In this passage from Deuteronomy, El gives each of the gods authority over a segment of the people of earth and Yahweh is assigned to the Israelites who, in time, will make him their supreme and only deity; but it is clear he existed beforehand as a lesser Canaanite god. This custom was followed by other nations in the Fertile Crescent for similar religious reasons. A critic might hastily claim that I am employing a tu quoque argument here, but I’m not (that is the fallacy of defending something on the basis that the other person does it, too). There are secret things that belong only to God (Deut.

You shall tear down their altars and break their pillars and cut down their Asherim (for you shall worship no other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God), lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and when they whore after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and you are invited, you eat of his sacrifice, and you take of their daughters for your sons, and their daughters whore after their gods and make your sons whore after their gods (vv.

Did the Canaanites have some kind of inherent rights to the land? They tried to merge the two religions by adopting Canaanite methods in their worship of Yahweh. {21} The practice continued among the Canaanites (and sometimes even among the Israelites) even up to the time Israel was deported to Assyria in the late eighth century BC. The rest of the Book of Exodus details the Ten Plagues which Yahweh sends on Egypt and how Moses leads his people to freedom. The weapons of the Divine Warrior are described in Habakkuk 3: You brandished your naked bow, . Visit Probe's website. To understand what God was doing in Canaan, in addition to having a correct understanding of God’s existence and authority and of the consequences of sin, one must see it within the larger context of redemptive history. Furthermore, justice must respond to the moral failure of sin. . The question has been raised whether God really intended the Israelites to kill all the people in the land. How long, O LORD?

(Ps. and of the temple, "Your foundation shall be laid." In so stating the matter, the divine exercise of wrath, which may include violence, is finally a word of good news (for those oppressed) and bad news (for oppressors).”{42}. Jewish God Yahweh Originated in Canaanite Vulcan, Says New Theory by Ariel David, On the Origins of Yahweh: A Response to Martin Leuenberger, Yahweh, the Canaanite God of Metallurgy? “The frequency with which the urns were deposited makes it unlikely that natural death could account for all such double deaths in families in a city of such size.”{22}. But the LORD sends confusion on the enemy. The most striking difference from the Canaanite parallels is that the Canaanite deities lead their armies against each other or against cosmic forces. 1, 2). If God wanted the Israelites in that land, He had every right to put them there. The debate over monergism and synergism may have some bearing over whether Israel should fight, but there is no disguising the belief that Yahweh fights, that Yahweh is a warrior.

5. Let’s turn now to look at the goals of the conquest of Canaan by Israel.

Glenn M. Miller, "How could a God of Love order the massacre/annihilation of the Canaanites?"

34:7). . They engaged in temple prostitution which was thought to be a re-enactment of the sexual unions of the gods and goddesses. ‘Yahweh Sabaoth, the God of hosts’ is one of the frequent titles or names of God in the Old Testament. 23:18).

One is that holy war was always defensive. When the Israelites were about to attack Jericho, the prostitute Rahab helped the Israelite spies and offered this explanation for her help: I know that the LORD has given you the land, and that the fear of you has fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land melt away before you. 67, 98. In other psalms, Yahweh actively fights against the people. The inscription mentions how Mesha, after defeating the Israelites, “took the vessels of Yahweh to Kemosh” (the chief god of Moab), meaning the objects sacred to the worship of Yahweh in the temple, most likely the temple in Israel’s capital of Samaria (Kerrigan, 78-79). 14). . Numbers says it was practiced east of Jordan (21:3, 34-35; ch. The way the Yahweh line was interpreted further supported the concept of Yahweh as the god of the Israelites alone since Mesha claims to have taken the Israelite god’s vessels as tribute to his own. One more note about the complaints of atheists. 13:3) or sent out dismembered flesh (Judg. The Canaanites, by contrast, were destroyed at the direction of God and primarily because of their sin. Unlike Joshua's brief, four-verse description of the treatment of the five kings (10:24–27), the Neo-Assyrian annals of Asshurnasirpal (tenth century) take pleasure in describing the atrocities which gruesomely describe the flaying of live victims, the impaling of others on poles, and the heaping up of bodies for display.{20}.