“Save Alive Nothing That Breathes”: How Should We Understand Divine Commands to Destroy? A Response to Paul Copan

By Nicholas K. Meriwether

On Nov. 27, Paul Copan responded to a reader’s inquiry concerned about the language of divine judgment in Ezekiel 9, specifically, Ezek. 9:5-6. 6 men, likely angels, are appointed by God to exercise divine judgment against the inhabitants of Jerusalem. One man is assigned the task of marking those who are repentant so that they may be spared, but the others are to kill the rest of the people, including women, young adults, and children:

And to the others he said in my hearing, “Pass through the city after him, and strike. Your eye shall not spare, and you shall show no pity. Kill old men outright, young men and maidens, little children and women, but touch no one on whom is the mark.”

While there may be various factors that lessen the severity of the divine injunction, such as that not everyone in the city is destroyed, there is no getting around the fact that in this and in other instances of divine judgment, some who appear innocent of the actions bringing judgment are not spared, including children, even infants, as well as adults not in positions of authority. The moral question is intensified by the fact that in several passages, it is not angels who execute divine judgment, rather God commands the nation of Israel itself to carry out his judgment, that is, to carry out herem (Deut. 7:1-2; 20:16-18; Josh. 6:21; 1 Sam. 15:1-3).[1]

Paul has written extensively on this topic, most recently in Is God a Vindictive Bully?[2] In his response to the inquirer, Paul claims that such passages do not mean what they appear to mean, rather this is Ancient Near Eastern hyperbole, or “trash talk,” mixed with merism, an inclusive rhetorical expression, as when we say we looked “high and low.” While I appreciate the enormous effort Paul has made to exonerate God of acting unjustly, and though I am neither a theologian nor a Bible scholar, I remain unconvinced that he is successful in respect to herem.[3] While it’s always possible that the Bible exaggerates or employs widely-accepted hyperbole, several instances in which herem against the innocent is commanded specifically and in detail make it implausible that mere hyperbole is meant.

Which Cities to Destroy: Deuteronomy 20:10-18

Here God instructs the Israelites regarding how to attack a city. They first must offer terms of peace, and only besiege it if the residents refuse. By contrast, if the city is a Canaanite city, they must “save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction” (vv. 16-17). The interpretation that this is mere hyperbole doesn’t fit with the fact that two categories are specified, and different instructions assigned to each category. Why would mere hyperbole be employed in the giving of instructions if the eventual treatment is the same? I suggest the simpler explanation is that we take the instructions at face value. This interpretation is reinforced in the passages below.

Achan and his Family: Joshua 7

God had commanded Joshua to place the entire city of Jericho under herem (6:17-18) in keeping with the deuteronomic herem policy for all the Canaanite peoples (see above). However, Achan violates the policy by keeping some of the herem bounty for himself, and so Israel is defeated by the people of Ai. When Joshua cries out to God, he is divinely guided to Achan. The latter, his entire family, and all their earthly goods are placed under herem, viz., Achan and his family, including his sons and daughters, are stoned, and all Achan’s goods are buried under rock (vv. 24-26). Joshua’s actions are fully in keeping with the herem policies in Deut. 20; there is simply no reason to think this is hyperbole or merism. But if it is not in this instance, why should we think the original policy is?

The Destruction of the Amalekites: 1 Samuel 15

Saul is instructed to destroy the Amalekites. Speaking for God, Samuel tells Saul,

“Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction [herem] all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (v. 3).

Yet Saul fails to complete the task, sparing the sheep and cattle as well as the king, Agag, and for this reason, is rejected by God. God tells Samuel, “I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and has not performed my commandments” (v. 11). When Samuel goes to deliver the news to Saul, he says, “What then is this bleating of the sheep in my ears and the lowing of the oxen that I hear?” (v. 14) Saul responds by saying that although he had devoted the Amalekites to destruction, he had spared the livestock as well as the king (v. 20). Is Saul using hyperbolic language with Samuel? This hardly seems likely. After announcing to Saul that he has lost the throne, Samuel calls Agag, who comes hoping “the bitterness of death is past” (v. 32). Why would Agag anticipate his death if no one other than Amalekite warriors had died in battle? Samuel then kills Agag himself (v. 33). The straightforward reading is that this passage is consistent with Deuteronomy 20 and Joshua 7: Saul had violated herem when he spared Agag after killing all the Amalekites.

It should be noted that herem is not the only occasion in which the innocent fall under divine judgment. The most famous example is the final plague in Egypt, which includes the death of the firstborn of everyone from the Pharoah to the slave girl, as well as the cattle (Exod. 11:5), and thus we see a foreshadowing of the herem policy for Canaan. Also, in the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, very small children are victims:

My eyes are spent with weeping;

my stomach churns;

my bile is poured out to the ground

because of the destruction of the daughter of my people,

because infants and babies faint

in the streets of the city.

They cry to their mothers,

“Where is bread and wine?”

as they faint like a wounded man

in the streets of the city,

as their life is poured out

on their mothers' bosom. Lam. 2:11-12

It is difficult to think that the very young children of slave girls, Achan, the Amalekites, or Jerusalem participated directly in the sins that brought about these judgments, yet they are punished along with those who did. I submit that taken together, these passages are far too detailed and varied to view them as mere hyperbole or as merism. Is there a better way to understand such passages, or at least a different way of understanding them? I believe there is.

Corporate Divine Judgment

Corporate divine judgment (CDJ) is divine judgment of a corporate entity, be it an empire, a nation, a city, a family, or indeed all of mankind. We first encounter CDJ against all mankind in Adam’s fall, then later in the Flood and Babel. As Israel returns to the Promised Land, God orders CDJ against the Canaanites (Deut. 7:1-8). In the prophets, CDJ is not restricted to Israel, that is, the covenant nation. Amos 1-2:3 contains perhaps the most frequently cited instances of CDJ against foreign (non-Israelite) nations, but of course, Egypt (Ezek. 29:8-12), Nineveh (Nahum, but spared due to repentance in Jonah), and Babylon (Jer. 50) are all judged corporately. Some argue that CDJ falls away in the New Testament, but it isn’t absent (Matt. 10:15; Mark 13:14-37; Rom. 1:18-32; and Rev. 18). Jerusalem is judged twice, once in the conquest by Babylon, and secondly by the Romans in 70 AD. In neither case are the very young spared, as we see in the passage in Lamentations above, and in the words of Christ: “And alas for women who are pregnant and for those who are nursing infants in those days!” (Matt. 24:19)

God uses various means of extending divine judgment, including flood (Gen. 6-8); fire (Gen. 19:1-29); famine (2 Sam. 21:1); drought (Hag. 1:11); foreign invasion (Isa. 8:5-10); and civil breakdown (Isa. 3:1-12), the latter including (ahem) weak and incompetent political leadership and loss of civility. In each of these judgments, no one is spared: rich and poor, male and female, young and old—the familiar formula from the herem passages.

Recognizing that judgment can be corporate doesn’t resolve the issue of why the innocent suffer, of course. But it may begin to make sense of the order to kill “everything that breathes:” God is judging the entire corporate entity, just as he does in natural disasters. Angels and warriors are extending the same judgment as “natural” events. If God is unjust in having the Israelites or angels strike down indiscriminately, he is also unjust in the fallenness of the world that leads to indiscriminate casualties due to disease, famine, tsunamis, or wildfires.

Is it unethical that God is ordering human beings to execute such judgment rather than employ natural processes? Human beings indeed have a divinely ordained role in carrying out his justice. God requires that the state, a collective entity, punish evildoers (Rom. 13:4). This “sword” can be carried by the state in dealing with its own citizens, or with the army of a foreign power. Of course, to go beyond those directly responsible for the evil being judged and to punish the innocent along with them requires the explicit instructions of God, and this has occurred in only one instance: the herem against the peoples of Canaan, people groups so evil that the land itself “vomited” them out (Lev. 18:26-28). Without explicit divine instructions, however, innocent civilians may not be singled out by an army or the state, which is precisely the evil perpetrated by Hamas against Jews on Oct. 7.[4]

Yet even if God commanded Israel to exercise herem against the Canaanites, is there a way to make sense of the deaths of those among them who did not contribute directly to the evil that brought judgment? I will end with several considerations that I hope will point toward at least a deeper understanding of the ways of God with man.

First, while we must revere, love, and worship God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, we must never forget that he is to be feared above any and every earthly suffering (Matt. 10:28). He is loving, indeed, but he is equally holy and just. He is, as the author of Hebrews puts it, a “consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29). We should never seek to modify or moderate the fact that God is also to be feared, not merely loved. As Moses wrote:

Who considers the power of your anger,

and your wrath according to the fear of you?

So teach us to number our days

that we may get a heart of wisdom. (Ps. 90:11-12)

Second, we must humbly acknowledge that everything any person has is always a gift from God, the ultimate source of all things, whether this be sight, hearing, clothes, food, loved ones, health, or security. At the same time, we are never completely safe from the ravages of sin and the consequences of the Fall, including disease, injury, or assault. The innocent do not suffer and die only in CDJ; mortality is the fate of all. What the Lord gives, he will eventually take from each of us. Our doxological response to either his blessings or his “hard providence” must be the same as Job’s: Blessed be the name of the Lord (Job 1:21).

Third, but a little reflection will convince us that all the blessings of life have as their foundation our corporate membership in family and state, and for those of us so blessed, the Church. Corporate entities provide food, shelter, protection from those who would harm us, but also language acquisition—one of God’s greatest gifts—without which the interaction required for a productive life and the development of our quintessentially human faculties would be impossible. Short of salvation, corporate membership is the greatest blessing God provides us. To exist without it one must be either a beast or a god, as Aristotle famously observed. Whatever one suffers because of his corporate membership will typically be compensated by the enormous blessings that stem from it.[5] And of course, the greatest blessing of all, Christ’s atonement, is corporate in nature. Just as I share corporately in the depravity of Adam, I share corporately in the atonement of Christ (Rom. 5:15-17).

Fourth, only God has the wisdom and the omniscience to command herem as a policy, and he has only done this on one occasion. Without divine revelation, and the canon is closed, the state may only “bear the sword” against individuals who commit evil or against the army of nations who attack it.

Finally, because of our innate depravity as well as our deliberate sins, all of us deserve God’s wrath (John 3:36). God’s omniscience extends to knowing our latent evil, and thus who would have performed the same evil under the same circumstances. Many of us, perhaps without exception, could have been a Nazi or a Hamas terrorist, or simply looked the other way to save our own skin. Innate depravity alone justifies our deaths in corporate judgment, even those who have been saved through God’s grace. No one is completely innocent.

No doubt, many who read this will think I’ve raised more questions than I’ve answered. But I have tried to keep this as short as possible, and I welcome any and all responses.

Notes

[1] I will refer to commands given by God to Israel to destroy all ages and persons in a corporate entity as herem commands. The term herem in the Old Testament has various uses, only one of which is a command given by God that everything under the ban be killed. Joel S. Kaminsky, “BAN”, Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, ed. David Noel Freedman (Grand Rapids, MI: 2000), 146.

[2] Paul Copan, Is God a Vindictive Bully? (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic), 2022.

[3] Eugene H. Merrill expresses similar reservations in his review: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/review/did-god-really-command-genocide-coming-to-terms-with-the-justice-of-god/.

[4] The evil perpetrated by Hamas was not merely a military attack against unarmed civilians, but its savage cruelty. Nowhere does the Bible countenance gang rape or torture (Deut. 21:10-14).

[5] In Scripture, children do not only suffer corporately, they are also blessed corporately (Deut. 28:11; Ps. 127; Zech. 9:17, 10:7, 9).

— Nicholas K. Meriwether is Professor of Philosophy at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, OH. He has taught the Ethics requirement at SSU for 26 years. He received an MA in Christian Thought from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and a PhD in Philosophy from Purdue University. He has published in the areas of moral psychology, Critical Theory, Islamic militancy, and the role of ethics instruction in higher education. He and his wife, Janet, have three grown children. They are members of the Presbyterian Church in America.

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