point of view.

The following is completely quoted from the website given. (cut & pasted)

AS a Christian, do you agree with this writing? If not, why?

http://www.cresourcei.org/killcanaanites.html

Did God Order the Massacre of Canaanites?
Dennis Bratcher

The question of the apparently ruthless attitudes of the Israelites toward Canaanites is a perplexing one in Scripture. -1- The problem is compounded by the passages in which God is pictured as commanding the extermination of certain peoples, including the slaughter of women and children. Dealing with this issue can be quite complicated depending on what perspective of Scripture with which one is working since the answer is really tied to what we understand Scripture to be.

Without trying to speak to all those different perspectives, let me address the issue from only one. This view sees Scripture as a dynamic witness by the community of Faith to God’s self-revelation in history. That is, Scripture records the witness of the community of Faith to God and His work in the world. As authoritative Scripture for the community, God also uses that witness to reveal himself to future generations, at the same time that those future generations may also encounter God in new ways at new points in history. That simply affirms a very dynamic view of Scripture as well as God’s actions in the world, and rejects the idea that Scripture is the absolute truth and paradigm for everything that we want to know, including past history. It is true in its testimony to the revelation of God, in what is tells us about God, about humanity, and about humanity’s relationship with God (see Revelation and Inspiration of Scripture).

From this perspective, I don't think God directly told the Israelites to slaughter other people such as the Canaanites in any absolute or ontological sense. That is because I don't think the Bible was written by God nor is it word for word what God thinks or says. If the Bible is a human witness to God's revelation of Himself in the world, then that witness is borne by men and women who lived in a certain history and a certain culture. Therefore the Bible must be seen in terms of the people who wrote it as well as for what it tells us about the revelation of God in the world. Contrary to what we like to think, ancient Israelites were not modern Christians. They were not modern anything. They lived in 1,200 BC and reflected the culture of that time.

When they encountered God in the exodus they did not immediately become enlightened so that they automatically understood everything about God that we understand nearly 3,500 years later! Their encounter with God was a significant one. But it was largely up to them to translate that revelation of God into practical living. And they struggled mightily over several hundred years to be able to do that adequately (not unlike the similar struggles of the church over an even longer period of time!). So they spoke of God in terms of their own culture, just like they worshipped God in terms of the culture that they understood (for example, sacrifices, circumcision, temples, prophets, etc.; see Speaking the Language of Canaan). They transformed that culture based on their encounter with God, so they began moving to monotheism, social justice, authentic worship, etc. But it would take them nearly 1,000 years to get there.

They basically took their culture and subsumed it under God. For example, they no longer (in theory) sacrificed to appease the fertility gods of the land, but as a celebration of God's grace (see Ba’al Worship in the Old Testament). Everything that they were culturally was subsumed under God. As a faith confession of who they had become as God's people, they placed every facet of life under God, and so attributed all of their activities to God. They grounded all of their religious life, as well as social, political, and economic activities, in the Exodus and Sinai and the idea that God had reveled this new way of life to them by revealing Himself. They were responding in life to what they had come to understand about God based on their encounter with God in history.

So, for example, they attributed all their laws to God as if he had given them at Sinai, even when most of those laws were already in place hundreds of years earlier throughout the Middle East (see Israel’s Codes of Conduct Compared with Surrounding Nations), or were developed several hundred years later during the monarchy. To us, that might sound dishonest. But we have to remember that they were not us; to them, it was a valid expression of who they were as God's people. It was a way to confess based on their encounter with God, "God has called us to live this way."

Unfortunately, sometimes in their history they also did things less noble that they also attributed to God's will. Or at least they gave a theological rationale for what they should have done. The fact is, the early Israelites were a warlike people, not uncommon for tribes of that area. They conceived of God in terms of a great divine warrior who fought beside them or for them. Frequently, they portrayed God Himself slaughtering their enemies. Warfare, then, became a sacred act whereby they could serve God. And this attitude was especially focused on the Canaanites who presented them with the greatest threat to their survival in the early years of their existence as a people.

The fact is they did not try to exterminate the Canaanites when they first entered the land. They settled in with them and adapted their ways and customs. They even entered in alliances and treaties with them (see Conquest or Settlement? History and Theology in Joshua and Judges). Later, they realized that the result was syncretism with the fertility religions of Baal and a steady erosion of their faithfulness to the God of the exodus. The theological confession was then expressed that they should have killed all of the Canaanites when they first entered the land in order to be protected from the temptations of Ba'al worship. It was a short step to conclude that since God had wanted them to be free from Ba'al worship, then God must have wanted them to kill the Canaanites. While there were isolated incidents of that happening there was never a wholesale attempt to exterminate the Canaanites. The tribes often fought each other as fiercely as they fought Philistines! (for example, Judges 20).

In other words, it was not simply a direct command from God, but their understanding from a certain time and place in history of what they thought would please God. They changed that later, just as they changed a lot of ideas about God throughout their history.

Christian history has similar circumstances. For example, religious leaders whipped up the fervor for the crusades with the cry that it was God's will that they should recapture the Holy Land from the infidels. Charlemagne slaughtered hundreds of his captured enemies after forcing them to accept Christianity at the point of a sword. If they refused, they were killed for being pagan. If they accepted, they were killed so they could immediately go to heaven! All done with the assurance that he was carrying out God's will in world.

A similar argument was made in the United States relating to Native Americans. The theo-political ideology of manifest destiny, using the model of the "promised land" and the settlers as the "Israelites" made it legitimate to exterminate the native population because they were "heathen" and because God had given this land to the new settlers. It is interesting that we now condemn those actions from our later perspectives, yet some continue to defend the Israelite’s attitudes toward the Canaanites as something mandated by God.

While this misreading of God's will in our own history is easy to spot, it is more difficult to do so in Scripture because we assume that everything in Scripture is exactly how it should be, and is all literally true and absolutely inerrant (see The Modern Inerrancy Debate). It never seems to occur to us that biblical history records mistakes that God's people made as well as their successes. We don't quite get around to realizing that the Israelite attitudes toward exterminating the Canaanites might have been preserved as a model of how not to act and to recall the magnitude of the people's failure to understand God rather than as a paradigm for how to treat others. We somehow never connect the Israelite attitude toward the Canaanites with the failure of Abraham to live out God's promise and become a blessing to all peoples, instead bringing plagues and curses upon them (Genesis 12:10-20, 20:1-18).

Perhaps that helps us understand an astounding statement from Amos. When God's people were feeling especially privileged yet also feeling slighted because things were not going as they expected, God reminded them that they were not the only people in the world for whom God was concerned (Amos 9:7-10).

So, there really is no problem in the nature of God. The problem is with people who have a hard time separating their own culturally and historically conditioned ideas from the will of God in the world. If we could separate that out better, Christianity would have had a far less bloody history and we would probably be far less anxious to kill all the infidels even today. I think that is one of the most important aspects of the Incarnation and the proclamation of Peace on earth that accompanied it.


Notes
1. Canaanites are a general designation for a wide variety of people who lived throughout the Middle East, from as far south as the Philistine coast north to Phoenicia, and including various groups of people east of the Jordan River as far north as Babylon (sometimes referred to as Amorites). Their commonality was not ethnic or racial, but only, besides living in the same general region, that they worshipped nature and fertility deities. More specifically, however, Canaanite refers to the peoples who inhabited the territory in which the Israelite tribes settled, from Mount Hermon and the Sea of Galilee in the north to the southern end of the Negeb and the Sinai Peninsula in the south, from the Mediterranean coast on the west to the Jordan river on the east.

Too late on a Sunday evening, I guess, for such a long read.

I have to admit, i was too lazy to read it

Thanks anyway, thewalrusx.

Some1 got really messed up and decided to kill them no matter what was their beef with them!

Geeeeeze don't expect me to read that long O.post, besides I don't need to read it.

NO NO NO NO NO, HELL NO, GOD DID NOT order the Massacre of any Canaanites.

That is just the excuse that was used for the massacre.(If it even happened that way.) People think its okay to kill if its war, or if its been commanded by the all mighty god.

A thinking person would not believe that story in a million years. Un-thinking people maybe would. (That would be them who call themselves "believers." )

JB