Genocide? Or Obedience?

In 2010, I attended a writer’s retreat at Laity Lodge in the Hill Country of Texas. I was part of the poetry seminar, led by poet (and University of Missouri professor) Scott Cairns. Our overnight assignment was to write a poem about a Bible passage we found troublesome.

I chose Joshua 5-12.

One of the main themes in that section is herem, a Hebrew word meaning destruction of essentially everything. In that section, before a number of battles, God tells Joshua and the Israelites to commit herem when they defeat the foe. That means killing every living thing – men, women, children, domestic animals and livestock.

The command was given several times, and the Israelites obeyed (one tried to hold on to some treasure and got death for him and his family as a result). At Jericho, only the prostitute Rahab and her family were spared, because she had protected the spies. Every other living thing in the city was put to the sword.

The passage is clear. God told the Israelites to do it.

Today we use words like genocide or “ethnic cleansing.”

No matter what it’s called, the idea of herem is unsettling. In most of the conflicts, God told his people to undertake mass killings of those they conquered.

Theoretically, I can understand what was happening. God was cleansing the land. What I didn’t know, until Andy Stanley pointed it out in The Grace of God, was that God was also judging the Canaanites (referred to as the Amorites in Genesis), the people living in the land promised to the Israelites.

Stanley says that the sins of the Amorites were grievous and offensive to God (things like child sacrifice); that they had been given ample time to repent and change (several hundred years, in fact); that they had heard what was coming with the Israelites (Rahab clearly knew the whole story of the Exodus). So it wasn’t only about the Hebrews taking the promised land; it was also about the Canaanites being judged for their sins.

My modern sensibilities still recoil. It doesn’t seem harsh; it was harsh. But I’m reminded of our own examples of non-God genocide – the Nazi death camps, the war in the Balkans in the 1990s, Rwanda, and Dafur. The difference is that God had a godly purpose.

God is both terrifying and loving, Stanley writes. The terrifying part is, well, terrifying.

This is the poem I wrote.

As for me and my house
A meditation on Joshua 5-12

Would I have been cleansed
in the wilderness, or buried
in the sand as a submission
to the cleansing?

That man wielding the
great sword, that man
commanding the Lord’s host,
that man who makes ground
holy,
would I have obeyed, even
unto death?

Could I have stood in that
Jericho doorway, and plunged
the sword into the mother
and then the child? Or the child
first and then the mother?
And plunged that sword again
at Ai and Makeddeh,
Libnah and Lachish,
Eglon and Hebron,
Hazor and Anab, Jarmuth and
Gexer and Bethel and Aphek
and Tirzah and Megiddo and…

When the man who makes
ground holy turned over
the tables of shekels and
talents and doves, shouting
at thieves and robbers,
would I have conspired
to kill him, becoming yet
another submission to the
cleansing?
Or would he have
cleansed me?

Led by Jason Stayszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Grace of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “Rescued by Grace,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.