Why did God condone genocide in the Old Testament?
But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded, that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and so you sin against the Lord your God. -Deuteronomy 20:16-18 Perhaps nothing has caused more controversy than the decimation of whole cities and inhabitants in the land of Canaan by the Israelites. Men, women, and even children were instructed to be killed, but was it justified? I will address this issue head on and give a little understanding as to why this was done, but first a little background information is needed. It should be noted that God had originally given the land of Canaan to Abraham and his decedents as an everlasting ...