Today on the podcast, we're exploring a heavy topic, a topic many people call divine violence.

You see in Deuteronomy and some of the scrolls that follow Deuteronomy in the Hebrew Bible,

Yahweh and Strux Israel, to move into the land of Canaan and conquer the people who live there.

This theme of Israel's entering into the land where another group of people is living,

dispossessing them, engaging them and war killing them, and that all of this is that God's command.

This is highly disturbing to every person I know reading these stories in the Bible, including myself.

This is really uncomfortable.

It's hard enough that humans are violence against other humans.

Why would God ever condone violence?

We're not going to make excuses for it, but we're going to try to seek and understand it.

The biblical narrative is trying to tell us that it's humans who are taking life.

And what God is doing is accelerating to its natural end, the thing that humans have already set in motion.

Humans were ruining the land.

They were going to undo what God had created and set all life on a course towards death.

You see, Deuteronomy employs language which hyperlinks it to the Genesis School,

comparing the people who live in the land of Canaan to the giants in Genesis 6, the Nephilim,

the evil human demon hybrids who are so violent and corrupt that God had to bring a flood of justice upon the earth to wipe them out.

When a human culture gives itself over to death and practices that lead to death,

which they think are good.

That's Genesis 3 through 11.

That's the portrait there.

And so here, these people groups in the land are portrayed as a people group that are too far gone by the generation of the flood.

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