In focus are common apologetic defenses of biblical genocide commanded by Yahweh, the Supreme deity of the ancient Hebrews.

Part 6 – The Canaanite Extermination in Light of Genocide Criteria
Part 8 – Forthcoming

The defender of the moral rightness of Yahweh commanding the genocide of the Canaanite tribes in the Promised Land so that the Hebrew people could occupy it is that the biblical accounts are exaggerations of what occurred.

The Hebrews conquered Canaan through incursions, but this did not entail the full and thorough extermination of the land’s inhabitants. According to Nicolas Wolterstorff, a philosopher and theologian, the Joshua conquest accounts,

“are narrated in a particular style, which is not intended to be literal in all of its details and contains a lot of hyperbole, formulaic language and literary expressions for rhetorical effect. We argue in our book that the evidence both from within the Bible and from other ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts supports this conclusion” (1).

This literary characteristic is called hagiographic hyperbole. The biblical evidence for it is strong. For example, one reads in Joshua 10:20 that “Joshua and the Israelites defeated them completely” but then “a few survivors managed to reach their fortified cities.” How could the Hebrews have exterminated them completely if the same text says some remained alive?

In Joshua 8:24, the reader is informed that “Israel cut them down, leaving them neither survivors or fugitives…” and then later “Israel went to the city of Ai and killed all the men in it.” But if there were no survivors then why is the reader told that there were still men in the city?

The biblical author is using deliberate exaggeration of events. Christian apologist Paul Copan uses the analogy of a modern sports fan saying that his team “slaughtered” or “killed” their opponents when not intending that to be taken literally.

That this hyperbolic language was a common Ancient Near Eastern literary device beyond the biblical texts too. It is in the Mesha Inscription of the Moabites and their king. The inscription speaks of the Moabite “extermination” of the Israelites in the ninth century BCE. However, historians are aware that Israel was not fully wiped out by either the Moabites or their deity Chemosh but continued to exist for a century until Assyria conquered them. Often when it is stated that populations were entirely exterminated, they were not really. Other examples include the Merneptah Stele and the Bulletin of Ramses II.

The apologist’s argument is that the biblical conquest narratives do not really constitute genocide, which blunts the critic’s charge since not everyone in the Canaanite tribes was exterminated.

The immediate challenge to this argument is that the biblical texts still portray Yahweh as ordering the extermination of the Canaanites, which alone is the ethical and theological challenge the apologist and inerrantist are required to defend as justified on Yahweh’s and the Hebrews’ part.

Regardless of whether it was full extermination, the apologist must still deal with Yahweh commanding that everything that breathed (i.e. men, women, children, infants, and animals) needed to be exterminated in devotion to Yahweh.

A second concern is that this apologetic defense defends ethnic cleansing, which is the forced and systematic removal of ethnic or racial groups from a territory by a more powerful ethnic group. This is still a moral evil and raises the same concerned questions that the greater charge of genocide does.

Christian philosopher William Lane Craig argues that the Hebrews were to drive the Canaanites en masse out of their land, thereby limiting the extermination only to those Canaanites who remained. Craig draws the following conclusion:

“It is therefore completely misleading to characterize God’s command to Israel as a command to commit genocide. Rather it was first and foremost a command to drive the tribes out of the land and to occupy it. Only those who remained behind were to be utterly exterminated” (2).

Beyond this being pure speculation, the problem is left unresolved as the biblical texts still teach that genocide were commanded by Yahweh. The ethical and theological problem remains.

Although one could make the argument that ethnic cleansing is a lesser moral evil than genocide, it might still be argued that killing some people on their land and dispossessing the rest is sufficient to qualify as genocide. This scenario satisfies several of the criteria of international law by the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. One is warranted at making a claim of genocide should any of the following criteria be met:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

The Hebrews dispossessing the Canaanite tribes of their land entails (a), (b), and (c), and therefore qualifies as genocide. The Hebrews, whether entirely or not, intended to kill the Canaanites as a collective population, destroying their religious and cultural identity and forcing them out of their land. Assuming the historicity of the events handed down via these traditions, no doubt great physical and psychological harm would have accompanied these tragic circumstances.

Craig speculates more, saying that it is possible that no non-combatants were killed by the Hebrew foot soldiers and that it was only the Canaanite combatants who stayed to fight. This is, of course, pure speculation. It is unlikely because the biblical texts describe the full dispossession of entire tribes of their land, which must be viewed in the context of the biblical mandates to kill everything that breathes.

If we are to engage in our own speculations, it is also not unreasonable to suggest that immobile Canaanites (i.e., frail, elderly, injured, physically infirm) could not have fled their homes or villages in time to escape the Hebrew advances.

References.

1. Merritt, J. 2015. Did God command genocide in the Bible? Available.

2. Craig, W. 2011. #225 The “Slaughter” of the Canaanites Re-visited. Available.