Customer Reviews

Show Them No Mercy: 4 Views on God and Canaanite Genocide

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I'd give it 3 1/2 stars actually, if that were one of the options. This book, in a format of similar volumes, consists of contributions from four scholars who each give their point of view, followed by responses from the other three. Three of the authors more or less agree with one other in the reasons God commanded what the title dubs the "genocide" of the Canaanites (the reasons being those generally advanced by evangelical authors and given in the biblical text: to preserve Israel from idolatry, to judge the sins of the inhabitants of Canaan, etc.). Where they differ is in the meaning and application of "holy war" or "Yahweh war" for today. None believes we should engage in physical holy war, but for example, one author sees it as a model for spiritual warfare in the church.

C. S. Cowles provides a lively counterpoint to the other three, as his position is essentially that God never did command the destruction of the Canaanites, nor would he; he was misconstrued or believed to have commanded it, but God is love and would never condone such a massacre. Unfortunately, his responses to each of the other authors, is simply along the same lines: God is love as revealed in Christ, and is not someone who commands the massacre of whole peoples. He chastises Eugene Merrill for a "clinical" analysis of the situation, as though there were no place for exegesis or philosophical analysis of ethics. He appears to believe in the reality of hell, and the same arguments he marshalls against "Yahweh war" could be extended to an all-embracing universalism.

Recently I read the book "The Pianist," on which the recent movie was based. At the end, they include excerpts from the diary of a German soldier who had helped the author, Wladyslaw Szpilman, to hide and to survive. In his diary, maybe 4 or 5 times the German solider says that the Germans did such horrible things to the Jews and to others, they will have to suffer, innocent and guilty alike, one and all. It was amazing to me that someone who lived through the Holocaust and participated in its machinery, could state that even innocent people will have to die as a result of Germany's wickedness -- whereas Cowles, who I take it has a fairly comfortable life (like many of us in this country) as an American professor, was quick to say, how dare anyone say that God would order the killing of "innocent" Canaanites.

The book did a better job at answer the question, why can't we destroy people today, in the church age, than at answering, how can we justify the destruction of the Canaanites in the Old Testament? I felt a stronger apologetic was needed in light of current events (Israelis/Palestinians; Tutsis/Hutus; Bosnia).

As a totally different evangelical point of view, Glenn Miller in his web site "Christian Think-Tank" argues that deportation and people movements are a better description of what took place; only a small portion of the people, those who did not re-locate, were put to death. ....

In any event, if one thinks that God justly commanded the killing of the Canaanites, I am not sure that "genocide" is a helpful word, as useful as it is in grabbing attention. The word carries overtones of injustice and inhumanity -- precisely what three of the authors believe was NOT involved, since it came at God's command.

The book excels at laying out the pattern and identifying marks of "Yahweh war" vs. other kinds of war.

This book deals with one of the more difficult questions arising out of the OT narratives: How could a God of love, as he is described in the NT, order the wholesale slaughter of the Canaanites in the OT? The answers and analyses in this book are certainly thought-provoking. I wasn't sure I appreciated the book's frequent use of the term "genocide" to describe the Israelite's warfare, as this word tends to produce a very emotional reaction in people and is often assumed to describe an inherently evil act which has no regard for the value of human life. (And all the contributors deny that God ever does evil or that he lacks respect for human life.) The word "genocide" seems more like an attempt to appeal to sensationalism and capitalize on the events of Sept.11, than a completely accurate term for what happened to the Canaanites.

Also, each of the authors' chapters is heavily based on unproven presuppositions which he simply assumes to be true. Specifically:

--C.S. Cowles assumes that parts of the OT (namely, those ordering the warfare) either are not inspired by God, or that they completely misconstrue God's true intent (Cowles doesn't specify which of these options he prefers), to the extent that they are of little if any value to modern readers.

--Eugene Merrill assumes that a dispensational interpretation of the Bible is accurate. (While I understand that many people today are dispensationalits, Merrill simply assumes this scheme without proving it).

--Daniel Gard assumes that an eschatological theme exists in 1-2 Chronicles (spending more time commenting on implications of this theme, and tracing it through the rest of the Bible, than establishing whether it even exists in the first place).

--Tremper Longman assumes that some of God's ways are inherently mysterious and impossible for finite humans to understand completely. (This allows him a very convenient excuse to what otherwise would be a major hole in his argumentation -- namely, why God orders the destruction of the Canaanites but protects the Israelites, when both groups were guilty of sin.)

Personally I was most convinced by Longman -- partly because I reject the presuppositions of Cowles and Merrill and agree with Longman's, and partly because of Longman's appeal to "intrusion ethics" (p.185 if you buy the book) as a way of linking God's OT savagery against the Canaanites w/ his future Final Judgment over all mankind. I find this a fascinating concept in explaining God's warfare-commands to Israel. Other readers are certainly free to side with other contributors of the book, but anyone who reads this will get 4 intelligent, well-argued, yet markedly different approaches toward making sense of a problem for which no easy answers exist.

I'd give it 3 1/2 stars actually, if that were one of the options. This book, in a format of similar volumes, consists of contributions from four scholars who each give their point of view, followed by responses from the other three. Three of the authors more or less agree with one other in the reasons God commanded what the title dubs the "genocide" of the Canaanites (the reasons being those generally advanced by evangelical authors and given in the biblical text: to preserve Israel from idolatry, to judge the sins of the inhabitants of Canaan, etc.). Where they differ is in the meaning and application of "holy war" or "Yahweh war" for today. None believes we should engage in physical holy war, but for example, one author sees it as a model for spiritual warfare in the church.

C. S. Cowles provides a lively counterpoint to the other three, as his position is essentially that God never did command the destruction of the Canaanites, nor would he; he was misconstrued or believed to have commanded it, but God is love and would never condone such a massacre. Unfortunately, his responses to each of the other authors, is simply along the same lines: God is love as revealed in Christ, and is not someone who commands the massacre of whole peoples. He chastises Eugene Merrill for a "clinical" analysis of the situation, as though there were no place for exegesis or philosophical analysis of ethics. He appears to believe in the reality of hell, and the same arguments he marshalls against "Yahweh war" could be extended to an all-embracing universalism.

Recently I read the book "The Pianist," on which the recent movie was based. At the end, they include excerpts from the diary of a German soldier who had helped the author, Wladyslaw Szpilman, to hide and to survive. In his diary, maybe 4 or 5 times the German solider says that the Germans did such horrible things to the Jews and to others, they will have to suffer, innocent and guilty alike, one and all. It was amazing to me that someone who lived through the Holocaust and participated in its machinery, could state that even innocent people will have to die as a result of Germany's wickedness -- whereas Cowles, who I take it has a fairly comfortable life (like many of us in this country) as an American professor, was quick to say, how dare anyone say that God would order the killing of "innocent" Canaanites.

The book did a better job at answer the question, why can't we destroy people today, in the church age, than at answering, how can we justify the destruction of the Canaanites in the Old Testament? I felt a stronger apologetic was needed in light of current events (Israelis/Palestinians; Tutsis/Hutus; Bosnia).

As a totally different evangelical point of view, Glenn Miller in his web site "Christian Think-Tank" argues that deportation and people movements are a better description of what took place; only a small portion of the people, those who did not re-locate, were put to death. ...

In any event, if one thinks that God justly commanded the killing of the Canaanites, I am not sure that "genocide" is a helpful word, as useful as it is in grabbing attention. The word carries overtones of injustice and inhumanity -- precisely what three of the authors believe was NOT involved, since it came at God's command.

The book excels at laying out the pattern and identifying marks of "Yahweh war" vs. other kinds of war.

Four Old Testament scholars debate the ethical issue as to how a God of love could order the genocide of the Canaanite communities. CS Cowles handles this by stating that the Israelites misunderstood what God was saying, and that Canaanite genocide is incompatible with God's love shown in Jesus Christ. His essay was the weakest in my view because he in essence rejected the authority of the Old Testament. The other three writers called him to task on this, and also called on Cowles to strengthen his commitment to the infallibility of Scripture. Yikes!

The best article in my humble opinion was the one by Eugene Merrill of Dallas Theological Seminary, He goes through every salient Hebrew Bible text about holy war (herem) and concludes that God's call for the destruction of these communites was a unique time in history when God was executing judgment on historically oppressive, repressive societies in opposition to the Noachide commandments. He gives the following reasons: 1) the stubbornness of the Canaanites in their persistence in idolatry, child sacrifice, and their opposition to the revealed will of God, 2) because this was a special time in history when the people of Israel were emerging as God's chosen instrument to bring salvation and judgment to the nations (3 to bring Israel into the promised land and to prepare them for the coming of their Messiah (4 to show them that the Most High is sovereign over the kingdoms of men and 5) to remove communities that would continue to oppress God's people and to tempt them toward idolatry and sin. Never mind that Israel didn't obey God completely, the article deals with the theological reasons for OT holy war.

This satisfies the biblical reasoning more than it solves the ethical dilemna, but nevertheless, I found it to be the most compelling discussion in the book, and John Gard and Tremper Longman (two of the other contributors found themselves in substantial agreement with a number of Merrill's arguments).

John Gard (the Missouri Synod Lutheran contributor) ties this topic in with God's eschatological judgment on His enemies. And Tremper Longman says that the NT carries on the Old Testament idea of holy war in the spiritual realm (pointing out Jesus' encounter with the demon world at His first coming).

This was a good book. It satisfied me. I have never really had a problem with the idea of God judging whole civilizations. He is the Lord, He can do what is right in His own eyes. I am just glad that He has given me life and allows me to live in His world.

I should also say that I commend all four writers for noting that this was an unusual time in history and that there is no authorization or word from God to continue this sort of action today. In the book of Revelation, God pours out His wrath on the beast and his minions, but that will be at His initiative.

This is a tough subject where it will be hard to find a unanimous consent. But I commend the writers for their courage in taking up such a hot potato.

Every Christian needs to read this book which confronts us with the inescapable gory nature of our history. We believe in a God who is loving and merciful, but who is also holy and cannot abide evil.

We rightly focus on the New Testament and its message of love and forgiveness for sins: this book reminds us that our salvation has a bloody history, not only in the torture and crucifixion of Christ, but also in the death of many hundreds of thousands of people, by leaders who believed they were ordered to do this by God himself.

Three of the book's contributors understand that Moses, Joshua and David were led by God to wipe out Canaanites, Amalekites, Philistines and others, but Nazarene pacifist C S Cowles believes that the New Testament shows that they were misled.

It is worth reading the articles from the different points of view, but also intriguing to read each author's critique of the others' views.

I felt that each article was worth having been included in the book, but I would have liked to read what an evangelical pacifist with a high view of the bible would have written, too.

Highly recommended

"When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations... then you must destroy them totally... and show them no mercy. Do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them... as the Lord your God has commanded you."

These statements found in Deuteronomy and Joshua serve as the backdrop to one of the hardest stories in the Bible to reconcile with my beliefs and with the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us, Jesus. It is the story of the genocide of the Canaanites. It is with that in mind that I picked up Show Them No Mercy: Four Views on God and Canaanite Genocide edited by Stanley Gundry. It contains essays by four scholars, C.S. Cowles, Eugene Merrill, Daniel Gard, and Tremper Longman. What made it especially interesting for me was that I had read some of Longman's other work that he has done with Dan Allender, so that was at least one familiar voice.

The four essays widely varied in quality. While I liked Longman's article, I thought that Cowles, who was the least conservative of all of them, actually had the best argument. I thought Merrill's arguments were poor and would put Gard above Merrill but below Longman. Without a doubt, the three conservative articles shared the most in common in that they all defended the idea that God had actually told Moses and Joshua to conquer the land just as is recorded in the Bible. They solve the tension for themselves by jamming the proverbial square peg in the round hole and saying, "look it fits!" Cowles, to put it simply and most accurately, solves the problem by denying that the Bible records God's command to the Israelite leaders accurately.

To critics who would say that Cowles selection of scripture is arbitrary he would respond thus,

"... how can we speak of Jesus as the embodiment of deity when he not only fails to incarnate Israel's image of a warrior God, from whom `good and evil comes forth,' but discloses its exact opposite?.. what is our criterion for selection [of Scripture]? John Wesley would answer in a flash: Jesus! As the full and final revelation of God, Jesus is "the criterion" for evaluating Scripture, the prism through which the Hebrew Scriptures must be read."

For Cowles, Jesus is the "canon" so to speak. Now from what I've read from others who have read Karl Barth, this sounds like the logical extension of his idea that Jesus, as opposed to the Bible, is the true Word/Revelation of God. To loosely paraphrase N.T. Wright who put it something like this in a panel discussion with Anne Rice: Jesus didn't say all authority has been given unto the books and letters which you chaps will go on to write. He said all authority has been given unto me. Ostensibly, to bring a modern reformed voice into the discussion, Cowles quotes John Stott who says, "our Christian conviction is that the Bible has both authority and relevance... and that the secret of both is Jesus Christ."

(Disclaimer: I am pretty sure that none of the above mentioned writers would absolutely deny any kind of inspiration in Scripture).

Cowles goes on to say that "Jesus exercised an audacious prophetic authority over the Torah and on how it was to be interpreted... The benchmark of divine revelation in the era of the new covenant was no longer the Word of God mediated by Moses but by Jesus." He then traces the evolution of the Israelite beliefs, from blaming bad events on God (2 Sam. 24:1) to blaming bad events on Satan (I Chron. 21:1). He goes on to say it was not that the revelation of God was ever full of malice and genocidal intentions but that the Israelites misinterpreted and distorted God's command. He points out how God's command to annihilate everything was conveniently modified as the conquest went on.

To be fair, Cowles attempts to point out that the Israelites acted in good faith based on what they understood of God's will, much as a Crusader might have done back in the middle ages. He compares an Old Testament treatment of the unbeliever to the New Testament treatment by quoting Jack Ford and A.R.G. Deasley: "There can be no doubt that, armed with the Christian gospel and endued with the Holy Spirit, Paul would have entered Canaan as he entered Corinth to show God's triumph over evil in transformed lives."

He closes with the following,

"Where was God in Israel's genocidal conquest of Canaan? In the `lost hopes,' the `charred past,' the "extinguished future,' of the babies, the infants, the little children - all the `Julieks' of Canaan. It was in those like Melchizedek, the priest of God Most High, and Rahab, who might have glorified God had they been given the chance." [His quote marks are in reference to Elie Wiesel's book "Night".]

All in all, the book did not meet my expectations. Other than Cowles, the other 3 had very similar views and seemed to sort of shirk the question that still haunts me even after reading this book.

Compiled by series editor Stanley N. Gundry, Show Them No Mercy brings together four disparate views by C. S. Cowles (Professor of Bible and theology, Point Loma Nazarene University, San Diego, California), Eugene H. Merrill (Distinguished Professor of Old Testament Studies, Dallas Theological Seminary), Daniel L. Gard (Associate Professor of Exegetical Theology, concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana), and Tremper Longman III (Professor of Old Testament, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California), on God and the genocide of the Canaanites, with a very close eye on both events of Biblical history and their relevance to modern-day crises such as the September 11th attacks. A diverse, scholarly, thoughtful and thought-provoking addressing of issues that do not, on the surface, seem to reconcile with the teaching of Jesus Christ that commanded love for thy neighbor, Show Them No Mercy is very highly recommended reading, especially for those who are having difficulty reconciling the Yahweh of the Old Testament with the teachings of Jesus Christ in the New Testament.

A common complaint against Christianity and the Bible is that the loving Jesus of the New Testament seems completely different from the angry, punishing God of the Old Testament. How can we claim to love and serve a God who loves and saves us when that same God was smiting whole cities in the Old Testament? Most Christians will likely have a hard time answering that question, and may instead prefer to just ignore the Old Testament. Not a good solution! Reading this book is a better solution!

Four essays run the gamut from pretty much writing off the Old Testament completely to seeing it as a very real example of the fate that all who rebel against God will suffer either in this world or the next. In other words, one author in this book doesn't see any relationship at all between the Old and New Testaments, while the other three authors see varying levels of relationship.

Much of the discussion is centered on the academic exercise of defining terms and setting parameters. What constitutes a 'holy war' and what were the unique rules thereof? I'm assuming each author was required to define this for themselves, and the repetition can get a little tedious. It also seems that the bulk of each essay is taken up with this process of definition rather than with addressing the core question of how could a loving and good God ever command this sort of devastation?

This is a wonderful resource to help make sense of the Old Testament and see how a God of love who sacrificed His Son to reconcile us to Himself could also be the God demanding the execution of women and children in the midst of holy war. It's a painful topic, but when understood correctly, it clearly demonstrates the horrible situation of our rebellion, rather than callousness on God's part.

Show Them No Mercy is part of Zondervan's fantastic `counterpoints' series that explores the deeply problematic topic of genocidal violence in the Old Testament. Each contributor explores the theme in light of the terrible display of religious violence executed on September 11th. How can we justify the religiously motivated violence in the Old Testament when we so clearly condemn it today? At the heart of the issue is how the New Testament relates to the Old. The four contributors take the following four positions in terms of continuity between the testaments:

CS Cowles takes the view of "radical discontinuity"

Eugene Merrill takes the view of "moderate discontinuity"

Daniel Gard takes the view of "eschatological continuity"

Tremper Longman takes the view of "spiritual continuity"

Cowles's essay and responses are by far the most entertaining and impassioned as he unambiguously condemns the violence in the OT as "texts of terror" produced by fallible human authors. The result of such a view is that Jesus and the NT serves as a corrective to the deplorable ethics of Moses, Joshua and Samuel. Certainly he denies inerrancy, and this puts him in the awkward position of denying the full authority of the Old Testament. Cowles tries to show that Jesus had an ambivalent view of the OT arguing that while his message was ultimately contained in it, he rejected parts of it as unbecoming of God's character. The consistency of this position moves him towards the heresy of Marcion, though he takes time to defend himself from this charge.

Merrill, Gard, and Longman's essays are relatively similar, though not without some important differences. Merrill finds the violence confined to the old covenant never to appear again, while Longman and Gard argue that this type of violence will manifest on the Last Day when sinners are judged. Merrill finds justification for the violence in Divine Command Theory, while the Longman and Gard pose the following reversal: how is it that God continues to endure humanity since we all deserve what the Canaanites deserved? Gard's essay is the most confusing as he sees stages in salvation history represented typologically through Saul (sinful state), David (salvific state), and Solomon (glorified state). Skip to Longman's for a similar but much clearer presentation of the issues.

One will discover a few things while reading this book. The first is that the OT accounts look a lot like genocide and not at all like genocide at the same time. The extermination of men, women, and children by virtue of a certain ethnicity most certainly is genocide. Yet the process by which the "devotion to destruction" (herem) is carried out is an odd one (circumcision before battle?). The second, is that the when taken altogether, Scripture does not present a uniform view of holy war. The rationale and extent of holy war in the OT varies greatly from circumstance to circumstance. Third, there is no satisifying answer or explanation for the problem. Merrill even concedes at one point that the entire subject is left the realm of mystery that we cannot penetrate and Gard maintains that the problem of not understanding has not to do with God, but with our own human limitations. Readers will probably side with either Cowles or Longman as they both believe that the phenomena can be fully explained, and it seems the debate is determined by whether one believes in inerrancy or not.

I was disappointed with the lack of attention paid to the most exacerbating facet of the problem of OT violence: that God commands HUMAN BEINGS to carry it out. It is not that God does not have a right to do with his creation and judge sinners accordingly. It is that he asks sinners to carry out his judgments on other sinners! Imagining an Israelite warrior shaped by the ethics of neighbor-love in the Torah for most of his life, and then, in an instant, carrying out actions that resemble those of Rwanda in the mid 1990s is simply incongruent to put it mildly. One cannot imagine how one's human psyche would be negatively effected by participating is such actions. Would they not have some severe form of PTSD, some horrified conscience, some moral anguish? Slaughtering children, after all, is the stuff that moral monsters are made of. Everyone knows this. We do not need to be instructed or taught this simple moral principle. Nothing is said of this in the book and leaves us wondering if true worship theoretically includes obeying such commands.

All in all, though, the book is a fascinating look at how evangelicals approach the profoundest of problems in a post 9/11 age.

This book is an excellent exploration of the unity between the Old & New Testaments of the Bible. Although the massacre of a people is difficult to accept, 3 of the 4 writers clearly explain that those acts must be viewed in context of: 1) a unique period and challenge for God's people; and 2) God's standard of justice is the same in both testatments of the Bible. You will find 4 arguments on how to understand God's call to commit the act of "herem" and how that relates to Jesus. Only one writer, C.S. Cowles, takes the Marcion view that Jesus is in no way related to the God or the events of the Old Testament.

Overall, an excellent treatment of a difficult subject matter.