The conquest of Canaan and Noah’s curse
Apologetic commonplaces don’t tell the whole story.
One of the hot topics on the apologetics quarters of the internet lately is the conquest of Canaan. Gavin Ortlund has been producing a few different videos on this topic. This discussion with Michael Jones is the most recent:
As far as I can tell, over the course of the last few videos, Gavin has made the following points in response to the problem presented by the conquest of Canaan in the biblical narrative.
The warfare language of the Bible is often exaggerated for rhetorical effect. In other words, even if God seems to tell the Israelites to kill everyone and everything (e.g., Deut 20:16–18), he doesn’t really mean this. And even if the text says that the Israelites wiped everyone out, it doesn’t really mean this. There are indications in the texts themselves that motivate this conclusion, and it seems to be a practice among peoples in that time and place.
The peoples of Canaan engaged in very evil practices. This means that their expulsion or destruction by Israel can be seen as a kind of just punishment which God imposes upon them through his people as an instrument. For example, it can be compared to the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War.
There are other points Gavin has made, as well. For example, he’s argued that the Israelites did not target non-combatants, and that the cities they destroyed were sooner military garrisons with little to no civilian population. Randal Rauser has released a video response to Gavin on this point:
I think that Randal makes good points. Perhaps Gavin will address them on another occasion.
For my part, I want to focus on the two points I listed above. It may be that this is the best that a defender of the Old Testament can say: the language is exaggerated, and in any case the people were evil. For my part, however, I think these responses do not yet solve the problem. A major issue remains.
First, the conquest of Canaan is explained biblically with reference to Noah’s curse of Canaan (Gen. 9:20–27).
After coming out of the ark, Noah builds a vineyard and gets drunk. His son, Ham, sees him naked and goes to tell his brothers. His brothers Shem and Japheth cover his father’s nakedness without looking up on it. Noah wakes up from his drunkenness, and in his hangover curses Canaan, Ham’s son, to be the slave of Shem.
“Cursed be Canaan; lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” He also said, “Blessed by the Lord my God be Shem, and let Canaan be his slave. May God make space for Japheth, and let him live in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his slave” (Gen. 9:25–27).
Abram is the ancestor of Shem (Gen. 11). The reason why God calls Abram out of his father’s household and tells him to go away to Canaan (Gen. 12:1–5) is thus the hungover Noah’s curse of his own grandson. Canaan must be the slave of Shem. The reason why Abram’s ancestors must be slaves for four hundred years so that the sin of the Amorites may be completed (Gen. 15:13–16) is also the hungover Noah’s curse of his own grandson. Canaan is the ancestor of the Amorites (Gen. 10:15–16). God specifically wants to punish Canaan through Shem’s ancestors, in keeping with Noah’s curse.
Once the origin of the conquest in Noah’s hungover curse of Canaan is understood, the defense of it in moral terms begins to fall apart.
Suppose the people of Canaan were evil. How does that constitute a defense of the conquest? At least two counter-questions can be raised in response.
In the first place, why does God care so much about the evils of the Canaanites? The people of Canaan may have engaged in various evil practices. Other peoples did, too. It’s not as though the Canaanites were particularly evil. Neither does God seem quick in history to put an end to other evil peoples, as the rest of human history makes clear.
In the second place, even granting that the Canaanites were evil, why didn’t God simply raise up prophets from among the Canaanites to reform them? He could have, if he wanted to. God can do anything. But Genesis never says anything about that. Or why didn’t God simply send Israel into another land, with different sorts of people living there? Even if the Canaanites were evil, possibly a bad influence on Israel, there’s no obvious reason why Israel simply has to live there, in that land in particular.
Genesis provides the answer to these questions. The peoples of Canaan in particular must be destroyed, not reformed or saved, and the Israelites must be the ones to do it because Noah cursed Canaan to be the slave of Shem, and Israel through Abram are the descendants of Shem.
God is thus fulfilling Noah’s curse. That’s why Abram and his people must live there, in Canaan, specifically—because Canaan must be the slave of Shem. That’s also why God has to wait four hundred years for the sins of the Amorites to reach their limit—so that Shem can destroy Canaan and make him his slave.
This also undermines the attempt to “soften” God’s genocidal commands on the grounds that they are nothing more than typical ancient near eastern warfare rhetoric.
Canaan must be made the slave of Shem. That was Noah’s curse, which God is fulfilling. This is to say that God has no favorable disposition toward Canaan at all, but only to Shem and Japheth.
The narrative of Genesis corroborates this when it says that the Hebrews must be slaves for four generations so that the Amorites’ sin can reach its limit. That way, God may punish them utterly. Neither does God ever send Abram as a moral light or prophet to any of the Canaanite peoples. He’s rather a constant cause of trouble for them as he gets richer and richer in their midst (e.g., the story of Abimelech in Gen. 20).
Noah’s curse of Canaan is why God tells the Israelites:
“But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. Indeed, you shall annihilate them—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded” (Deut. 20:16-17).
The Israelites certainly did not succeed in killing these peoples in their entirety. But that was a failure on their part to fulfill God’s command, which was total annihilation. It is not an indication that God intended anything less than what he explicitly told them to do, which was utter annihilation.
The picture that Torah paints is thus not a flattering one for God, at least not from the point of view of contemporary sentiments.
The conquest of Canaan is God’s way of fulfilling the curse that Noah uttered against his grandson while hungover from a night of heavy drinking. It explains why Israel must live in Canaan, rather than anywhere else on earth. It also explains why the sin of the Amorites must reach its limit and be punished in the end, rather than be atoned for or corrected through education.
In general, Torah does not present God as morally perfect or maximally good. Trying to defend God’s actions on this assumption seems to me a doomed effort from the start. God is rather presented as amoral. Effectively, he always does what he pleases, occasionally showing some concern for righteousness but other times doing what seems monstrous without apparent remorse. He’s closer to a mafia boss than anything else.
God’s principal concern in Torah is his relationship with Israel. He demands that Israel be loyal, and he promises to be loyal to Israel, too. At the same time, he often pushes them to the limit and provokes them to unfaithfulness by not providing food and other necessities (e.g., in Num. 21:5–6). God also often blesses Israel in such a way as intentionally to bring about trouble and harm for other peoples. For example, he raises Joseph to a position of power in Egypt, who in turn makes all of Egypt slaves of Pharaoh (Gen. 47:20–21).
In my opinion, this is the lens that the conquest of Canaan must be understood through if one is to be faithful to the texts themselves. If one doesn’t like the picture of God that emerges, then one can always refuse to believe in it.