How Jesus Conquers Canaan
Making Sense of the Canaanite Conquest
Let’s begin in a bustling train station, 1893, on Prince Edward Island, Canada. Amid the chaos stood a small girl reciting poetry for money. Anne was taking up a collection because she had become convinced that she was no longer wanted by her family. She was an orphan, after all. So she tried running as far as she could. Yet her shame only carried her to the train station before she was found by her adoptive father.
He appeared over her shoulder, huffing from his old age. He begged her to come home, and she refused. Time and time again pride prevented her from his parental love. Finally, a stout young man with a healthy looking beard stood up!
“Is this old man bothering you?” He grunted. He looked like he was ready for a fight.
“Yes, he is!” Anne shouted as she turned around, arms crossed, tears ready to burst.
“No, she’s my daughter!” He said defiantly and definitively.
At those words, she broke down in sobs. She turned and ran to her father’s arms. For all she needed was to hear that she belonged.
For those that know, this is the scene that begins the second episode of Anne With an E, a remake of Anne of Green Gables. The story of an orphan girl trying to find where home is. While this is the beginning of her story, it really is the end of ours.
Now, I have written this and rewritten this piece half a dozen times. The problem with the Canaanite conquest is not that it makes no sense. The issue in truth is that it makes too much sense. What I mean is that it is no small narrative. Within its stories, we actually find nearly the whole breadth of the Gospel. From it, we know of Hell and justice and victory and, of course, adoption. But most poignantly, we know that God will win over death regardless of how strong we are.
Therefore, this is but a mere introduction to a story that is central to the biblical epic. Which is why Jesus alone makes sense of the Canaanite conquest. Because of this, the Conquest is not justification for warfare, just or unjust. It is designed to elicit an orientation toward the justice of God alone. Here, we will only explore how this is highlighted brilliantly in the person of Jesus.
You see, the Conquest narratives have puzzled Christrians and nonchristians alike for centuries. From the likes of Alex O’Connor to Gavin Ortlund, many are trying to make sense of these tantalizing tales. Yet, they all seem to be missing a crucial piece of this complex conundrum: Jesus. I believe that Jesus is both the reason why the Canaanite conquest is so complicated, and the answer to making sense of it all.
Many of the Chrsitan responses make a good deal of sense and I do not want to downplay them in the least. Apologists use the historical and literary context to nuance the critiques. Still others defend the theology of it all – after all, God does have a right to punish evil, says Ortlund in a brilliantly animated short. These are all quite good, thoroughly researched answers from people much – much – smarter than myself. Yet no one seems to be fitting the story of Jesus’ earthly ministry into the equation. Conspicuously, Jesus has one of the weirdest encounters in all of the New Testament with a Canaanite woman.
But first, we ought to begin with how the person of Jesus Christ traditionally serves to complicate the Canaanite conquest stories, not make sense of them. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says that to be like God (Matt. 5:48) is to love your enemies (5:44), turn the other cheek (5:39), and never be angry (5:22). This is a far cry from the Deuteronomic command to “devote [the Canaanites] to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them.” (Deut. 7:2). The two seem entirely at odds.
Yet, an enigmatic phrase near the end of the Sermon on the Mount bears the makings of a good bridge. Jesus says “Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.” (Matt. 7:6). This bit deserves our brief attention, given that it often startles many young Christians (myself included) into thinking perhaps we have entirely misunderstood Jesus’ mission.
However, this saying is totally consistent with Jesus’ kingdom ethic. “What is holy refers probably to consecrated food” like the holy bread and other sacrificed meats (France 148). And should not be given to “dogs, which were regarded as unclean animals to be fed with unclean food” (France 148). In other words, Christians will be Kingdom oriented; non-Christians will not be. Or as I like to say: people who don’t want to change, don’t want to change! Particularly when it comes to something as sacred as spiritual rebirth. To think you are responsible for transforming the heart is arrogant at best and deadly at worst. Instead, we rely on God to change the hearts of persons.
Which is why we become so utterly stricken when Jesus meets a dog and gives her the holy bread. The story is told in Matthew 15, and a parallel account is found in Mark 7. It is the only time in the entire New Testament where one can find the word “Canaanite” – and the story is as unique.
Jesus intentionally makes his way up, out of Israel, into Canaan. Already, the echoes of Joshua reverberate: the conqueror has arrived. Will He fulfill what Joshua failed to do? Well the story takes an unexpected turn when
“Behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.”
Which plays like a record scratch over our John Williams score. But don’t get ahead of us. Jesus doesn’t flinch. In fact, He says nothing.
“[Jesus] did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, “Send her away, for she is crying out after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
Jesus here might be reassuring His disciples. Not to worry, I am only here for Israel, not Canaan. We might imagine the camera finding Matthew who gives a knowing Jim Halpert shrug. When suddenly
“She came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” And he answered, “It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.”
There is comfort in finding Jesus taking His own advice! He gives no holy bread to dogs. Plus, like the Israelites were commanded in Exodus and Deuteronomy: He speaks no words of peace to the Canaanites! (Ex 23:32; Deut 20:17). For what it’s worth, He is remarkably consistent.
Now, to be fair, the word translated “dog” here is not the same as in the Sermon on the Mount – though they are changed only by their suffix. No, the word used here is almost surely akin to a puppy. In Matthew 7, we find a snarling beast. But perhaps the joke is that she is a small snarling beast all the same, waiting to grow into a large ravenous wolf.
“She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table.”
I wonder if there was dead silence as Peter waited for Jesus to step on her toes or something. After all, her ancestral religion was quite immoral by Israelite standards – and ours (sacrificing babies, large fertility cults, a bloodlust for conquest (Unger)). Yet her agreement reveals that she desires a crumb of the holy bread.
Then Jesus answered her, “O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed instantly.”
Either Jesus has just entirely upended all that Israel was commanded to by God; or Jesus has just made sense of the conquest by revealing to us God’s prerogative. I believe it is the latter because of an uncouth passage nestled at the end of the Canaanite conquest, in Joshua 11:19-20..
The verse reads
“There was not a city that made peace with the people of Israel except the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon. They took them all in battle. For it was the Lord's doing to harden their hearts that they should come against Israel in battle, in order that they should be devoted to destruction and should receive no mercy but be destroyed, just as the Lord commanded Moses.” (Josh. 11:19-20)
Which yields two significant conclusions.
First, every city conquered had the option to make peace with Israel and chose not to do so.
Many object here. God is the active agent, hardening the hearts of Canaanites. But this is (almost certainly) a direct call-back to the Exodus, linking Canaan with Pharaoh. The conclusion we find there is the same as in the past: God does not need to do anything to harden hearts! He only needs to reveal the hardness of the heart already there (c.f., Ex. 7:13). To prove this ask yourself: given what you know about Pharaoh from Exodus 1-6 do you think he was going to will himself to a compassionate heart of magnanimity? He would not have. The same is true for Canaan.
This is precisely how John Calvin interprets this passage, too. He writes “God hardens them for this very end, that they may [show themselves unworthy of] mercy. Hence that hardness is called his work, because it secures the accomplishment of his design.” The Canaanites chose not to make peace, though they had every opportunity.
This is to say, secondly, Israel was on the defensive throughout much of the campaign. This is what David Firth says, “It was God who was waging war—and even leading the Canaanites out to war, so that in many respects Israel was waging a defensive campaign.” In the natural, sin-laden hardness of their hearts, the Canaanites were actively making war on the Israelites – when they could have been making peace.
Which is why the Bible seems to be designed so that we meet the Canaanite woman against this backstory. She is finally doing what is in her power to make peace with God. Jesus says her faith is great. As if to say that it goes: Jesus, John the Baptist, this Canaanite woman! Her faith is exemplary. Like Jesus’ own kin, Rahab (another great example to showcase the assertion made above).
Even without all of the historical and theological context surrounding these narratives, the problem dissipates when we realize that the entire story is a picture of Jesus’ interaction with the Canaanite woman. The Canaanites had every opportunity to make peace with Israel; God desired for them to make peace with Israel. But through the hardness of their hearts, they had rejected God, continued in their immorality and let that fuel their bloodlust (c.f., Rom. 1:28).
In other words, we might say that while there might appear to be a tension between justice and grace in the Old Testament, Christ shows us only harmony. But since Jesus is the image of the invisible God, then we know that these tensions exist solely because we stop reading the Bible at these complicated parts. But the Bible, like all of history, is Christocentric.
To make the point further, morality is Christocentric. Many presuppose that morality is for making nice or ensuring civility. That is an outcome, sure. But in truth, biblical Christian morality exists as a picture of Jesus.
So Canaan finds herself in a bustling train station of religious convictions, begging for money to get away from an adoptive parent. But God stands over her, hand on her shoulder and says my daughter, you belong to me.
For some, like Rahab and the Canaanite woman, this is enough to soften even the hardest of hearts. For others, as it will be one day, this is enough to harden the conviction that running away is the only option left.
Work Cited
Calvin, John. Commentaries on the Book of Joshua. Translated by Henry Beveridge, Calvin Translation Society, 1854. https://ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom07/calcom07.i.html
Firth, David G. The Message of Joshua. Edited by Alec Motyer and Derek Tidball. The Bible Speaks Today. Nottingham, England: Inter-Varsity Press, 2015.
France, R. T. Matthew: An Introduction and Commentary. Vol. 1. Tyndale New Testament Commentaries. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1985.
Stern, David H. Jewish New Testament Commentary : A Companion Volume to the Jewish New Testament. Electronic ed. Clarksville: Jewish New Testament Publications, 1996.
Stott, John R. W., and John R. W. Stott. The Message of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7): Christian Counter-Culture. The Bible Speaks Today. Leicester; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1985.
Unger, Merrill F. “Canaan, Canaanites.” Edited by R.K. Harrison. The New Unger’s Bible Dictionary. Chicago: Moody Press, 1988.
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Of possible interest. A study note on Exodus 7:3 in the NET Full Notes Edition says that the verb in the verse (qashah) is presented in the imperfect tense, and is found in that tense “only in these ‘hardening passages’”.
English doesn’t have an imperfect tense. In languages that do have imperfect tense verbs, they may refer to an action that occurred in the past and is incomplete / ongoing — or — to an action that coincides with another action.
I assume the second sense is what the translators intended when they choose the phrase “I will harden” to render the text in English. They made it a future tense, to show that the Lord’s touch on Pharaoh’s heart was contingent on Aaron’s delivery of His message to Pharaoh.
But our English texts make it seem like there are 2 separate events in time (speech & hardening), where maybe the intent was to communicate a deeper / more subtle connection between the two actions.
The connection in our texts is there by implication but not shown by the grammatical construct itself.
What I am trying to say is, perhaps the Lord’s words are more like a prophesy than an explanation of an intervention He planned to do in a temporal sense. Not so much “you do this and I will do that” and more “because of Pharaoh’s nature, when this happens that will happen.”
Not saying that should be the literal translation by any means. Only that there is a sense of that aspect that might have been in the original text but is not in the English.
I am puzzling over this, this morning, because yesterday I spent a good deal of time with the phrase that is translated in our English Bibles as “the Lord’s wrath.” If I understand correctly, the word translated as “wrath” (or anger in many versions) is *not* intended to mean the human emotion of anger. Per the NET study note on Exodus 15:7, the word is a metonymy of “cause.” It is a figure of speech evoking cause->effect. So more like what we moderns call karma than the picture we form when we think of a wrathful person.
I am posting more thoughts on this myself shortly, because of these LA fires and the sense we get that they have a dimension outside the natural. But it is an error, IMO, to imagine that that non-natural dimension is something like human vengeance or temper tantrum.
Of course I could be completely wrong…
You're on the right track when you say we need a Christocentric view of this issue (when isn't this true??). However you neglect to mention the whole the caanites are giants issue and how Joshua (the same name as Jesus!) is doing what the flood did to giants since God said he wouldn't flood the world again (which was in part to deal with the giants) it's not like the caanites were your run of the mill idolaters, they were deeply engrossed in sin in a way that in our Christian influenced world we find hard to even imagine. Another issue that couldn't been brought up viewing this Christocentrically is that with Jesus we have the solution to sin whereas under with the nomos (Torah/Law) you can only deal and manage sin hence why you have to do the Day of Atonement ritual yearly. So Joshua, and later David, destroying the giants (nephalim) of caanan is part of merely managing the problem of sin, but with Jesus the problem of sin is dealt with in a permanent way where even a crumb is able to make the women's daughter clean (perhaps eucharistic language??). Also, the women's daughter is plagued with an "unclean spirit" (Mark 7:25). In biblical terms unclean almost always mean mixture, a call back to giants being the byproduct of fallen angels intermingling with humans ( see Genesis 6).
Knit pick: "c.f." is used to indicate contrast/disagreement "The realm of the forms does not exist (cf. Plato)". "See" is used for supporting evidence "God created the world (see Genesis 1).