Canaanites slaughter and the Jesus connection
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 it