In the early books of the Bible, it appears God responds to human corruption in a pattern across generations – he intervenes when pervasive violence imperils his continued relationship with people and land.
The conquest of Canaan stands out among stories of the Bible for God’s use of violence in a manner that appears to many to be unjust. In the article linked above, we saw how the pattern God follows is in many ways like some modern attempts to deal with violence or corruption. The stories portray God responding to cries for help, investigating, concluding that violence is present and demands a response, then imposing exile or death to preserve a remnant in the land with whom he will continue to interact. Modern response to violence often includes a report to police, an investigation, a trial, and, if a guilty verdict, “exile” from society in prison or, in extreme cases, the death penalty to remove the offender from society, so others may live in peace.
To connect the stories of the Bible to our own experience, it may be helpful to imagine a more specific modern response to a common violent scenario. During a domestic violence incident in which a man seriously injures a woman at their home with children present, police would respond to subdue, detain, and jail the man while he awaits trial in the justice system. Emergency medical services would take the woman to a hospital, where she would receive treatment that might itself be difficult – possibly surgery, a cast, physical therapy. And child protective services would remove the children from the home, possibly to stay in a group home or with a family they have never met.
Each participant in the above scenario experiences a bad outcome. The man is detained, separated from his family, and may spend years in prison. The woman is hospitalized away from her children and must endure rehabilitation. The children are (at least temporarily) removed from the only home they’ve known to stay with others. It cannot plausibly be argued that any of these outcomes is “good,” yet each may be the best available outcome given the man’s choice to engage in violence.
When we read the Bible’s description of thorough corruption in each of the judgment narratives, it becomes clear that God is not merely responding to a single assault, he is dealing with a pervasive, culture-wide embrace of corruption and violence. The impossibility (for us) of dealing with even a single family’s needs in a single violent incident ought to give us pause if we attempt to judge God in his judgment.
To hold God accountable for his actions in judgment of the pre-Flood peoples or those of Babel, Sodom, Egypt during the Israelites’ exodus, or the Canaanites during the Israelites’ conquest of Canaan, we would have to comprehend the interactions of innumerable violent people across generations and geography. Our domestic violence example reminds us of how unlikely it is that a “good’ outcome can be found in a single scenario. What options are available for dealing effectively with pervasive violence, for preserving a remnant who will not embrace corruption?
Either God is just and sovereign, in which case we cannot know enough to determine what actions are good, effective, and just on the scale he is operating in, or God does not have the attributes the biblical authors claim for him. If the latter, debating the ethics of the Conquest doesn’t matter very much; we can’t rely on the account anyway.
Believers can find some comfort in the knowledge that God acts consistently across many stories with a unified purpose – to rescue the vulnerable, to preserve relationship with people and land – while receiving on faith that God’s grasp of the extraordinarily complex web of interactions he’s judging transcends ours. We could never hope to fully understand it.
Judgment on the scale of a city or nation for actions spanning decades is beyond the capacity of humans to comprehend or assess. Concerning his choices of judgment, we can choose to trust God or not, but we can’t hope to effectively evaluate him.
edited on 6/3/2023