Did God Command Genocide
They have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. Something I did not command, nor did it enter my mind (Jeremiah 19:4&5).
“Beneath the wounded sky, torn and trembling, a boy walked alone. He was very small. He looked about nine, though grief had stolen time from his face. Dust clung to his bare feet. On his cheek, a single tear had dried long ago. It had not been wiped away, not even noticed. No one had seen it fall. Children like him have learned that the world does not recognize the tears of those it has chosen to forget. I am a doctor in Gaza. Each day, I move through the ruins, stitching wounds the world will never see. And at night, I write, because some truths cannot remain buried. Last night, Gaza was not bombed. It was forsaken. The sky tore open above Jabalia and did not close again. Flames did not fall; they descended like judgment, deliberate and merciless. Homes were not destroyed; they were erased from the memory of the earth, as if they’re existence had offended both men and gods. I once believed in duty, in the sanctity of the Hippocratic oath. But now I find myself treating children whose bones I cannot mend, whose pain I cannot lessen. The healthcare system has collapsed. We work beneath falling missiles. We stitch flesh with shaking fingers while the sky groans above us. We whisper words of comfort into ears that may not live to hear them. God, if you are watching this, and how could you not, why are you silent?” ( Dr. Ezzideen @ezzingaza).
Genocide. A gross depravity that seeks to eliminate an entire ethnic group. Genocide. The unrelenting hoofbeats of conquest, war, famine, and death. Genocide. It is manmade. I use the gender language deliberately because women do not wage genocide. Their voices are unheard until they are wailing in anguish, burying their dead children. Genocide is godless— antihuman and antichrist. Today it is happening on Biblical land contested throughout recorded history. So we must ask, did God really command genocide? Modern commentators commonly assert that God orders the genocide of various ethnic groups of Canaanites. This is treated as self-evident— God unequivocally commands the indiscriminate killing of women and children. In this matrix, anyone seeking to defend or even understand how the Bible portrays the Israelite conquest of the land of Canaan is effectively condoning genocide. This is a catastrophic conclusion. After all, if someone willingly rationalizes violence, warfare, and the displacement of people in the Scriptures, what’s to stop him from justifying such evil at other points in history, including the present?
Context: What did the original audience know and understand?
Regardless of a given reader’s beliefs, the authors of Scripture believed that God, angels, demons, the spirits of the dead, and other spiritual realities were real. Psalm 96:5 bluntly states, “All the gods of the nations are demons.” No nation is excluded. Spiritual warfare is real; it is the substrate of the Biblical text. It is writ large in the Great Flood, and every culture bears witness to this cataclysmic event. Likewise, there are near-universal traditions of giants and warfare against them. In Greek stories, the giants were children of Gaea, the earth, brought forth to take revenge for the Titans after their imprisonment in Tartarus. Celtic stories describe the malformed Fomorians, who were part human and part faerie. Giants likewise feature prominently in Germanic and Old Norse stories as well as in the memory of Southeast Asian and even Mezzo-American cultures. In every case, these giants were monstrous and wicked beings who needed to be defeated by the most recent tier of gods and human beings, often working in tandem.
Who are the Nephilim/giants? Israel understood the gods of the nations to be created spiritual beings in rebellion to God. Genesis 6:1-4 describes the progeny produced at the culmination of this spiritual rebellion as giants (Nephilim) who are both human and divine, and exceedingly wicked. The Genesis account is abbreviated, because the details were well known in antiquity, based on ritual texts of the surrounding nations. Membership in one of these giant clans was not determined by DNA or ethnic features but by ritual practice, specifically gross sexual sacraments, idolatry, human sacrifice (predominantly children), blood consumption and cannibalism. “What the nations sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons” (1 Corinthians 10:20). The gods they worshiped ferociously sought the destruction of humanity and the members of the clan were active participants in spiritual and demonic oppression and depravity. “Giant” is not a description of physical size, you won’t find these giants in any fossil record, it is the manifestation of a spiritual condition, demon worshippers who become demons. Israel was given specific instructions by God to completely destroy seven giant clans: the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites(Deuteronomy 20: 10-18). Another clan is added (Exodus 17:8-16), the Amalekites. But Israel was strictly forbidden to pursue total war against anyone else, which included other descendants of Abraham who also inherited the promised land. Before Israel arrived the other Abrahamic tribes had already driven the giant clans from their respective territories. They are listed in the land of Canaan as the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Edomites, and the Caphtorim. God used Israel as the agent of judgment to eliminate those responsible for demonic tyranny and gross wickedness, which polluted the land and accumulated countless victims whose blood cried out for justice. For the sake of these clans’ past and future victims, they could not be allowed to continue. Their cup of iniquity was overflowing. In their proper context the text of Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua do not describe a ‘holy war’ or genocide directed at a particular ethnicity of human beings, rather it is a war waged by God against his spiritual enemies, demonic powers that had come to dominate the region of Canaan and the Transjordan. God used Israel as the agent of judgment just as he would later use Assyria and Babylon to bring judgment upon Israel and Judah for their wickedness. The conquest that began with Joshua was completed with David. The last of the giants were driven out from hiding among the Philistines in Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod (2 Samuel 21:15-22). It should be noted God did not call for the elimination of the Philistines because they were not wholesale guilty of the ritual acts and wickedness of the giants.
Who was Biblical Israel? God chose Israel as the conduit for Messiah, to image/reflect God, and thereby to bless all the nations of the earth (Genesis 22:17 &18). God promised Israel, “I will be your God, and you will be my people. I will give you the land promised to Abraham and his descendants” (Exodus 6:7&8). At the foot of Mt Sinai, the people accepted God’s promise and responded, “We will do everything the Lord has said” (Exodus 19:8). God warned them, “If you defile the land, it will vomit you out, just as it is vomiting out the nation that was there before you” (Leviticus 18:28). At the end of the land conquest Joshua declared, “The Lord kept every promise that he made to the Israelites. There were no promises that he failed to keep. Every promise came true” (Joshua 21:45). Promise given, promise received, but sadly Israel failed to faithfully keep the promise. Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, records God’s grief over the utter depravity of Israel, “They have forsaken me and made this a place of foreign gods; they have burned incense in it to gods that neither they nor their ancestors nor the kings of Judah ever knew, and they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. They have built the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as offerings to Baal—something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind” (Jeremiah 19:4&5). As forewarned, they were vomited out of the land. God used Assyria and Babylon to bring judgment upon Israel and Judah for their gross wickedness.
Historical Progression:
Who is modern Israel? Israel was founded in 1948 as a secular Jewish state, established in Palestine by Great Britain. This idea was sold as “A land without people, for a people without land.” Fueled by the political Zionist enterprise, Israel laid claim to the land, violently destroying, intent on purging the Palestinians (50% are children) who’ve lived in the land for millennia. This expulsion is known as the Nakba. To justify herself, Israel dehumanizes Palestinians, dishonestly labeling them “Amalekites”, even though that clan of giants was eliminated long ago. If modern-day Israel is the reincarnation of Biblical Israel, she should be imaging God and bringing blessing to all the nations of the earth (Genesis 22:18). Are the Palestinians blessed? Are the orphaned, maimed, and starving children blessed? Are her neighbors, the surrounding nations, blessed? Can Israel, in fact, be a blessing while breaking God’s commandment, “Thou shalt not murder!?” The stench of death has reached the heavens. There’s no blessing coming. In contrast, faithfulness to God was at the heart of Israel’s patriarch, Abraham. He received the promise, though he never received the land, because he was faithfully looking forward to something far greater— the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God (Hebrews 11:8-10). Faithfulness to God is the key to the land and the blessing. Biblical Israel broke her promise to God and was expelled from the land. Modern Israel never recognized God; she is a secular state, negating any sacred privilege to the land. History is repeating itself: “They have filled this place with the blood of the innocent—something I did not command, nor did it enter my mind.”
Who are the Palestinians? The Bronze Age Collapse at the end of the 11th century BC resulted in the mass migration of many people groups. Deuteronomy describes a sea people from Caphtor, modern day Crete, who arrived in Canaan and were instrumental in driving out the giant clans (Deuteronomy 2:23). They were known to the Egyptians as “Peleset,” to the Hebrews as “P'lishtim,” and to the Romans as “Palestinians.” The Bible declares they were brought by God from Caphtor (Amos 9:7). These Greeks settled with Abraham’s descendants in Canaan, before Israel arrived, and founded the cities of Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gath, and Gaza. By engaging in war against the giant clans, along with Abraham’s descendants, they were faithful to Abraham’s god and were counted as his descendants. Remember, membership in a clan is not based on DNA but on the God you honor. This relationship is highlighted by the Maccabean (Jewish) leader, Jonathan. In 160 BC he sent letters to Sparta (Greek) to renew and affirm their "family ties" and friendship, based on their common ancestry. (1 Maccabees 12: 1-23). Israel remembers this heritage with every Hanukah celebration. This thread of ancestry is still claimed by Christians in the Greek Orthodox Church. It is not a thread of DNA but a thread of faithfulness to God. In the first century the Jews rejected the promised messiah (John 1:11) and the majority continue to do so today. But Palestinians, along with Armenians, were first to embrace the messiah. For two-thousand years God’s people were faithfully evident in the Christian churches that dotted the countryside of Palestine. Today, they are rubble in the midst of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Is it coincidence that both Armenians and Palestinians have endured genocide? "Will not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?" (Genesis 18:25).
What is Christian Zionism? The Church is to image/reflect God to the nations (Matthew 28:19). Sadly, a segment of the Church has lost the thread of faithfulness. She is a Zionist, promoting an eschatology created in 19th-century Great Britain, that Jesus never condoned. Seated in material comfort she watches, giving hearty approval from her pulpits, Israel’s frenzied determination to seize the land. While the majority of Christians decry the ethnic cleansing and genocide, she is complicit in the destruction of God’s image bearers; as if she is dressed in purple and scarlet, drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus (Revelation 17:4-6). She is without excuse. The confusion is not because of the facts, rather she has been conditioned to believe God values some lives more highly than others. The credibility of her Gospel lies in shambles. When the Zionist Church finally awakens to the dark spirits who have deceived her, she will rend her garments in anguish, desperately grasping for her robes of white. Jesus never pined over the land or sought to restore it to Israel. He came with a far greater mission in mind— to rescue humanity and conquer the demonic realm (1John 3:8), and the demons know exactly who he is (Luke 8:26-39). He admonished his followers to love one another, even their enemies, and to be the peacemakers who are called the sons of God. At the trial before his crucifixion Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world; if it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But my kingdom is not of this realm” (John 18:36). He metaphorically shook the dust of the land off his sandals, declaring, “Your house is left to you desolate” (Matthew 23: 37-38). When the dust clears at the threshold of eternity, not everyone who says ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven. For many, the response will be “I never knew you” (Matthew 7:21-23). Remember, O Church, your first love and return to him (Revelation 2:4&5). Instead of grasping for a tract of land, glorify the Lord of all things, by remaining faithful.
Conclusion: Dr Ezzideen, whose name means “glorious faith,” continues his post: “More than two thousand years ago a man staggered beneath a wooden cross on a hill soaked with dust and blood. He was spat on. Stripped. Dragged to his execution by a world that demanded obedience, not justice. And that cross, that unholy burden, was not lifted with his death. It was planted in the earth, and it has remained. Oh God, we are tired, not in the body, but in the soul. Tired like Job. Tired like Christ before the cross. I am a doctor in Gaza, merely one of many still clinging to the faith. Not because I believe it will save me, but because I believe that suffering beside the innocent is the last honest thing a man can do” ( Dr. Ezzideen @ezzingaza). “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40).
Sources: Jesus and the Land, Gary M Burge; Is God a Moral Monster? Paul Copan; The Whole Council of God, Stephen de Young https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/wholecounsel/2018/10/09/here-there-be-giants/ ; Ancient Faith Radio, A Land of Giants https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjqchu-XUXE ; The Apocalypse Code, Hank Hanegraaff; God is a Man of War, Stephen de Young; The Lord of Spirits, Andrew Stephen Damick; Demons, Michael S Heiser; The Unseen Realm, Michael S Heiser; The Religion of the Apostles, Stephen de Young; Jewish Currents, Maya Rosen, https://jewishcurrents.org/facing-amalek; Reflections on Israel Palestine, the Destruction of Gaza, and the American Church, Daniel Bannoura, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfm266PUeVE; Son of an Israeli General Becomes an Activist for Palestine, Matti Peled, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYCcverHUkU ; Alex de Waal, Starvation in Gaza, https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/may/starvation-in-gaza