Famines in Israel are mentioned plenty of times in scripture, sometimes due to lack of rain, sometimes due to siege and invasion, and other times because of ravaging locusts. When one problem left, another one was soon to arise. Solomon’s reign of peace was the exception and not the norm; even he was caught in wars near the end of his time.
Ecclesiastes 5:11 “When goods increase, they increase who eat them;
So what profit have the owners, except to see them with their eyes?”
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The fact is, it was simply hard to survive, even with land of your own. Now imagine if Israel had made a peace treaty with the Canaanites. The same patch of land would have to feed twice as many mouths. They didn’t have nitrogen fertilizers obviously and could not increase the land’s output. People would have went hungry which would have led to war anyways. The truth is, the slaughter of the Canaanites was inevitable if Israel’s people were to survive. Manna wasn’t dropping out of heaven anymore like in the desert. They had to find their own food now.
Israel had a covenant with God and one of God’s obligations was to protect the people. This means sometimes unpleasant decisions had to be made to fulfill this. Although the New Testament generally teaches non-violence and turning the other cheek, these are instructions given for an individual level and were not necessarily intended for national leaders to conform to.
The option of taking “prisoners” in the modern sense would be laughable. Israel had no organized logistics. In our age of computers, printing, and transport it is easy to keep records and track individuals, but such was not the case in Bible times. A prisoner would receive food for free without having to work, making it a preferred situation. Mass enslavement would be an option, but then again, this would put Israel at a risk of a slave uprising which could happen at a weak moment for the new nation. Taking prisoners was only possible for organized and well-coordinated nations like Persia and Rome.
The fact is the Canaanites were headed straight for hell. They not only worshiped idols and false gods but went further and actually sacrificed their own infants and children by fire as a form of worship. By destroying this entire culture, it prevented them from reproducing more souls who would have simply been bound for damnation.
Genesis 6:4 “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, AND ALSO AFTERWARD, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of mankind, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.”
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The story of the Nephilim is discussed in more detail in the book of Enoch. For those who are not familiar these were powerful men that were birthed from the union of humans and fallen angels before Noah’s flood. What is interesting however is the phrase “and also afterward.” This implies that another set of angels descended to couple with human women in the area of Canaan, even after the first ones were wiped out in Noah’s flood. This would explain the giants seen by Moses spies:
Numbers 13:32-33, “And they gave the children of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out, saying, “The land through which we have gone as spies is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great stature. There we saw the giants (the descendants of Anak came from the giants); and we were like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.”
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Also in the story of David vs Goliath it was mentioned that the giant had six fingers and six toes. This shows some kind of corruption of DNA which would occur in a being sired by fallen angels.
Another of the land’s giants was Og kind of Bashan:
Deuteronomy 3:11 “For only Og the king of Bashan was left of the remnant of the Rephaim. Behold, his bed was a bed of iron. Is it not in Rabbah of the Ammonites? Nine cubits was its length, and four cubits its breadth, according to the common cubit.”
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So in addition to the problem of limited food supply insufficient to feed two nations the Israelites also had to kill the Nephilim offspring the Canaanites had intermingled with.
All in all, while it is difficult for us moderns to accept God’s decree for extermination of Canaan, we can at least appreciate that the alternatives were not any better. It was the right decision given the circumstances. Were God to command Israel to spare enemies who surrendered this would have been signing a death sentence for Israel and was simply unrealistic.
God in the Old Testament was not some brute. He even went out of his way to bring salvation to heathen nations such as Ninevah; sword enemies of Israel. Death was never God’s first option for rebellious humans. God always wanted to give the people a chance to repent. Sometimes a leader must make very difficult decisions that seem evil for the greater good. God has the authority to do such.