Dr Paul Allen

I have been writing about the alarming Bible passages in which God commands the destruction of the older peoples of the land of Canaan, ordering what by any common sense understanding we would call genocide. Early Christians were not too troubled by such texts, because they mainly saw them as allegorical, and they saw no need to confront the moral dilemmas in their own writings, particularly in the New Testament. But here is one exception, and a significant one. It appears in a devious and quite sneaky way in the Gospel of Matthew. Am I allowed to call gospels sneaky? The genocide commands are explicit. In Deuteronomy 7, God orders that When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations ….  and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. The word for “destroy totally” is herem, Greek anathema, and...

After Forty Years, God Renews the Covenant With Sinful Israel Before the Conquest of Canaan Deuteronomy concludes the larger composition we know as the Pentateuch (“five books”), but which Jews call the Torah. Although Genesis to Deuteronomy is cast as a continuous narrative, in its content and structure Deuteronomy is a self-contained literary unit. Here the narratives and divine speeches revealing in detail the terms of Yahweh’s covenant with Israel give way to a report of verbal and ritual events that took place within the last weeks or days of Moses’ life.  As Jesus would do with his disciples ( John 13–17 ), here Moses prepares his people for his imminent departure ( Deut 31:2 ,  14 ), by supervising a covenant-renewal ceremony ( 29:1  [Heb  28:69 ]), delivering a series of farewell addresses developing the grace-based theology underlying the covenant ( 1:1–31:22 ), publicly presenting and charging Joshua as Israel’s divinely chosen leader in conquering the prom...

Genocide. The very word makes us cringe and conjures up unpleasant images of death and reminds us of some of the most wicked acts in history. It is a loaded term, to be sure, and many Christians are caught off guard when they hear it used to describe the invasion of Canaan that God ordered the Israelites to accomplish. Hearing such a charge puts us on the defensive, and it may even cause us to wonder whether our critics might be right. In our series on the invasion of Canaan, we have been considering whether it is accurate to describe the conquest as an act of genocide. Thus far, we have considered whether the invasion matches Merriam-Webster’s definition of genocide as “the deliberate killing of people who belong to a particular racial, political, or cultural group,” and we have seen that the actual biblical narrative and history does not support the charge that the invasion of Canaan was a genocide. Before we move on to consider other aspects of the invasion more specifically, let...

Genesis 9:20-27 has been used in the last 200 years, as the passage that defends the American institution of slavery (that designation comes from Albert Barnes:  “This passage, by a singular perverseness of interpretation, and a singular perseverance in that perverseness, notwithstanding the plainest rules of exegesis, is often employed to justify the reduction of the African to slavery”.  So let’s look at that passage:    Noah began to be a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were turned backward, and they did not see their father’s nakedness. When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, “Curse...

“ Cursed be Canaan ; a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.… Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem ; and let Canaan be his servant. May God enlarge Japheth , and let him dwell in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant” ( Gen. 9:25–27 ).- Genesis 9:24–29 Exodus 20:12 teaches us necessarily to obey all authorities, for “it pleases God to govern us by their hand” (Heidleberg Catechism, 104). How we treat our leaders (family, church, or civil) reveals what we think of our Father, since He ordains them all ( Rom. 13:1–7 ). Having despised God by dishonoring his father, today’s passage records the curse Ham earned for his seed. These verses illustrate the maladies that can result if we do not obey our authorities faithfully. Let us first note this text has a sordid history of being used to justify ethnic slavery and racism. However, this use is manifestly unjustifiable. The malediction says nothing about race; it is based on faith, and in any case is pronounced on...

Moses with the tablets of the Ten Commandments, painting by Rembrandt (1659) (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) By its own testimony (Deut. 1:1, 5; 31:22), Deuteronomy is the work of Moses. Mosaic authorship is affirmed many times elsewhere in the Old Testament (e.g. 2 Kin. 14:6), in ancient Jewish sources (e.g., Josephus), and in the New Testament. This view was almost universally held until the rise of rationalistic criticism in modern times. Critics correctly point out that the last chapter could not have been written by Moses. It is widely agreed that ch. 34 is an addendum, perhaps appended by Joshua. In the same way, the Book of Joshua ends with the death of Joshua, this record clearly having been supplied by the author of the Book of Judges, who appended verses from Judges to the end of Joshua (Judg. 2:7–9; cf. Josh. 24:29–31).  Likewise, the first verses of Ezra are copied and appended to the last chapter of Chronicles (Chronicles ends in the middle of a sentence). This w...

Map of the Land of Israel as defined in Numbers 34 and Ezekiel 47 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) “These are murmurers, complainers, walking after their own lusts; and their mouth speaketh great swelling words, having men’s persons in admiration because of advantage.” ( Jude 1:16 ) Jude’s book cites several incidents in the early history of Israel right after they were wonderfully delivered from slavery in Egypt . Within a very short time, they had come through the Red Sea , had bitter water made sweet, seen water come out of a rock, and been fed with “angels’ food” from heaven. Yet when the 12 spies came back from the land of Canaan that had been promised to them, there was a widespread revolt against God and against Moses ’ leadership. The ten spies who “murmured” against God “died by the plague before the LORD” ( Numbers 14:37 ). Some who had previously sided with the defeatist words of the spies tried to take matters into their own hands and “presumed to go up” to fight against ...

The Destruction Of Sodom And Gomorrah, a painting by John Martin (painter), died 1854, thus 100 years. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) "I have been assigned to provide “your exegesis on Dr. Dawkins' characterization of Deuteronomy 20:13-15” in regards to his refusal to debate William Lane Craig . First, Dawkins characterized Deuteronomy 20:13-15 by this statement, “You would search far to find a modern preacher willing to defend God ’s commandment, in Deuteronomy 20:13-15, to kill all the men in a conquered city and to seize the women, children and livestock as plunder ... You might say that such a call to genocide could never have come from a good and loving God.” It appears that Dawkins characterizes this section as a command of God commit genocide. Genocide is defined as “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.” (Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, 1969) Secondly, I think that we may be starting in the wrong place. In a...

“For there are certain men crept in unawares . . . ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ .” ( Jude 1:4 ) The special word chosen by the Holy Spirit is most helpful in understanding this warning. The Greek term translated “crept in unawares” is pareisduno, a uniquely compounded word meaning to “sink down in alongside.” What could be more descriptive? These kinds of sneaky people have been written about before, Jude says, and are prime examples of those who transpose the grace of God into uncontrolled lust. Paul uses a similar word in his letter to Timothy to warn him about the ungodly men of the last days who “creep into houses” and undermine the lifestyles of “silly women” ( 2 Timothy 3:6-7 ). The imagery implies the subtlety and cleverness of these “ungodly men,” but there is a horrible consequence of this replacement of God’s grace with “lasciviousness.” Jude lists the terrible judgment on the peop...