Canaanites in the Old Testament,

Canaanites

In the Old Testament, God commanded that the Canaanites be destroyed. However, we cannot look to the New Testament to tell us why God commanded that the Canaanites be eradicated. Why would he do this? God does not tell us in the Old or New Testament why he wishes for this to be so, just as he does not do so in the Old Testament. We cannot look to the Old or the New Testament because both Testaments are trying to teach us about the love of God -- plainly and simply. Wright says that we have to accept that there are things that will not be explained to us and things that we will never understand. However, there are things that we can at least not confuse. Wanting to destroy the Canaanites seems like an evil thing and it doesn't make sense to us although it does later when we see that Israel made the same mistakes as the Canaanites. It doesn't make sense to Wright either and he believes that one cannot look to the New Testament to find answers to the question; one will not find the answers there.

Wright states that Israel's conquest of Canaan is never justified on so-called ethnic grounds in the Bible, and that any "notions of ethnic superiority -- moral or numerical -- are resoundingly squashed in Deuteronomy" (p. 92). Israel was supposedly never acting in a way that was evil on its own part, but rather, Israel was simply carrying out what God wanted and God did this through his people. We cannot look at what happened to the Canaanites as cruelty against a race because what God was dealing with was not a race of people, but rather, he was dealing with evil people (independent of race).

Wright doesn't spiritualize Israel's Conquest of Canaan because he believes that there is a difference between any kind of violent acts that appear to be arbitrary -- like the conquest of the Canaanites, which also appeared to him as selfish -- and an act that appears to be the consequence or punishment because of an act. Wright likens it to a parent smacking their child for no good reason as compared to a person who enacts a punishment because of disobedient behavior.