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by Greg Lanier

If you are with God you are in Life. If you are away from God you are in Death.

Part 1: The Problem(s)

Its for Children, only

“Joshua fought the Battle of Jericho…Jericho…Jericho.”

“Joshua fought the Battle of Jericho…and the walls came tumbling down.”

This song features prominently in our kids’ Veggie Tales album on our old school iPod mini. There is also an entertaining Veggie Tales video in which the soldiers of Jericho exchange quips with the Israelites as they walk in silly circles around the city.

Oh, those silly soldiers of Jericho. Joking around right before they are totally annihilated.

I find this kind of thing somewhat puzzling. Making light of the battle of Jericho is like hanging a nice, happy picture of Noah’s ark on the wall of a kid’s bedroom. “Look at all those happy animals and Noah’s family floating on that water, at the bottom of which are hundreds of thousands of dead bodies!”

The Bible does not make light of these things. Neither do non-believers as well as many, many sincere Christians who read the texts of destruction and death in the OT and have serious ethical and theological challenges. Rightly so. In fact, I once told a friend of mine who was facing such struggles, “Look, if you read the narratives of the holy war in the OT, in which entire cities were completely destroyed, and don’t have at least some sort of heartburn, then something’s wrong.”

In recent years the specific topic of the Israelite “holy war” against the Canaanites as part of their conquest of the land has become a hugely important apologetic and theological issue. In fact, one of the primary problems former Westminster Theological Seminary professor Peter Enns repeatedly voices, most recently in his book The Bible Tells Me So (excellent review here), is this very issue: the so-called genocide of the OT makes God out to be an evil, maniacal, bloodthirsty, angry tribal deity that is not worthy of our worship (or, per Enns, requires serious reconstruction according to modern sensibilities). But he’s not the only one with complaints.

So what do we make of the “holy war” in the OT? How should we respond to it as Christians in this era of history? How should we think about it in light of the Islamic jihad?

Introducing a new blog series

Over the next several blog posts, I aim to make some sort of contribution to the large and heated discussion about the conquest and “holy war.” I cannot solve all the problems, of course, but I hope to offer what I would consider a biblical-theological perspective that helps see the holy war in light of the overarching purposes of God.

Most treatments by evangelical scholars in recent years have focused almost exclusively on the ethics of the “holy war.” In the various works by Paul Copan, Tremper Longman, and Stanley Gundry (among many), the main approach has been to demonstrate how God—whom the Bible reveals to be holy, righteous, good, and loving—can possibly be ethically justified in commanding the slaughter of allegedly innocent women and children in the Canaanite lands and elsewhere.

How can a loving God command such a thing?

There have been many excellent lines of argument that appeal to

• how God defines ethics, not us,
• how anyone who even expresses moral outrage at such events must be appealing to some higher authority to even tell them such warfare is wrong (and, thus, must ultimately get that authoritative “norm” from God), and
• how all mankind is under sin and condemnation, so that there is no such thing as an “innocent” Canaanite (or American, or whomever).

Those arguments need not be repeated here.

I aim to complement this ethical focus by highlighting an aspect of the OT “holy war” that far to frequently overlooked: its role in the covenant of grace.

Cherem as part of the Covenant of Grace

Yes, you read that right. Consistent across nearly everything I’ve read on the subject is a tendency to neglect the fact that the very first instance of God’s command for Israel to engage in cherem (Hebrew חרם, for the destruction of the people and property of the target group, often called “the ban” in older English translations; I’ll mainly use “holy war” here) comes in Exodus 23:20–33.

It is a key part of the covenant legislation that God reveals to Moses at Sinai, which began with the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 and includes the cherem in ch. 23. This is immensely significant, and I aim to unpack all the implications of the fact that “holy war” was instituted by God as part of his covenant dealings with mankind.

Approach

I will approach this task in a few steps:

1. The Problems: What are the most common complaints or issues raised about the OT holy war, and how have they often been dealt with?
2. Covenant Setting: How the institution of the Mosaic Covenant defines Holy War.
3. Holy War and the Crushing Seed: The macro framework—rooted in the first administration of the covenant with Adam in Genesis 3—that I will use in discussing this topic.
4. Holy War and the Promise: How the OT holy war relates to the Abrahamic Covenant.
5. Holy War and the Nation: How it, likewise, relates to the Mosaic and Davidic Covenants.
6. Holy War and the Covenant-Maker: What does holy war tell us about the God who commanded it as part of the covenant of grace?
7. Holy War and Christ: How should we understand the OT holy war in light of the eschatological fulfillment of the covenant in Christ?
8. Conclusions

The Problems

The biblical record of Israel’s God-sanctioned conquest of Canaan is a profound emotional and moral stumbling block for modern minds. Within Christian circles, the numerous detailed commands of God pertaining to the total destruction of the Canaanite nations seem to be a horrific and self-contradictory license for genocide: in view of a God of love, “what could possibly be ‘just’ about the wanton and indiscriminate slaughter of ‘women and children, the aged and decrepit’?”[1]

Among non-Christians, the OT “ethnic cleansing” is a point of leverage for despising, mocking, and denying Yahweh as a cosmic bully of “maniacal jealousy … bloodthirsty massacres … [and] xenophobic relish.”[2] This is one of the most common polemics launched against Christians—regardless of whether you are conservative or liberal or other—by popular atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, etc.), skeptics (such as Thom Stark), secularists, and, increasingly, self-proclaimed “progressive” Christians such as Enns, Rachel Held Evans, Brian McLaren, and many many more.

As the accounts of Holy War occupy a significant portion of Genesis-Joshua, the Christian is forced to deal with the questions raised by the Conquest that are absolutely central to the faith:

• Did God really command this activity? (or is the Bible error?)
• Did the events really happen? (or, again, is the Bible in error?)
• If either of the above is true, then is God truly good and loving?
• How can God morally justify the conquest in light of other commandments that prohibit murder? Does God contradict himself here?
• What makes the conquest different than the Crusades, Hitler, Stalin, Rwanda, or other instances of genocide?

These issues are massive in importance. As mentioned above, my hope is to begin to provide a biblical-theological framework for understanding the OT holy war that comes alongside other arguments that have addressed several of the ethical sides of the question. But first, let us look at a few types of responses to these problems that have been offered over the years.

(Problematic) Solutions to the Problems

Various attempts to deal with the implications of what some consider “genocide” in Canaan fall along three broad categories, each of which faces serious problems.

(a) De-historicizing

First, a number of biblical critics have attempted to resolve the Holy War dilemma by declaring the events in the pertinent OT books unhistorical or mythical.

Some maintain that the conquest was crafted by the original biblical authors, or perhaps imported into scripture via the later “Deuteronomic” editor or other redactors, who desired merely to created these stories as common Ancient Near Eastern myths to explain how the ancient tribes came together as one nation (the so-called “amphictyony” theory), much like Greco-Roman epic writers or philosophers created their mythology of the battles of the gods to explain the rise of their nation.[3]

Some postulate that perhaps God was speaking of spiritual warfare but Moses and Joshua misunderstood it as literal.[4]

Some historians claim that, regardless of what Exod 23 (and Deut 7) commanded, the Holy War was never actually carried out in history. In fact, a wide range of scholars doubt the exodus and conquest accounts of the books of Exodus, Numbers, and Joshua altogether and claim that essentially none of it is historically accurate.[5]

All three of these approaches question the fundamental integrity of the biblical narratives and, thus, undermine (usually intentionally) the inspiration and inerrancy of the OT.

(b) Theological Fragmentation

Secondly, a more common approach is to argue along theological lines that the conquest of Canaan is incompatible with what we know about God throughout the Bible, and, thus, could not have happened or have been commanded by God.

This approach is driven entirely by a desire—which seems admirable on the surface—to uphold a view of God as all-loving, merciful, and kind to sinners. Such a God, the argument goes, could not have commanded such a travesties against men and women, since God loves all mankind.

The net effect is either that the entirety of the biblical narratives are called into question because of the seemingly “unloving” things that God commands or does, or a sharp theological wedge is driven between the OT God (who is mean and nasty) and the NT God (who is loving and kind): as one scholar summarizes it, “The God portrayed in the Old Testament was full of fury against sinners, but the God incarnate in Jesus is not.”[6]

There are a TON of problems with this view, and I’ll just briefly mention two: (a) love and kindness are definitely central attributes of God that are affirmed all over Scripture … but they are not the only attributes mentioned (he is also a jealous and just and wrathful God); (b) Jesus himself, along with all the NT writers, never even remotely suggested that the God of the OT was in some sense different than they understood him in the new era, or that he changed, or that he even needed to change.

(c) Ethical Reframing

A final category of solutions focuses on how the OT holy war violates (modern) ethical codes.

Some argue that it is impossible, on any moral code, for God to have a “morally sufficient” reason to annihilate the Canaanites, especially women and children.[7] In other words, everyone in the modern day implicitly knows that such an event is evil. Hence, if the Israelites did this, or if they wrote the narratives that command it or describe it, then they must be simply reflecting an earlier, pre-modern time in which the ethics were not as enlightened as they are today. So we must see them simply as ancient backwards people doing what ancient backwards people, and, thus, we should write them off altogether as irrelevant to us today.

Others ignore the historical issues altogether and simply say that, even if God commanded it, and even if Israel did it, such acts of violence can be used to justify later acts of violence (such as, say, the westward conquest of American settlers over the Native Americans).[8] Thus, we have to throw them all out and focus only on the good parts of the Bible that fit with our current cultural sensibilities.

The chief flaw of this approach, among many, is this:

• How do ”we” all apparently know that such an activity (or any activity) is morally wrong?
• Who says?
• Is it really true that such a moral precept is universal?
• How can we prove that?
• We have to appeal to something to tell us that it is wrong … but if that “something” is not the unchanging word of God, what is it?
• National laws (which can and often have been rewritten)?
• Ethical codes among pagan philosophers (who were stuck in the same worldview that this argument condemns as outdated)?
• Ourselves? (but then who decides who is right?)

Proposing a Better Solution

In short, all three of these solutions to the problem offered mostly by critics of the Bible have tremendous problems. I believe many better solutions have been offered, especially along the ethical lines, such as Copan’s Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God, and Longman/Reid God is a Warrior.

I will focus on a different line of reasoning that attempts to understand the conquest theologically as it relates to who God is and how he is bringing to fulfillment his promise to redeem his people through the covenant of grace.  In so doing I will approach the OT holy war as historical fact and as something commanded by God, who is unchanging from the OT to the NT, and who is a God of love. So I will turn to that task in the next post.

Part 2: Covenant Setting: The Covenant Context of the Cherem

In discussions about the holy war within Christian circles—let alone within non-Christian circles that throw around the heavily laden term “genocide” repetitively—it is rarely noticed that the holy war command forms part of the covenant legislation revealed at Sinai and later recapitulated on the plains of Moab prior to the entry into the Promised Land. This neglect is very unfortunate, as I will argue that understanding the cherem—a term which I will define further below—in light of the covenant context in which it originates is absolutely essential to making sense of it biblically.

God’s command regarding the destruction of the Canaanites and the takeover of the land appears first in substantial detail in Exodus 23:20–33, which forms the concluding aspect of God’s revelation given to Moses on his first sojourn on Mount Sinai amid the terrifying theophany of the Lord. Here is the outline of the account:

Prologue to the Covenant

(Exod 19): recounting God’s mighty act of deliverance in bringing Israel out of bondage in Egypt. This constitutes the redemptive indicative for the entire Mosaic Covenant: God has saved his people, and now he gives them commands to govern the way in which they are to live in light of that redemption.

Declaration of the Covenant

(Exod 20–23)

Ten Commandments (Exod 20:1–21): the moral core of the Mosaic Covenant

• Commandments 1–4: Love your God
• Commandments 5–10: Love your Neighbor
• Elaboration of Commandments (Exod 20:22–23:19: regulations for life in Israel under the rule of Yahweh
• “Love your God”: Worship laws (altars)
• “Love your Neighbor”
• Personal conduct laws
• Property laws
• Social justice laws
• “Love your God”: Worship laws (festivals)

Institution of the Cherem / Holy War (Exod 23:20–33)

Confirmation of the Covenant (Exod 24)

You can see from this outline that the context of the first major discussion of the upcoming conquest is rather important. God has reiterated to his people that he alone is their savior, that he has redeemed them for himself, and that he has a great plan for them: he will make them a holy nation that will exist as a beacon of light on earth to worship him rightly. He then gives them the Mosaic covenant, which, as I’ve argued extensively elsewhere, is a central part of the Covenant of Grace. This covenant in its essential form presented here in Exod 20–23 is focused around the two parts of the Ten Commandments: loving God and loving neighbor. While the principial form of these moral commandments are given in the Ten, the subsequent chapters elaborate on them. After this elaboration, God promises that he will lead Israel into the land he has promised them, where they will be able to live according to this covenant by worshipping him and loving one another according to his commandments. Moses then concludes the covenant institution and immediately begins the confirmation ceremony, which, notably, reaches its crescendo with these all-important words: “And Moses took the blood and threw it on the people and said, ‘Behold the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words’” (Exod 24:8).

Decades later, after a prolonged period of wandering in the desert waiting for this conquest to begin, Moses renews the covenant in Deuteronomy 5–7. Though the account is quite different, the logical flow is strikingly similar:

Prologue to the Covenant

• (Deut 4:44–49): Moses recaps where the Lord has brought them when he took them out of Egypt

Declaration of the Covenant

• (Deut 5–7)
• Ten Commandments (Deut 5:1–21)
• Elaboration of the Commandments (Deut 5:22–6:25, 7:6-15)
• Love the Lord (the Shema)
• Remember and keep all the commandments the Lord has given you when you come into the Promised Land
• You are a people whom God has chosen to worship him

Institution of the Cherem / holy war (Deut 7:1–5, 16–26)

Remember the Lord (there is no ceremony this time, as that has already taken place in Exod 24)

The holy war in its covenantal context, then, somehow plays a key role in how Israel will fulfill its calling to love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, and might as well as fulfill their social responsibilities towards one another. Regardless of whether this strikes against our modern sensibilities, the plain fact is that the holy war is positioned near the very center of the Mosaic Covenant, which itself propels along the Covenant of Grace that God has established with his people. We will return to these implications in later posts, but for now I simply note that, if we want to understand the conquest/holy war, we have to do so by starting in the right place: namely, in the covenant documentation where it was commanded.

So let us look at those passages a little more closely.

Defining the Cherem

The passages mentioned above in which the holy war is outline read as follows (ESV):

Both texts are quite dense, so I will simply outline the key features of what God is commanding:

The Divine Warrior:

God will send his “angel,” his “hornet” (which in the Hebrew is quite tricky to translate), and his “terror” before the Israelites to guarantee victory. Moreover, God promises that he will “be an enemy to your enemies … and blot them out.” Finally, God makes it clear that he is fighting the battle, not Israel by themselves. He declares, “Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased and possess the land.”

The Enemies:

God names six tribes in Exodus and adds a seventh in the Deuteronomy account: Amorites, Hittites, Girgashites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hivites, and Jebusites. Numerous commentators point out that the sheer number of opposing people groups suggests the fullness of the opposition that the Israelites are facing in order to live out God’s covenant in the land. Note also that the fact that all of the people groups, rather than a single one, are designated by God should immediately call into question the whole “genocide” hypothesis.

The Nature of the Holy War:

God’s stipulations concerning the war include the following: utterly overthrow them, break down their pillars and altars, and undertake the cherem (Deut 7:2, 26). This term is notoriously difficult to translate, but the ESV is as good as any: “devote to destruction.” As later elaborated in Numbers (31:17–23; 33:52), the cherem includes destruction of living things, burning of flammable things, and the carrying of noncombustible metals into the tabernacle. The cherem involves, in other words, the total destruction of all material things as well as the lives of every man (in some cases, Deut 20:13) or every man, woman, and child (in other cases, Deut 20:16). It is deadly serious.

The Rationale:

The Exodus account most clearly elucidates the rationale for the holy war, and, perhaps not surprisingly, it is covenantal in nature. As a conclusion to the covenant legislation (shown above), God declares: “You shall make no covenant with them and their gods. They shall not dwell in your land, lest they make you sin against me; for if you serve their gods, it will surely be a snare to you” (Exod 23:32–33). This is hugely important: the holy war is commanded in order that the covenant with Yahweh might not be put in jeopardy through falling into the sin patterns of the enemies of God. Deut 7:2–3 reiterates the same covenantal points.

Throughout both accounts, the recurring theme is hard to miss: Yahweh fights the battle, and he calls upon his people to trust in him through this bloody conquest. The cherem is holy war—it is “Yahweh war.” Just as he has called his people into covenant with him, so also he undertakes the battle necessary for them to live under that covenant without it being jeopardized by the people currently occupying the land.

The cherem serves the covenant.

We may not like it; we may find that logic repulsive. But it is God’s logic nonetheless: he fights the battle against his enemies so that his covenant people may live in holiness before him.

But why? Why destroy these ancient Near Eastern people groups? Why could there not be a peaceful, diplomatic solution? Why were all these “innocent” enemies dealt with this way? And how can this possibly further the Covenant of Grace? We will turn to these vital questions in the next post.

Part 3: Seed Conflict

Cain and Abel in Genesis 4.

Throughout history there have been longstanding conflicts between families—between generations born within those families. In a way, this repeated pattern has shaped all of human history, for it goes all the way back to the very beginning, when God promised there would be enmity between the offspring (“seed”) of Eve and the offspring (“seed”) of the Serpent. This “seed conflict” has been playing out ever since, and it shapes the next step in our analysis of OT holy war.

In the prior post I established that the command for the Israelites to engage in this holy war was rooted in the covenant (specifically Exodus 23 and Deuteronomy 7), which is significant for how we understand its fit within the purposes of God. In this post, we will rewind to Genesis 3 to understand how the very first instantiation of the covenant of grace sets the stage for understanding the conflict between the sons of God and the sons of Satan, of which the holy war is a specific case.

Approaching a biblical-theological “answer”

It is common among those who attempt to provide a solution to the conundrum of the holy war to make appeal to one or more of these three points:

• The holy war took place once the “sin of the Amorites” had reached its fullness (Gen 15:16), and it effected God’s judgment for those sins (the Amorites here serving as a representative for all the Canaanite peoples)
• The holy war took place so that God could provide the promised land for his people (e.g., Deut 9:28)
• The holy war took place to eradicate the people who would present a threat to pure Israelite worship (Exod 23:33)

It is very much true that the holy war is related at least in part to these three points. And each of these reasons bears witness to the truth that, regardless of the ethics of the Holy War, the biblical narrative presents it ultimately as God’s “will and purpose,”[1] as indicated by the repetition of “I” and “I will” in the text (at least 16 instances in Exod 23:20–33).

It is important, however, to view Holy War in a broader redemptive-historical context, which, as will be argued, it clearly occupies in the Mosaic texts. Each of these reasons are but pieces to a larger, integrated understanding of the place the Canaanite conquest in God’s salvation acts for his people.

Dramatic Religio-Political Continuation of the Bloody, Cosmic Conflict

Yawheh’s war over the promised land is, in effect, a dramatic religio-political continuation of the bloody, cosmic conflict between the redeemed and the wicked that was already taking place in both the spiritual and earthly realms before the Exodus 23 command was revealed: that is, the conflict between the “seeds.”

Seed Conflict

Briefly stated, “seed” theology organizes the events of redemptive history around the conflict that God announced to Satan in Gen 3:15:

I will put enmity (Heb. איב or ‘yb) between you and the woman,
and between your offspring (Heb. zera ‘seed’) and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.

The seed of the woman (“her offspring”) represents the redeemed line, namely, those who are part of the people of God. This line culminates in the Messiah, Jesus Christ, as we learn in Gal 3:16 (“It does not say, ‘And to offsprings,’ referring to many, but referring to one, ‘And to your offspring,’ who is Christ”).

The seed of the serpent (“your offspring”) is the wicked line of Satan, namely, those who are not part of the people of God, those who are consigned to destruction because they are enemies of God.

Genesis 3:15 anticipates that these two “seeds” or lines will be engaged in mortal conflict throughout time until the “he” (Jesus) comes who will bruise/crush the serpent’s seed for good.

This “seed conflict” is a major organizing framework from Genesis onward,[2] manifesting itself throughout the OT:

• Cain vs Abel
• Noah and the flood
• Ham vs Shem
• Jacob vs Esau
• Israel vs Egypt
• Israel vs the Canaanites
• Northern Kingdom (Israel/Samaria) vs Southern Kingdom (Judah)
• Israel vs Assyria
• Judah vs. Babylon

And so on

Seed Conflict and Covenant

The key instrument through which God directs this war is, somewhat surprisingly, the very Covenant of Grace  of which Gen 3:15 itself constitutes the first administration, the Adamic covenant.[3]

In this stage of the covenant, God promises to redeem the good seed and judge the bad seed. He promises that, though Satan and his seed will attack his chosen people (the seed of the woman) throughout time, God will ultimately send a “he” (the seed) who will be victorious.

In other words, the somewhat surprising truth is that the progress of the covenant of grace parallels and, in a sense, is effected through the victory of the redeemed seed over the condemned seed. The conflict between the seeds is the very thing that the covenant of grace simultaneously anticipates and solves; the seed war drives the covenant of grace forward to that point in time when the victor comes on the scene.

In a stunning way, God promises that there will be enmity—which will always be under his control—but also promises that he will provide the seed who will overcome this enmity in victory in the end.

This, then, forms the background of the holy war, for the holy war is a stage in the outworking of this primordial seed conflict. The cherem  against Canaan is a key part of the covenant relationship between Yahweh and the seed of the woman and, thus, plays a monumental role in the outworking of the covenant.

Thus, all the elements of holy war are unified—and justified—in the fact that the conflict between Israel and the Canaanites actualizes God’s gracious covenant, whereby he is redeeming one seed and defeating another.

Seed theology, with the covenantal administrations that unfold as part of it, is the key interpretive framework for understanding the conquest. Thus, in subsequent posts we will next look at how this seed conflict relates to the next stages in the outworking of the covenant of grace: the covenant with Abraham, with Moses, and the new covenant with Christ. We will see that the holy war with the Canaanites, which was kicked off, as it were, with Gen 3:15, is also intimately related with these other stages of the covenant.

Part 4: The Abrahamic Promise

Renovating an old, dilapidated house can be tricky. Sometimes you can fix things by ripping out some old wood and replacing it, or shoring up the foundation, or replacing some plumbing, or putting on a new roof. Sometimes you can fix an uneven floor by replacing some joists. Sometimes you can repair rotted windows without having to rip out studs or plywood. Sometimes the termite problem is not so severe, so that they can be dealt with with chemicals. Sometimes drainage issues around the house can be remedied with moving some earth around.

But sometimes the problems are so bad that you need to bulldoze the whole thing and start over.

And that’s what God needed to do to prepare a new home for his chosen people, Israel, when he initiated the “holy war” to secure their future. In this post, we look at how the OT holy war to take possession of the land of Canaan fulfills the promise God made to Abraham.

In the prior post, I introduced how the holy war is part of the temporal outworking (in historical time) of the “seed conflict” that God declared would take place between the redeemed seed of Eve and the cursed seed of Satan (Gen 3:15). In other words, the holy war as a manifestation of the “seed conflict” carries out the covenant of grace that God established with Adam.

In this post, we will take the next step to see how holy war, which is part of the covenant instituted with Moses, also carries forward the covenant administration God made with Abraham.

I will outline three specific ways the OT holy war—perhaps surprisingly—directly fulfills important aspects of the Abrahamic promise.

(a) The “Immanuel Principle”: God fights for his people

First, in the declaration of “holy war” in Exodus 23 we see an overwhelming emphasis on God’s presence with his people and his fighting their battle. In particular, we see in Exod 23:22–31 the following features:

• God will make the enemies of Israel his own enemies(“I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries”). One thinks of how your dad has your back if someone is messing with you: your enemies become his enemies.
• God promises to be with his people in battle. He declares he will  send his angel (v23), his “terror” (v27), and his “hornets” (v28; a very difficult word to translate) before the Israelites to lead them in the fight. He promises to be directly present with his people through these intermediaries. Moreover, as this war plays out in the book of Joshua, we see how the most visible manifestation of his presence—the ark of the covenant—takes on a central role in the war procession.
• God promises to be the one who secures victory, not Israel. He declares that “I will drive them out before you” (v30). It is HIS battle.

The net effect is a clear recollection of what is often called the “Immanuel principle” of the covenant of grace: that Yahweh will be our God, and we will be his people. This promise was central to the covenant God made with Abraham, as we seen in Gen 17:7: “And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.”

The Immanuel principle is reiterated again and again throughout the OT, as in Gen 12:1–3; Gen 17:8; Exod 6:7; Exod 29:45; Lev 26:11–12; Deut 7:6; Deut 14:2; Deut 27:9; Deut 29:13; Jer 7:22–23; and numerous others.

The Immanuel principle highlights a particular aspect of God’s saving work, namely, his electing purpose in declaring them to be his people in the first place. Notably, this idea of the election of Israel, which is implied in the Exodus 23 account, takes center stage in the second version of the holy war legislation in Deut 7:6–8:

6 For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. 7 It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, 8 but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers.

Notice the logic: God declares that his people are holy … that he has chosen them to be his special possession out of all the peoples of the earth … and that their impending victory in the holy war (which the passage goes on to describe) is completely unmerited: it is NOT because of any special thing about Israel, but solely because God loved them and swore (to Abraham) that he would be their God, and they would be his people.

The holy war, in other words, is a direct result of God’s electing of Israel to be the holy, redeemed “seed” through which he would accomplish his purposes. We may dislike that logic and the violence it entails—as modern logic may entail—but it is there in the text nonetheless. Fundamentally, God commanded holy war because he had declared to Abraham that he would be their God, and they would be his holy, special, covenant people. God commanded holy war because he had elected Israel as the “seed of the woman,” not the Canaanites, who were the “seed of the serpent.”[1]

(b) Fulfilling the Abrahamic covenant’s 3 core promises

Second, the holy war not only fulfills the overarching Immanuel principle which is central to the Abrahamic as well as all other stages of the covenant of grace, but it also fulfills (at least temporally) the three specific promises that God made to Abraham: seed, land, and blessing to the nations.

“To make you the father of many nations.” One key aspect of God’s promise to Abraham is that he would bless his “seed” (same word used in Gen 3:15) in Gen 15:4-5 and make him the father of many nations (Gen 17:4). God emphatically declares that the children of Abraham are the elect, righteous seed that are part of the greater seed conflict. In contrast, the Canaanites represent the wicked seed that exists in constant conflict with God’s chosen seed; they are a recapitulation of the evil Cainites (Gen 4:16–24), the cursed descendants of Ham (“’Cursed be Canaan,’” Gen 9:25) who would war against the children of Shem,[2] and the people from whom Abraham emphatically forbid Isaac to find a wife (Gen 24:3). The Canaanites are, in other words, the enemy of the seed of the Abrahamic covenant, those who would curse Abraham and be cursed by God (Gen 12:3).

“To your offspring I will give this land.” A second key aspect of the Abrahamic covenant is, of course, God’s promise that he would give the land itself to Abraham. This aspect often gets overlooked, particularly among those who tend to separate the Abrahamic covenant (as a more spiritual “promise”-covenant that is faith-based) and the Mosaic covenant (as the more earth-bound “law”-covenant that deals with land, rules, ceremonies, etc.); I’ve dealt with this misconception in my long Moses series. It is quite clear, however, that central to the Abrahamic stage of the covenant is the land promise expressed in Gen 12:7 and Gen 15:18-20. Thus, when God commands Israel to force the Canaanites off “your land” (Exod 23:33a)—and when he himself declares he will do it—he is simply making good on his promise to Abraham. The idea that Canaan belongs to Israel via the covenant is reiterated in numerous places such as Lev 14:34 and Num 13:2.

“Through you many nations will be blessed.” Finally, God promises Abraham in Gen 18:18 that “all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him.” We see in, say, Romans 4 and Galatians 2–3 how this principle plays out when the people of God expands beyond believing Israel to include elect Gentiles. But this principle was also in effect, albeit in an unexpected way, in the holy war. Even through the conquest, bloody and violent though it was, God was executing his purposes for Israel to be a blessing to all nations, including those who, at the time of the conquest, were of the seed of the serpent. By first driving out the evil nations and causing them to “turn their backs” to Israel (Exod 23:27), God was preparing the way for a future time when Israel’s mission would be to attract the wicked to repent and come to worship at the Mountain of the Lord in the promised land once again (e.g., Mic 4:1–5). In other words, sometimes you have to burn the whole thing down to salvage it. The very same Canaanites who were forced out of the land to make a sacred space for God’s chosen, holy people Israel to develop into a nation through whom the promise Seed—Jesus Christ—would come … these same Canaanites become the very Gentile branch that is later grafted into the people of God. God’s ways are mysterious in this sense, but they are there nonetheless. The holy war prepared a way for Abraham to be a blessing to many nations who would later repent and return to Zion, metaphorically speaking.

In sum, the holy war is a means by which God advanced and temporally fulfilled his multi-faceted covenant promises to Abraham.

(c) Faith as the driving force

This may seem like the odd-man out of this list of three, since at first glance the OT holy war seems as far from the NT understanding of “faith” as possible. That would be a misconception. The holy war declaration in Exod 23 and Deut 7 is laced through with elements of faith, and indeed when we get to the book of Joshua, faith is the prevailing posture commanded upon the Israelites. For instance:

Exod 23:21–25: The obedience of faith. God commands Israel to pay close attention, to obey him, to worship him alone.

Deut 7:17–18: Reliance on God. God commands Israel to trust in his faithfulness and not in their own strength, calling them to remember and rest in his redemptive work for them in the past (=exodus).

Deut 7:21: Trusting in his presence. God commands them to trust in the fact that the almighty God, Yahweh himself, is “in your midst.” He is their object of faith.

In other words, the holy war is an ultimate litmus test for Israel’s faith: will they place their absolute trust in Yahweh, or will they run away after other gods and put their faith in them instead (Deut 29:18)? The circumstances of the holy war forced the Israelites—who stood between the Abrahamic promise and a future fulfillment—to place their trust in God against all odds, against more powerful nations, and against a seemingly impossible task.

Summary

To summarize, the very design of holy war – the promise of Yaweh’s presence with the elect seed, the fact that the seed inherits covenant promises through conflict with the wicked seed, and the operative principle of faith – clearly positions the Canaanite conquest in the redemptive stream flowing through Abraham’s promised seed.

It is no wonder, then, that the stipulations themselves follow on a declaration of God’s faithfulness in delivering Israel from Egypt (Exod 20:2), which he promised Abraham (Gen 15:13–14), and continually make reference to the fact that God is “keeping the oath he swore to [their] fathers,” the patriarchs (Deut 7:8; cf. Deut 1:8; 6:18–19).

Part 5: The Covenant with Moses

It reminded me of two things: (1) the statement made in the article that “There’s every ground to trust God had a good reason for whatever he ordered” is valid, but what exactly is that reason? … and (2) It’s been nearly 2 months since I’ve posted on this topic, so it is high time I move the ball forward.

As mentioned at the outset of this series, I’m taking a different approach to the question of the holy war or conquest of Canaan. Most folks, including Dr. Williams, argue the issue from an apologetics perspective. That’s all well and necessary, but my focus has been to attempt to articulate a biblical theology of the holy war: that is, what purpose does it play within the Bible, and what light can that shed on the issue?

The aim of this post is to analyze the holy war from the angle of the covenant God made with Moses. Recall from post #2 that the first time God commanded Israel to wage war with the Canaanites, he did so in the context of the covenant he gave Moses at Mount Sinai. That is, the declaration of holy war (cherem) was part of the Book of the Covenant and comes shortly after the giving of the Ten Commandments. We’ve seen in the prior two posts that the notion of the holy war goes back before Moses, namely, to Adam and Abraham, but it is intensified in a historical sense with the time of the Mosaic Covenant.

So let’s see how this plays out in the time of Moses.

The assumption that drives how the holy war plays out with Moses and, ultimately, Joshua, is that Israel has been consecrated by God to be a nation of his own, a special people chosen from among all others within which God would work out his saving purposes. This choosing or election of Israel itself begins, in fact, with an act of holy war: the battle with Egypt, the exodus, and the crossing of the Red Sea. That is to say, the nation itself is created through God’s fighting the battle with Egypt to deliver them. It is another instance of “seed conflict” between the people of God (seed of the woman) and God’s enemies (seed of Satan). We must not forget this, for it shapes how the rest of the holy war with Canaan will play out. God has already fought for his people and won a great deliverance—a deliverance that is, in fact, THE chief redemptive event of the entire Old Testament. But that theme is for another day.

This setting-apart of Israel as God’s special people prepares the way for the next stage of the ongoing “seed conflict”: namely, the creation of a space in which God’s purposes for Israel could play out. They needed land; they needed security; they needed a place where they could live under God’s law and worship him. Hence, the holy war that God commanded in Exodus 23 / Deuteronomy 7 was directed at two ends: national purposes and religious purposes. Let’s look at each briefly in turn.

(a) National Purposes

After decades during which God’s people were sojourners in Egypt and the wilderness (cf. Num 33:1–49), the legislation for the holy war aimed at achieving three objectives for the new nation:

National boundaries. First, in Exod 23:31, God delineates the national boundaries to Moses, saying, “I will set your border from the Red Sea to the Sea of the Philistines, and from the wilderness to the Euphrates.”[1] Note the emphasis on God’s action, as we’ve seen previously: I will set. Not you. God demonstrates that he is sovereign over the details of the outcome and that he is setting up a physical-temporal nation with clear boundaries — taken from seven evil nations — through which he would perpetuate the righteous seed.[2]

Provision. Secondly, God promises Israel that it will receive material blessings as a result of its consecration to him: “You shall serve the LORD your God, and he will bless your bread and your water, and I will take sickness away from among you. None shall miscarry or be barren in your land; I will fulfill the number of your days” (Exod 23:25–26). God would bring agricultural, reproductive, and physical blessing on his newly constituted nation once they are in the land. Note the two key dimensions of the Mosaic Covenant shining through here: God’s grace (I will do this) combined with the expectation of obedience (You shall serve). For more on this, see my Moses series.

Security. Finally, God demonstrates that he designed the conquest in such a way to preserve the new nation. He would eliminate the enemies in a progressive fashion to enable Israel to subdue the land in an orderly way. He declares, “I will not drive them out from before you in one year, lest the land become desolate and the wild beasts multiply against you. Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased and possess the land” (Exod 23:29–30; cf. Deut 7:22–23). He also strongly commanded Israel to abstain from forming any national treaties with the immediately surrounding nations (Exod 23:32) to preserve their political independence. Moreover, while on the one hand God will “give their kings into your hand” (Deut 7:24), he made provision for Israel to appoint a king to rule over the nation as God’s vice-regent, ensuring unity and stability among the tribes (Deut 17:14ff).[3] Importantly, this king must be of the seed of the woman, not of the serpent (“One from among your brothers … not … a foreigner,” Deut 17:15).

In sum, the politico-national angle of Yahweh War demonstrates God’s concern for providing a stable, well-defined, economically viable nation in which his redemptive purposes through Moses could take root. The conquest was a key step in the transformation of Israel, as a military and political nation, from a seedling to a mature entity that would fight against evil.

The national and military element is not the only emphasis, however. Worship is the primary goal. To that we turn.

(b) Religious Purposes

More prominent throughout the holy war legislation than the political angle is the pervasive religious emphasis: holy war is primarily about protecting the righteous seed from the wickedness and idolatry of the evil seed. In the Mosaic Covenant, God’s interest again and again centers around purity in worship: that Israel would worship only the true God, and do so rightly.

However, the history of the conflict between the “seeds,” since the time of Cain and Abel (recall the issue over their sacrifices in Gen 4:1-7), has been characterized by a clash of worship, as there has loomed the threat that the seed of the serpent would pollute, defile, or even destroy the religious worship of the righteous and, thus, jeopardize its very continuation. Thus, the conquest ensures that God’s holy people remain undefiled. Let us look at a few ways this shows up in the text.

Monotheism

Having given the Ten Commandments that identify the true God and the imperative to worship him alone (Exod 20), and having further detailed the parameters for such things as sacrifices and Sabbath-keeping (Exod 23:10–19), God then commands Moses, in the context of the holy war declaration, that “you shall not bow down to their gods nor serve them, nor do as they do” (Exod 23:24).

Pure worship

He continues by stating that Israel must not make covenants with “their gods” and concludes, “They shall not dwell in your land, lest they make you sin against me; for if you serve their gods, it will surely be a snare to you” (Exod 23:32-33).  God declares that the worship of the Canaanites is wicked, that the worship of the Israelites is to be pure and true, that the presence of the pagan practices could thwart Israel’s calling, and, thus, that Israel must be aggressive to eradicate the pagans or risk religious devastation.

Protection from themselves

Ironically, the Israelites were not commanded to destroy Canaan because they were somehow morally superior, but quite the opposite. Because of Israel’s weakness and rebelliousness (Deut 9:6–7), God acts aggressively to protect his covenant people from pagan inroads that could destroy the seed of the woman. So God moves to remove anything that would cause his people to stumble. God commands Israel to destroy idols, altars, and shrines in order to protect them from the temptation to religious syncretism, and he forbids them to intermarry with Canaanites, “for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods” (Deut 7:3–4).

Establish a national-religious pattern

Finally, we see how the holy war was commanded by God in such a way that the religious worship of the people would be their identifying mark as a nation. (a) Before the inaugural battle of Jericho, all the soldiers are circumcised (Josh 5:2–12)—thus applying the covenant sign to the newly set-apart nation. (b) The ark of the covenant takes a central role in the battles (Josh 3:14-17; 6:7-11; 7:6; 8:33). This is doubly important, since the holy war declaration was stored in the ark, and since God’s presence himself is symbolized via the ark. (c) The Levites take on a very important role in the conquest: leading the people across the Jordan (Josh 4:10), carrying the ark into battle (Josh 6:6), blowing the trumpets that were instrumental in the battle of Jericho (Josh 6:13), receiving the spoils and bringing them before the Lord (Num 31:54), and orchestrating the destruction of the material cherem spoils (Deut 7:25–26).

This is key: God’s declaration of holy war is not, strictly speaking, to remove pagan nations that practice idolatry, but rather to exterminate idolatry itself. To, in other words, “purge the evil from Israel” (Deut 17:12) from within and from without.

Many specific details of the conquest narrative reveal the underlying religious nature of holy war and, in particular, its connection with key elements of Mosaic law and Israel’s sacrificial system: circumcision, Passover, ark, offerings, worship, and the priesthood.

God is, in effect, drawing his people into a war against the false gods that challenge his rule in order that he might consecrate a nation through which he may be worshiped rightly on earth.

We may not like this logic, but it is there, and it is not up to us to try to excuse it or change it to fit modern secular sensibilities. Evil is real, and God endeavors to crush it to protect his people, the righteous seed.

Part 6: The Covenant Maker

Since the Vietnam and Korean wars in the U.S. (though the roots were there before, no doubt), there has been a tendency in the U.S. among some groups to voice a strongly critical opinion regarding U.S. military troops. They are often seen less as brave freedom-defenders and more as villains for fighting various wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, and others. Note, for instance, the critical backlash against American Sniper and the charge that  the deceased Chris Kyle is not a patriotic American soldier but an Islamophobic, Arab-hating, blood-thirsty criminal.

In response, there has been an equally strong counter-reaction that has lauded American soldiers (the yellow ribbon magnets, etc.), zealously defended Chris Kyle, and treated all soldiers as heroes.

While the public ostracizing of returning troops may not be as strong now as it was with Vietnam, the anti-soldier attitude is still present.

This state of affairs is interesting in that it ignores a key feature of warfare: the soldiers themselves do not pick which battles to fight. Their leaders do. Yes, the soldiers pull the triggers and make decisions in the field and so forth—and they are responsible for their actions—but in principle the war is the leader’s war. Any blame for whether a war is just or unjust falls primarily on the one who wages it, not the ones who are sent.

While my goal here is not to get into the modern war question, this analogy does bring us to an important aspect of the OT cherem.

Recap

We are nearing the end of a series I began about 7 years ago (or so it seems!) on the “holy war” that Israel waged against Canaan in the OT.

I have been arguing from the beginning that the OT holy war against Canaan is an instance in the historical unfolding of a primordial battle between the “seed of the woman” and the “seed of the serpent.” This seed conflict, in turn, pushes forward the covenantal outworking of God’s redemptive plan.

In this post, I will wrap up the OT discussion by fleshing out a few macro considerations we need to keep in mind regarding the OT holy war, which highlight a key truth: the cherem was Yahweh’s war. It was, in modern scholarly parlance, Yahweh-War.

Holy War, Covenant, and the Covenant-Maker

I have argued previously that central to the development of the Covenant of Grace in the OT is the fact that it drives forward the promise made in Genesis 3:15, that God would send a redeemer to crush the serpent, though in the meantime there would be an ongoing battle between the righteous and wicked “seed” in humanity. The conquest of Canaan is a temporal instance of this battle, and the fact that this war is declared at the end of the covenant documentation at Sinai indicates its relationship to the covenant itself.

I have, thus, labored to show how the cherem war fulfills—temporally, at least—various aspects of these stages in the covenant. What I have not made as clear yet, however, is the role of Yahweh as the covenant-maker.

Behind the declaration of the war on Canaan in Exodus 23 and elsewhere is the fact that God is the sovereign king or suzerain who declares the covenant and the war that is part of it. It is not, ultimately, Israel’s war. It is Yahweh’s. This changes the equation considerably. Any moral questions about the war—was it “genocide,” was it just, etc.—must be taken to Yahweh himself and not blamed on Israel.

I will develop this somewhat briefly through four observations:

(1) Yahweh declares the war

Yahweh is the one in Genesis 3:15 who declares that “I will put” enmity between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman. It is not a random conflict, but one ordained from the very beginning and sovereignly administered by God to his own righteous ends.

In the same way, Yahweh is the one who declares war on Canaan. It is not Moses.  In the summary/recap of the covenant legislation where the cherem is instituted, Moses records Yahweh as saying the following: “And he said, ‘Behold, I am making a covenant. … Observe what I command you this day. Behold, I will drive out before you the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. ‘” (Exod 34:10-11).

The entire war arises out of God’s sovereign command. This makes sense, for Israel lacked a human king at this point, as Yahweh was their king. Only kings can declare war, not troops. Not even Moses. Yahweh as king declares the holy war.

(2) Yahweh enlists the troops

Second, as Yahweh is the one who declares the war, he also conscripts Israel into his service as his vassal-army to fight it: “obey his [Yahweh’s] voice … utterly overthrow them … serve the LORD your God … I will give the inhabitants of the land into your hand, and you shall drive them out before you. ” (Exod 23:22, 24, 25, 31). Moreover, he declares that Israel’s enemies are really his enemies: “I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries” (Exod 23:22).

God had begun building the army during the exodus event itself when he brought an enlarged nation out of Egypt. The army becomes more formalized during the wilderness wandering (note the censuses in Num 1 and 26). By the time they reach Jericho, the men of Israel are consecrated to Yahweh as his army.

As Kline puts it, God’s exercise of his right to conscript his vassals, the nation of Israel, into his military service is what one would expect of a suzerain in covenant with a vassal: “the requirement to render military assistance to the suzerain … is heavily stressed in ancient treaties, and it assumes a place of considerable prominence in Yahweh’s covenant with Israel.”[1]

In other words, Israel as vassal is not fighting its own independent battle against the Canaanites, but is serving its suzerain-king in fighting his battle, playing out the enmity that he put between them and his enemies.

(3) Yahweh wins the battle

Though God is implementing Holy War through the Israelite army, the various narratives and the war declaration itself witness to the fact that in all cases it is Yahweh who gives victory or defeat. Moses indicates this with the heavy repetition of “I” in Exodus 23 and God’s mentioning his angel, terror, and hornets as the efficient causes of bringing the Israelites into battle (v. 23), guarding them (v. 20), confusing the enemy (v. 27), driving out the enemy (v. 28), and ultimately destroying them (Deut 7:20). Moses emphasizes how God vindicates this promise when he describes God’s hand in the victories at Arad (Num 21:3), Bashan (Num 21:34), Midian (Num 31:2ff.), Sihon (Deut 2:33), Og (Deut 3:3), Jericho (Josh 6:1ff), Ai (Josh 8:1), Gibeon (Josh 10:10), and the Southern and Northern Canaanite lands (e.g., Josh 10:29–11:23), as well as the defeats of Amalek (Num 14:42–43) and Ai (Josh 7:1).

Helpful historical reenactment of how the Israelites underestimated Ai.

Moses writes again and again that “the Lord fought for Israel … [and] gave it also and its king into the hand of Israel” (e.g., Josh 10:14, 30). Yahweh even picks the fight on occasion, “For it was the Lord’s doing to harden their hearts that they should come against Israel in battle, in order that they should be devoted to destruction and should receive no mercy but be destroyed” (Josh 11:20).

Holy War, then, is profoundly God’s war, not simply because he commands it or achieves his covenant purposes through it, but because he is controlling it end-to-end, from instigating the battle to determining the outcome.

This is not altogether surprising, for in each prior stage of the conflict between the seeds, God has supernaturally effected results, from the flood to the exodus. It is clearly God who resolves the enmity.

(4) Yahweh executes the punishment

Finally, the practice of cherem itself (the “ban”), arguably the most controversial element of Holy War to the modern conscience, is a consummation of God’s victory in war, as he pours out harsh judgment on the conquered.

In one sense, cherem involves the destruction of the property and people of the conquered group. E.g., God commands the Israelites to “utterly overthrow [the Canaanites] and break their pillars in pieces” (Exod 23:24), and, moreover, to set apart the various plunder as “devoted to destruction” (Deut 7:26). Joshua and the army “captured the city … devoted all in the city to destruction, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword” (Josh 6:20–21). The “ban” shows how the defeated city was impure before God and could not remain in his presence.

In another sense, cherem also involves setting apart certain holy things to Yahweh (e.g., Josh 7:1). In some cases not everything was destroyed, but some was kept to bring back to the tabernacle to use in worship. Again, this may not seem fair, but as suzerain-king, Yahweh deserves the spoils of war.

That is to say, cherem is thoroughly theocentric, a dedication of the outcome of war from the vassal to the suzerain: “God won the victory, so he was due the spoils.”[2]

Conclusion

We may not always like this, but the OT accounts of the holy war make it quite clear that Yahweh is the chief causative factor in the judgment on Canaan. He declares the war; he constitutes the army; he gives victory or defeat; and he pours out judgment and receives the spoils. He does so through the ordained actions of his people, but in the great mystery of providence, the Covenant-Maker Himself is sovereign over the war.

(Side note: In view of this, it is interesting how the OT never blames the Israelites for the holy war, unlike modern critics who think the war is unjust. In fact, the Israelites are only ever blamed for failing to wage the war according to God’s explicit commands. Some skeptics may see this as entirely obvious—why would the Israelites indicate their own culpability for genocide if they saw it through patriotic lenses?—but this criticism is invalid precisely because the Israelite writers do express their guilt elsewhere. They are not whitewashing the story.)

In the next post, we will turn to the issues of “intrusion ethics” and the New Testament.

About Post Author

Rolf Thielen

rolf.thielen@gmail.com

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