Which Is It - Kill Your Enemy Or Love Him? (December 28, 2003)

Recently I was asked,

Why were the Old Testament Israelites commanded to slaughter their enemies but Jesus commands us to love ours?

First of all, the Israelites were not commanded to slaughter their enemies in all circumstances. Deuteronomy 20:10-15 gives the general rule for warfare - it is a kind of "Geneva Convention" protocol in which the first step was to offer peace. If the offer was accepted, then the enemy was simply subjugated without a drop of blood being shed. Only if the peace offer was refused were the Israelites allowed to go to war - and that would begin with a siege rather than a bloody assault. When it came to actual fighting, only the men (enemy combatants) were to be killed. Civilians (women and children) were spared. I defy anyone to find a more restrained rule of combat in any ancient text anywhere in the world.

The Israelites were actually told to be kind to foreigners in their midst - an oddly "modern" commandment in a world where racist suspicion was assumed. For example, Exodus 22:21: "Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt." Leviticus 19:34: "The foreigner living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt.”

The command to slaughter enemies was limited to a specific time and targeted to a specific place. It concerned only those living within the borders of the Promised Land at the time the Israelites arrived. These people were not to be given an offer of peace as outlined in Deuteronomy 20:10-15. The next few verses (16-18) read:

However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them - the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites - as the Lord your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God.

Why so harsh? Why kill everybody? Read the stomach-turning regulations in Leviticus 18 and it may explain a lot. That chapter forbids all kinds of perversions - like sons having sex with their mothers, brothers and sisters copulating, people violating animals, and parents sacrificing their children to the demon god Molech. The inspiration for these laws is found in verse 24: "Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled." All the nasty things in Leviticus 18 were accepted pieces of Canaanite culture.

The inhabitants of that land had become so perverse that they simply had to be eradicated. For centuries the wickedness had been building up as severely twisted people passed on their twisted natures and sick cultural norms (like incest and human sacrifice) to succeeding generations. Look - there's bad and there's hopeless. Some cancers you can treat, some you just have to cut out. Four hundred years earlier, the evil of this land was not ripe enough for judgment, as indicated in God's words to Abraham in Genesis 15:16: "In the fourth generation [here meaning 400 years] your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure." There we learn of God's patience with the inhabitants of this land - they were given 400 years to repent, but they only got worse. When their culture-wide corruption reached its zenith, God said, "Enough is enough. Destroy it all."

It reminds me of a scene in a book about the Ebola virus, The Hot Zone. When a certain lab facility was thought to be infected, health authorities evacuated the building, sealed it off hermetically, and released a substance that had the power to kill everything - even those microbes that could survive a nuclear holocaust. The author wrote that after this treatment, that building was the only one in the world where there was nothing living, nothing at all. The health authorities took such measures because you do not want to mess with the Ebola virus.

Israel, rather than obediently eradicating the cultural Ebola that was Canaan, let many of its inhabitants live, and soon adopted its corrupt practices. The Old Testament's account of Israel's subsequent, relentless slide into corruption is the saddest human tragedy you'll ever read.

So there was a good reason why in this particular case the Israelites were commanded to destroy their enemies. But Jesus, when he says in Matthew 5:44, "Love your enemies," is addressing a completely different situation. The whole text in Matthew reads:

But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? (Matthew 5:44-47)

Jesus is not talking about conflict on a battlefield. He is talking about personal relationships with those who mistreat us or with those who stand outside our circle of friends. He is saying, "Pray for mean people - even those who are mean to you. Do acts of kindness and say hello even to those who aren't in your group."

If you have seen Fiddler on the Roof, for example, think of the way Reb Tevye could greet and even have a respectfully cordial relationship with his "enemy," the Russian constable. While others in Tevye's group might refuse to acknowledge the constable's existence, or spit on the ground whenever the man walked by, Tevye would give the man the time of day and maybe even offer him a piece of cheese. That is not to say he would refrain from killing him if the two ever found themselves in opposing armies on a field of battle.