God described the sin of the Canaanites vividly in these
words, “I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants”
(Lev. 18:25).
Were the Israelites somehow morally superior in God’s
mind? Deuteronomy 9:4-6, God makes it absolutely clear that the Israelites are
not being used because they are better than the Canaanites or morally superior,
but simply as agents of His judgment. In fact, He repeats twice that it is “not
because of your righteousness”… not just that from v 7 till the end of the
chapter (9), the Lord even articulates in very precise terms the sins of the
children of Israel and how they themselves were deserving to be punished.
Perhaps God wanted to use the Israelites in this way so that they would learn
the seriousness of sin, the detestability to God of the Canaanite religions and
the reality of God’s judgment. These truths would be burned deeply on their
consciousness as they remembered the annihilation they had been involved in.
This problem of how God could use sinful people as agents
of judgment of other sinful people arises again later in the Old Testament. The
book of Habakkuk focuses on this concern in the context of the impending
invasion of Judah by the Babylonians. The prophet struggles with the fact that
God’s people, sinful as they were, are about to be defeated by an even more
sinful nation (Habakkuk 1:13). Chapter 2 details God’s response to Habakkuk as
He vindicates Himself and assures the prophet that in due time he will judge
the Babylonians by the same righteous standard that He was now holding against
Judah. The book ends with a declaration of Habakkuk’s faith as he praises God
and expresses his trust in Him (Chapter 3).
In my searching for answers, the Lord blessed me with a
wonderful analogy. Let’s assume that a powerful country notices that one of its
provinces had totally rejected the governance of the rulers and were now
working in an absolutely debauched manner, after a lot of failed diplomacy and
requests to revert to submission to the parent state, decides to send one of
their generals to get rid of mischief mongers in that land and establish a
righteous rule under the parent state. What if, the general after establishing
control over this province then proceeds to himself rule in the same debauched
manner of the earlier rulers, will the parent state not send another general to
displace and punish this renegade general and establish a fair and just rule
under the parent state? What if this new general also was no better, won’t the
parent state send another general to totally root out the rot? Absolutely… and that’s
precisely what the good Lord did.
Israel’s response to Canaanite sin is a parable of how
their own sinfulness empowered them to ape the sin of the Canaanites and
thereby procure God’s judgment on them. For God does not show favoritism.
Israel was warned not to let the Canaanites live in their land, but to
completely destroy them (Exod. 23:33; Deut. 20:16–18), lest the Israelites
learn the Canaanite ways (Exod. 34:15–16). If they did not destroy them, the
land would “vomit” them out just as it had vomited out the Canaanites (Num.
33:56; Lev. 18:28; Deut 4:23–29, 8:19–20).
Instead, the Israelites worshiped the Canaanites’ gods
and “did evil” (Judg. 10:6; 1 Kings 14:22; 2 Kings 17:10). They had “male
shrine prostitutes” (1 Kings 14:22), committed acts of “lewdness,” adultery,
and incest (Jer. 5:7; 29:23; Hos. 4:13–14; Ezek. 22:10–11; Amos 2:7), and even
Solomon set up an altar to Molech (1 Kings 11:5, 7–8). But instead of repenting
when things went badly, they concluded that their misfortune was because they
stopped burning incense to “the Queen of Heaven,” Inanna/Ishtar (Jer. 44:18).
So the Lord said that Israel became “like Sodom to me” (Jer. 23:14). In short,
Israel was Canaanized.
Although prophets warned the northern kingdom (usually
referred to as Israel or Samaria) of impending doom, they didn’t repent, and in
722 BC the king of Assyria killed or deported most of them, and filled the land
with conquered peoples from other nations. Similarly, the southern tribes
(usually referred to as Judah) were deported when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed
Jerusalem beginning in 586 BC. Just as God had demonstrated his knowledge of
who would repent in the Canaanite cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, before he
destroyed Jerusalem He told Jeremiah that if He could find even one righteous
person He would spare the entire city (Jer. 5:1).
Let’s see the fate of the conquerors through the ages:
Assyria - Nineveh
The city of Nineveh, the ancient capital of the Assyrian
Empire, was destroyed in 612 B.C. The fall of that great city was not a matter
of chance, but rather a fulfillment of Bible prophecy.
Nineveh was established by Nimrod, "the mighty
hunter" (Gen. 10:8-10). It served as the capitol of the Assyrian Empire
for many years.
Assyria’s conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel
began approximately 740 BC under King Pul. First Chronicles 5:26 notes, “So the
God of Israel stirred up the spirit of Pul king of Assyria, the spirit of
Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, and he took them into exile, namely, the
Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half-tribe of Manasseh, and brought them to
Halah, Habor, Hara, and the river Gozan, to this day.” These tribes, located
east of the Jordan River, were the first ones conquered by Assyria.
Nearly 20 years later, about 722 BC, the capital city,
Samaria, was overtaken by the Assyrians under Shalmaneser V. After first
forcing tribute payments, Shalmaneser later laid siege to the city when it
refused to pay. Following a three-year siege, 2 Kings 17:5-6 notes that, “in
the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria, and he carried
the Israelites away to Assyria and placed them in Halah, and on the Habor, the
river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.” And in 701 BC the Assyrians
marched south into Judah; however, they were unable to capture Jerusalem due to
the Lord’s intervention (2 Chronicles 32:22).
The prophet Nahum predicted the destruction of Nineveh in
the book that bears his name. The following items were to be a part of the
destruction of that great city:
An "overflowing flood" would "make an
utter end of its place" (Nah. 1:8)
Nineveh would be destroyed while her inhabitants were
"drunken like drunkards" (Nah. 1:10)
Nineveh would be unprotected because "fire shall
devour the bars of your gates" (Nah. 3:13)
Nineveh would never recover, for their "injury has
no healing" (Nah. 3:19)
The downfall of Nineveh would come with remarkable ease,
like figs falling when the tree is shaken (Nah. 3:12)
In 612 B.C. Nabopolassar united the Babylonian army with
an army of Medes and Scythians and led a campaign which captured the Assyrian
citadels in the North. The Babylonian army laid siege to Nineveh, but the walls
of the city were too strong for battering rams, so they decided to try and
starve the people out. A famous oracle had been given that "Nineveh should
never be taken until the river became its enemy." After a three month
siege, "rain fell in such abundance that the waters of the Tigris
inundated part of the city and overturned one of its walls for a distance of twenty
stades. Then the King, convinced that the oracle was accomplished and
despairing of any means of escape, to avoid falling alive into the enemy's
hands constructed in his palace an immense funeral pyre, placed on it his gold
and silver and his royal robes, and then, shutting himself up with his wives
and eunuchs in a chamber formed in the midst of the pile, disappeared in the
flames. Nineveh opened its gates to the besiegers, but this tardy submission
did not save the proud city. It was pillaged and burned, and then razed to the
ground so completely as to evidence the implacable hatred enkindled in the
minds of subject nations by the fierce and cruel Assyrian government."
(Lenormant and E. Chevallier, The Rise and Fall of Assyria).
"Nineveh was laid waste as ruthlessly and completely
as her kings had once ravaged Susa and Babylon; the city was put to the torch,
the population was slaughtered or enslaved, and the palace so recently built by
Ashurbanipal was sacked and destroyed. At one blow Assyria disappeared from history.
Nothing remained of her except certain tactics and weapons of war ...The Near
East remembered her for a while as a merciless unifier of a dozen lesser
states; and the Jews recalled Nineveh vengefully as 'the bloody city, full of
lies and robbery.' In a little while all but the mightiest of the Great Kings
were forgotten, and all their royal palaces were in ruins under the drifting
sands. Two hundred years after its capture, Xenophon's Ten Thousand marched
over the mounds that had been Nineveh, and never suspected that these were the
site of the ancient metropolis that had ruled half the world. Not a stone
remained visible of all the temples with which Assyria's pious warriors had
sought to beautify their greatest capital. Even Ashur, the everlasting god, was
dead." (Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage, pp. 283, 284).
The prophet Jonah had gone to Nineveh and preached,
saying, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" (Jonah
3:4). The record tells us "the people of Nineveh believed God, proclaimed
a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least of them"
(Jonah 3:5). In response to one of the greatest stories of repentance in
history, "God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and
God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and
He did not do it" (Jonah 3:10).
Babylon
In the Bible, Isaiah 13:1 says, “The burden against
Babylon which Isaiah the son of Amoz saw.” At the time of Isaiah’s prediction,
Babylon was one of the largest and most important cities in the world. This is
what God told Isaiah would happen to Babylon:
Isaiah claimed that God told him that Babylon would be
completely destroyed.
“Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them, who will
not regard silver; and as for gold, they will not delight in it. Also their
bows will dash the young men to pieces, and they will have no pity on the fruit
of the womb; their eye will not spare children. And Babylon, the glory of the
kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldeans’ pride, will be as when God overthrew
Sodom and Gomorrah. It will never be inhabited, nor will it be settled from
generation to generation; nor will the Arabian pitch tents there, nor will the
shepherds make their sheepfolds there” (Isaiah 13:17-20).
When Isaiah wrote his prediction, the Medes were weak.
Most of the Medes were ruled by other nations, and the remaining Medes were not
unified (The Cambridge History of Iran, 1985, Vol. 2, p. 80). It would have
been impossible for them to capture or destroy the strong city of Babylon.
Isaiah’s prediction appeared to be wrong. When the Assyrians destroyed Babylon
in 689 B.C., Isaiah’s prediction appeared to be completely impossible. The
Medes could not fight against a city that was gone!
Finally, nearly 200 years after Isaiah wrote about
Babylon, part of his prophecy was fulfilled. God told Isaiah, “Behold, I will
stir up the Medes against them, who will not regard silver; and as for gold,
they will not delight in it” (Isaiah 13:17). The Medes captured Babylon, just
as Isaiah predicted. They captured the city without a battle and did not
plunder the city. However, the other details of the prophecy had not happened
yet.
Isaiah said that the Medes would kill many people: “Also
their bows will dash the young men to pieces, and they will have no pity on the
fruit of the womb; their eye will not spare children” (Isaiah 13:18). This
prediction was fulfilled several years later.
An inscription written on a rock cliff in Bisotun,
Iran—made by Darius, king of the Medes and Persians—describes the event. In 521
B.C. the Babylonians appointed their own king and the city rebelled. Darius’
army defeated the rebel army and captured Babylon. Then the rebel king and his
main followers were impaled inside the city.
Medes – Persian
empire
The history of the rise and fall of the Medes and the
Persians forms an important background for over two hundred years of Biblical
history. Located in the area south of the Caspian Sea and east of the Zagros
Mountains, its original domain stretched for 600 miles north and south, and 250
miles east to west. The nation first came into prominence in the ninth century
b.c. and is mentioned in inscriptions concerning Shalmaneser III (about 836
b.c. ). Though under the domination of Assyria until the seventh century b.c.,
their rise in power was contemporary with the decline of the Assyrian Empire
and in 614 b.c. the Medes captured Asshur, the capitol city of Assyria. Later
in 612 b.c. in alliance with the Chaldeans they captured Nineveh resulting in
the downfall of the Assyrian Empire. In the years which followed they were an
important ally of Babylonia and formed various alliances and intermarriages.
Toward the end of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, the Persians began to become a
powerful force and under Cyrus II Media was conquered in 549 b.c. and was
combined with the empire of the Persians to form Medo-Persia. The combined
strength of the Persians and the Medes led to conquest of Babylon in 539 b.c.,
with the resulting extension of their empire over much of the Middle East until
the conquest of Alexander the Great in 331 b.c.
The Grecan empire after the death of King Alexander split
into 4 kingdoms which then consolidated into 2 kingdoms which then merged into
the single Roman empire…
The conquest was neither ethnic cleansing nor genocide.
God cared nothing about skin color or national origin. Aliens shared the same
legal rights in the commonwealth as Jews (Lev. 19:34, Lev. 24:22, Deut.
10:18-19). Foreigners like Naomi and Rahab were welcome within their ranks.
(... To Be Continued in Part 8)
