“For it was the Lord’s doing to harden their hearts so that they would come against Israel in battle, in order that they might be utterly destroyed, and might receive no mercy, but be exterminated, just as the Lord had commanded Moses” (NRSV, Josh. 11.20). Upon receiving the Lord’s fulfilment of His covenant with them, the Israelites utterly destroyed the Canaanite forces and acquired the Promised Land. This Old Testament account initially appears to be incongruent with the central aspect of the character of God: His enduring, boundless, and inexplicable love. Typically, people challenge this concept with the following query: “How can a perfectly loving God command his followers to commit atrocities of genocide and military violence?” This …show more content…
This explains the reason God’s instruction for the Israelites to not plant poles near the Lord’s altar (NRSV, Deut. 16. 21). David Padfield accurately summarizes the wickedness of Canaanite worship in his article The Abominations of the Canaanites, with an excerpt from The Message of Deuteronomy: “Canaanite worship was socially destructive. Its religious acts were pornographic and sick, seriously damaging to children, creating early impressions of deities with no interest in moral behavior. It tried to dignify, by the use of religious labels, depraved acts of bestiality and corruption. It had a low estimate of human life. It suggested that anything was permissible, promiscuity, murder, or anything else, in order to guarantee a good crop at harvest. It ignored the highest values both in the family and in the wider community-love,loyalty, purity, peace and security-and encouraged the view that all these things were inferior to material prosperity, physical satisfaction and human pleasure. A society where those things matter most is self-destructive” (Padfield,