What's the objection re the Canaanites?

[snarflemike]

Personally, I find it challenging that a loving and merciful God commands the violent killing of people, including children.

Does it not cause you to scratch your head at all snarflemike?

God allows us all to die, and allows most of us to suffer. Is that different? He could prevent it all.

Yes, of course it is “challenging”, because God’s ways are not our ways. But what I’m wondering is what point, exactly, is the fate of the Canaanites supposed to prove regarding God and/or the OT and/or Christianity?

 

[TimothyH]

It’s not challenging. The Canaanites were BAD dudes.

***For truly, the ancient inhabitants of your holy land, whom you hated for deeds most odious-- Works of witchcraft and impious sacrifices; a cannibal feast of human flesh and of blood, from the midst of. . .-- These merciless murerers of children, and parents who took with their own hands defenseless lives, You willed to destroy by the hands of our fathers, that the land that is dearest of all to you might receive a worthy colony of God’s children. *(Wisdom 12:3-7)

They sold their children into prostitution, sacrificed their children to false gods and ate their own sons and daughters. They were incestuous cannibals, slept with their own mothers and fathers.

***Before they went to bed, all the townsmen of Sodom, both young and old–all the people to the last man–closed in on the house. They called to Lot and said to him, “Where are the men who came to your house tonight? Bring them out to us that we may have intimacies with them.” Lot went out to meet them at the entrance. When he had shut the door behind him, he said, "I beg you, my brothers, not to do this wicked thing. *(Genesis 19:4-7)

They were homosexual gang rapists.

These people weren’t minding their own business, sipping coffee at Starbucks when the Israelites decided to wipe them out. They had seen God part the Red Sea, seen the destruction of Jericho with trumpets, rivers totally stop flowing, the sun stand still and had seen the angel of God mow down 180,000 men with one blow, and they refused to repent and turn to God. All they had to do was repent and turn to God and their lives would have been spared.

And there is no double standard. God did the same thing to Israel when they turned away from God to a life of sin. Nothing has changed. The same fate awaits us if we choose that life.

-Tim-

 

[Michael_Allen]

God allows us all to die, and allows most of us to suffer. Is that different?

I do think there is a difference of dying of old age, after a life fully lived here on Earth, and the violent killing of a child or infant, yes.

I struggle with the idea of a God commanding the violent deaths of children, and one option I am open to is that it was not God commanding those deaths, but the people believing it was God’s command. It seems to me that in scripture we have a progression of understanding of God, with the prophets challenging the strict legalism of the Mosaic interpretation of God’s will, and then Jesus bringing that to fulfilment. In that way, the commanding of the violent deaths of children does challenge a literal unquestioning reading of the Old Testament scriptures (which, let’s face it, we all pick and choose from when it comes to deciding what laws and punishments should be kept for today and which we’ll consign to another time, place and people). I tend to agree that, to some extent, the question of the Canaanites and similar acts of genocide, call into question a face-value reading of the texts of the Old Testament. However I also accept many people are very happy to read those scriptures at face value and do not find that they bring into question how much of the Old Testament scripture is the voice of God and how much it is the voice of the writers.

P.S. On a more positive note I remember the wise advice of someone I talked to about this, and she said “the thing is we don’t have to tick all the boxes of understanding everything, we just have to tick one box, with the name Jesus next to it”. I hang on to that very much as I try to better understand the violence of the Old Testament, but I can understand those who find these genocidal narratives challenging to faith.

 

[Gorgias]

Thanks. I think I see a contradiction here. If according to Judeo-Christian teaching, God is the source of all morality, and God orders a thing, then BY DEFINITION that thing cannot be immoral.

That’s one of the arguments that non-believers make: the notion of “all-good” doesn’t make sense if it merely reduces to “all-God”, since anything God says (good or bad) automatically is defined as ‘good’. Therefore, according to this line of thought, the killing of the Canaanites is ‘good’ even though it is ‘evil’. In other words, they see this as paradoxical in its very definition, and therefore, as false.

Unfortunately, this train of thought doesn’t accept the possibility that God, in his wisdom, sees good where we, in our lack of perspective, only perceive evil.

 

[snarflemike]

That’s one of the arguments that non-believers make: the notion of “all-good” doesn’t make sense if it merely reduces to “all-God”, since anything God says (good or bad) automatically is defined as ‘good’. Therefore, according to this line of thought, the killing of the Canaanites is ‘good’ even though it is ‘evil’. In other words, they see this as paradoxical in its very definition, and therefore, as false.

Unfortunately, this train of thought doesn’t accept the possibility that God, in his wisdom, sees good where we, in our lack of perspective, only perceive evil.

Good point. Of course they would have to have another universal, and thus binding on all, source for their judgement that the killing of the Canannites was in fact evil. Where do they find this universal source?

 

[Gorgias]

Good point. Of course they would have to have another universal, and thus binding on all, source for their judgement that the killing of the Canannites was in fact evil. Where do they find this universal source?

That’s just it: there isn’t any other ‘universal’ that rises to transcend all other considerations. Instead, what’s offered is exactly the opposite: a particular. That is, the individual is offered as the supreme measure. Therefore, anything that opposes an individual (or a collection of them) in their self-expression is, by definition, evil.

 

[JIB]

If they complain about killing entire societies, then ask them if they are prolife. If not, they have no leg to stand on. Those people were merely being saved from a bad life, like how a baby is aborted to save it from a life of misery.

 

[Michael_Allen]

If they complain about killing entire societies, then ask them if they are prolife. If not, they have no leg to stand on. Those people were merely being saved from a bad life, like how a baby is aborted to save it from a life of misery.

I’m not sure how that helps you. I am pro-life and I struggle with God ordering the killing of children and sucklings. My pro-life position makes those passages more, not less, challenging to me. If I did not see all life as having dignity and value I think I could shrug off those passages much more easily. Your argument (saving a baby from a bad life in these passages) seems, to me, to undermine the pro-life position, where all life is good and has value, if you were to be consistent.

 

[JIB]

My point is to undermine a proabortion POV, not a prolife view. Different strategies for different viewpoints.

 

[Michael_Allen]

My point is to undermine a proabortion POV, not a prolife view. Different strategies for different viewpoints.

Hmm, but it does seem your strategy can’t be consistently applied - if someone, like me, says they do support pro-life then you are left in an awkward place it seems (especially if one leg of your argument was to say God killed infants to save them from a bad life. That’s possible a dangerous place to go if you have pro-life sensitivities yourself as it makes the value of life dependent on quality of life). I think we always have to look for arguments that can be consistently applied, otherwise it can give the appearance of just looking for arguments that can win a particular debate rather than trying to understand a fuller truth.

 

[Stillness]

It is easy to understand why the Israelites wanted the Canaanites dead. Not from a biblical standpoint, of which I don’t have enough understanding to comment on. But from an economic and social standpoint. Assuming that the Israelites did indeed kill as many of the Canaanites as claimed.

At the time, the region was growing more crowded and competition for both land and resources was becoming more fierce. The Hebrews had two options, as far as I can tell:

1. Travel (or remain) in Egypt and either be assimilated or become a separate underclass.
2. Travel into Canaan and either be assimilated or take the land for themselves.

Assimilation is rarely desirable for such a large cultural group as the Hebrews would have been. If it would have been possible at all, seeing as how the Canaanites would likely have been hesitant to allow such a large influx of foreigners to dilute their population. So it was left that either the Canaanites or the Hebrews would keep the land.

The Hebrews did what anyone would have. It was a competition for resources and survival. It would be easy to pass a moral judgement on the fact, thousands of years afterwards, when I have never lived in a more savage world where I would face the threat, face to face, of the extinction of my tribe or my culture. But such a judgement would be pointless. And I am genuinely certain that we would react the same way that they did, if we lived in the same world that they faced.

As for how such things can be justified in a Catholic way, I don’t know. I do not know enough about the theological or scriptural understanding of the situation to comment on that. And seeing as how I avoid such moral judgements anyway, I am not the best person to ask.

 

[TimothyH]

It is easy to understand why the Israelites wanted the Canaanites dead. Not from a biblical standpoint, of which I don’t have enough understanding to comment on. But from an economic and social standpoint. Assuming that the Israelites did indeed kill as many of the Canaanites as claimed.

At the time, the region was growing more crowded and competition for both land and resources was becoming more fierce. The Hebrews had two options, as far as I can tell:

1. Travel (or remain) in Egypt and either be assimilated or become a separate underclass.
2. Travel into Canaan and either be assimilated or take the land for themselves.

Assimilation is rarely desirable for such a large cultural group as the Hebrews would have been. If it would have been possible at all, seeing as how the Canaanites would likely have been hesitant to allow such a large influx of foreigners to dilute their population. So it was left that either the Canaanites or the Hebrews would keep the land.

The Hebrews did what anyone would have. It was a competition for resources and survival. It would be easy to pass a moral judgement on the fact, thousands of years afterwards, when I have never lived in a more savage world where I would face the threat, face to face, of the extinction of my tribe or my culture. But such a judgement would be pointless. And I am genuinely certain that we would react the same way that they did, if we lived in the same world that they faced.

As for how such things can be justified in a Catholic way, I don’t know. I do not know enough about the theological or scriptural understanding of the situation to comment on that. And seeing as how I avoid such moral judgements anyway, I am not the best person to ask.

God let the Israelites die too, when they walked away from him and disobeyed his commandments.

The Israelites married Canaanite women, worshipped their Gods, sacrificed children just like them, engaged in fornication and incest just like them, and when they did, God let them have their own way and they died just like the Canaanites. God let the whole generation who worshipped the golden calf just die in the desert, 600,000 Israelite men, women and children, and these never set foot in Israel. God spared the non-Jewish city of Nineveh from destruction when they repented and turned to Him.

Everyone seems to forget, or maybe they don’t realize, that when the Israelites turned away, they died too, and when non-Jews turned to God, they were spared. It’s not about competition for resources. It’s not about being Jewish. It’s about trusting God and obeying his law, and thereby saving your life.

-Tim-

 

[ericc]

It seems like in the New Age, God is prohibited from killing his own creation. Apparently, there is a moral law above God.

At the very end, who can judge God? We humans are not all knowing. Only God knows for certain a group of people who may be beyond redemption, totally wicked that he sees fit to end their kind. He did that in the Great Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Amalekites and the Canaanites. In the Amalekites, because Saul disobeyed God in killing all the Amalekites, the Amalekites and their descendants almost succeeded in killing off the Jews at a later date (Esther). Moral of the story is we shouldn’t second guess God. If Queen Esther had not been around, perhaps the Jews will be killed off and the story of Christ may never be told or have to be told in a different way.

Some folks may feel that infants and women should be spared and for those to be killed is an immoral act by God. Yet only God knows whether the killing of these women and children serves a greater good. A case of “It may be better if that man wasn’t born.” So what do we do with stories of the OT God killing lots of people?

Some people like to search and identify the angry God in the OT and claiming that such an immoral(per their personal view of morals) God is not worthy of their worship. However, the angry God is also the loving god, and the just God. Given what we know what the Christian God is like, and not knowing what God knows, I have no problem in accepting God as he is. It is like we know someone to be good person and later when we hear things that is unlike of him, we normally attribute that he may have very good reasons for doing such things.

In addition, some disbelieve that God can command someone to kill another. They have a concept that God should just let evil people be and let them do whatever they please and God should only mete out punishment on judgement day. However, we know that God heard the cries of the suffering and bring punishment to those wicked doers in Sodom /Gomorrah. So the question why is it immoral for God to directly punish wicked doers and yet the very same people would cry out for justice if the wicked goes unpunished, NOW. They want the government to nabbed the culprits and punished to the full extent of the law. But if God did it, he is immoral. The Atom bomb and actually non-nuclear bombs too got many innocent deaths. But I think the deafening silence speaks volume. In the case of the Amalekites, these people says the punishment was for a deed done 400 years ago and God shouldn’t punish the current generation. However, these same people would disregard that the Amalekites continued to be a wicked people. It is not that 400 years ago they were evil and now turned good. The Amalakites continued to raid/pillage the Israelites through the centuries.

Lastly, God is creator. He can terminate his creation anything he sees fit. Some people naively think a loving God should let people live to a ripe old age. Anything short of that is immoral. I think it has become my morals are higher than God’s. If I deem your moral standard lacking, you are not fit to be my god. Back to Adam & Eve, fall of satan, self & pride comes first.