Page 15 - Advanced Biblical Backgrounds Student Textbook

commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping
their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God” (Deuteronomy 20:16-18). The Israelites failed in
this mission as well, and exactly what God said would happen occurred (Judges 2:1-3; 1 Kings
11:5; 14:24; 2 Kings 16:3-4). God did not order the extermination of these people to be cruel, but to
prevent even greater evil from occurring in the future.

Probably the most difficult part of these commands from God is that God ordered the death of children
and infants as well. Why would God order the death of innocent children? (1) Children are not innocent
(Psalm 51:5; 58:3). (2) These children would have likely grown up as adherents to the evil religions and
practices of their parents. (3) These children would naturally have grown up resentful of the Israelites
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and later sought to avenge the “unjust” treatment of their parents.
To answer the question, one must understand who God is. God is love, but He also is a God of wrath
against sin. He is a God of justice. The Canaanites were a people who totally defied God, nature, and all
that is good for hundreds of years.
God was angry. Indeed, He was furious. And with good reason. Even by ancient standards, the
Canaanites were a hideously nasty bunch. Their culture was grossly immoral, decadent to its roots. Its
debauchery was dictated primarily by its fertility religion that tied eroticism of all varieties to the
successful agrarian cycles of planting and harvest.

In addition to divination, witchcraft, and female and male temple sex, Canaanite idolatry encompassed a
host of morally disgusting practices that mimicked the sexually perverse conduct of their Canaanite
fertility gods: adultery, homosexuality, transvestitism, pederasty (men sexually abusing boys), sex with
all sorts of beasts, and incest. Note that after the Canaanite city Sodom was destroyed, Lot’s daughters
immediately seduced their drunken father, imitating one of the sexual practices of the city just
annihilated (Gen. 19:30-36).

Worst of all, Canaanites practiced child sacrifice. There was a reason God had commanded, “Do not give
any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech” (Lev. 18:21 NIV). Molech was an underworld deity with
the head of a bull and the body of a human. He had a hole in his belly in which a great fire was built. He
was formed with outstretched arms. The stone god would heat up almost red hot, then children were
placed on his arms and would slowly “cook” to death. They not only sacrificed infants, but children as
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old as four year were sacrificed. Their death has been described as thus:

As the flames surrounded the body, the limbs would shrivel up and the mouth would appear to grin
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as if laughing, until it was shrunk enough to slip into the cauldron.

Archeological evidence indicates that the children thus burned to death numbers in the thousands.

The judgment of God against the Canaanites was a judgment because of their sin. The consequence of
sin is death. The conquest was an exercise of capital punishment on a national scale, payback for

22 https://www.gotquestions.org/Canaanites-extermination.html
23 Clay Jones, “Why We Don’t Hate Sin so We don’t Understand What Happened to the Canaanites: An Addendum
to ’Divine Genocide’ Arguments,” Philosophia Christi n.s. 11 (2009), p. 61
24 Ibid.

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