Abstract
Whenever I express my love of the Hebrew Scriptures to friends, they invariably react with surprise. ‘As a Christian, how can you tolerate a God who sanctioned such bloodshed?’ It is this problem that exercises Trimm in his short study of the divine requirement to utterly destroy the Canaanites (Deut. 7.1–5). However, he does not seek to solve the problem but to open it up for discussion.
Trimm first outlines the various reasons that led countries to wage war, before considering warfare itself, its preparation, weaponry, its results, the role of gods, and finally the place of rhetoric as an ancient form of fake news. The author then considers the problems of defining genocide, noting the terms of the UN Convention and considering whether genocide as there defined occurred in the ancient Near East. Finally, in this first part of his book, he explores the origin and history of the Canaanites and the Pentateuchal texts that prescribe action against them, including the exercise of herem.
In the second part of his book, Trimm considers various proposals for facing up to God’s apparent sanction of genocide. The most obvious and easiest is to reject the idea that God is good, a conclusion popularized by the New Atheists. This solves the problem but at the expense of having to find a new basis for ethics and morality.
The second option is to disavow the offensive portions of the Old Testament by saying that events never happened or that Israel was mistaken about God’s wishes, or on ethical grounds, or to read the Old Testament Christologically. But the New Testament accepts the stories of the Old Testament, including the violent ones.
The third course is to deny that the Old Testament describes anything as violent as an act of genocide. Resort is had to spiritualization of the text, regarding it as metaphor or hyperbole, all of which involves ‘playing fast and loose with the text’ (p. 76).
The final option is to accept that the texts mean what they say but that God was justified in acting in this way due to the wickedness of the Canaanites. But, as Trimm notes, ‘the cost here is high … it associates YHWH with something that looks a lot like genocide’ (p. 92).
Finally acknowledging the unsatisfactory position his discourse has reached, the author recommends resort to the psalms of lamentation through which one can both speak to God of one’s grievances and find a way to restore trust in him.
Taking up Trimm’s hope that his work will encourage further thought, it seems to me that rather than be constrained by views about the inerrancy of Scripture, a restraint that lies behind his options, we need to recognize that the Bible is the product of decades of theologians struggling to understand the nature of their God in the historical situation that faced them. For the Deuteronomists this meant finding an explanation for the Babylonian conquest, namely Israel’s fraternizing with the Canaanites. The Bible gives us the unique opportunity to travel through those decades and in our own time continue that journey as we, too, wrestle to find the truth.