Did God command Genocide in the Bible?

Is God Mean | Episode 7

Did God command Genocide in the Bible?

Unwrapping the Accusations of Old Testament Genocide

  Here are two phrases I believe to be absolutely true:

1. God is a loving, just, and perfectly holy God.
2. Genocide is evil.

If you are a Christian, then I’m sure you would agree with both of these statements. Most people do. However, there are some people who, based on the scripture I’m about to read and other one’s like it, believe that God commanded Genocide in the Bible:

Deuteronomy 20:16-18

However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy[ them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God.

Whoa! That kind of sounds like God was commanding Israel to wipe out entire people groups doesn’t it? If that were true, then we would have a very difficult time resolving our initial two phrases of absolute truth. If genocide is evil, and God commanded genocide, then God wouldn’t be perfectly just or holy, right?

Well, I still believe both phrases are true. God is a loving, just, and perfectly holy God, and genocide is evil. And I’m going to explain to you how both are true at the same time right now. Stay tuned.

Welcome

Hey, and welcome to Is God Mean. A video series to explain Old Testament ethics and help you understand God’s seemingly harsh actions in the Bible. I’m your host Chris Ulery from Divine Romance Ministries, and in my last video we tackled the question “How could a loving God drown innocent women and children in a global flood?” and in this video we are going to answer the question, “Did God really command Genocide in the Bible?” If you want to continue to get updates everytime I make a new video tackling these difficult and often neglected topics then please hit the subscribe button now! If you believe more people need access to this type of information then hit the like button to give us a boost in the YouTube algorithm.

Popular, but insufficient, reasons to explain genocide in the Bible

So this topic of Genocide I believe is one of the most misunderstood and neglected topics when it comes to Old Testament ethics. It is so difficult to find satisfactory answers to this question based on the material that is already out there. While studying this topic I found that even most of my favorite scholars, professors, and apologists gave explanations to this moral dilemma that I just didn’t find satisfactory. I mean no disrespect to any of those scholars! I still hold them all in high esteem and love to follow their work, but I just feel like this particular question was not receiving an answer from any of the popular theories currently out there that adequately portrays God’s heart and character, and because of that I think there are many people being deceived and lured away from the Faith. I think there is still a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding regarding the issue of genocide in the Bible.

“Most scholars and professors will provide one of five, in my opinion, insufficient answers to the question, ‘How could a good and loving God command genocide?’

The five common ideas are:

1. God alone is the author of life, and therefore He alone is justified in taking it.

While I can agree that this statement is technically true, in my opinion it fails to capture the heart and character of God, and misrepresents Him as someone who doesn’t value the sanctity of human life. I don’t believe this is an accurate portrayal of His nature, and therefore this answer is not sufficient for me. It is certainly not an appreciated answer by the atheistic community. The atheist’s response would be ‘While God would be justified in doing so, what kind of a God would desire to take the innocent life of a baby?’

2. The Canaanites were really, really, really evil and deserved judgement.

Again, I agree with this statement when referencing sinful adults, and I definitely think that it is something that we will keep in mind as we explore the concept of Genocide in the Bible. However, I don’t believe that this answer in and of itself is sufficient either as the removal of all of the evil of the Canaanites would not require the murder of innocent children and infants. Babies are not evil. They are innocent. Therefore this answer remains insufficient, in my opinion, to justify a genocide.

3. God knew the Canaanite children would grow up to be evil like their parents, so God took them before the age of accountability so that they could escape eternal damnation.

The argument here is, if the Hebrews would have spared the infants and children, then those children would one day grow up to resent and hate the Hebrews for what they did to their parents. The spared children would have grown up to become a threat to Israel’s existence just like their parents were. Not only would this put the Hebrew nation at risk (whom the salvation of the whole world would come through), but it means the Canaanite children would have grown up to be just as evil and full of hatred as their parents were, and thus would have received eternal damnation after they died. If this were true, then God taking them before they reached the age of accountability was actually an act of mercy that spared them from eternal damnation.

However, assuming that not a single baby could grow up to forgive their adopted parents seems HIGHLY unlikely to me. I’m sure that growing up in a God-loving household from infancy would lead at least a few babies to grow up to recognize the barbarous evil of their birth parents and become Godly people. Besides this logic, there is also another conundrum.

While I’ll admit this is an interesting argument, ultimately, for me personally, taking the life of someone who hasn’t yet committed a crime doesn’t seem just or like it would be characteristic of God’s loving nature. However, this is an idea that I still wrestle with. I’ll admit that I struggle to decide where I stand on this concept.

Someone once asked me, “If you could go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby before he committed all of his crimes against humanity, would you do it?” Honestly, I don’t think that I could. Killing someone that is not yet guilty, even if I know that they eventually will be, doesn’t seem just to me, but I’ll let you wrestle with that moral dilemma yourself and come to your own conclusions. Still, I think there is a much better, more sensical explanation to the Canaanite conquest than this argument offers.

4. The Canaanites were Nephilim tribes of mixed blood and not human. So God was just protecting the human race from extinction.

I believe that’s what the global flood was about, but not the Canaanite conquest (or any other alleged post-flood ‘God-commanded genocide’ in the Bible). As we have already spent considerable time studying the Nephilim and Rephaim on this channel, you know that I believe all of the Nephilim were wiped out in the flood. This is not a point I’m dogmatic about. I’m open to other ideals, but after spending years studying this topic, as convenient as the Nephilim would be for issues like Genocide in the BIble, I just don’t see it in the scriptures. Therefore, I can’t accept this as a reasonable explanation for Genocide in the Bible.

5. The Bible uses hyperbole and poetry to make a point, but it doesn’t reflect what literally happened.

I definitely think that there are some major language barriers that make it difficult for modern readers to understand what is actually going on in these passages, and we are going to break down what I believe some of those language barriers are in this video. However, I think that to accuse God of exaggeration, or to imply that He provided a report that is not trustworthy is a dangerous accusation and not one that I personally believe. I do think that the Bible accurately portrays what happened. So while I do think that this explanation is the closest to providing a reasonable solution, to call it hyperbole or exaggeration I think is misleading and troublesome.”

So how do I reconcile a loving God with a command to commit genocide?

So we’ve looked at reasons that I think are insufficient to explain genocide in the Bible, but what about sufficient reasons to explain it? Well, It’s very simple. I don’t believe God ever commanded Genocide in the Bible. Since the most used Biblical example to accuse God of ordering Genocide is the conquest of Canaan, I am going to use Biblical evidence, extra-biblical textual evidence, and archaeological evidence to highlight how neither the book of Joshua or Judges, where the conquest of Canaan is recorded, supports the idea of any genocide.

To anticipate my conclusions, I am going to be making the points that: 

1. In the case of the conquest of Canaan, Joshua and the Israelites attacked specifically military targets where I believe it is unlikely and unattested that any noncombatants were ever targeted.

2. The major wars that Joshua and the Israelites fought were defensive, and in the cases where the battles were not defensive, the Israelites attacks were on military targets against a military force.

3. After the Israelites conquest of Canaan, the Canaanites remained in all regions and intermarried with the Israelites in the following Generations proving that a Genocide never took place.

4. In future generations, God Himself demanded the Israelites atone for their sin of an attempted annihilation of the Canaanites.

Obviously, that does not sound like a God who is set on seeing an entire race of people wiped out. It sounds like the opposite.

Understanding Cities in the Bible

So now that you know what my conclusions are. Let me explain how I got to those conclusions. If we’re going to look at the conquest of Canaan, then lets start by looking at the very beginning when God first gives the initial command to take Canaan. We looked at this scripture earlier, and this is where the majority of controversy lies, along with a few passages in Joshua, but let’s start by breaking down God’s initial command:

Deuteronomy 20:16-18

However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy[ them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God.

So at first glance, this command appears to be a command to wipe out entire people groups, but I believe that is due to our misunderstanding of the word “cities” that is used in this passage. Notice the command specifically states to only destroy those that are in the “cities.” The Hebrew word for cities there is “ʿîr”. So we really need to understand what a city, or an “ʿîr”, is in this context.

I know that when a modern reader reads the word city, they think of major population centers. For instance, I live in the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the city of Tulsa includes lots of businesses and multiple downtown districts, business areas, and also lots of neighborhoods where people live. However, in Bible times, this was not the case. I believe the word city in this verse would be better translated as what we would call a citadel as the word used here is the same word used to describe a citadel in other parts of Scripture. In Bible times, a big city would have a citadel that would house the military force, political leaders, and maybe a temple that people used for worship. However, this is not where the general population lived.

The general population lived outside the city in little hamlets and villages, and in the case of some of the smaller “citys” or citadels like Jericho and Ai that Joshua attacked, there were no population centers at all, but archaeological evidence seems to suggest that there was nothing more than a small military fort there to guard the pass into the bigger cities like Bethel, and maybe a small inn or brothel to house travelers on their way to trade in the bigger cities. Other than the innkeeper/harlot (Rahab) it would not make sense for there to be any women or children present in these areas.

With all of that in mind, let me quickly walk you through the story of the conquest of Canaan with the proper perspective now in mind.

The Conquest of Canaan

In case you are not familiar with the story of Israelites and the land of Canaan, I will quickly catch you up to speed. As you know, if you’ve been watching this channel, at the beginning of time mankind was created to live in eternal bliss, with no sickness, no destruction, no sadness, and no death, but mankind was deceived in the Garden of Eden and sin entered our world bringing sickness, destruction and death with it. Thankfully, God already had a plan of redemption in mind to save mankind from the wages of sin. God searched the world for a people that would partner with Him to bring about the salvation of mankind and found a partner in the person of Abraham, the father of the Israelites. As time goes on, God promises to give a fruitful area of land to the Israelites to help them be fruitful and multiply as they partner with God to bring about the salvation and redemption of all mankind.

The problem is, in this current plot of land abides several races of people who are heinously wicked and bent on the destruction of anything connected to Yahweh and righteousness. They are demon possessed, murderers, rapists, and have a culture of habitually, violently sacrificing children to demons by cooking them alive on ovens as they would dance to the children’s screams as the children’s skin melted.

God decides He will kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, and will use the Israelites to put an end to this barbarous evil plaguing the earth, and also lead the Israelites into a fruitful and blessed land as they continue to partner with Him to bring about the redemption of all mankind.

Now, I would like to pause at this point in the story to point something out. Many critics of God’s command to route the evil out of Canaan here act like this was a Hitler and the Jews type of situation. They act like God was sending the Israelites in there to route innocent and peaceful people out of Canaan. That was not at all the case. This would more closely resemble the police sending in operatives to route out a child-trafficking ring, or the police shutting down a mafia ring in New York where innocent people and business owners have been terrorized for decades. This is the kind of action that should be celebrated, not criticized! This is good winning and evil losing, and if you don’t like that, well, that is on you, not on God.

I feel like I say this every video, but it always blows me away that one of the major critiques of atheists towards God is called “the problem of evil” in which their major complaint towards God is that He doesn’t intervene in the earth to stop evil. Yet, throughout history, every time God did intervene to stop evil, like this instance of God stopping the evil Canaanites, or the story of the global flood where God stopped the evil Nephilim from destroying mankind, the same critics angry at God for not intervening to stop evil then get angry at God for intervening to stop evil. It makes no sense. Anyways, moving forward in this story, I just want us to keep the right perspective here that this is the good guys going in to defeat the bad guys. Not vice versa. This is a classic good versus evil story and the proper response is to rejoice that the good guys are winning. If this story was to be put into a movie, you would cheer at the end when the Israelites defeat the barbaric and evil Canaanites. Just keep that in mind as we continue to move forward in the story.

Getting back to the story, God decides to use the Israelites to stop the evil plaguing the earth through the Canaanites. God does this by giving the command we looked at earlier where He commands Joshua and the troops to go defeat and slaughter the citadel fortresses of the Canaanite strongholds. Keep in mind the command is to go specifically to the citadels, the military and political seats of power, NOT to go to the general population centers. This is not a command to commit genocide on a general population. This is a command to defeat and overthrow the evil military and political powers so that they can create their own government and culture in these areas.

This command would be equivalent to the president of the United States giving a command to drone strike a terrorist cell. The United States has done this many times and the general public celebrated these moves. Why? Because the general public recognizes that this is not genocide. This is simply removing dangerous and evil combatants that are attempting to bring about the destruction of innocents. I view God’s command to destroy these military bases in the same way.

The first citadel that is to be destroyed is Jericho, and before we move any further in this story we need to clear up all of the misconceptions surrounding Jericho, because there are a lot of them. Growing up I always saw Jericho portrayed in all of the animated children’s programs as this massive glorious city filled with lots of people and activity. Painting portray the same thing. I think that’s how most of us picture Jericho. However, the Bible never calls Jericho a great city. In fact, it’s unlikely that it was a city at all, but was actually probably nothing more than a small military fort that housed about 100 soldiers. Keep in mind, Jericho had to be small enough for all of Israel to march around it seven times and then still have enough time to fight an entire battle in one day. That would never be possible with a big city. All of the extra-biblical textual evidence and archaeological evidence backup this same idea. There is no archaeological evidence to suggest that a general population ever lived at Jericho during the time of Joshua, and all of the pottery suggests nothing more than a simple military outpost, and Ai, the second fortress they attacked was even smaller.

Another reason that people get confused concerning the size of the battle at Jericho is because the word that is used to describe “thousand” in Hebrew is the same word used to describe “unit” or “squad” that has no specific number in mind. So when we see scriptures like:

Joshua 4:13
About forty thousand armed for battle crossed over before the Lord to the plains of Jericho for war.

We immediately envision these massive battles with thousands and thousands of people, but in reality a better translation is likely, “about forty units armed for battle crossed over before the Lord to the plains of Jericho for war.” That could be forty units of 10 men each, which would only be 400 men, not 40,000 men. Or maybe it could have been 40 units of 100 men each that would add up to 4,000 men. We don’t know, but what we do know is that it drastically changes our understanding of the battle of Jericho from a massive battle of tens of thousands of men, to a more realistic and smaller battle potentially involving less than 1,000 men.

So, continuing with the story, before attacking Jericho Joshua sends spies to check out Jericho. The Bible says that spies find a harlot’s house built into the wall of the fortress. Again, I think this fact confuses people as they are picturing a general population area where many non-combatants live. The explanation for this is that many of these small citadels like Jericho guarding the passes into the bigger cities had a small one or two room inn/brothel for travelers to stop on their way into the city. This is what the spies came to, and the harlot they met, Rahab, would have been the innkeeper for Jericho. She was likely the only woman that lived there. 

Rahab asks to be rescued in exchange for helping the spies, and the spies agree. The spies go back to their camp, and Rahab gathers up her family, I would assume probably from the city of Bethel. The Israelite army shows back up a while later, they march around Jericho once for six days, and then on the seventh day they march around it seven times. I believe this is significant and worth noting because Joshua 11:19 alludes to the idea that Canaanite cities could have been offered peace treaties just like Rahab received.

Joshua 11:19 (NIV)
Except for the Hivites living in Gibeon, not one city made a treaty of peace with the Israelites, who took them all in battle.

That sounds to me like making a peace treaty was an option, and I think that Israel’s marching around Jericho was God giving Jericho a seven-fold opportunity to make peace with Israel just like Rahab did. Rahab was a resident of Jericho. I don’t see why other residents couldn’t have gotten the same deal. I believe the marching around the city was symbolic of God searching for any path of redemption into the city, and that it was an opportunity for the Canaanites to repent and surrender to Yahweh. I could go into a lot more detail to flesh this idea out, but for the sake of brevity I’m going to skip over that, but I do think it’s worth noting that an opportunity for surrender was provided.

Some people have critiqued that God should not have forced them to surrender, that they should have had the freedom to worship whatever God they wanted. Well, here in America we have the freedom to worship whatever God we want, but if your God starts leading you to cut off people’s heads and sacrifice babies by burning them alive on molten ovens then our government is going to step in and forcibly shut you down. No one complains that our government does that. In fact, we applaud it and actually feel much safer because of it. So why are people going to get mad at God for upholding the same standard? If you have a problem with God stepping in to stop people from violently torturing and murdering innocent children, then the person with the problem is probably the one staring at you in the mirror, not God.

Anyways, moving on with the story, other than Rahab and her family, no one in Jericho surrenders, so after marching around Jericho seven times the Israelites blow their trumpets and shout, Jericho’s walls fall, and Israel attacks. That’s when we come to the next scripture that greatly confuses many people. It is:

Joshua 6:21

They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.

Wow, that feels like such a heavy verse, but I again blame the confusion that comes from this verse on a poor translation from the original language. This scripture, in our English translations, is worded in a way that confirms that women and young and old were in fact killed. However, in the original language, the phrase that is used does not actually necessitate that women and young and old had to be present at this event. The phrase that is used in the original language was a stock phrase that was used to communicate “anything that breathes.” So I think a better translation would have been, “they devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it, anything that breathed.” So of course, if women, young, or old, had been present, then yes, they would have have been included in the destruction. However, as I have pointed out, it is highly unlikely that there would have been any women, children, or elderly or any kind of noncombatants at this location other than Rahab, who was rescued and became an ascendant of Jesus Christ.

Again, it would be the same thing as though the president of the United States ordered a drone strike on a terrorist cell with the instructions, “I want you to wipe out anything that breathes.” Obviously, no one is going to assume that the president is ordering the destruction of women and children, because no one assumes that there would be women and children in the middle of a terrorist cell.

The actual phrase that is used in Joshua 6:21 is used again in Joshua 8 when describing the attack on Ai. The literal phrase is “from man to woman” and again it doesn’t actually require that women must be present, but just that they would be included if they were present. It would be the same thing as me throwing a party and saying, “from church friends, to work friends, to school friends, any of my friends that come will receive a gift bag.” That doesn’t necessarily mean that any of those groups of friends were actually present at the party. It just means that if they were present then they received a gift bag. But technically that also leaves open the possibility that no work friends (for instance) showed up, and thus no work friends received a gift bag. My point is the phrase leaves open the opportunity, but doesn’t necessitate their presence, and I think the Israelites were just making it clear they wiped out anything that breathed just as they were commanded to. However, I don’t think that they actually ever targeted any large swaths of non-combatants, and I certainly don’t think God ever ordered them to. Again, I believe this was in no way a command to commit genocide, but was a command to wipe out military and political power.

I’m going to quickly wrap up this story. After Israel’s attack on Ai, which was just a small little military base built out of old ruins (again unlikely that there would have been any non-combatants present) the Gibeonites, who were Canaanites, deceived Israel into forming a peace treaty with them by pretending to be foreigners from a far-away land. Even though the Gibeonites deceived Israel, Israel still honored their peace treaty with them. The next wars that happen are a result of a coalition of Canaanite kings deciding to attack the Gibeonites for becoming an ally of Israel, and Israel has to go defend the Gibeonites. It was a defensive war, not an offensive one, and I don’t see any way for those battles to be labeled genocide.

Then the next battles happen when another coalition of Canaanite kings shows up on Israel’s doorstep with the sole purpose of wiping out Israel. Those were some of the biggest battles that Joshua fought, and those were defensive battles. Again, I don’t see any way these defensive battles could be labeled genocide. Israel had to fight in order to defend themselves from annihilation.

After the wars with the southern and northern coalitions Israel then went on to attack a series of Canaanite citadels and strongholds, again I think of these as disabling raids on military and political targets as I described earlier concerning Jericho and Ai. During these battles, I assume that the people from the villages and hamlets around these citadels likely fled into the hills to hide. Jeremiah 4:29 reads:

At the noise of charioteers and archers, the people flee in terror. They hide in the bushes and run for the mountains. All the towns have been abandoned— not a person remains! (NLT)

I see no evidence that Israel was ever commanded by God to chase these noncombatants into the hills to destroy them, as God’s original command specifically targeted the citadels.

Regardless of what happened to the populations living around these cities, one thing is for certain; the Canaanites were most definitely never destroyed. By the time we get to Judges 1 we read numerous occasions of the Canaanites living side by side with the Israelites. This goes on for generations. For instance, we’re left to assume that the Gibeonites were eventually fully assimilated into Israel as we see them helping the Israelites rebuild the walls of Jerusalem after their exile (Nehemiah 3:7). And not only that, God even punishes all of Israel with a 3 year famine for Saul’s attempted annihilation of the Gibeonites (Canaanites), and the famine isn’t lifted until David atones for Saul’s sin and makes things right with the Gibeonites.

2 Samuel 21:

During the reign of David, there was a famine for three successive years; so David sought the face of the Lord. The Lord said, “It is on account of Saul and his blood-stained house; it is because he put the Gibeonites to death.”

The king summoned the Gibeonites and spoke to them. (Now the Gibeonites were not a part of Israel but were survivors of the Amorites; the Israelites had sworn to spare them, but Saul in his zeal for Israel and Judah had tried to annihilate them.) David asked the Gibeonites, “What shall I do for you? How shall I make atonement so that you will bless the Lord’s inheritance?”

The story goes that King David grant’s the Gibeonites their request, and after having atoned for Saul’s attempted annihilation God begins to once again answer prayers on behalf of the land.

This in no way sounds like a xenophobic (racist) God desiring the destruction of certain people groups just because of their race. In fact, we see the exact opposite of a xenophobic God portrayed in scriptures as over and over again we see other ethnicities welcomed into the Israelite ranks, and that includes the Canaanites. God repeatedly told the Israelites to show concern for the aliens and sojourners. We just read that as the Canaanites assimilated and lived among the Israelites God demanded justice for the Canaanites and even made them an honored and integral part of God’s redemption story for mankind as Rahab produced the line that brought the Christ. All of this makes it obvious to me that the story of Israel’s conquest of Canaan was never about judging a particular race of people or genocide, but was about judging evil behavior and purging the earth of the Canaanites’ evil practices. Again, I believe the correct perspective of these events is to view them in the same way that you would removing a cancer in order to save the rest of the body. This was about ridding the world of evil practices that had already hurt a lot of people, and would have continued to hurt many more had God not intervened. The innocents living among the Canaanite people groups were not wiped out, but actually in the long run were honored, rescued, and redeemed through this process.

Ultimately, as with all of God’s actions, God’s seemingly harsh command to route out the evil practices and governments of the Canaanite peoples was ultimately about the redemption of all people, not the destruction of people, and in this case even repentant Canaanites themselves experienced redemption. God is still about redemption, and He loves to redeem those that the rest of the world has given up on. If you would like anyone to pray with you, please leave a comment or send a message and I would be more then happy to contact you.

Before we move on, I would like to acknowledge that there are other passages in the Bible, other than just the conquest of Canaan, that deal with a command from God to destroy a people group because of their evil practices that threaten society. All of these passages are challenging and stretching, but I hope you’ve learned from this study that there is usually more to the story than what initially meets the eye in just a surface level reading of these passages. I hope to someday produce a work that dives deeper into all of these instances, but for now, I hope that this study has highlighted that every single action from God in the Old Testament was based in love, and that thorough study into any passage will always reveal that. Including every other Old Testament passage where God commanded war.