).

            2) Israel prepared for battle by consecrating themselves (Deuteronomy 23:9-14).

            3) Israel fought in “the armies of the living God” (1 Samuel 17:26).

            4) The Lord caused Israel’s enemy to lose courage (Joshua 5:1).

            5) God directly defeated the enemy (Joshua 10:11).

            6) Israel sometimes aided the Lord (Judges 5:23).

            6) The high point was the herem, the consecration of the booty to Yahweh (Joshua 6:18).

            7) After the battle, Yahweh commanded “To your tents, O Israel” (2 Samuel 20:1).[11]

            Clearly from these references, there were literal holy wars in the Old Testament. The question is why?

Why did God command Joshua to annihilate the Canaanites?

            John M. Frame states that “theodicy means the literal justification of God. It is used to describe proposed solutions to the problem of evil.”[12] This paper will provide a theodicy or a justification for God’s righteousness in commanding the use of force in eliminating Canaanites.

            Eventually, the chosen nation migrated to Egypt for 400 years. The place of refuge became a place of oppression. God became their divine Warrior in delivering them from Egypt in Exodus 12:12: “I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast: and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the Lord.” God, their warrior God, delivered them after the iniquity of the Amorites was complete (Genesis 15:16) because the Amorites were “beyond remedy and could therefore be dealt with only by destruction.”[13] The Canaanites were not just squatters on Israel’s Promised Land, they were incurably wicked for hundreds of years and refused to repent.

            Israel was the chosen nation through whom God would bring salvation to the world through the future Jewish Messiah. This God-given mission was to be fulfilled in the Promised Land. For example, the Messiah had to be born in Bethlehem in Judah (Micah 5:2). Consequently, Israel was the only nation authorized to be involved in holy war and Israel was only to be involved in holy war when God commanded them. Attempts on their own failed (1 Samuel 4:1-11). Eugene Merrill makes this application for our generation: “If no case could be made for Yahweh war without Israel’s participation in the Old Testament times, surely none can be made today whether done in the name of Christ, Allah, or any other authority.”[14]

There are three theological justifications for holy war in the Old Testament.

The command to kill Canaanites was justified because of the irremediable hardness of the hearts of the idolaters 

            Merrill wrote that the process begins with one’s hardening of oneself and ends with the confirmation of that hardening by the Lord, who then brings about the only avenue available to him--- the destruction of the irredeemable rebel.[15]

            An example is Pharaoh who hardened his heart (Exodus 7:13) before God responded in hardening Pharaoh’s heart (Exodus 9:12). This also was the case in the Canaanite conquest. Joshua gives a summary of the Northern Campaign in 11:16-23 when he notes that none of the cities made peace with Israel, save only the Gibeonites because the Lord had hardened their hearts that he might “destroy them utterly” (11:19-20). Donald Campbell writes that this hardening happened because “the Canaanites’ day of grace was gone.”[16]

The command to kill the Canaanites was also justified because of the need to protect Israel against spiritual corruption 

            In two prescriptive passages, God instructed Israel to annihilate the wicked Canaanites lest the nation Israel fall prey to the Canaanite idolatry and false teaching (Deuteronomy 7:1-5 and 20:16-18). Idolatry cannot be separated from pagan nations that were idolatrous, therefore the idolatrous nations had to be annihilated. After referring to the ten commandments in Deuteronomy 4:13, Moses warned the children of Israel to take heed and avoid idolatry “lest you corrupt yourselves.”

            God had told Abraham that Israel was going to be enslaved in Egypt for 400 years (Genesis 15:13). But when the iniquity of Amorites was full, then Israel would enter the Promised Land. Howard writes, “For many years, the Canaanites’ sins apparently would not justify the annihilation that would come when the Israelites took the land. However, that time would arrive, and we see that it did arrive by the time of Joshua.”[17] Clay Jones notes the evidence of the moral decline in Canaan: “Although early Canaanite laws proscribed either death or banishment for most forms of incest, after the fourteenth century BC, [the time of Joshua’s conquest] the penalties were reduced to no more than the payment of a fine.”[18] This coincides with God’s command to punish the extreme wickedness of Canaan.

            In Leviticus 18:3, Moses recorded the command of the Lord to the children of Israel: “After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein you dwelt, shall you not do: and after the doings of the land of Canaan, where I bring you, shall you not do: neither shall you walk in their ordinances.” Then the heinous sins of Canaan are listed and described in 18:6-23: incest, adultery, child sacrifice, homosexuality, and bestiality. Howard notes that “Archaeological excavation has shown that the practice of child sacrifice was especially the province of the Canaanites.”[19]

            The reason for the herem (the command to “utterly destroy”) was to keep Israel from being polluted with the sins of the idolatry of the Canaanites. Howard stated that Israel had already “yielded to temptation and the Baal of Peor in the wilderness” (Numbers 25; 31:1-4). In Deuteronomy, the Lord had made His desires clear: ‘You shall utterly destroy them ... precisely so that they might not teach you to do according to all their abominations which they have done on behalf of their gods (20:17-18).’”[20]

            Clay Jones argues that one of the reasons for the command to kill the Canaanites was the capital punishment for their sins:

            The “new atheists” call God’s commands to kill the Canaanites “genocide,” but a closer look at the horror of the Canaanites’ sinfulness, exhibited in rampant idolatry, incest, adultery, child sacrifice, homosexuality, and bestiality, reveals that God’s reason for commanding their death was not genocide but capital punishment.[21]

Finally, the command to kill the Canaanites was justified because Israel and the nations needed to be taught the character and intentions of the one true God 

            The Canaanites knew who God was. Rahab testified to this knowledge in Joshua 2:10-11: “For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt; and what you did unto the two kings of the Amorites, that were on the other side Jordan, Sihon, and Og, whom you utterly destroyed. And as soon as we had heard these things, our hearts did melt, neither did there remain any more courage in any man, because of you: for the LORD your God, he is God in heaven above, and in the earth beneath.” Dawkins complains that “the ethnic cleansing begun in the time of Moses is brought to bloody fruition in the book of Joshua, a text remarkable for the bloodthirsty massacres it records and the xenophobic relish with which it does so.”[22] Neither the Exodus nor the Conquest was racial cleansing, for in the future when Israel sinned, Israel suffered a similar fate at the hands of the Babylonians as a judgment from God. Lamentations 2 provides the sad story that recounted this judgment. God was concerned with sin, not ethnicity.[23]

Why did God command Joshua to kill children?

            What is the difference between the massacre at My Lai on March 16, 1968, in the Vietnam War and what Joshua did? Intelligence informed the military that Vietcong was in My Lai and all of the civilians were gone. On March 16, Charlie Company invaded the village of My Lai and found no Vietcong but only civilians made up of the elderly, women, children, and babies. The Vietcong were over 100 miles away. Charlie Company still opened fire and killed over 500 innocent civilians. How is what happened in Canaan different from what happened in My Lai?

  • God gave the command to Joshua. To disobey God would have been a sin. Military commanders with wrong intelligence ordered the destruction of My Lai.  

  • The captain after knowing no enemy combatants were in My Lai still led his men to massacre civilians.

  • The Canaanites were guilty of degrading sins and even the murder of their children. These sins are punished with capital punishment in the Old Testament.

  • The Canaanites threatened and attacked the Israelites. The civilians of My Lai were no threat to Charlie Company.

  • The massacre at My Lai was covered up by top generals who were later dishonorably discharged. God did not cover up the annihilation of the wicked Canaanites who were guilty of rejecting His offers of peace and grotesque sins.

            When Israel was on the plains of Moab preparing to enter Canaan, God in Deuteronomy 7:1-2; and 20:16-18 commanded Israel to kill all the living in the Promised Land. Joshua 6:21 records that Israel obeyed this command at the battle of Jericho: “And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.” Cowles calls this the “genocidal destruction of Canaanite children”[24] and compared what happened in Canaan to the Nazis dumping truckloads of Jewish children into the flames at Jewish concentration camps.”[25]

            In Deuteronomy 7:3-4, God also commanded Israel: “Neither shall you make marriages with them; your daughter you shall not give unto his son, nor his daughter shall you take unto your son. For they will turn away your son from following me, that they may serve other gods.”

            In Deuteronomy 20, God called on Israel to “utterly destroy” the Canaanites including their children, and added a similar reason for the command: “That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods; so should you sin against the Lord your God” (20:18).

  • Had the Canaanite children been spared, they would have grown up and married the Old Testament children of God and turned them away from the one true God.

  • The result of these marriages and turning from God would have been eternal separation from God.

  • The downfall of Solomon was the result of Joshua not obeying God’s command. It is recorded in 1 Kings 11:1 that “Solomon love many foreign women of Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites.” The Canaanite nations that Joshua failed to destroy. This resulted in precisely the apostasy that God predicted: “For it came to pass when Solomon was old, that his wives turned his heart after other gods .... For Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians, and after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites” (11:1-5).

            William Lane Craig in discussing the command to kill the Canaanites brings out another gracious act of God in the command to kill the Canaanite children:

            Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.[26]

            Had the Canaanite children grown up in the wicked Canaanite culture of idolatry, upon death they would have spent eternity in judgment? But as the case was, these Canaanite children who had not yet reached the age of accountability, went to Heaven and we will meet them one day. God is merciful even in wrath.

God was justified in His command to exterminate the wicked, God rejecting Canaanites. At the Second Coming, Revelation 19 records a future judgment on nations who reject Christ in the Battle of Armageddon. All of these nations who choose to reject Christ or God’s message of salvation, God. loves and sent His Son to die for their sins and provide salvation.

            [1] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), 280, 292.

            [2] Ibid., 282.

            [3] Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2011), 674-675.

            [4] Gerhard von Rad. Holy War in Ancient Israel. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1958) 118.                       

             [5] This manual of war has two parts. The first part is the Manual of Ordinary War in Deuteronomy 20:1-15. There was instruction for fighting nations “at a distance” in 20:15 or outside the Promised Land. In this case, only the men were to be killed not the women and children because the likelihood of intermarriage and adoption of their gods was less likely. Also, these nations were not as wicked as the Canaanites. “Aramean women adopted the religions of their husbands. Abraham, for example, insisted that his servant get a wife from the Aramean culture for Isaac and not a Canaanite woman (Genesis 24)” (Jack S. Deere, Bible Knowledge Commentary, John F. Walvoord, Roy B. Zuck, ed. [Wheaton: Victor Books, 1985]). The second part was the Manual of Holy War in Deuteronomy 20:16-20. For the nations within Canaan, the command was total annihilation because of their incurable wickedness and the threat of intermarriage and adoption of the Canaanite false religions (Deuteronomy 20:19-20).

            [6] C. S. Cowles, “The Case for Radical Discontinuity” in Show Them No Mercy, 40.  

            [7] “Joshua’s conventional warfare rhetoric was common in many other Ancient Near Eastern military accounts in the second and first millennia BC. The language is typically exaggerated and full of bravado, depicting total devastation” (Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? [Baker Publishing Group, 2011], 171, Kindle Edition).

            [8] Richard S. Hess, “The Jericho and Ai of the Book of Joshua,” in Critical Issues in Early Israelite History (vol. 3. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbranus, 2008), 36.

            [9] C. S. Cowles, Show Them No Mercy, 37. Cowles quoted Duane L. Christensen in Deuteronomy, [WBC; Dallas: Word, 1991], 32.

           [10] After referring to God’s command to drive out the Canaanites, Dawkins responded to the apologists who reject the literal interpretation of these narratives. “They cannot get away with it, not even if they employ that favorite trick of interpreting selected scriptures as ‘symbolic’ rather than literal. By what criterion do you decide which passages are symbolic, which literal?’” (Dawkins, The God Delusion, 280).

            [11] Gerhard von Rad, Holy War in Ancient Israel, 49.

            [12] Frame has an interesting approach to the problem of evil. He references Job’s problem with evil and suffering. Job believed he was suffering undeservedly and expressed those feelings by blaming God in 19:7. Frame writes, “Notice also that Job never learns why he has had to endure suffering .... The book provides no answers to these questions .... We need, to be cautious in probing the problem of evil .... God may sometimes do things that appear to our finite minds to be contrary to that divine righteousness. When that happens, we must not demand explanations, but rather trust” (John M. Frame, Apologetics: A Justification of Christian Belief [Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2015], 167, 175, 179). It could be argued, if one believes that Job wrote the book that bears his name, that God did eventually reveal to Job the reasons for his sufferings when the Holy Spirit superintended Job in the writing of inspired Scripture.

            [13] Eugene Merrill, Show Them No Mercy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003), 83.

[14] Eugene Merrill, Show Them No Mercy, 85.

            [15] Ibid., 86.

            [16] Donald K. Campbell, Bible Knowledge Commentary (Wheaton: Victor Books, 1985) 354.

            [17] David Howard, Jr., An Introduction to the Old Testament Historical Books (Chicago: Moody Press, 1993) 81.

            [18] Clay Jones. Christian Research Journal, vol. 33, Number 4, (2010). Harry Hoffner, Jr. an American professor of Hittitology writes that several centuries prior to the fourteenth century the incest and bestiality were punishable by banishment or death among the Hittites. After the fourteenth century, the laws changed so that “the human offender could continue to live in the city without bringing the wrath of the gods upon it .... The same pattern of ameliorating the older and more rigorous penalties and replacing them with simple fines can be seen again and again in Hittite laws themselves” (Harry A. Hoffner, Jr., “Incest, Sodomy and Bestiality in the Ancient Near East” in Orient and Occident: Essays Presented to Cyrus H. Gordon on the Occasion of his Sixty-fifth Birthday, ed. Harry A. Hoffner, Jr. [Germany: Neukirchen Vluyn, 1973], 85-90.     

            [19] David Howard, Jr. An Introduction to the Old Testament Historical Books, 82.

            [20] Ibid., 96.

            [21] Clay notes that most of the sins of the Canaanites were simply imitations of their false gods: “Like all Ancient Near East (ANE) pantheons, the Canaanite pantheon was incestuous. Baal has sex with his mother Asherah, his sister Anat, and his daughter Pidray, and none of this is presented pejoratively.” About the sin of bestiality, Clay writes that “probably the ultimate sexual depravity is intercourse with animals. As with incest, the penalty for having sex with animals decreased about the fourteenth century BC ... This explains why, in certain cities, Yahweh sentenced to death everything that breathes. If they had sex with just about every living thing they could get their hands on, and they did, then all had to die” (Clay Jones, Christian Research Journal, vol. 33, Number 4, 2010). 

            [22] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 280.

            [23]  Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God, 165.

            [24] C. S. Cowles, “The Case for Radical Discontinuity” in Show Them No Mercy, ed. Stanly N. Gundry (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003), 31.

            [25] Ibid.,

[26] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith. #16 Slaughter of the Canaanites. By Willian Lane Craig. August 06, 2007. Accessed 8-1-2018. 

https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/slaughter-of-the-canaanites/17