Genocide in the Old Testament
/“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
Wow. What is Dawkins’ problem with God? He apparently has many, but I’d bet that a number of these descriptors—unjust, vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, infanticidal, genocidal—are aimed at God’s acts of judgment in the Old Testament against various people groups. Some of these judgments involved total annihilation. I think of the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, God’s command that the Israelites wipe out the Canaanites during the conquest, and the slaughter of the Amalekites. Multiple noteworthy Christian apologists have given excellent answers to this challenge and some of what I say below reflects their thinking. Because this is a frequently-rehearsed objection to the Christian faith, I want to spend some time on the issue here.
I think the big problem here is with the idea of “innocent” people dying. Before moving on, let me note that there are two kinds of innocence. First, there is legal or ethical innocence relative to particular crimes. Different people are guilty or innocent relative to different crimes. Most people you and I meet on a daily basis are innocent of the crime of murder, but most have probably lied at some point. Second, there is general innocence, or sinlessness. Only one human being to have ever walked the earth is and remains innocent and sinless—Jesus.
It’s this second kind of innocence that is important here. Scripture teaches that all have sinned, and that the wages of sin is death. That being said, it is perfectly just for God—the ultimate Judge—to demand the life of any unjustified sinner at any time. We are all sinners, so we all die. God is perfectly justified in deciding that any person’s death come sooner rather than later. Personally, I think it’s a mercy of God that any of us live for any length of time on this earth. That’s a sobering thought, and I think it’s an indication that the human story is much, much darker than we think about most of the time.
Now, the fact that no one is really innocent doesn’t give we humans justification to go around murdering each other. God is the ultimate Judge. People in general do not have much moral high ground over other people. I do believe there are contexts in which killing is justified—defense, for example. This would include self-defense and defense of others on both a small scale (e.g., thwarting a terrorist attack), and a large scale (war). Even capital punishment involves an element of defense (e.g., protecting society from murderers, rapists, etc.), although such crimes that usually merit capital punishment can justly involve a punitive element as well.
But aside from the fact that no one is really innocent, we must remember that the inhabitants of the earth before the flood, the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Canaanites were all characterized by abominable, almost unimaginably perverse evil. Old Testament scholar Walter Kaiser, referring in particular to the Canaanites, sums up their perversion and its consequences well: “They were cut off to prevent Israel and the rest of the world from being corrupted (Deut. 20:16-18). When a people starts to burn their children in honor of their gods (Lev. 18:21), practice sodomy, bestiality, and all sorts of loathsome vices (Lev. 18:23,24; 20:3), the land itself begins to ‘vomit’ them out as the body heaves under the load of internal poisons (Lev. 18:25,27-30)” (From Ron Rhodes, Answering the Objections of Atheists, Agnostics, and Skeptics [Harvest House Publishers, 2006], 254).
Canaanite society had fallen to such depths of perversion that the land itself “vomited” them out. We who live in more developed societies have difficulty visualizing this kind of corporate corruption. This is probably particularly true of those of us who live in the West, where our moral sensibilities and those of our ancestors have been shaped and restrained by biblical principles for centuries. But some places in the world lack the moral restraint that more developed societies enjoy. I went to a missions conference once, and I remember the speaker describing the evil he was exposed to during his time as a missionary in Somalia. But you know what? Even Somalia can’t hold a candle to ancient Canaanite society. If you want to get an idea of the kinds of evil that could possibly warrant the annihilation of an entire culture, watch Mel Gibson’s movie Apocalypto.
What about infants and young children in such a society? Surely such innocents don’t deserve the same fate as their older and more corrupt kin. Admittedly, this is a more difficult question. The concept of an “age of accountability” will help us here. For our purposes, let’s say that every child has an “age of accountability,” and that God will not hold any child morally accountable who hasn’t yet reached this age. Personally, I believe this is true, and that infants and children under this age go straight to heaven when they die. So it could be that by ordering the annihilation of the entire Canaanite civilization, God providentially spared the infants and young children what almost certainly would have been their eventual fate—participation in their culture’s extreme moral decadence and eternal condemnation. The same would apply for infants and young children living the pre-flood cultures and in Sodom and Gomorrah.
What about children beyond the age of accountability? It’s possible that such children, though young, were already old enough to participate fully in their culture’s extreme depravity. Or perhaps their culture had so seeded their hearts with corruption that they were destined to experience an eventual blossoming into full participation in their culture’s depravity. Hence, dying young may have secured them a less-severe punishment in the afterlife. Dark, I know. But perhaps helpful.
It bears mentioning that God gave the Canaanites, pre-flood humans, and even the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah hundreds of years to repent. God is patient, and He wants all people to turn to Him.
One final point. We know it is morally wrong in most circumstances for us to take another human life. But I don’t think we can say the same thing about God. I think it’s probably fair to say that God—the Giver of life—can rightfully take it away. I believe that for the most part, He desires for His creatures to live, and to live to the fullest. But sometimes He deems it right that life must be taken, and He is perfectly just to do so. And so God decided that the Amalekites—a people who had threatened His chosen nation and hence the plan of salvation on multiple occasions—must be wiped out. As a side note, the Amalekites and the Canaanites were sort of neighbors, so one might reasonably assume that some of the Canaanites’ corruption had rubbed off on the Amalekites, thus increasing the warrant for their destruction.
I realize this is all pretty heavy. As I mentioned earlier, I think the human story has some much darker threads than we sometimes allow ourselves to acknowledge. The corruption of sin is dark, dark, dark, and apparently some groups of people in the past so heavily embraced or sided with the darkness that they needed to be excised like cancerous tumors.
But thank goodness there is light too, and it shines with an infinite brightness that makes the darkness like nothing. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Through faith in Christ, God delivers repentant sinners from the bonds of darkness and the consequences of their sin into light eternal. This is good news. The best news.