p. 111Ladies and Gentlemen,—
I have been directing your attention to certain features of the history of the invasion of Canaan by Israel under Joshua by way of suggesting and contending that the history cannot but be a true one. Let me now ask you to take a larger view, and to realize two aspects of the matter which are absolutely irreconcilable one with the other if the story is fictitious, or if the enterprize it describes was a human one; but which are not only consistent, but the natural complements of each other, if the story is true and the work a Divine one.
You are, of course, acquainted with the current, and as I might almost call it, the fashionable view of the case, which I will submit is a most shadowy and untenable view. It is taken for granted that Israel did in some form undertake and perform the conquest of Canaan under Joshua, but that the achievement was a purely human performance on their part, p. 112 instigated by the desire to possess a good country, and carried out with the most reckless disregard to the rights of the original owners, whom they butchered in vast multitudes, and, in fact, exterminated from the face of the earth so far as it was in their power to do so, on the false plea of a Divine authorization.
Ladies and Gentlemen,—If this is a true representation of the case, then Israel was an unprincipled body of marauding freebooters, influenced only by lust of plunder knowing no law but the might of their own right hands, which they were prepared to steep, and did steep, deeply in the blood of all who came between them and their objects, and that, too, on the most hypocritical pretences. That they did destroy whole communities of the Canaanites is granted. Their commission was to “leave nothing alive that breatheth, but to slay utterly old and young,” and they acted liberally up to it throughout the length and breadth of the land. The question is, the origin and the meaning of this wholesale butchery. It may seem to you there ought to be no difficulty about this. It has of course been no uncommon thing in the course of history for one race to invade the country of another. We have all read of the Saxons and Danes coming over into England and exterminating the Britons; and if there was nothing else in the case of Israel’s invasion of Canaan than the extermination of the Canaanities, it would be natural and easy to place it in the category of those dismal racial irruptions that have from time to time disfigured the history of mankind.
But there is much more than this in connection with it. We have a very full and precise account of the interior economy and animating principles of the Jewish system, and it is this aspect of the case that p. 113 makes it impossible to class the conquest of Canaan with the robber enterprises of other nations. If the Danes and Saxons laid waste the smiling countries of England east and south and destroyed the population that they had ostensibly come to befriend, we know that they acted in harmony with their own lawless character, which there was no pretence of concealing. But in the case of Israel we have a totally different state of things. They were organized on the basis of a law which imposed the utmost restraint on themselves and prescribed the utmost holiness and justice and kindness, not only in their own dealings, but in their dealings with the stranger. The authority of God was not only alleged for the invasion of Canaan and the destruction of the Canaanites, but for many other things, which a rapacious and unprincipled people could not be conceived as enacting.
Take the obligation to observe the whole law of Moses: “It shall be when the Lord thy God shall have brought thee unto the land which He sware unto thy fathers . . . . ye shall diligently keep the commandments of the Lord your God and his testimonies and his statutes which he hath commanded thee. And thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of the Lord that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest go in and possess the good land which the Lord sware unto thy fathers to cast out all thine enemies from before thee” (Deut. x. 10, 17), “Beware that thou forget not the Lord thy God, in not keeping his commandments and his judgments and his statutes, which I command thee this day . . . . Thou shalt consider in thine heart that as a man chasteneth his son, so the Lord thy God chasteneth thee” (viii. 11, 5).
Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, even if we did not p. 114 know what the “Commandments and Statutes” were that are thus referred to, there would be something in this injunction that would distinguish the people recognizing and placing themselves under it from ordinary invaders. It places them under a standard of action exterior to themselves and above their own devices. They were entering the land, that they might as a nation obey a Divine system of law with the object of pleasing God and securing His blessing, and under a threat that if they were disobedient they would perish from the land and became fugitives among the nations (Deut. xxviii., whole chapter). You cannot reconcile this with their being a nation of murderers and robbers.
When we come to consider the commandments themselves, the case becomes stronger and stronger. They were such as to mark off the Jewish law from all contemporary systems, and such indeed as to constitute it to this day the highest standard of justice and equity, and the highest form of spiritual life ever conceived among men. Take the very first commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul and with all thy might.” A nation of God-lovers would not be a nation of mankillers, per se. It matters not to the argument that the nation were disobedient to their law. The law was the picture of what they were to be; and those who gave them the law were the directors of the conquest, and therefore the argument from the character of the law to the character of the invasion remains in full force. If a nation with such a law killed, it must have been for a reason compatible with the love of God, which it prescribed. The command of God to do it because of the unrighteousness of the people, would be such a reason. What was their p. 115 first institution? Sacrifice. Sacrifice morning and evening by rote: sacrifice for every case of personal offence: a day of atonement by sacrifice once a year for the whole nation (Lev. xvi. 34; xxiii. 27-30). What was the reason of this? A reason is given. Ponder it: “Ye shall be holy unto me: for I, the Lord, am holy and have severed you from other people that ye should be mine” (Lev. xx. 26). This also was given as a reason for scrupulosity as to sanitary arrangement and as to what they should eat. “The Lord thy God walketh in the midst of thy camp: therefore shall thy camp be holy that he see no unclean thing in thee and turn away from thee” (Deut. xxiii. 14).
Then consider the laws regulating
1.—Their dealings: “Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment, in meteyard, in weight or in measure. Just balances, just weights, a just ephah and a just hin shall ye have. I am the Lord your God which brought you up out of the land of Egypt” (Lev. xix. 35).
2.—Their attitude to the stranger. “If a stranger sojourn with you in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you; and thou shalt love him as thyself” (ver. 33).
3.—Deportment to the aged. “Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head and honour the face of the old man and fear thy God: I am the Lord” (ver. 32).
4.—Dealings with neighbours. “Thou shalt not defraud thy neighbour, neither rob him; the wages of him that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the morning.”
5.—As to property, veracity, and law. “Ye p. 116 shall not steal, neither deal falsely, neither lie one to another. Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment. Thou shalt not respect the person of the poor nor honour the person of the mighty; but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour.”
6.—Behaviour to the unfortunate. “Thou shalt not curse the deaf nor put a stumbling block before the blind, but shalt fear thy God: I am the Lord.”
And so in many other matters, Ladies and Gentlemen; you must have all these things in view in judging of the conquest of Canaan. The question is, How came a people animated by such principles to destroy and plunder their neighbours’ property and take away their neighbours’ lives? If you say it was merely from lust of spoil, you then have to ask, How came a people animated by lust and spoil to have established among them such a merciful and just and holy and spiritual law? How came they to be so very particular about eating, about separateness, about cleansing the conscience by sacrifice in a hundred commonplace circumstances of life? If God spoke to them by Moses and gave them their law, you have a complete explanation both of the excellence of their law, and of their failure to keep it, and of their invasion of Canaan and the destruction of its inhabitants; for the same law that enjoins mercy on the strangers by God’s command, enjoins also the slaughter of the Canaanites for their iniquity, by the same command. There is nothing inconsistent between one part of the law and another in that case, for the authority of God covers all and explains all. The Divine injunction to destroy the Canaanites for their wickedness would be an intelligible ground for such a procedure and a complete explanation of it. But if you take this away, you have an insoluble p. 117 problem on hand. You cannot explain how a people acting under the most beneficial law the world has ever seen came to perpetrate the most shocking barbarity of which history has any record, against whole districts and entire multitudes of people who were civilized in their way, and numbered thousands of helpless children and infirm old men and women. The case stands square and solid on its own foundation. In no other way can you make it stand. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bible is true.