My lecture for the Biblical School today is on the book of Joshua. Discussing Israel's conquest of Canaan always brings up the huge question of just what we're supposed to do with this issue of divinely mandated total warfare. I've been looking for an answer to this question for years--in fact, I chose it for the topic of my first research paper when I started my MA at the Augustine Institute. Dr. Sri's response when I informed him of my paper topic? "Ha! Good luck!" I did manage to get an A on the paper, and I've continued pondering and studying the question since then. I welcome your thoughts and questions in the comments!
War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothin'!
For a book (and a God) that tells us "Blessed are the peacemakers" (Matthew 5:9) and instructs us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44), there is also an awful lot of war and violence. And much to our dismay, it doesn't appear that we can simply chalk it up to good old-fashioned human strife--the Old Testament has several instances of God apparently mandating total warfare (kherem warfare in Hebrew, also translated as the "ban") between nations (Deuteronomy 20:16-18, for example). What are we supposed to do with this? A common solution is to draw a line about four-fifths of the way through the Bible and make a distinction between the angry, vindictive, capricious God of the Old Testament and the loving, gentle, forgiving God of the New Testament. This might work just fine if we're going to ignore the fact that Jesus himself made no such distinction, but if we're going to through out what Jesus says about himself and his Father, then there's no reason to struggle to come to terms with all those difficulties in the Old Testament.
So two different Gods (or the Jews completely misunderstanding God and the Christians finally getting Him right) won't work. What then? Another common response even since the early days of the Church has been to focus exclusively on the moral sense of the passages in question. So the book of Joshua becomes purely an illustration of how we are to mercilessly root out sin from our hearts and ceases to be an historical narrative. While this moral interpretation can be incredibly helpful to applying the conquest of the Promised Land to our own lives, it must still be based firmly on the literal sense--and so we cannot simply dismiss the book of Joshua as history.
Reconciling the New Testament's picture of a merciful God calling all peoples unto himself with this image of God commanding Israel to completely destroy some of the Canaanite tribes and cities doesn't have to be a major stumbling block. I would propose that it is precisely the mercy of God which provides the interpretive key to understanding the issue of kherem warfare.
The first thing to keep in mind is that the mandate to destroy completely certain Canaanite tribes in Deuteronomy 20:16-18 is not a free pass to slaughter anyone the Israelites don't like. This command regarding warfare actually limits war for the sake of booty (no one can get rich from kherem warfare) and escalating violence. Israel does not get to decide when and where to fight this kind of war--the ban is only applied to specific groups of people who have obstinately refused to turn away from a horrifically sinful culture. Going back to Genesis 15:12-16 we see God telling Abram/Abraham that his descendants will be brought into the Promised Land only when the "iniquity of the Amorites" is complete. Over 400 years pass between God promising Abraham that his descendants would occupy the land of Canaan and the Israelites actually taking possession of the land. In that time the Canaanite peoples (including the Amorites) persisted in a culture that glorified incest and adultery and institutionalized child-sacrifice in their worship of their god Molech.
Genesis has other instances of God wiping out sinful people who refused to repent (the Flood in Genesis 6 and Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19). In those cases God uses natural disasters; in Joshua God uses his first-born, Israel, to carry out his judgment. It's quite a bit easier to accept God's judgment when it comes directly from him in the form of a flood or fire and brimstone, rather than when it's carried out by other humans at his command--but it's much the same thing. In fact, Deuteronomy 9:5 specifies that Israel isn't inheriting the Promised Land on their own merits, but rather God is driving out the other nations because of their wickedness.
Another key to understanding kherem warfare is that it was not Plan A. God initially told Israel that He would drive out the Canaanites before the Israelites (Exodus 23:23-30). No mention is made of warfare of any kind--the Canaanites would presumably simply leave. This makes sense in the context of Exodus--the Israelite slaves have just departed a humbled, broken Egypt thanks to their powerful God. Egypt was the world power at the time, and the whole Middle East would have been abuzz with this very dramatic turn of events. Now the Israelites have set out for the land of Canaan, which their God has promised to give them. The only logical thing for the Canaanites to do is to flee, lest they suffer the same fate as Egypt. However, Israel fails to trust in God's promise and ends up taking a 40 year detour going around in circles in the wilderness. After 40 years the terror of YHWH and the Israelites no longer lies so heavily on the Canaanites (see the Canaanite Rahab's declaration of faith in Joshua 2:8-11). In addition to the delay in taking possession of the land, the Israelites must now fight for it rather than simply march in and set up camp.
In addition, like many other laws in Deuteronomy (literally "Second Law," loosely translated as "Plan B"), the mandate of the ban is not necessarily good in and of itself, but rather it is a concession to the Israelites' weakness. This is the explanation Jesus gives for Moses allowing divorce when the question comes up in Matthew 19:3-8: "For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so." Similarly, Moses might as well say "For your hardness of heart you must now destroy the Canaanites, but from the beginning it was not so." God's intention for Israel was for them to be a light to the nations--a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Exodus 19:5-6). But Israel has proven to have a hard enough time staying faithful themselves, let alone evangelizing other nations. If the Canaanites are allowed to remain in the land alongside Israel, it is clear that Israel will be converted to paganism, rather than converting the Canaanites to worship of the one true God (God himself says as much in Exodus 23:33 and Numbers 33:55-56). So kherem warfare becomes necessary to deal with those Canaanites who will not join Israel in worshiping YHWH and will not remove themselves from the land, because otherwise the revelation which Israel has received for the sake of the other nations will be lost.
In summary, kherem warfare is God's judgment against the sinful, unrepentant Canaanite culture and a concession made necessary by Israel's own lack of faithfulness. It is by no means a precedent for how to deal with other nations, either in the rest of the Old Testament or under the New Covenant established by Jesus--this was a specific command for a specific situation in history.
This isn't a complete answer--it's only a start. It is completely okay to still be bothered by this! Scripture isn't easy. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, "Is He safe? Of course not. He isn't a tame God. But He's good."
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