To modern readers, there is an ethical problem with the biblical commands found at various points in the Old Testament to wipe out the Canaanites. Why would Israel's God, the God of Jesus Christ, order his own people to kill another people group’even a sinful people’in order to take their land? Several factors can help us understand this perplexing and sometimes ill-used injunction.
First, if we think of this command as "religiously motivated violence," we forget that Israel couldn't talk about warfare, land ownership, or rulership without talking about its God, and neither could its opponents. Israel's blending of religious and political language would have been perfectly normal in its own cultural context.
Second, talking about total slaughter of enemies was common in Israel's ancient Near Eastern milieu, even when annihilation did not actually occur. This rhetoric served to inflate the importance of successes in battle and to exaggerate the power of those who accomplished them.
Third, we need to consider that the most distinctive language about wiping out the Canaanites is distributed in texts that were likely written a long time after Israel's settlement of the land. As a result, their message has little to do with actual Canaanites. Rather, the sweeping scope of these statements both emphasizes the completeness of Israel's devotion to its own Lord, as Nathan MacDonald and R. W. L. Moberly have written, and serves as a warning to Israel of the consequences that will follow if it chooses disobedience.
All three of these points beckon us to move past the immediate "shock value" of these biblical commands and to focus on how they might be speaking to us from within their cultural and literary context.
