Biblical slaughter can teach us

BY DAVID BRATTSTON

Mass slaughter of the enemies of God’s elect is commanded time and again throughout the Old Testament. God both ordered and approved putting the populations of whole cities and nations to death. How do we reconcile such merciless bloodlust with the message of the meek and compassionate Jesus who preached that the Holy One of Israel is a god of love and mercy?

“God both ordered and approved putting the populations of whole cities and nations to death. How do we reconcile such merciless bloodlust with the message of the meek and compassionate Jesus who preached that the Holy One of Israel is a god of love and mercy?”

One example of wanton bloodshed is Deuteronomy, which prescribes the way the Israelites were to treat the people living in the land of Canaan: “But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord, your God, is giving you as a heritage, you shall not leave a single soul alive. You must put them all under the ban — the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites — just as the Lord, your God, has commanded you” (20:16-17).

After Joshua had led the Israelites into the Promised Land, “they put to the sword all living creatures in the city: men and women, young and old, as well as oxen, sheep and donkeys” (Joshua 6:21).

In Joshua 8:24-28: “When Israel finished killing all the inhabitants of Ai in the open, who had pursued them into the wilderness, and all of them to the last man fell by the sword, then all Israel returned and put to the sword those inside the city. There fell that day a total of twelve thousand men and women, the entire population of Ai. Joshua kept the javelin in his hand stretched out until he had carried out the ban on all the inhabitants of Ai.

“However, the Israelites took for themselves as plunder the livestock and the spoil of that city, according to the command of the Lord issued to Joshua. Then Joshua destroyed Ai by fire, reducing it to an everlasting mound of ruins, as it remains today.”

In Joshua 11:11-12: “He also struck down with the sword every person there, carrying out the ban, till none was left alive. Hazor itself he burned. All the cities of those kings, and the kings themselves, Joshua captured and put to the sword, carrying out the ban on them, as Moses, the servant of the Lord, had commanded.”

According to 1 Samuel 15, the divinely ordained mayhem continued in the era of Samuel and King Saul: “Go, now, attack Amalek, and put under the ban everything he has. Do not spare him; kill men and women, children and infants, oxen and sheep, camels and donkeys” (15:3).

These Bible passages and many more like them are wildly at odds with the time-honoured conception of Christianity as a religion of peace and mercy. Can we reconcile God’s command that Israelites put their enemies to death on a wholesale scale with the same God’s blessing the merciful, who shall obtain mercy?

The same questions occurred to Origen, who was the foremost Bible scholar and teacher of the first half of the third century AD. His writing and preaching influenced the Church for centuries after his own time.

In his Homilies on Joshua 8.7 (AD 249/250) he preached the wars and massacres in the historical books of the Old Testament were not meant to be applied literally as a precedent for how Christians ought to treat other people. Rather, they were symbols or examples or teaching aids to instruct Christians to war against and totally destroy in our own lives not only every kind of sin but also every temptation and near occasion to sin.

With the same thoroughness that the Israelites comprehensively obliterated their enemies, preached Origen, so should believers just as completely eradicate their own enemies: sin and everything that leads to sin.

The thoroughness of the Old Testament exterminations, Origen said, is to teach Christians not to be content with avoiding mortal sins like fornication, malice, and lusts.

Nor is it enough to refrain from all sins. We must exert our souls, he preached, to root out as spiritual enemies all wicked thoughts, distorted desires, and other enticements and inclination to sin with the same diligence and perseverance as an exterminating army acting under God’s orders.