Show them no mercy?
Recently I’ve seen the ban on the Canaanites in Joshua brought up in contexts surrounding authority issues in the church, especially as a trump to any idea of infallibility on the part of the scriptures (see here and here for examples).
(Edit: One reader emailed me and suggested I misrepresented Dan’s intention in his post, insofar as Dan was only attempting to criticize Wright’s attempt to deal with the conquest narratives, not pronounce finally on the in/fallibility issue. So, not wanting to misrepresent anyone, I add this criticism of my reading here.)
Now, when it comes to issues of ultimate authority in wordlviews, sometimes arguments between different systems don’t work. For those who, like me, hold to Scripture as an ultimate authority, appeals to emotion are not going to dislodge this commitment. As a last resort, I will simply admit I don’t understand the passage at hand before admitting it is not right to submit to it.
However, today I found what I think is a very plausible response to this particular objection to holding to the comprehensive authority of Scripture. Building on OT scholars like Richard Hess, Paul Copan sums up a very good argument for thinking that the Canaanite conquest is not as disturbing as we might have thought: Yahweh Wars and the Canaanites.
I did my final paper in my Sex and Violence in the Hebrew Bible class at York on these passages and how to reconcile violence in the Hebrew Bible with a compassionate Saviour in the NT. I’ll check this one out, thanks Andrew!
Unorganized thoughts:
- I think Copan hints at this: We prefer to depict all our wars as defensive, it’s simply part of our culture’s understanding of war. For whatever reason we don’t want to own up to our aggression. In World War I in particular one gets the sense that all of the combatants claim that they are to engage in conflict to “defend civilization” against the uncivilized other. For whatever reason it may be culturally preferable in the Ancient Near East to depict all wars as aggressive for a slew of reasons that we might hypothesize about (influence of Assyrian culture where adding any territory was a religious duty, wanting to appear strong before regional rivals, I don’t know take your pick). Anyway, war – fought for whatever reason today is claimed to be defensive, and perhaps in the ancient near-east was claimed to be offensive. For all we know the Canaanites may have been preparing to make a move on Israel.
-It struck me that Copan says that formulas about killing all the men, women, and children are specifically NOT about killing all the men, women, and children, but mainly about killing the (presumably adult male) combatants. If correct interpretations, and I have no reason to doubt Copan’s interpretation, can be this counter-intuitive (and this is by no means the only case where a plain reading of the text can lead one to error) then we should perhaps all take the stance of functional inerrantists, assuming that as we read, we are reading errors into the scriptures. Even if we were to ascribe perfection to the texts, our abilities to understand them, even in the plainest of readings, may be defective by virtue of these counter-intuitive idioms.
Dan,
The best way I’ve heard the exegetical task described is the “hermeneutical spiral”. It’s a continually self-correcting process, which allows for some conviction on what passages mean, but recommends continual openness to modification in light of further evidence. It makes the most sense to me (in light of the fact that we do know some things, but don’t know everything…)