To explain why an evil order coming from God is problematic and why I can’t just say obey blindly (blind obedience means there’s no line you won’t cross upon command), I should clarify as to WHY I worship God. While God is All-Knowing and All-Powerful, and while both of those are deserving of respect and reverence, those alone aren’t why I worship God.
I worship God because he is the Summum Bonum. That means God is the Highest Good, that everything he does and commands is absolute Good, and that all Good everywhere comes from Him. In my opinion, being the very Embodiment of Good is the most important aspect about God.
If God wasn’t Good, if He was All-Powerful yet still capable of Evil, than we wouldn’t worship him: we’d fear him.
During Antiquity, the Greeks and Romans believed in (thankfully false) Pagan Gods who raped, murdered, and caused suffering out of little more than spite and vindictiveness. The Romans and Greeks did not love or adore their Gods; the tribute they offered to the temples of Poseidon and Mars were essentially
Pizzo. This lead The Romans to be very cruel, to place little-to-no value on human life, and to have a dreary and sad outlook on life. That’s one of the reasons why Christianity spread so quickly across Europe: the idea that a God actually loves humanity and isn’t capricious was a concept that was previously unheard of on that continent.
Now on the subject of the Canaanites. Sure they were brutal, but it is impossible for every single member of that ethnic group to have been irredeemably evil from cradle to grave: human nature has simply does not work like that and never has. Take for instance The Aztecs: the Aztecs practiced grizzly and bloody human sacrifices of thousands every year, and you could argue that their culture was worse than the culture of the Canaanites. Yet when people today talk about the end of The Aztec Culture, they describe it as a genocide and a horrible atrocity. That’s because there is no group where the members are monolithic, and the brutality of the Aztec High Priests did not make the women and children deserving of death.
Fortunately, there are some ways to interpret God’s seemingly-harsh orders that wouldn’t make him evil. It is possible that God was testing the Israelite People to see if they would ask him for mercy on behalf of their enemies (as Job did for his three unsupportive friends, as Abraham did for Sodom and Gomorrah, and as Jesus did for the Roman Guards who were crucifying him). It is also possible that “leave no Canaanites alive in the land” was less of an extermination order and more of a deportation order; this is supported by the existence of Canaanites centuries after The Holy Land was conquered. It is possible, as others have pointed out, that God was just being hyperbolic to place emphasis on how important it was that they didn’t intermingle with the locals. It is also possible that the people who recorded the events of The Old Testament exaggerated or simplified the actions of The Isralites (if they didn’t have writing at the time, than oral tradition would have been how those stories would have survived).
There are ways to explain things like this while keeping God as the Summum Bonum, but “If He demands genocide, than we should obey blindly” isn’t one of those ways.
Hyperbole was a literary device in great use at the time. I don’t know, of course, but I, personally, believe it is hyperbole.
If I felt God was commanding me to do something evil, my response would be the same as Christ’s, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” Christ did tell us that we will know them by their fruits. I don’t intend to follow anyone who produces bad fruit, and I intend to do all I can to produce good fruit myself. Killing isn’t good fruit.
Sorry to butt in.
Lily, you make a good point.
