How are we to understand, and justify, the Torah’s injunction to engage in genocide against the indigenous inhabitants of Canaan? Granted the Canaanites were very evil and as the Torah states, their evil behavior was (at least one of) the reasons why they were subject to the decree of extermination, but it seems to me that Hashem could have eliminated them by plague or some other miraculous means. Why did He command us to go about sticking swords into other human beings?
Thanks for asking this great question.
Hashem created the world bound by time and from our perspective, within our small ability to understand the physical and spiritual. From my vantage point it is very hard to see why things happen or why G-d would choose to do something that seems so wrong or harsh. Let me ask you a question: If someone were to bring you Adolf Hitler as a teenager and say, “I am a prophet. I know that this man is going to murder 10,000,000 people in the next 40 years. All you have to do is pull this trigger and you can save over 10,000,000 lives – would you do it. (Assuming that you believed him and he could prove it to you somehow. The ability of the prophet is not in question here. The only question is whether or not you would do something that seems evil in your eyes right now to insure peace and life in the future. Most normal people would say that they would. Hashem is not bound by our limitations of what we think good and evil are. He knows what is right and wrong. When He commanded the Jews to wipe out certain peoples it was because they were the Nazis of that time. By the way, did you know that these people were not just “wiped out” but rather they were given a choice to stay under Jewish rule in true peace. Did America give the Nazis that choice? America eventually saw that this evil was truly evil and went to take care of business. G-d told the Jews to do something that was an absolute necessity from a spiritual perspective.
Of course, this is a discussion that implies the belief in G-d. For a person who believes in nothing, this discussion is pointless because if G-d is not beyond time then He is no better a judge than I am and the Jews murdered tens of thousands needlessly.
Rabbi Litt