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The Seven Nations of Canaan

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The Seven Nations of Canaan The Seven Nations of Canaan THE SEVEN NATIONS OF CANAAN[1] By Reuven Kimelman This study deals with the war and the seven Canaanite nations.[2] It complements my previous post on Amalek of March 13, 2014, “The Ethics of the Case of Amalek: An Alternative Reading of the Biblical Data and the Jewish Tradition. “The popular conception in both cases is that the Bible demands their extermination thereby providing a precedent for genocide.[3] The popular reading of the Canaanites filters it through the prism of Deuteronomy. The popular reading of Amalek filters the Torah material through the prism of Saul’s battle against Amalek in the Book of Samuel. In actuality, the biblical data is much more ambiguous making the most destructive comments the exception not the rule as will be evident from a systematic analysis of the Canaanite material in the Bible as was previously done with Amalek. This post will deal with the following seven questions with regard to the nations of Canaan: a). What are the different biblical approaches to the native nations of Canaan? b). According to the Bible, what actually happened to them? c). What is the evidence that the Bible is sensitive to the moral issues involved? d). How has the Jewish tradition removed the category of the seven nations from its ethical agenda? e). What is the role of the doctrine of repentance? f). What is the relevance of the “Sennacherib principle”? g). How relevant is the category “holy war”? With regard to the extermination of the seven nations of Canaan,[4] sometimes called Canaanites sometimes Amorites, the biblical record is also not of one cloth. The clarification of their status in the Bible requires a systematic treatment of all the data book by book. Genesis (12:6, 15:16) is aware that the Canaanites were in the land when Abraham arrived and would remain for generations. From Genesis 38 and the end of The Book of Ruth we learn that from the progeny of Abraham’s great grandson Judah and the Canaanite Tamar will issue King David. Also Simeon’s son is identified as “Saul the son of a Cannanite women” (Genesis 46:10, Exodus 6:15) without comment. Exodus (23)’s position on the elimination of the Canaanites (v. 23) is a gradual dispossession by God, not by the Israelites:[5] 27 I will send forth My terror before you, and I will throw into panic all the people among whom you come, and I will make all your enemies turn tail before you. 28 I will send a plague ahead of you, and it shall drive out before you the Hivites, the Canaanites, and the Hittites.[6] 29 I will not drive them out before you in a single year, lest the land become desolate and the wild beasts multiply to your hurt. 30 I will drive them out before you little by little, until you have increased and possess the land. Leviticus (18) refers to God casting out of the nations: 24 Do not defile yourselves in any of those ways, for it is by such that the nations that I am casting out before you defiled themselves. 25 Thus the land became defiled; and I called it to account for its iniquity, and the land spewed out its inhabitants. Here there is a coordination between God and land. The land spews out its inhabitants for defiling it and God expels them. Numbers (33) refers to the Israelites deporting the local inhabitants: 51 Speak to the Israelite people and say to them: When you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan, 52 you shall dispossess all the inhabitants of the land; you shall destroy all their figured objects; you shall destroy all their molten images, and you shall demolish all their cult places. 53 And you shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have assigned the land to you to possess. It is clear that the issue here is not ethnic but religio-cultural. The fear is that Israel will be ensnared, especially through intermarriage, by the local moral and cultic practices . Exodus 34 emphasizes the religious factor: 12b Beware of making a covenant with the inhabitants of the land against which you are advancing, lest they be a snare in your midst. 13 Rather you must tear down their altars, smash their pillars,and cut down their sacred posts; 14 for you must not worship any other God, because the Lord, whose name is Impassioned, is an impassioned God. 15 You must not make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, for they will lust after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and invite you, and you will eat of their sacrifices. 16 And when you take wives from among their daughters for your sons, their daughters will lust after their gods and will cause your sons to lust after their gods.[7] Leviticus 18 emphasizes the moral factor: 26 But you must keep My laws and My rules, and you must not do any of those abhorrent things, neither the citizen nor the stranger who resides among you; 27 for all those abhorrent things were done by the people who were in the land before you, and the land became defiled. 28 So let not the land spew you out for defiling it as it spewed out the nation that came before you. 29 All who do any of those abhorrent things—such persons shall be cut off from their people. 30 You shall keep My charge not to engage in any of the abhorrent practices that were carried on before you, and you shall not defile yourselves through them: I the Lord am your God. Numbers 33 warns Israel against assimilating Canaanite norms lest they share their fate of expulsion. “55 But if you do not dispossess the inhabitants of the land, those whom you allow to remain shall be stings in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall harass you in the land in which you live; 56 so that I will do to you what I planned to do to them.” The exception is Deuteronomy 7 which demands total destruction: 1 When the Lord your God brings you to the land that you are about to enter and possess, and He dislodges many nations before you— the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, seven nations much larger than you—2and the Lord your God delivers them to you and you defeat them, you must doom them to destruction: grant them no terms and give them no quarter. Even according to Deuteronomy the fear is not of their DNA but moral assimilation, for it goes on to say: “Lest they lead you into doing all the abhorrent things that they have done for their gods and you stand guilty before the Lord your God” (20:18). For Deuteronomy (12:31; 18:9-12), the abhorrent things include child sacrifice. Strangely, Deuteronomy continues with a provision against intermarriage: 3 You shall not intermarry with them: do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons. 4 For they will turn your children away from Me to worship other gods, and the Lord’s anger will blaze forth against you and He will promptly wipe you out. 5 Instead, this is what you shall do to them: you shall tear down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred posts, and consign their images to the fire. Apprehension about intermarriage or coming to terms with an eradicated people is strange unless Deuteronomy is aware that its demand to doom them will not be (or was not) implemented. And, in fact, as we shall see the evidence from Judges 3 is that they did intermarry. Alternatively, ḥerem does not entail the elimination of the Canaanites only their isolation, that is, they are to be quarantined. This understanding follows its Semitic cognates where it means to separate, to set aside.[8] The goal is to exclude any intercourse with them. Thus verse 5 only refers to the elimination of their objects of worship not their persons. This opens the possibility that “What we have is a retention of the … traditional language of ḥerem, but a shift in the direction of its acquiring significance as a metaphor … for religious fidelity.”[9] Even stranger is the description of the confrontation with Sihon king of the Amorites. Within the context of Deuteronomy, one would expect an outright attack when God says to Moses: “See, I give into your power Sihon the Amorite, king of Heshbon, and his land. Begin the occupation: engage him in battle” (2:24). Instead, what does Moses do: 26 Then I sent messengers from the wilderness of Kedemoth to King Sihon of Heshbon with an offer of peace, as follows, 27 “Let me pass through your country. I will keep strictly to the highway, turning off neither to the right nor to the left. 28 What food I eat you will supply for money, and what water I drink you will furnish for money; just let me pass through.” Sihon rejects the offer and attacks Israel. They are destroyed only in the counterattack. If there is no evidence for the expulsion of the Canaanites, whence the position of Deuteronomy 7:1-2? It has been speculated that Deuteronomy took “both the expulsion law of Exodus 23:20-33, directed against the inhabitants of Canaan, and the ḥerem (total destruction) law of Exodus 22:19 (“Whoever sacrifices to a God other than the Lord shall be proscribed), directed against the individual Israelite, and fused them into a new law that appliesḥerem to all idolaters, Israelites and non-Israelites alike.”[10] In other words, the ḥerem is not against Canaanites as Canaanites, but idolaters as idolaters.
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