From Theology.edu (Quartz Hill School of Theology, affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention) , comes the argument that the Old Testament deity’s commandment to destroy the Canaanite cultures was morally justifiable.
From the evidence of contemporary cultural practice – the mainstreaming of incest (see here), pedophilia (see here), sado-masochism (see here), bestiality (see here and here), any and all fetishes (see here), sodomy, orgiastic sex, and hard-core violent pornography (see here) – the modern, post-Christian West is closer to being Canaanite than it is to being anything resembling Christian.
For traditionalists of any religion, then, it is the West that is barbaric, judged by the standards of its own Hebraic and Greco-Roman heritage.
“The Character of the Canaanite Cults Justifies the Command to Destroy Them
It is without sound theological basis to question God’s justice in ordering the extermination of such a depraved people or to deny Israel’s integrity as God’s people in carrying out the divine order. Nor is there anything in this episode or the devotion of Jericho to destruction that involves conflict with the New Testament revelation of God in Jesus Christ.
God’s infinite holiness is just as much outraged by sin in the NT as it was in the OT, and the divine wrath is not less in the NT against those who refuse the forgiveness provided by Christ. Consider what Jesus said to and about the scribes and Pharisees who opposed him, the fate of Annanias and Sephira, or the rather apocalyptic judgments describe in Revelation.
The principle of divine forbearance, however, operates in every era of God’s dealings with people. God awaits till the measure of iniquity is full, whether in the case of the Amorite (Gen. 15:16) or the antediluvians consumed by the Deluge (Gen. 6) or the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19). But God always gives a way to repent and avoid the judgment (consider God’s words in Ezekiel 33, as an example — “God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather, that the wicked turn from his evil ways.”)
In the case of the Canaanites, instead of using the forces of nature to effect his punitive ends, he employs the Israelites to be his ministers of justice. The Israelites were apprized of the truth that they were the instruments of the divine judgement (Joshua 5:13-14). In the light of the total picture the extermination of the Canaanites by the Israelites was just and employment of the Israelites for the purpose was right.
It was, frankly, a question of destroying or being destroyed, of keeping separated or of being contaminated and consumed.
Canaanite Cults Dangerously Contaminating
Implicit in the righteous judgment was the divine intention to protect and benefit the world. When Joshua and the Israelites entered Palestine in the 14th century (or 13th), Canaanite civilization was so decadent that it was small loss to the world that in parts of Palestine it was virtually exterminated. The failure of the Israelites to execute God’s command fully was one of the great blunders which they committed, as well as a sin, and it resulted in lasting injury to the nation (Judges 1:28, 2:1-3).
In the ensuing judgment the infinite holiness of Yahweh, the God of Israel, was to be vindicated saliently against the dark background of a thoroughly immoral and degraded paganism. The completely uncompromising attitude commanded by Yahweh and followed by the leaders of Israel must be seen in its true light.
Compromise between Israel’s God and the degraded deities of Canaanite religion was unthinkable. Yahweh and Baal were poles apart. There could be no compromise without catastrophe.
W.F. Albright wrote:
It was fortunate for the future of monotheism that the Israelites of the conquest were a wild folk, endowed with primitive energy and ruthless will to exist, since the resulting decimation of the Canaanites prevented the complete fusion of the two kindred folk which would almost inevitably have depressed Yahwistic standards to a point where recovery was impossible.
Thus the Canaanites, with their orgiastic nature-worship, their cult of fertility in the form of serpent symbols and sensuous nudity, and their gross mythology, were replaced by Israel, with its nomadic simplicity and purity of life, its lofty monotheism, and its severe code of ethics. In a not altogether dissimilar way, a millennium later, the African Canaanites, as they still called themselves, or the Carthaginians, as we call them, with the gross Phoenician mythology which we know from Ugarit and Philo Byblius, with human sacrifices and the cult of sex, were crushed by the immensely superior Romans, whose stern code of morals and singularly elevated paganism remind us in many ways of early Israel. (Note: the Romans were apparently descended from Japheth, so their destruction of Carthage was a fulfillment of Gen. 9:27).”