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One objection that the atheist Emerson Green makes against Christianity is that there’s no way to harmonize the merciful God of Christianity, with God in the Old Testament seemingly commanding genocide. So how do we make sense of this apparent contradiction?
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Hey, and welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So today I want to talk about whether God commands genocide in the Old Testament, and if he does, what do we make of that? So I’ll tell you how I got here. An atheist, former Christian by the name of Emerson Green was responding to a Capturing Christianity post. So Tim Bertuzzi mentioned that he’s going to be interviewing, he maybe at this point has interviewed, Dr. Paul Copan on his new book, Is God A Vindictive Bully? And I’ll tell you, I haven’t read it, but given what this episode’s about, I probably should read it.
Emerson replies, “I remember asking Frank Turek, another Christian apologist, in person during a Q&A how he reconciled the portrayals of God in the Old Testament and New Testament, since it seemed like there was a personality change. He said, “There wasn’t one. Next question.” Anyway, I deconverted a week later.”
And I found that really striking because there was a really good, hard question and what looked like a really kind of smug and dismissive response. And so I wrote a very short piece over on Catholic Answers’ website on our new blog called Indulgences called God’s Personality Change, and in it I did three things. This is a good reminder not to be smug and dismissive as Christians. St. Peter after all warns us in First Peter 3, 15 to 16, this famous passage, people like to quote the first half of it, “Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you.” But we often want to stop there. But Peter goes on to say, “Yet do it with gentleness and reference, and keep your conscience clear so that when you are abused, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.”
So if you are being a cocky, arrogant Christian, you’re not doing apologetics right. That’s the first point I wanted to make, and in some ways the most important for a Christian audience. The second is to say, well, what would be a better way of answering his question? And so I gave the analogy there of the change in audience. When you’ve got kids, you talk to them in a different way than you talk to adults. So my in-laws and I have been having a really good ongoing conversation because my wife is one of four girls and she’s got two brothers, and all of us have toddlers or babies. And so it’s a great time to have people traveling with you saying, “What do you do in these situations?” And it’s so hard to reason with, talk to, communicate with toddlers, whether that’s discipline, whether it’s teaching, whatever it is.
Recently during prayer time, my three-year-old asked me, “What is grace?” You know how hard that question is to answer to a three year old? So that was kind of the point that I made. That there are these things in the Old Testament where there’s a progressive revelation even of the moral code because people have to get the fundamentals in place. So that was the second point that I made. And the third point was quoting Pope Benedict the 16th in his work, Verbum Domini, in which he points out that in the Old Testament, the preaching of the prophets vigorously challenged every kind of injustice and violence. That is if you actually follow the Old Testament story, the prophets are not just accepting whatever the culture offers, they really stand in this prophetic role of challenging the culture and of calling them to the next step. And it’s true, we don’t get from A to Z overnight, but there’s this constant process in which they’re calling Israel to more.
And so he says it would be a mistake to neglect those passages of scripture that strike us as problematic. So don’t just ignore them, don’t just sweep them under the rug. Rather, we should be aware the correct interpretation of these passages requires a degree of expertise acquired through a training that interprets the text in their historical literary context and within the Christian perspective, which has as its ultimate hermeneutical key the gospel and the new commandment of Jesus Christ brought about in the Paschal mystery.
Now, that is potentially a word salad, so let’s break it down. He’s saying three things. One, as I said, the prophetic tradition is this ongoing process of educating Israel. St. Paul refers to the law as a pedagogue, [inaudible 00:04:19], it’s like a teaching slave. It was someone who a rich family would have as basically an in-house slave who would work as a tutor and a teacher, and that this is the role of the law, this is also the role of the prophets, to constantly be calling you to the next step, to the next step, to the next step.
And certainly what’s expected of you intellectually in college is more than what’s expected of you in kindergarten. Likewise with the moral code, it gets higher, it gets stronger. But the second thing that he’s saying is that we need historical literary context. And this is a little bit of expertise. You don’t just read a text and say, “Oh, well obviously given the ancient near Eastern idioms of the eighth century BC.” No, understandably this is not something the ordinary person just has immediate access to, but this is why we have scholarship.
And the third is that we should read these things in the light of Jesus Christ. That the Christian reading of scripture is that the Old Testament is revealed in the new, that the New Testament lies hidden in the old. That there’s integrity between the two, but there’s this sense in which the New Testament is revealing the meaning of the Old Testament in a way it wouldn’t have been obvious otherwise. Now, as I said, those were the points that I made first. Emerson very graciously responded. I really was impressed with his graciousness. But he disagreed with some of what I had to say. So here’s part of his response.
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The main problem with the parenthood analogy is that nearly all its force depends on speaking at a level of generality and abstraction that conveniently glosses over the extent of the moral dissonance between the Old and New Testaments. To paraphrase David Bentley Hart, if we can’t know there’s a difference between laying down one’s life for the world and exterminating the inhabitants of a city down to the last infant, then what can we know? The reason this issue is so often raised is because of the lack of harmony and complementarity. This might not have ever come up if it all boiled down to a difference in complexity and depth that corresponded with a change in audience.
I suppose that when humanity was spiritually six, God condoned the practice of owning other humans as property and ordered the children of Canaanite tribes to be slaughtered. Then when we were spiritually 36, he commanded us to love our neighbor as ourselves. How exactly does the parenthood analogy square the command of genocide with the command to love our neighbors ourselves?
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So I think that’s a really good question, and I want to explore that. How do we make sense of what appears to be Old Testament commands to commit genocide with what Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount? How do we square this with the Christian message? Like I said, I think it’s a great question, and I’m hoping to address that. But before I get there, I want to touch on one other thing, because Emerson offers an alternative interpretation, which he acknowledges is Marcionism. In other words that the God of the New Testament and the God of the Old Testament are just not the same person. They’re not the same character. Whether you believe in God or not, this is a separate question, but that there is no way of harmonizing the two. And so he points out, this is one of the ways that early Christians tried to make sense of this.
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Plenty have tried to reconcile the stark differences between Jesus and Yahweh and their respective moral characters. But some early Christians gave up entirely. Marcionism emerged because the loving God revealed through Christ was impossible to harmonize with the malevolence of Yahweh and all his genocide commanding, child murdering, blood drenched glory.
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So if you’re not familiar, Marcion was one of the early heretics, and his argument was simply that Jesus was not the son of the Old Testament God, that Jesus came to deliver us from the Old Testament God. And the problem with Marcionism, regardless of all of the other theological problems, is a basic biblical canonical problem. That he’s got a moth eaten cloak. So St Epiphanius described his version of the Gospel of Luke as mutilated without beginning, middle, or end, so that it looked like a cloak full of moth holes. The idea is really simple. That if you say, “Okay, well because I’m having trouble squaring Jesus with the God of the Old Testament, I’m going to accept Jesus and reject the God of the Old Testament,” seemingly the simplest solution, that solution only works until you actually open the Bible. Because when you read the words of Jesus, he’s regularly quoting the Old Testament, and he’s quoting it favorably, and he’s describing the God of the Old Testament as his father.
And so the Marcion solution doesn’t work because it can’t be squared with the biblical presentation of Jesus. Instead, we’re in a strange position where, this is actually regardless of whether you’re a Christian, whether you’re non-Christian, whatever, that these three things seem to be true. Number one, Jesus presents a radical gospel message of peace and forgiveness. Obviously we could get into all the nuances of that, but we’ll just take that for granted, right? The Sermon on the Mount is revolutionary. But second, Jesus also presents himself as the fulfillment of the Old Testament, and he describes the God of the Old Testament as his father. And third, neither Jesus nor his initial followers, I mean here like the disciples, seem to have found this contradictory. They don’t seem to feel the need to say, “Well wait, wasn’t the God of the Old Testament bad? How could you be his son and be good?” There’s none of that even apparent tension.
So again, whether you’re an atheist, whether you’re an agnostic, whether you’re a Christian, whether you’re not, whatever, this is something we should grapple with. That apparently Jesus and his followers were reading the Old Testament in a way that was consistent with the Sermon on the Mount and with the radical message Jesus is preaching so that Jesus harmonized with that, that he fulfilled that. Now, certainly he’s still presenting something new, but it wasn’t viewed as a contradiction or an undermining of what came before. And in fact, Jesus is really clear about this. He says he’s not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it.
So we need to figure out, well, how were the early Christians reading the Old Testament that they saw a harmony where so many modern Christians and modern atheists don’t see a harmony? So that’s what I hope to do. What is the right way of reading these seemingly genocidal accounts in a way that’s consistent with the message of Jesus Christ? And so I’m just going to call this the genocide that wasn’t. And I know that might sound controversial. Genocide denial’s a serious thing, right? Except in this case, we actually have pretty good historical evidence that the alleged genocide of the Canaanites didn’t happen. So the historian Hans von Wees in his Genocide In The Ancient World says, “The genocidal campaigns claim for the early Israelites, however, were largely fictional. The intrinsic improbability and internal inconsistencies of the account in Joshua and its incompatibility to the stories of Judges leave little doubt about this.” That there was no eradication of every man, woman, and child in the land of Canaan. It just didn’t happen.
And so more specifically, I think we want to say several things. Number one, we want to say that the biblical accounts are true, but that true doesn’t mean literal. Number two, that inspired scripture frequently uses intentional exaggeration, that you can find exaggeration all over the place in the Bible. Number three, the genocidal sounding language is actually an ancient near Eastern mode of speech that we find both within the Bible and outside of the Bible. Examples of this kind of exaggeration being used and it was recognizable what was being said, not to take it literally. And number four, that the real point of these passages isn’t to condone genocide. It isn’t to recount genocide or to encourage it in any way. But is instead to encourage spiritual warfare, and that this is the way the earliest Christians read the texts.
So let’s see if I can prove that case. I want to start with the internal biblical evidence. Now, the first thing I want to point out is Exodus Chapter 19 Verse 4, in which God says to Israel, “You’ve seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I bore you on eagle’s wings and brought you to myself.” I use this verse all the time for the simple reason that the exodus is a historic event. Israel was in slavery. God brings them out of slavery. And then in the same context that this thing is being described, God describes it using metaphorical language, with the understanding that the readers or listeners know this is a metaphor. This isn’t literal. That is we shouldn’t assume that everything we’re reading is either intended as literal or was understood by its original audience as literal. That ancient people had much more of an ear for metaphor, for figures of speech, exaggeration and the like than we sometimes give them credit for. We think of them as being simplistic and overly literalistic when I think we’ll see it’s us, it’s we who are the overly simplistic, overly literalistic readers.
So obviously Exodus does happen, doesn’t really happen on eagle’s wings. Is God lying to Israel? No, He’s just using a recognized figure of speech. Next and more relevant to our point, First Samuel Chapter 18, Verses 6 to 9. So David has just come back from killing one guy, Goliath, and the women come out of all the cities of Israel. Now already there’s an exaggeration there, right? It’s probably not every city in Israel. And they’re singing and dancing to meet King Saul with [inaudible 00:14:41] with songs of joy and with instruments and music. And the women sang to one another as they made Mary, “Saul has slain his thousands and David his 10,000s.” Look at that. David killed one guy, and yet the bloodshed has reached this massacre proportion that tens of thousands of people have been murdered by David. Well, of course that didn’t really happen, right? He killed one person.
And Saul gets angry. But notice he’s not angry because it’s a non-literal recounting of what happened. He’s angry because he says they’ve ascribed to David 10,000s and to me they’ve ascribed thousands. In other words, he’s getting more glory than I’m getting. So Saul understands this is a figure of speech. And the point of this figure of speech is to say, Saul is glorious, David is very glorious. Saul is victorious, David is very victorious. And that what they’re doing with the numbers, what they’re doing with the body count is not meant to be literal in the way that you would expect a literal body count in say a newspaper today.
So that’s I think an important interpretive framework, that when you are reading about what appears to be a gory bloodshed, understand that in scripture this is a way of exaggerating for effect. And if you want, you can call this Anakin versus Anakim. There’re only a letter difference. And now those of you who’ve blessedly forgotten the Star Wars prequels, I am going to remind you. There’s a scene in episode two in which Anakin Skywalker reveals the following.
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I killed them. I killed them all. They’re dead. Every single one of them. And not just the men, but the women and the children too.
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That is what a lot of people think is going on in the Old Testament, that Joshua or Moses or any of these Old Testament figures says, “I killed them. I killed the men and the women and the children too.” But when you actually read about the biblical accounts, it’s a little more complicated than that. That when you get past the exaggeration, you start to notice some strange things, certainly strange from a modern reading perspective.
So the Anakim are who I want to focus on. In Joshua 11, we hear that Joshua came out and wiped out the Anakim from the hill country, from Hebron, from [inaudible 00:17:38], from Anab, from all the hill country of Judah, all the hill country of Israel, that he utterly destroyed them with their cities. There was none of the Anakim left in the land of the people of Israel. And so Joshua we’re told takes the whole land, according to all the [inaudible 00:17:54] spoken to Moses, and Joshua gave it for an inheritance to Israel according to their tribal allotments, and the land had rest from war.
Okay, seems like pretty straightforward in the story, right? But then three chapters later, Caleb says that he’s still as strong as he was when Moses sent him when they scouted out the land originally. And so he asked Joshua, “Now give me this hill country of which the Lord spoke on that day, for you heard on that day how the Anakim were there with a great fortified city, and maybe that the Lord will be with me and I shall drive them out as the Lord said.”
Hold on a second. The Anakim are still in the hill country. Even though in Joshua 11 they’re described as being eradicated, exterminated, they’re still there. And so Hebron, the same city they were allegedly like all wiped out from, is given to Caleb so he can continue the fight. That’s an important interpretive framework, that it’s not just that Joshua read literally doesn’t match up with Judges, it’s that Joshua read literally doesn’t match up with Joshua. That there’s no way to read Joshua as literally throughout without it just being full of contradictions. Because there’s a lot of this exaggerated sort of language.
But then also when you compare it to Judges, you realize that in Judges 3, we find out that the Canaanites didn’t leave. And in fact, Judges 3 says, “Now these are the nations which the Lord left to test Israel by them, that is all in Israel who had no experience of any war in Canaan. It was only that the generations of the people of Israel might know war that he might teach war to such at least as had not known it before.” In other words, if you were to read just Joshua, you would expect to just find a total genocide of the Canaanites. But then Judges is very clear that it was actually very difficult for Israel to move into the Promised Land. There was ongoing fighting with the Canaanites in both directions. It was not just a sweep in and take the whole thing, much less a genocide.
So the Anakim and comparing Joshua and Judges shows from the biblical evidence itself that we shouldn’t be expecting a literal historical genocide. But this is also supported by looking at the other historical evidence outside of scripture. So for instance, I actually already quoted from this book, but the Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, that’s where this genocide in the ancient world essay is coming from. This Hans von Wees, Wees, it’s W-E-E-S. I don’t know how to pronounce that, depends on the language. And as I already quoted, he says the genocidal campaigns were largely fictional based on the intrinsic improbability and the internal inconsistencies of the account in Joshua and its incompatibility to the stories of Judges. But he also points out that there is an inscription from around 810 BC in which Mesha, the King of Moab, Israel’s old enemy, boasts that he massacred the population of a town, 7,000 men, women and children for the God Chemosh. I had it put to the ban. Now the ban is what we’re talking about. This is the command of universal eradication. That’s the most controversial element of these accounts of warfare.
That’s not just you beat the other side, it’s that you exterminate them. That’s the ban. But then von Wees says, “We need to be wary of taking this claim at face value since Mesha also made the quite unwarranted boast that as a result of his campaigns Israel utterly perished forever.” Okay, so here’s what we need to take away from this. If you read Israel’s language about its foes, it sounds like Israel totally exterminated them, totally wiped them out. But if you read the other nation’s language, they’ll say, “Well, yeah, we totally wiped out Israel. We totally exterminated them. They’re gone.” And neither of those things is literally true. And people reading that then and now would know that.
In the same way that if you said, “We killed the other team in basketball,” no one is saying, “I need to call the police. This person just confessed a murder.” Because it’s an understood figure of speech. It’s a trope in our culture, in our context, to use really violent language to talk about sports. And in their culture, it was common to use genocidal language to talk about ordinary warfare.
And so von Wees makes an interesting contrast. He says, “At the other extreme of the rhetorical range, when you’re looking at the Greek and Roman sources, they’ll use just a single word like sacked or destroyed to describe what happened to a city without really talking at all about what happened to the people.” Or bold statements that a defeated people were sold into slavery. So they don’t really give you much in the way of detail. And he suggests that this is because they belong to a sort of school of thought which didn’t want to elaborate on the suffering caused by war, and they didn’t think that the conquered people deserved the pity.
But he says such attitudes are almost the opposite of the celebrations of force in some near Eastern texts. And so if the Greco Roman sources are understating the violence, the near Eastern sources, Israel, Canaanite, Moabite, that kind of area in the Middle East or near east, they’re exaggerating the violence. So just on that level, it’s exaggerated, and again, it’s important to know this, the people knew it was exaggerated. They knew this didn’t literally happen the way the text is describing.
This is also backed up by other evidence. So for instance, in 2020, National Geographic had an article about how DNA from the Bible’s Canaanites lives on in modern Arabs and Jews. That as the Canaanite people were not exterminated, they went on to live outside of Israel, they also many of them lived in Israel and intermarried Jewish people. Which you would actually get from plenty of places in the Bible, that would become clear enough. So the historical evidence as well as the biblical evidence points away from there being an actual historical genocide.
The third thing to look at are the early Christian interpretations. Now, this could be a much bigger conversation. I want to look at just three. I want to look at St. Justin Martyr, I want to look at Origen and I want to look at Pope St. Gregory the Great. How did these early Christians read these texts? And so I want to start with Exodus 17. There’s this scene in which Amelec fights with Israel. So Moses says to Joshua, “Come with me. We’re going to fight with Amelec.” And they go out and fight, and Moses is standing at the top of the hill with Aaron and Hur, and whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed. But whenever he lowered his hand, Amelec prevailed. So Moses’ hands get tired. And so Aaron and Hur hold up his hands one on one side, one on the other.
And so we’re told Joshua mowed down Amelec and his people with the edge of the sword. Again, pretty bloody account, right? At least this time it’s warfare, it’s not genocide or something. But it’s interesting how the early Christians read it. St. Justin Martyr points to this and says this is symbolically announcing the cross. For the one of them stretching out his hands, Moses, remained till evening on the hill, his hands being supported. And this reveals a type, meaning like a prefigurement of no other thing than of the cross. And the other, Joshua, whose name was altered to Jesus, led the fight and Israel conquered.
Now, this is an important detail that the early Christians were really big on. When you’re reading these conquest of Canaan’s stories, a lot of them are in the book of Joshua, or they’re about Joshua, because he’s the one who Moses kind of sends in to conquer. But Joshua’s name Yeshua is Jesus’ name. That’s the same name. And so the early Christians really honed in on this and said, “If you want to know what’s going on, this is Jesus.” Now, the prefigurement of Jesus of Nazareth, this is Jesus son of none, but this Yeshua prefigures the other Yeshua.
Just like if you want to make sense of Saint Joseph in the New Testament who has these dreams and goes into Egypt, you read him in connection with Old Testament Joseph, who has dreams and goes into Egypt. There’s a connection. There’s a comparison. The two figures reveal one another. They’re meant to be read together in a certain way. Well, likewise, Old Testament Jesus and New Testament Jesus. That’s how they’re reading Joshua.
So when he gets to Joshua 2, famous story, Rahab, right? They go into Jericho, and then Rahab the prostitute rescues the spies, and they give her a scarlet cord to bind on the window, and she can gather into the house her father and mother, her brothers in the father’s household, and they’ll be spared the onslaught. Okay? Well, Justin Martyr says the sign of the scarlet thread, which the spies sent to Jericho by Joshua, son of none, gave to Rahab the Harlet, telling her to bind it to the window through which she let them down to escape from their enemies, also manifested the symbol of the blood of Christ, by which those who were at one time harlets and unrighteous persons out of all the nations are saved. Receiving remission of sins and continuing no longer in sin.
In other words, they were not reading these texts saying, look, it’s okay to massacre your enemies. They were reading this text and saying, look, this seems pretty clearly to be prefiguring and foreshadowing Jesus and his conquest over sin. That’s how Justin Martyr’s reading this. This is the middle part, maybe 150, contemporary with Marcion. So this is another way of reading the Old Testament, not as Old Testament bad, New Testament good, but Old Testament actually a story about the New Testament, even if it doesn’t appear that way immediately.
The second person, Origen, he has a whole series of homilies on Joshua, but in homily 15, he points to two seemingly problematic texts. The first one is from Joshua 11, verse 20, which says, “It was the Lord’s doing to harden their hearts, the Canaanines, that they should come against Israel in battle in order that they should be utterly destroyed and should receive no mercy, but be exterminated as the Lord commanded Moses.”
And then he connects this to Jeremiah 48:10, says, “Curse it is he who does the work of the Lord with slackness, and curse it is he who keeps back his sword from bloodshed.” And Origen says, “This is about the spiritual sword, not the physical one, because if we understand this according to the letter, it’ll be necessary for us to shed blood incessantly.” Now, his point there, it’s not just a moral one, that we would be monstrous people if we took this very literally. His point is that you really can’t, like you cannot just go around everywhere constantly murdering people. Nobody does that. Like no one takes these verses literally, nobody does. I mean, people who aren’t Christian might point to that and say, “Oh, look, you’ve got that. You must live by that.” But no one who actually believes in these texts says, “I guess that means I have to go out and murder all my neighbors.”
That is understood that this is an admonition to spiritual warfare, not literal, physical violence. And then Origen has this beautiful passage. He says that, “A kingdom of sin was in every one of us before we believed. But afterwards, Jesus came and struck down all the kings who possessed kingdoms of sin in us, and He ordered us to destroy all those kings and to leave none of them. For if someone should keep any of them alive within, that person will not be able to be in the army of Jesus. Thus, if avarice still reigns in you or ostentation or pride or lust, you will not be a soldier of Israel and neither will you fulfill the precept that the Lord gave to Jesus.”
That the new Joshua, Jesus of Nazareth is on this campaign of conquest of the enemy territory, the Promised Land, that has been overrun by the kingdoms of sin, that that’s the spiritual warfare we’re all in, and that’s what the story of Joshua’s actually about. That it’s a prefigurement of that, that there’s some historical nucleus, right? Like Israel does come in, they do fight the Canaanites, but it’s been amped up and exaggerated both because that’s the ancient way of telling the story, but also because this really important spiritual point that we actually do have to be that ruthless in rooting sin out of our lives.
And so Christian Hofreiter, who I was very heavily influenced by in reading up on this and researching this, several authors, but he’s one of them, he’s got I think his PhD thesis that he turned into a book called Making Sense of Old Testament Genocide, Christian Interpretations of Herem Passages. Heram is the ban, this extermination kind of language. He points out that Origen’s reading in terms of extermination of the vices became very widespread, especially through inclusion and development in monastic devotional literature. And so we can, with some justification, claim that his way of receiving Herem as Christian scripture become the dominant ecclesial reading of medieval western Christianity.
So why do I point this out? Origen’s a controversial figure. He’s not a canonized saint. He’s got some crazy views. But on this point, he’s absolutely standard and is incredibly influential. And so whether we’re looking at the ancient Jews, whether we’re looking at the early Christians, whether we’re looking at the medieval Christians, there was an understanding these parts are not to be taken literally. Now, will you find people who take them literally? Yes, but that’s not the only or the overwhelming or the normative kind of view. By the way, you may be hearing some hail in the background, so apologies for that.
The final Christian I want to cover is St. Gregory the Great and his morals on the Book of Job. He says, “Hence, when the land of promise now one was to be divided to the people of Israel, the Gentile people of Canaan are not said to be slain, but to be made tributary to the Tribe of Ephraim. Now, he’s referring to something very particular, that even though there’s all of this language about how all of them get wiped out and annihilated and genocided, Joshua 16:10 then says, “However, they did not drive out the Canaanites that dwelt in Gazer.” So the Canaanites have dwelt in the midst of Ephraim to this day, but have become slaves to do forced labor. So again, it’s one of these internal seeming contradictions. You can’t take all of this literally within the book of Joshua because it says one thing and then it says another seemingly opposite thing.
But Gregory’s point is that this is true spiritually. So remember, Origen says you got to wipe out and annihilate all of the sin in your life because that’s what the Canaanites represent, that all of these evil kingdoms, just utterly destroy them. Gregory points out that even if you try to do that, you may find that you still have some remaining faults. And that God will actually use that, that amidst lofty deeds we retain certain small faults. We as it were permit the Canaanite to dwell in our land. But he’s made tributary. He’s still kind of a spiritual [inaudible 00:33:49] that even sin can serve in a strange way towards spiritual growth because it forces us back into humility. And so we can both say we need to be on this campaign eradicating all sin from our life, totally genocidal against sin, and God is going to allow us to struggle. He’s going to allow some pockets, some kingdoms to still be there where it seems like we’ve eradicated all of the Canaanites in our heart, and then we find a few more. That that’s a reality.
So again, taken as a literal claim about historical people that doesn’t really make sense, but taken as a spiritual claim I think is utterly true, and I think relatable, right? Who hasn’t had that moment where you think, “Hey, things are going pretty well,” and then you find some vices you haven’t eradicated, or you find some remaining sins or you find some recurring thing that you thought you’d gotten over. That’s why it seems like the Canaanites keep popping up again, because they’re to be understood not just as historical people, they’re to be understood as spiritual forces.
And so Gregory goes on, “Hence it is well written again. Now, these are the nations which the Lord left to prove Israel by them.” That’s that passage from Judges 3. “For it is for this that some of our least faults are retained, that our fixed mind may ever be practicing itself heedfully to the conflict.” In other words, if you really found yourself in a state where you no longer were in a fight against sin in any way, shape, or form, your spiritual faculties would actually grow dull. That it’s good that God allows you to be tempted in some at least small ways, so you can constantly be honing your spiritual combat. That, no, you don’t want to be constantly keeping a sword out, murdering your neighbor, but you do want your spiritual sword out all the time. You do want to be constantly engaging in the fight against evil.
He says, “Thus Israel’s trained by the Gentile people being reserved, and that the uplifting of our goodness meets with a check in some very little faults, and learns in the little things that withstand it, that it does not subdue the greater ones by itself.” So it keeps us humble, it keeps us spiritually sharpened, keeps us honed.
But notice the common thread here. The early Christians are not reading this to say, “Well, this contradicts the New Testament,” nor are they reading it to say, “Well, I guess God’s okay with genocide.” They’re instead reading it and saying, “Seems like what’s going on here is a spiritual allegory.” And that is a way of reading scripture that is largely lost to us today. And here I think the problem is with us and not with the early Christians. That we have especially since really the scientific revolution bought into this idea that anything true is true in a literal kind of way, and that’s a bad way of understanding truth.
I always give the example, if you give your mom a world’s best mom cup, the sentiment you’re expressing is true. The words you’re using to express it are a little hyperbolic. No offense to your mom. That kind of idea, like we — and as St. John Henry Newman said, you don’t want to confuse a love letter and a police report. And we’ve gotten this idea that only police reports are true and that love letters aren’t, and that’s a poverty on our side, that if you want to understand scripture, you have to understand hyperbolic language, you have to understand exaggerations, you have to understand allegory. You have to understand all of these modes of speech that are totally foreign from the way people are analyzing this, they’re putting it under a microscope and saying, “Taken literally, this would be really abhorrent.” Yeah, true. But so would we murdered the other team.
So do we find violent seeming, seemingly immoral spiritual imagery in the New Testament? In other words, the reason I ask this is, well, how do we know these early Christians are reading the Bible correctly and that we are the ones reading it wrong? How do we know they’re not just coping with the fact that they can’t make sense of the Old Testament? Well, because they have a lot of biblical texts on their side. We’ve already seen a lot of them, but I want to give you some New Testament examples. That Jesus in Matthew 5, this is at the Sermon on the Mount, so remember the original question was how do we harmonize this really violent language in the Old Testament with the Sermon on the Mount? And here’s the Sermon on the Mount.
“If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away. It is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go to hell.” Now, taken literally, that would be an admonition to mutilation, and that’s contrary to the good, right? Like God doesn’t actually want you to mutilate your own body.
There’s a story told about Origen of all people, that when he was a young man, he took this passage and the one we’re going to look at in a couple verses here on being made a eunuch for the kingdom of God too literally and castrated himself, and his enemies tell the story, it may not be true, but the point of the story is it would be insane to read all of these texts literally. It would also explain, if it is true, why Origen pushed back so hard against people who took everything too literally, because he would know keenly why that was a disaster.
But the second biblical text is Luke 14:26, in which Jesus tells us, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” Now, do you literally have to hate your family? No. And in fact, you shouldn’t. The 10 Commandments talk about honoring your father and mother. Scripture talks about loving your spouse. You can’t literally be Jesus’s disciple and hate your family. But you need to figuratively hate them in the sense of putting Jesus above them. You get the idea? Then Mark 3:24-27, Jesus talks about how a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. Turns out that was not originally Abraham Lincoln. It was Jesus. And he goes on to say that no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods unless he first binds a strong man. Then indeed, he may plunder his house.
Now, if you just read that verse Mark 3:27 by itself, it sounds like Jesus is giving you tips on home invasion and assault. But what he’s really talking about is spiritual conquest. That the devil is powerful, but Jesus is more powerful. That the prince of this world is being cast out. So again, you’ve got this violent, seemingly immoral spiritual language. Matthew 19 Verse 12 talks about the Eunuchs who’ve been so from birth, Eunuchs who’ve been made Eunuchs by men and Eunuchs who’ve made themselves Eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.
Now, at a literal level, again, this is castration. This is immoral. At a figurative level this is talking about priestly celibacy or we’d say religious celibacy. So the principle in all of this is I think really made clearest in Ephesians 6, when St. Paul says, “We should put on the whole armor of God. You may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil for not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the power, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” And so he tells us, “Take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day and having done all to stand.” Now, I love that passage, and I actually intend to do a full episode just about what that’s all about.
But the core idea is this. We don’t believe our enemy is Canaan. We don’t believe our enemy is the Anakim or the Philistines or the sea peoples or the Egyptians or the Babylonians or the Assyrians or the Greeks or the Romans or the Jews or whoever. No, our enemy is the devil and the host of spiritual forces arrayed against us. That’s the battle we’re in. The fight is against sin. The fight is not against other people or other groups of people. That’s the Christian message.
And so all of the really violent language being used is about being really just unrelentingly violent against the things enslaving you, unrelentingly violent against the things holding you back. So in closing, five major points I want to make sure we take away from this. Number one, genocide is bad. It is really bad. I don’t think as a Christian you should be in the business of excusing genocide as maybe okay. Number two, the Israelites didn’t really commit genocide against the Canaanites. Despite the way it would read if you read it out of context, with no knowledge of history, no knowledge of the way these Moses speech work, it didn’t really happen.
Number three, the ancient Israelite readers knew it didn’t really happen. They knew these texts weren’t literal. Number four, the early Christian readers also knew these texts weren’t literal. And number five, the actual point of these texts is both spiritual about the war against sin and christological about the way Joshua prefigures Jesus Christ.
Now, there’s a lot more that could be said about all of the details with that, but I think it’s important that that’s the way we read it. This is why there isn’t some major personality change in God. There’s a change in mode of speech, but even still, you find really violent sounding language in the Old Testament. You find really violent sounding language as we just saw in the New Testament. It’s just more obvious to us in reading the New Testament that the violent sounding language is metaphorical. And because we’re not used to ancient near Eastern modes of speech, because that’s a more foreign mode of communication, we’re more likely to misunderstand those parts as being literal and not spiritual.
So I want to close with the thing that I already quoted from Origen’s homily on Joshua, that if you want anything to take away from this really constructively, besides thank God we don’t have to defend genocide, or thank God you didn’t command genocide, that a good God didn’t command this horrible evil, it’s this reminder, that there’s a kingdom of sin that was in each of us before we believed, and that Jesus came in and he struck down all of those kings just as Joshua did, and that we need to make sure we’re not leaving a few of them alive within us.
Now, as Gregory says, there may be some that despite your best efforts you still find and that they’re keeping you back and they’re making you humble, and that God can use even that. But we should really be on a campaign of eradication against the Canaanite kings of avarice, of ostentation, of pride, of lust, and the rest so that we can be a true soldier of Israel. So we can follow our Joshua, our Yeshua, our Jesus. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Thanks a lot. God bless you.