I remember a discussion I once had with an elderly Christian woman about Joshua and the Battle of Jericho. In that account, Scripture tells us that after Israel had taken Jericho, they were to devote “all in the city to destruction, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword” (Josh. 6:21)[1]. At the end of the conversation, the woman told me that reading that story used to bother her. She always struggled with how God told Israel to leave no one alive, but then she remembered that the children who were taken were not of the age of accountability. Once she realized that, she felt better.
Out of earnest desire, sometimes Christians try to make portions of Scripture that are hard to reconcile in modern culture more palatable. The Bible says some hard things that make us uncomfortable and understandably so. It was written in a different historical and cultural context. However, our belief in the inspiration of Scripture reminds us that such passages, though difficult to reconcile, are just as profitable for believers today as they were for their original audience.
The Problem of Holy War
One portion of Scripture with which Christians (and non-Christians) struggle are the Bible’s teachings on holy war. From my experience in pastoral ministry, many people are ignorant of these passages and are surprised by them when they start a Bible reading plan. In the Old Testament, God commanded Israel to wipe out the enemies that had settled in the land of Canaan. Deuteronomy 20:16–17 says:
But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded.
For Israel to follow God’s instruction, they were to take the lives of military combatants and non-combatants (elderly men, women, and children). What makes this instruction even more difficult for Christians is that it seems so different from what Jesus taught when He said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Mt. 5:44). How then do we reconcile these things?
Because they were a theocracy, Israel did not have sacred wars and secular wars. All wars were sacred.[2] Wars of Israel were wars of Yahweh. He called them to fight. Because of this sacred dimension, soldiers were required to fast and restrain from sexual relations. At this time in Israel’s history, Israel did not have a standing army, meaning that no one was paid and war involved every abled-bodied man.
Other nations usually allowed their soldiers to partake in the spoil as incentive to fight, but this prospect was not true for Israel. Unlike their enemies, the spoils of war belonged to God, since He was the victor. The most important factor was that this war was God’s. He was the one Who fought, and He gave Israel victory. Thus, Israel had no reason to believe they would lose, so long as they had faith.
The miraculous way that Israel conquered Jericho (Josh. 6) and Gibeon (10:11, 14) displayed how God was the one Who achieved victory, not Israel. Because God was the Victor, He decided what things were devoted to Him. At times, God took the plunder for Himself (6:17)[3] and, at other times, He gave it to Israel (8:27). If Israel took what belonged to God, they, too, became His enemies, as in the case of Achan (7:1–26). The taking of the devoted things was the equivalent of stealing what rightfully belonged to God.
The Purpose of Holy War for Israel
The Old Testament seems to present three purposes for holy war. The first is that it was for the judgment of the Canaanites. After making a covenant with Abraham, God told Abraham that his seed would be enslaved to Egypt for 400 years and would then return. God was waiting for the sins of the pagans to fill up (Gen. 15:16). He was being patient with them by not punishing them for their sin and abominable practices.
When Israel drove out the Canaanites 400 years later, God used Israel as His instrument to punish the Canaanites and cleanse the land of sin. However, if Israel failed to drive out the Canaanites, the curse of God’s covenant would be upon them (Lev. 18:28; Deut. 28:25–68). What was supposed to happen to their enemies would happen to them.
Another purpose for holy war was that it protected Israel from becoming like the Canaanite culture. Their religious practices involved idolatry, sexual immorality, cult prostitution, and child sacrifice. God had completely forbade Israel from these practices (Deut. 7:1–5).
Of course, the Book of Judges shows that Israel never fulfilled God’s commands completely. Israel made alliances with the nations around them. They “settled among the people” (Judg. 1:16, 29, 32, 33) and became like the culture around them, instead of being set apart from it. Eventually, they intermarried and adopted Canaanite religious practices. When they did not listen to God, it came back to hurt them. Holy war was God’s way of protecting Israel from this temptation.
The final purpose of holy war was the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham concerning the giving of the land. As stated earlier, God promised Abraham that his seed would inherit Canaan. Since only Canaan was promised, Israel’s conquest was not about building an empire. They were to drive out only the people who inhabited the land God had promised them. The conquering of any other inhabited lands was a violation of God’s law and promise.[4]
The Application of Holy War Today
One might ask: What significance does holy war have for the New Testament Christian? What can it possibly teach us? First, it teaches the need for eradicating sin. Individually, we are to drive out sin from our lives—to destroy it completely. God will accept nothing less than holiness. Corporately, wayward church members must be called to repent. If they refuse after much patience and grace have been offered, then the appropriate measures of church discipline become necessary (Mt. 18:15–20; 1 Cor. 5:4–5). When congregations do not take necessary steps to remove sin, they become compromised at best or look like the culture around them at worst.
Second, holy war is a picture of God’s final salvation and eternal judgment. Israel’s conquest of the land was the fulfillment of God’s promise of rest from their slavery in Egypt, while also being God’s hand of judgment upon the Canaanites. God’s salvation and judgment are no different for anyone today. Old Testament scholar Barry Webb writes, “The view of both the Old and New Testaments is that there were times in the past when such judgment was justified (e.g. the world of Noah’s day, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Canaan of Joshua’s day), and that the present world stands under the very real threat of similar destruction.”[5]
Scriptural witness bears testimony to a God Who is patient and slow to anger. He waited 400 years before executing judgment upon the Canaanites. When the time came for Israel’s conquest, judgment was not inevitable, as taught from the story of Rahab. If faith spared her and her family from judgment, then it could have spared others as well. The nations were judged because they refused to repent.
Under the new covenant, the pattern of salvation and judgment continues. Those who accept God’s offer of salvation through Jesus will be saved from their sins. When Christ returns, the saints’ salvation will also be the sinners’ judgment. The two are inextricably linked.
For some reason, Christians find Christ’s coming judgment easier to accept than God’s judgment in holy war. However, the judgment Christ brings will be far greater and more devastating than anything Israel had ever done or the world has ever seen. The appalling nature of God’s judgment in holy war is meant to awaken us to the horrifying reality of the eternal judgment that awaits this world. Nothing will be spared, except those who believe.
So why does God not call Christians today to wage this kind of warfare? Properly distinguishing the old covenant from the new covenant is important at this juncture. Without meaning to pit the two covenants against each other, we sometimes do so by implying that one teaches something different from the other.[6] Webb states:
The fundamental difference from the Old Testament is the way in which the kingdom of God is manifested in the world under the new covenant: no longer in the form of a nation with political and military power . . . but as a church which exists in the world as salt and light, and maintains itself and grows by the preaching of the gospel. It is the state, not the church, which has the responsibility of wielding the sword as the agent of God’s wrath.[7]
In the end, what makes the Bible’s teaching on holy war difficult is that we unknowingly think we have achieved progress. We presume moral superiority over other cultures and peoples who have preceded us in history—what C. S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.”[8] We are not more morally enlightened than peoples and nations from other times in history. All of us are affected by sin, a truth that should humble us. When we examine the problems that plague modern culture, we discover that we are not as “enlightened” as we thought but are just as primitive as the nations of old. The Christian gospel reminds us that no generation, people, or culture is better than another. None of us would be what we are without God’s grace.
About the author: Jeremy Craft is a former contributor to the HSF and is the pastor of Piney Grove Free Will Baptist Church. He holds a Master of Divinity from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and a Bachelor of Science from Welch College. He resides in Chipley, Florida with his wife and two children.
[1] All biblical quotations are taken from the English Standard Version unless otherwise stated.
[2] By calling holy war “sacred,” I do not mean that Israel was on a religious conquest or that war was the means of advancing Judaism. Rather, no sacred-secular division existed. All of life, including war, was a sacred act.
[3] In Joshua 6:17, Jericho was devoted to the Lord for destruction. The word used is herem, which means that the entire city was set apart (devoted) to the Lord. Hence, the city was burned to the ground as an offering. Jericho could have been a kind of first fruits offering, since it was the first city to fall in the Israelite conquest of Canaan. Thus, the city was devoted entirely to the Lord. Judges 1:8, 17, and 25 also indicates that Israel did commit other Canaanite other cities to total destruction.
[4] Perhaps this background helps explain why David angered the Lord when he wanted to take a census in 2 Samuel 24. He needed to know how many men were able to fight for the purposes of expanding his kingdom.
[5] Barry Webb, The Book of Judges, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 69.
[6] Interestingly, the moral ethic that makes holy war problematic for many people (including Christians) comes from the same person who affirmed all that the Old Testament taught. Whether conscious of it or not, they pit the moral ethic of the old covenant against that of the new covenant. Yet Jesus never criticized God’s commandments under the law. Instead, He affirmed all that the law taught and came to fulfill it (Mt. 5:17).
[7] Webb, The Book of Judges, 66.
[8] C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966), 207–08. Lewis defined chronological snobbery as the “uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”
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