DAY 144
CHALLENGE
“The Bible can’t be the word of God. It has passages where God commands the Israelites to exterminate whole populations when they entered the promised land (Deut. 7:1–2, 20:16–17).”
DEFENSE
The response still depends on whether the passages are meant literally.
Yesterday we considered the view that they are literal. Here we consider the view that they are non-literal. According to this view, God did not literally expect the Israelites to exterminate certain peoples.
Moses is conventionally referred to as the Pentateuch’s author be- cause he is the principal leader it discusses. The Pentateuch does not say Moses is its author, and it contains material he could not have authored, such as the account of his death (Deut. 34).
Although the Pentateuch may contain material that dates to the time of Moses, it was not put in its final form until later. Consequently, the passages concerning the extermination of the Canaanites may not have been written until later. If they are post-Mosaic then they were not intended to be carried out literally, for Israel was already living in the land. In that case, they would have been meant to communicate a spiritual lesson.
Though not a body of the Church’s Magisterium, the Pontifical Biblical Commission expresses a common view when it writes:
As the best interpreters of the patristic tradition [i.e., the Church Fathers] had already suggested, the narration of the conquest epic should be seen as a sort of parable presenting characters of symbolic value; the law of extermination, for its part, requires a non-literal interpretation, as in the case of the command of the Lord to cut off one’s hand or pluck out one’s eye, if they are a cause of scandal (Matt 5:29; 18:9) (The Inspiration and Truth of Sacred Scripture 127).
The portrait given of the Canaanites in the Pentateuch is one of great depravity that even involved child sacrifice (Deut. 12:31, 18:10– 12). By contrast, the Israelites are called to holiness, for they are “a people holy to the Lord” (Deut. 7:6, 14:2; cf. Lev. 11:44, 20:26).
The extermination commands may thus be a way of signifying the radical incompatibility of paganism and serving God: Paganism is to be entirely avoided, though this does not mean literal extermination any more than Christ meant we should literally cut off our hand to avoid sin.