Is God a brutal killing machine in the Old Testament?

When can a person be killed? Any reasonable person would agree that one person killing another person for selfish reasons is a murderer. Killing in self-defense and in defense of others or a nation, though, is a different matter, since the other person began the lethal attack. But a study of the OT produces this question: if murder is wrong, then how can Christians call the God of the Bible “good” when he commanded the Israelites to kill the Canaanites (in the Promised Land) and take their land? On the surface, God would appear to be not only harsh but a murderer.

But, what if this is not the first case, where God ordered the Jews to kill innocent people, but the second case, where God was defending people? One way to answer this is to understand the Canaanites better. If they were innocent people who God told the Jews to kill, then God was a murderer. But if they were clearly violent and murderers themselves, then they are no longer victims of God but rather people who received their deserved punishment. By examining the Canaanites, we will find that they fit this second category of deserved punishment.

How can we determine this? We can start by looking at the biblical record itself:

• Deuteronomy 9:4 states: “After the LORD your God has driven them [the Canaanites] out before you, do not say to yourself, ‘The LORD has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness.’ No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is going to drive them out before you.” (Ezra 9:11 adds: "The land you are entering to possess is a land polluted by the corruption of its people. By their detestable pracices they have filled it with their impurity from one end to the other.")
• What where the Canaanites doing that caused God to order the Jews to kill them? Deuteronomy 18:9-13 described some of the detestable acts: “When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not learn to imitate the detestable ways of the nations there. Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord; because of these same detestable practices the Lord your God will drive out those nations before you. You must be blameless before the Lord your God.”
• Canannites even offered their own children as sacrifices to their false gods. How horrible is that? Plus, think about it this way: if the Canaanites would do that to their own children, imagine the type of violence that they inflected on those who were not in their own family? Or even the type of violence they inflicted on their enemies or on those they defeated in battle?

Judges 1:4-7 describes another case of God using the Jews to exert righteous punishment. It tells the story of the king of Bezek, whom the Jews captured and then cut off his thumbs and big toes. That may sound overly harsh, but hear what the king said about it: Seventy kings have their thumbs and big toes cut off have picked up scraps under my table. Now God has paid me back for what I did to them. The Jews merely exacted the punishment on the king of Bezek that he enforced on others.

Bill Webb and Gordon Oeste wrote a book called Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric? in which they examined some of the ways that other nations killed people in those days. This includes extermination methods such as “slicing open pregnant women and killing the unborn, impaling live victims on stakes pushed through their bodies, flaying alive—cutting/peeling the skin from live captives staked to the ground,” among others. (p. 285) Furthermore, nonlethal activities included “stripping captives naked and parading them with shaved genitals; excruciatingly painful rope bindings that dislocated and shattered joints; mutilating (often live) captives—cutting off the tongue, toes, noses, genitals, hands, feet, legs, head, and more; blinding prisoners; displaying body parts—stacking piles of heads at the city gate or piling up hands and penises” along with many other equally horrible deeds, much of which was done while their victims were alive. (p. 284) Other nations desired to strike terror in the hearts of their enemies so that they would not dare attack them in fear that they might be captured. This is not the kind of command that takes place in the Old Testament from God. Deuteronomy 20:13 stated that the Jews were to kill quickly and not maim or torture. The killing that the Israelites engage in while conquering the Promised Land was just that, killing due to punishment without maiming or torturing for display.

If that is how other kingdoms treated enemies, how did they treat their own people? I mentioned above the pracrice of sacrificing their own children. In addition, the Old Testament mentions that other kingdoms not only worshipped false gods but used temple prostitution, including both men and women prostitutes. Protestation was wrong enough, but to join worship, even false worship, with prostitution was another way to degrade people in the name of a god.

Therefore, the Canaanites brought punishment on themselves, both men and women, by engaging in multiple evil acts. God was not mean, violent, or a murderer. Instead, He delivered a just punishment to the Canaanites.

In addition, God viewed his creation (meaning all people) so highly that he also promised his own people, the Jews, that he would target them for the same type of destruction if they engaged in the actions of the Canaanites.

• Deuteronomy 28:14, 15: "Do not turn aside from any of the commands I give you today, to the right or to the left, following other gods and serving them. However, if you do not obey the LORD your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I [Moses] give you today, all these curses [spoken about earlier about other kingdoms] will come upon you and overtake you."
• Deuteronomy 28:37: "You will become a thing of horror and an object of scorn and ridicule to all the nations where the LORD will drive you."
• Deuteronomy 28: 63: "Just as it pleased the LORD to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please him to ruin and destroy you. You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess."
• Deuteronomy 30:17-18: "But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you bow down to other gods and worship them [including temple prostitution and child sacrifice], I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess."

But this is exactly what the Jews did multiple times in the years after Solomon:

• I Kings 14: 24b and descibing the practices of the Jews in the time of Rehoboam, son of Solomon: "the people engaged in all the detestable practices of the nations that LORD had driven out before the Israelites.
• II Kings 16:3: "He [the king of Judah] followed the ways of the kings of Israel and even sacrificed his son in the fire, engaging in the detestable practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before the Israelites." The Jews eventually adopted the detestable practice of sacricing their own children to false gods.
• II Kings 17:16, 17: "They forsook all the commands of the Lord their God and made for themselves two idols cast in the shape of calves, and an Asherah pole. They bowed down to all the starry hosts, and they worshiped Baal. 17 They sacrificed their sons and daughters in the fire. They practiced divination and sought omens and sold themselves to do evil in the eyes of the Lord, arousing his anger."
• They did exactly what God forbid them from doing back in Deuteronomy 18:9-13 (see above for the verses), which was before they even entered the Promised Land.
• Jeremiah 32:35 [God speaking]: "They built high places for Baal in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to sacrifice their sons and daughters to Molech, though I never commanded, nor did it enter my mind, that they would do such a detestable thing and so make Judah sin."
• Finally, God decided to do to the Jews what he commanded the Jews to do to the inhabitants earlier, when the Jews first conquered the Promised Land:
• II Kings 21:4-6: He [Manasseh] built altars in the temple of the Lord, of which the Lord had said, "In Jerusalem I will put my Name." In the two courts of the temple of the Lord, he built altars to all the starry hosts. 6 He sacrificed his own son in the fire, practiced divination, sought omens, and consulted mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the eyes of the Lord, arousing his anger.
• II Kings 21:10-12: The Lord said through his servants the prophets: "Manasseh king of Judah has committed these detestable sins. He has done more evil than the Amorites who preceded him and has led Judah into sin with his idols. Therefore this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: I am going to bring such disaster on Jerusalem and Judah that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle."

What happened to the Jews? II Kings 17:23 tells the story: "The Lord removed them from his presence." God sent the Babylonians to conquer the kingdom of Judah. They also destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, which meant that the Jews could not offer sacrifice to God. The Jews had rejected God so fully that God did not want their sacrifices anymore until they had fully repented. Plus, the Babylonians took most of the Jews back to Babylonia, where they lived in exile for seventy years. So, just as he had promised them, God punished the Jews and removed them from the Promised Land. During that time of exile, they did repent, and so God brought them back, and they rebuilt the Temple and began to offer sacrifices again. But they would not regain the land for another 350 years.

Therefore, and this is the main point: God did not set aside his punishment even among the Jews, his own people. This shows that God is not the murderer some might think he is, but instead is always fair and just, even if it meant destroying the Canaanites when they deserved it, and even if it meant having his people the Jews conquered and scattered plus rejecting their sacrifices until they repented.

Therefore, as God initially told the Jews, they were going to take over the Promised Land because the horrible actions of the Canaanites living there and not because of the anything the Jews thought they deserved.

In summary, God did aid the Jews in killing the Canaanites in the Promised Land. But he did not do so simply to remove the Canaanites and give the land to the Jews, but because the detestable actions that the Canaanites engaged in required that they be punished. Plus, even in battle, the Jews were to act in a way that honored people by killing them quickly and without unnecessary pain and suffering, unlike other kingdoms who often tortured captives. Therefore, the Canaanites were punished justly and humanely for their evil actions. In addition, the Jews themselves were not above the same type of punishment and displacement if they acted as the Canaanites in the Promised Land did. Therefore, God was concerned with justice and protecting his creation. He used the Jews rightly to punish the Canaanites, but did the same to the Jews once they rejected Him and treated others as the Canaaanites did.

Mark Nickens and adapted from LindsayAnn Nickens's “Is God a brutal killing machine in the OT?” paper at Dallas Theological Seminary.

© 2021, 2022 Mark Nickens