I spent way too long on this article. I’m sure that will make Bible critics squeal with delight, because Deuteronomy 7:1-6 is one of the hardest passages of the Bible to defend.
For good reason. This section—along with Deuteronomy 20:15-18—demands that Israel absolutely annihilate every single person in Israel proper (the neighboring Canaanite nations are later given the opportunity to surrender).
Why does God demand such an extreme action? According to this same Text, the answer is not a secret: If they don’t, Canaan will entice them to sin through either intermarriage, or idolatry, or both. To remove this temptation, God wants them all gone.
To be fair, God calls for the same punishment to be applied to His own people in similar situations. According to Deuteronomy 13:12-18, any city that has allowed idolatry to take root and fester inside their borders is to be annihilated as well.
You can argue that God is extreme, but you can’t argue that He isn’t fair.
This section has caused so many problems for so many believers, including Old Testament Jews who struggled to justify this Text in connection with other passages that espouse God’s goodness. After all, how can a God who is called long-suffering also give no quarter to a pagan nation?
Because of this, some have argued that the destruction here isn’t really destruction; instead, it’s more of a “dedication,” as is assumed with Jephthah’s daughter (Judges 11).
Others still claim that even the direct audience (A.K.A. the people Moses spoke directly to in Deuteronomy) understood that God was speaking in hyperbole. He didn’t really mean annihilate everyone, despite what the Text literally says.
As with other difficult passages, I know that any struggle we have with the Bible is purely our own. God’s Word is true and perfect, so my issues are my own. The answer isn’t to call God violent, but to dig further into the Word to see what the Truth is.
So let’s do that. Why do you think God orders this?
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