Page 14 - Biblical Backgrounds

(Psalm 51:5; 58:3). (2) These children would have likely grown up as adherents to their parents' evil
religions and practices. (3) These children would naturally have grown up resentful of the Israelites and
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later sought to avenge their parents' “unjust” treatment.
To answer the question, one must understand who God is. God is love, but He is also 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 and 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 they built a great fire.
He was formed with outstretched arms. The stone god would heat up almost red hot, then children
were placed in his arms and would slowly “cook” to death. They not only sacrificed infants, but they
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also sacrificed children as old as four years. Here is a description of their death:
As the flames surrounded the body, the limbs would shrivel up, and the mouth would appear to grin
as if laughing, until it was shrunk enough to slip into the cauldron.
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Archeological evidence indicates that the number of children thus burned to death was 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
hundreds of years of idolatry and unthinkable debauchery. Indeed, God brought the same sentence of
destruction on His own people when they sinned in like manner.

So did God break his own commandment (sixth of the Ten Commandments), which says,
“Thou shalt not kill.”

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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