The fact is, critics of the God of the Bible are fond of repeating the allegation that, because of His instruction to the Israelites to kill millions of people in their conquest of Canaan, the God of the Bible has (allegedly) shown Himself to be an unruly, shameful, offensive, genocidal, “evil monster” (Dawkins, p. According to one search engine, this quote (in part or in whole) is found on-line approximately one million times. One of the most oft-quoted phrases from this work comes from page 31, where Dawkins called God, a “racist, infanticidal, genocidal…capriciously malevolent bully” (2006). Two centuries later, Richard Dawkins (arguably the most famous atheist in the world today), published his book The God Delusion, which soon became a New York Times bestseller. How could a loving God instruct one group of people to kill and conquer another group? America’s most well-known critic of Christianity in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Thomas Paine (one of only a handful of America’s Founding Fathers who did not claim to be a Christian), called the God of the Old Testament “the Mars of the Jews, the fighting God of Israel,” Who was “boisterous, contemptible, and vulgar” (Paine, 1807). Still, many find God’s commands to conquer and destroy the Canaanite nation states problematic. The Israelites were to drive out and dispossess the nations of their land (killing all who resisted the dispossession), but they were not instructed to annihilate a particular race or ethnic group from the face of the Earth. Nor were the Israelites commanded to pursue and kill the Canaanite nations if they fled from Israel’s Promised Land.
But, it was not a war against a particular race (from the Greek genos) or ethnic group. It was genocide in the sense that it was a planned, systematic, limited extermination of a number of nation states from a relatively small area in the Middle East (cf. God had the Israelites kill countless thousands, perhaps millions, of people throughout the land of Canaan. He utterly destroyed them, as Moses the servant of the Lord had commanded” (Joshua 11:12). “So all the cities of those kings, and all their kings, Joshua took and struck with the edge of the sword. The Israelites then conquered Gezer, Eglon, Hebron, Debir, and Hazor (10:33-39 11:1-1). They struck Lachish “and all the people who were in it with the edge of the sword” (10:32). In Makkedah and Libnah, the Israelites “let none remain” (Joshua 10:28,30). They also “utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai” (Joshua 8:26), killing 12,000 men and women and hanging their king (8:25,29). hey burned the city and all that was in it with fire” (Joshua 6:21,24). After crossing the Jordan River, we learn in the book of Joshua that the Israelites “utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and donkey, with the edge of the sword…. They were to conquer, kill, and cast out the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites (Exodus 23:23 Deuteronomy 7:1-2 Joshua 3:10). Some 3,400 years before the Holocaust, the God of the Bible commanded the Israelites to “destroy all the inhabitants of the land” of Canaan (Joshua 9:24). Most sane people, including Christians and many atheists (e.g., Antony Flew, Wallace Matson), have interpreted the Nazis’ actions for what they were-cruel, callous, and nefarious. In addition, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime slaughtered another three million Poles, Soviets, gypsies, and people with disabilities (see “Holocaust,” 2011 for more information). The Jews were starved, gassed, and experimented on like animals. The Nazis murdered approximately one million Jewish children, two million Jewish women, and three million Jewish men. In the 1930s and 40s, the Nazi regime committed state-sponsored genocide of so-called “inferior races.” Of the approximately nine million Jews who lived in Europe at the beginning of the 1930s, some six million of them were exterminated.