Word Matters · Brandon Smith and Trevin Wax

Does God promote genocide?

April 3, 2017·23 min·2 clips

Hosts Trevin Wax and Brandon Smith ask if God promotes genocide, introducing a controversial Deuteronomy passage.

The episode opens with hosts Brandon Smith and Trevin Wax framing the central problem: passages in Deuteronomy, Joshua, and 1 Samuel appear to show God commanding Israel to completely destroy entire peoples, which seems irreconcilable with the nonviolent, merciful God depicted in the New Testament. Smith reads Deuteronomy 7, which commands Israel to 'completely destroy' the Canaanites, make no treaties, show no mercy, and tear down their altars. Wax references the Zondervan counterpoints book 'Show Them No Mercy,' which presents four scholarly views on the question. The first view holds that Israel simply misunderstood God and that the Canaanite conquest was a human error, not divine revelation. The second view, associated with scholar Eugene Merrill, accepts that God commanded these wars but only for a brief, unique historical period as a demonstration of his sovereignty and judgment against extreme corruption. The third view, associated with Tremper Longman, sees holy war as part of a continuous biblical pattern from Israel's battles through to the final battle in Revelation. Guest Joshua Butler identifies with the third view and offers three specific observations to reframe the passages. First, he argues that ancient Near Eastern cities were small fortified military outposts, not civilian population centers, making the commands primarily about military engagement. Second, he introduces the concept of 'ancient trash talk,' comparing the hyperbolic war rhetoric to athletes claiming they 'annihilated' opponents in a game that was actually close, noting that the same supposedly destroyed peoples reappear in subsequent biblical chapters. Third, he highlights that 'drive out' is the primary language used for Canaan, appearing more than 50 times, while 'utterly destroy' commands appear in only four main places. Butler connects the eviction language to the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve were driven out, and notes that Israel itself later receives the same exile treatment through Babylon. Butler also addresses the question of why God didn't simply give Canaan more time to repent, pointing to Genesis 15 where God tells Abraham his descendants will wait 400 years in Egypt because 'the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full extent.' Wax raises a cultural observation: that modern Western Christians find these passages uniquely troubling, while persecuted Christians globally and much of church history have not, suggesting the discomfort may reflect a particular cultural vantage point. Butler and Wax both argue that the standard framing — God and Israel as a powerful empire crushing helpless people — is actually inverted: Israel was a nation of former slaves, outgunned by Canaanites with horses and chariots, whose battle strategies like marching around Jericho were designed to show God as the primary agent of victory. Butler distinguishes Israel's posture ('God will fight for us') from what he calls a terrorist mindset ('we will fight for God'). The episode closes with Butler suggesting that belief in God's ultimate justice enables the oppressed to refrain from retaliation, and that these passages offer hope to the global church that God will ultimately overturn systemic evil.

As heard by us

A careful Christian reading of conquest language that faces the difficulty without flattening the biblical text.

Word Matters takes up one of Scripture's most troubling conquest questions by slowing down how Deuteronomy, Joshua, and 1 Samuel use the language of war.

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Why you'd press play

You want a serious, text-first read on whether God promotes genocide in the Bible's hardest war passages.

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