God, the Canaanites and the Condition of Mankind

Reconciling the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament can at first seem problematic. Many Christians are comfortable with the God revealed by Christ in saving the woman caught in adultery but cringe and squirm at the thought that the same God commanded the destruction of the Canaanites. Hammered by neo-atheist polemic, some Christians of a more liberal persuasion have almost given up defending the God revealed in the Old Testament; “away with the brute!” they say, happy to accept a subtle form of Marcionism if it means they can keep up with culture. You see, we identify with those poor Canaanites, don’t we? We put ourselves in their position. And well we should. We share much in common with them, us and the Canaanites. Child sacrifice? Check. Sexual immorality? Check. False gods? Check. The fate that befell the Canaanites at the Hands of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is the very same fate that we are deserving of.

The surreptitious little lie in the heart of modern man is that he is good. “Why do I need God?”, he baulks, “I’m not a bad person, I look after my family, I give to charity.” Good? What is good? Someone can only be qualitatively good in reference to some objective standard of good and evil. Since the modern man rejects God, he must also reject an objective standard of good and evil. There is no foundation for such a standard in a godless universe, it is simply survival of the fittest and behaviours that make one’s chances of survival greater are the only ones that matter. Any notion of a transcendent moral code is illusory. So the godless man’s claim that he is good is just nonsense. He may as well say “I am the colour blue”. As for the Christian who claims that he is good he is at best ignorant and at worst a madman. Merely a cursory reading of scripture is enough to furnish you with the understanding that man’s attempts to live up to God’s holy standards are futile. Such a realisation ought to lead us to immediately seek the grace of God for our salvation since there isn’t a cat’s chance in hell that we can save ourselves. This much is clear from scripture; God is good and God is just, we are not. If there is one thing that is eminently provable about mankind it’s our proclivity for evil. In the last century alone, a time of great technological and scientific advance, over 100 million were murdered in communist states. Hitler oversaw the extermination of 6 million Jews, to say nothing of the 6 million Slavs murdered in nazi death camps. Too distant? How about Syria, Darfur, North Korea? Or perhaps the 8.7 million unborn babies aborted in the UK since 1967? Real enough? Perhaps what’s most disturbing about evil acts is that they are aren’t exclusively perpetrated by wicked, moral monsters but by quite normal people. People like you and me. American psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment at Yale in 1963 in which local people participated in what appeared to be a traditional learning study. He paired up the participants, one was given the role of teacher and the other was the learner. The learner was given a list of word pairs to memorise and then was strapped into a chair with electrodes attached to their wrists. When the learner got a question wrong the teacher was instructed by the investigator to give them a shock using a shock generator with increments ranging from 15-450V. These increments were labelled for the teacher from ‘slight shock’ through to ‘severe shock’ with the last increment simply labelled ‘xxx’. Before the experiment each teacher received a 45V shock to impress them of their actions. As the experiment progressed the teacher was instructed to keep increasing the shock voltage even though the learner began to scream and beg to be let out. In reality the participant receiving the shocks was actually a paid actor and received no real electric shocks. The purpose of the experiment was to find out how far the teacher would go, to discover how many of the teachers would administer dangerous shocks. What they found was that 65% of the teachers administered all of the shocks that they were instructed to, even up to 450V. Milgram concluded that Aushwitz could have been staffed by the average citizen of New Haven, Connecticut! The propensity for evil is a characteristic peculiar to mankind, no matter how nice we think we are, we all share it.

Now what does the Bible tell us of God’s attitude towards evil? He hates it. Moreover he hates those who perpetrate evil. A jagged pill to swallow for those who want to paint God like some great agony aunt in the sky. Do we really believe that a good, powerful and just God is going to turn a blind eye to sin? That he’ll be more than happy to welcome unrepentant murderers, child abusers and rapists into heaven? There is not single good reason given in scripture to believe this is the case. God hates sin and he must punish it.

The Bible tells us that the Canaanites were guilty of extraordinary evil, and that God stayed his hand for 400 years until their sin had appreciated to a vile crescendo (Gen 15:16) before judging them. God makes it clear to the Israelites that their inheritance of the promised land isn’t due to their own righteousness but because of the wickedness of the Canaanites who He would drive out to make room for them.

“Do not think in your heart, after the LORD your God has cast them out before you, saying, ‘Because of my righteousness the LORD has brought me in to possess this land’; but it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is driving them out from before you. It is not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart that you go in to possess their land, but because of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD your God drives them out from before you, and that He may fulfill the word which the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” – Deuteronomy 9:4-5 NKJV

So, what were the sins of the Canaanites? Were they worthy of such punishment? Here is what we know:

1. Idolatry

The Canaanites forsook their worship of God for the worship of many gods. The most prominent of these gods was Ba’al, who according to a Ba’al epic poem raped his sister while she was in the form of a calf 77 even 88 times. The god whom the Canaanites worshipped committed rape, incest and bestiality in the same act and repeated it many times.

“Yet how tragically ironic, but not accidental, that in the very way of ascribing worth to worthless things, the worthless confers worthlessness to the very ones ascribing due worth. What cyclical emptiness!” – Joseph Gorra

There is almost a sort of symbiosis in the relationship between a worshipper and the object of their worship. A transfer takes place, the worshipper begins to take on characteristics belonging to their deity. Consequently, the Canaanites naturally assumed many of Ba’al’s sexual proclivities.

2. Incest

The Canaanite pantheon was incestuous, as nearly every other ancient near eastern pantheon was. The God, El had 70 children by Asherah, Ba’al being one of them. Asherah attempted to seduce Ba’al, when Ba’al told El of this, El encouraged him to have sex with her to humiliate her, which he duly did.

We know from historical records that incest was originally punishable by death or banishment in Canaanite law but that around the 14th century BC the punishment for incest was reduced to no more than the payment of a fine. The decriminalisation of incest in Canaanite law happens in the time period between God speaking to Abraham concerning the sins of the Amorites not reaching their full measure (Gen 15:16) and the Israelite exodus from Egypt. Seeming to confirm God’s indictment of the Canaanites. Sodom was itself a Canaanite city which God destroyed for its brazen sexual immorality. Lot’s daughters, raised in Canaanite culture, upon escape from the damned city get their father drunk and have sex with him in order to conceive, revealing normative Canaanite sexual values.

3. Adultery

Canaanite religion involved temple prostitution. Priests in the temples most probably attended to their duties naked and performed ritual sex acts as sacraments.

“According to texts from Ugarit, the practice of the cult involved priests drawn from priestly families and also sacred prostitutes, both male and female.” – Jonathan Tubb, Curator of Syria-Palestine within the Western Asiatic Department of the British Museum

For the Canaanite, having sex with a temple prostitute was tantamount to copulating with the god themselves. As such, sex with temple prostitutes was seen as perfectly lawful. Gwendolyn Leick, Assyriology researcher at the University of the Arts London, writes; “in Mesopotamia, where all sexual behaviour was under the auspices of Inanna/Ištar, sexual acts outside of marriage could be condoned and to some extent institutionalised.” There is little reason to believe that the Canaanites, living between Mesopotamia and Egypt would have been any different. Ancient near eastern law at the time made adultery illegal for women, men could have sex with any unmarried woman they pleased. If a married man did have sex with another married woman it was an offence but not against his wife but against the married woman’s husband.

     4. Child Sacrifice

“Kleitarchos says the Phoenicians (Canaanites) and especially the Carthaginians who honoured Kronos, whenever they wished to succeed in any great enterprise, would vow by one of their children if they achieved the things they longed for, to sacrifice him to a god. A bronze image of Kronos was set up among them, stretching out its cupped hands above a bronze cauldron, which would burn the child. As the flame burning the child surrounded the body, the limbs would shrivel up and the mouth would appear to grin as if laughing, until it was shrunk enough to slip into the cauldron.” – Kleitarchos, scholia on Plato’s Republic

The Canaanites are reported in the bible as sacrificing their children to Molech, God specifically commands the Israelites not to engage in this practice in Leviticus 18:21 “Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech.” It wasn’t just unwanted babies that were sacrificed either, parents would sacrifice their own children even up to the age of four. Plutarch reports that music would be played loudly to drown out the screams of the infant. I cannot imagine a more horrifying event.

“We have independent evidence that child sacrifice was practiced in the Canaanite (Carthaginian and Phoenician) world from many classical sources, Punic inscriptions and archaeological evidence, as well as Egyptian depictions of the ritual occurring in Syria- Palestine, and from a recently discovered Phoenician inscription in Turkey. There is therefore no reason to doubt the biblical testimony to Canaanite child sacrifice.” – John Day, Professor at Oxford University

“No other ancient people, however, regularly chose their own children as sacrificial victims, or equated them with animals which could sometimes be substituted for them. The Phoenician practice indicates a definition of the ‘family’ and the boundaries belonging to it and alienation from it that was incomprehensible to others in the ancient Mediterranean.” – Shelby Brown, Researcher at UCLA

5. Bestiality

As mentioned earlier, the Canaanite god, Ba’al committed bestiality and it should be no surprise that the Canaanites also practiced it. Hittite law 199 states; “If anyone has intercourse with a pig or a dog, he shall die. If a man has intercourse with a horse or a mule, there is no punishment.” Elsewhere in the ancient near east other than for the Israelites, there is no prohibition against bestiality, in some cases it is positively encouraged. A Mesopotamian incantation for a man unable to achieve an erection involved a woman copulating with an animal (Leick, Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature).

Conclusion

As Clay Jones, associate professor of Christian Apologetics has it, unless we understand God’s holiness and hatred of sin, we can’t begin to understand His judgement of the Canaanites. The fact is, we don’t hate sin the way God does, we were born in it, our intuition is corrupted by it, we have grown used to it. Also, when The Lord spoke with Abraham about the destruction of Sodom in Genesis 18:16-33 He was willing to stay his hand if he found just 10 righteous men in the city. Sodom was a Canaanite city. We must see the linkage here, if God would have spared Sodom for just 10 righteous people, His approach to judging the rest of Canaan would have been the same. Are we to believe that an omniscient God would not have known whether the Canaanites were really guilty of the sins reported of them or not? Or that He could not have known whether they would repent or not? Moreover, there is one example in scripture of a Canaanite woman consigned to extermination within the city of Jericho who finds favour in Gods eyes. Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute harboured Israelite spies and cut a deal with them that in return for her kindness they would spare her and her fathers household. Through this act of kindness and humility, Rahab and her household didn’t simply escape with their lives, they became Israelites, they were given the same rights and privileges. Rahab married Salmon of Judah and gave birth to Boaz, she is in the genealogy of Christ himself (Matt 1:5). Repentance and obedience would have stayed God’s hand of judgement against the Canaanites but they clearly had no intention of doing any such thing. The Canaanite judgement was not genocide but rather capital punishment, a judgement which their maker was justified in making. Also, it seems reasonable from scripture to believe that any Canaanite children killed by the Israelites would have gone to be with God, an incommensurable good, a far better fate than living with their earthly parents who may or may not rape them or burn them alive.

Ultimately, the just result of a sinful life is death. That’s what’s fair, that’s what you and I deserved. It is by God’s goodness and grace that we are drawing breath, we are living on His time. He has poured out all the rightful punishment and holy wrath that our sins deserved upon His only Son, Jesus Christ who has now willingly saved us from paying the penalty that our sin deserves. The cross speaks of the horror of evil, of the ugliness of human nature, it exposes us, lays bear the carnal violence resident within our hearts. The cross also reveals the perfect love of God, his unending mercy and His mighty power to save us from our awful predicament. In Christ alone, our hope is found.

“Till on that cross as Jesus died

The wrath of God was satisfied

For every sin on Him was laid

Here in the death of Christ I live”

Hymn – In Christ Alone

By Graham Phillips

Sources

We Don’t Hate sin So We Don’t Understand What Happened to the Canaanites – Clay Jones, Philosophia Christi, 2009

Is God a Moral Monster; Making Sense of the Old Testament God – Paul Copan, 2011

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