God and the Israelites' Conquest of Canaan

The shocking and barbaric violence that is attributed to God in scripture, particularly the Old Testament, has bothered me for a long time. I recently read what I consider to be an enlightened, helpful perspective on this issue.

In The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It, biblical scholar Peter Enns discusses the Old Testament’s depiction of the Israelites’ conquest of Canaan. In Deuteronomy 20, we read that God assures the Israelites that “the Lord your God is he that goeth with you, to fight for you against your enemies.” God supposedly commands the Israelites to “utterly destroy” the Canaanites, and “save alive nothing that breatheth.”

In other words, according to the Bible, God commands the Israelites to attack the Canaanites (remember that the Israelites were the aggressors; this was not a defensive war) and run their swords through every living thing in Canaan: men, boys, infants, grandparents, pregnant women — everything that breathes.

I’ve read many attempts to justify this, and quite frankly, they all leave me sickened. They portray a God who is totally foreign to me — someone who inhabits a completely different moral universe.

But Enns says that “Biblical archaeologists are about as certain as you can be about these things that the conquest of Canaan as the Bible describes did not happen.” He says:

Battles and destructions of cities leave archaeological footprints — things like soot (if the town was burned), weapons, smashed pottery, and human bones. Mass migrations of people groups, as the Bible describes with Israel entering Canaan, would cause some cultural upheaval and leave some sort of remains for archaeologists to dig up and write long books about to help them get tenure. …

Sixteen towns were destroyed according to the stories in the books of Numbers, Joshua, and Judges. Of those sixteen, two or three, maybe four, cities show signs of violent destruction at or around the time when Joshua and his army would have been plowing through Canaan (thirteenth century BCE, about two hundred years before the time of King David). That’s it. …

[W]e can’t be dogmatic about explaining how and when Israel began. But it does seem that a nation eventually called “Israel” probably came on the scene gradually and relatively peacefully.

If this is true (and I don’t know if it is; this is the first time I’ve heard this) it would be fantastic news. As Enns says, it “puts the question, ‘How could God have all those Canaanites put to death?’ in a different light … He didn’t. The Israelites just said he did.”

Of course, this raises another question: “Why would the Israelites write a story about God that isn’t true?”

In answering this question, Enns reminds us:

The biblical historians were historians in an ancient sense of the word. We ask, “What really happened? Let’s get the facts straight.” … But this is not an ancient approach to recalling the past. … Wherever biblical writers talk about the past, we should expect them to be shaping the past as well.  

So regarding the conquest of Canaan:

It seems that, as time went on and Israel became a nation (after 1000 BCE), stories of … earlier skirmishes grew and turned into exaggerated stories of Israel’s wars against the Canaanites in days of old. These stories probably tell us more about Israel’s later conflicts with the original population of the land (during the time of Israel’s kings) than what happened centuries earlier.

But why would the Israelites portray God in such a violent manner?

Israel was an ancient tribal people, and they thought and acted like one. … They saw the world and their God in tribal ways. They told stories of their tribal past, led into battle by a tribal warrior God who valued the same things they did — like killing enemies and taking their land. This is how they connected with God — in their time, in their way.

In other words, even though the Old Testament portrays God as a violent, tribal warrior, that is not how God actually is. Instead, it is how God was understood to be by the ancient Israelites communing with God in their time and place.

But if the Bible really is the Word of God, how can it include stories that are not only historically inaccurate, but that also portray God incorrectly?

I really like how Enns frames and answers that question:

Why didn’t God stop the storytellers? “No, sorry. Listen, I get the whole tribal thing. It’s how you roll, but we’re not going to do it that way. You have no idea how much trouble Richard Dawkins is going to cause with all this. Plus, Jesus is going to dismantle this ‘kill your enemies and take their land’ business. Best to avoid the problem altogether.”

Instead of working within the system, God could have disallowed it. Then the Israelites could have written a wholly different kind of story altogether, a story no one had ever seen before, and knocked everyone’s socks off. That’s the kind of ancient storytelling I would have signed off on — if I were God.

But I’m not and I’ve given up trying to get into God’s head, and I wish others would, too. Still, here is something that makes sense to me, a mystery that keeps staring me in the face every time I open my Bible and read it. The Bible — from back to front — is the story of God told from the limited point of view of real people living at a certain place and time.

It’s not like the Israelites were debating whether or not to go ahead and describe God as a mighty warrior. They had no choice. That’s just how it was done — that was their cultural language. And if the writers had somehow been able to step outside of their culture and invent a new way of talking, their story would have made no sense to anyone else.

The Bible looks the way it does because “God lets his children tell the story,” so to speak.

This makes perfect sense to me, although I’m sure that many believers won’t like this explanation. For some, it is simply inconceivable that the Word of God would say things about God that are inaccurate.

Enns thinks this is a matter of “coming to the Bible with expectations it’s not set up to bear.”

Many Christians have been taught that the Bible is Truth downloaded from heaven, God’s rulebook, a heavenly instructional manual — [but] this rulebook view of the Bible is like a knockoff Chanel handbag — fine as long as it’s kept at a distance, away from curious and probing eyes. …

When you read the Bible on its own terms, you discover that it doesn’t behave itself like a holy rulebook should. It is definitely inspiring and uplifting — it wouldn’t have the shelf life it does otherwise. But just as often it’s a challenging book that leaves you with more questions than answers.

But if the Bible isn’t “God’s rulebook,” why should we read it?

God has invited us to participate in a wrestling match, a forum for us to be stretched and to grow. Those are the kinds of disciples God desires. [The Bible] is a giant permission slip to let the wrestling begin. …

In the Bible, we read of encounters with God by ancient peoples, in their times and places, asking their questions, and expressed in language and ideas familiar to them. Those encounters with God were, I believe, genuine, authentic, and real. But they were also ancient — and that explains why the Bible behaves the way it does.

This kind of Bible — the Bible we have — just doesn’t work well as a point-by-point exhaustive and timelessly binding list of instructions about God and the life of faith.

But it does work as a model for our own spiritual journey. An inspired model, in fact. …

Rather than a rulebook … the Bible is more a land we get to know by hiking through it and exploring its many paths and terrains. This land is both inviting and inspiring, but also unfamiliar, odd, and at points unsettling — even risky and precarious.

I believe God encourages us to explore this land — all of it — patiently, with discipline, in community, and above all with a sense that we, joining the long line of those who have gone before, will come to know ourselves better and God more deeply by accepting that challenge.