I recently came across an old (2003 – is this old now?) book on my shelf, Show Them No Mercy: Four Views on God and Canaanite Genocide, with contributions from various Christian Evangelical scholars. I remember the shock I felt when reading this slim volume two decades ago.
The book discusses the Biblical stories of the Hebrew people’s conquest of “the Land of Israel” after the Egyptian exile. The story is very violent; I won’t dwell on the language here other than to note that God tells the Jewish people to kill the local inhabitants and claim the land as their own.
There is a vigorous debate in the literature about what, if anything, this passage means from a historical point of view. There is plenty of reason to doubt that anything like the conquest of Canaan ever took place. Logically, the story was probably a later invention for purposes of national myth-making.
To me, however, the biggest challenge is ethical. If the founding document of the Jewish religion contains a commandment to mass killing, what should we do with that? Shouldn’t this be an essential part of the discussion?
I grew up in a Jewish household, although we were not religious. I was educated from fifth grade onwards in Israeli public schools, where the Bible was a mainstream subject. To my recollection, it was taught as a piece of vital literature rather than a theological or historical text.
We never spoke about the Canaanite genocide at home, in school, or anywhere else. We celebrated Passover but never talked about what was alleged to have happened after Moses took the Jewish people from Egypt and brought them to the Promised Land.
The specialist literature explains that Jewish sages believe those passages are irrelevant because the Canaanite tribes no longer exist, and God's deadly instructions pertained only to them. Still others note that while some Jewish nationalists today label Palestinians “Amalekites,” a hated Canaanite tribe, those are the views of a radical fringe.
The loudest sound I’ve heard about the Canaanite genocide, however, is silence. It’s simply not talked about. Jews think of themselves as ethical people. The Biblical commandment to commit genocide as a precondition for entering the Land of Israel seems bizarrely out of place. So we ignore it.
That’s a problem, given the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Our founding document and the main story we use to establish our connection to the Land has a huge black mark in its narrative.
It’s worth talking about.
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