Even if Israel is not brutal, like the caricature, we still have to ask: Why does God throw down on Canaan? A couple of options come to mind. Maybe Canaan was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe God woke up on the wrong side of the bed one day and decided if he couldn’t be happy, nobody could. So he walked into town looking for a brawl, and Canaan was the first civilization he came across. Or maybe this is just who God is: an angry warlord on a perpetual warpath searching high and low for people to stomp on and destroy. Fortunately, Israel’s story gives us a radically different
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