Commentary - Deuteronomy 7:1-6

Bird's-eye view

This passage in Deuteronomy 7 is one of the starkest and most severe in all of Scripture, and for that reason, one of the most necessary for us to understand correctly. As Israel stands on the precipice of the Promised Land, God lays out the terms of the conquest. This is not to be a typical military campaign for territory or resources. It is a holy war, a divine judgment, an act of extermination commanded by God Himself against a deeply corrupt and idolatrous civilization. The command is threefold: total destruction, no treaties, and no intermarriage. The reason for this severity is not ethnic or racial, but theological and covenantal. The Canaanites represent a spiritual contagion so virulent that any contact with it threatens Israel's very existence as a holy people. God is not just giving Israel land; He is consecrating a people to Himself, and that consecration requires a radical, violent separation from the profound wickedness of the nations they are dispossessing. This is the Old Testament equivalent of "If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out." The ultimate ground for this action is God's sovereign choice: He has set His affection on Israel, choosing them to be His treasured possession, a holy people set apart for His glory.

We must read this not as a manual for modern warfare, but as a unique, unrepeatable moment in redemptive history. The conquest of Canaan is a type, a foreshadowing, of a greater spiritual reality. The physical warfare against the Canaanites points to the spiritual warfare of the church, and the physical land points to the inheritance of the entire world promised to Christ. The principles of holiness, separation from idolatry, and the necessity of God's judgment on sin remain, but the application is transformed by the coming of Christ. Our weapons are not carnal, but they are mighty for pulling down strongholds.

Outline

Context In Deuteronomy

Deuteronomy is a book of covenant renewal. Moses, at the end of his life, is preaching a series of sermons to the generation of Israelites born in the wilderness, preparing them to enter and possess the land promised to their fathers. The book is structured like an ancient Near Eastern suzerainty treaty, with a historical prologue, stipulations, sanctions (blessings and curses), and arrangements for succession. Chapter 7 falls squarely in the section of stipulations. Having reiterated the Ten Commandments in chapter 5 and the central command to love God wholly (the Shema) in chapter 6, Moses now applies these foundational principles to the immediate task at hand: the conquest. The commands in this chapter are a direct outworking of the first and second commandments. Because Yahweh is the one true God, and Israel is to have no other gods before Him, the entire apparatus of Canaanite idolatry must be utterly eradicated. The severity of the command is directly proportional to the importance of covenant fidelity. This is not an outlier text; it is central to the logic of Deuteronomy.

Key Issues

The Justice of Herem Warfare

Let us be blunt. The command to "devote them to destruction" (herem) is a profound stumbling block for modern readers. It sounds like genocide, and our adversaries are quick to label it as such. But this is a fundamental misreading of what is happening. God's judgments are always moral, never ethnic. This was not a command to wipe out a particular people group because of their DNA, but rather to execute a long-delayed sentence upon a culture that had reached the terminal stages of moral and spiritual cancer. God had told Abraham centuries earlier that the conquest would be delayed, "for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full" (Gen. 15:16). This implies a divine patience that waited for centuries while the Canaanites spiraled deeper into depravity, a depravity that included child sacrifice, cult prostitution, and rampant idolatry. The conquest was a divine judgment, a holy execution, with Israel acting as the executioner. It was a one-time historical event, not a standing order for all time. The Canaanites were not innocent bystanders; they were convicted criminals on a divine death row. And Israel was not a marauding horde; they were a constituted posse, deputized by the Judge of all the earth.

Verse by Verse Commentary

1 “When Yahweh your God brings you into the land where you are entering to possess it, and He clears away many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and stronger than you,

The very first clause establishes the central truth of the conquest: God is the primary actor. It is Yahweh your God who "brings you in" and Yahweh who "clears away" the nations. Israel is the instrument, but God is the agent. This is crucial. Israel is not taking the land by their own strength; they are receiving it as a gift from their covenant Lord. The list of seven nations underscores the impossibility of the task from a human perspective. They are "more numerous and stronger than you." This is designed to strip Israel of any pride or self-reliance. Their victory will be so disproportionate to their strength that they will have no choice but to give God all the glory. This is a foundational principle of God's economy: He chooses the weak things of the world to shame the strong, so that no flesh may boast in His presence.

2 and when Yahweh your God gives them over before you and you strike them down, then you shall devote them to destruction. You shall cut no covenant with them and show no favor to them.

Here is the hard command. Again, God's sovereignty is emphasized: He "gives them over" to Israel. Only then is Israel to "strike them down." The phrase "devote them to destruction" is the Hebrew word herem. It means to remove something from common use and consecrate it wholly to God, usually through destruction. These nations and their possessions were to be treated like a cancerous limb, utterly removed and destroyed lest the infection spread. This is why the subsequent commands are so absolute. "You shall cut no covenant with them." A covenant implies a shared peace and shared loyalties. But there can be no peace between Yahweh and Baal. There can be no loyalty shared between the holy God and the gods of the Canaanites. "And show no favor to them." The word for favor here is related to grace. Israel is not to extend grace to those whom God has sentenced to judgment. To do so would be to place their own sentimentalities above the revealed justice of God. It would be an act of profound disobedience, questioning the righteousness of the Judge.

3 Furthermore, you shall not intermarry with them; you shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters for your sons.

This prohibition gets to the heart of the matter. The greatest threat the Canaanites posed was not military, but domestic. A treaty is a political threat, but intermarriage is a spiritual and cultural one. Marriage is the most intimate of covenants, the basic building block of society. To join in marriage with a Canaanite was to bring the contagion of idolatry right into the heart of the Israelite family. It was to yoke a son or daughter of the covenant with a child of a culture under God's curse. This was not a matter of racial purity, but of religious and covenantal purity. The line of the holy seed, through which Messiah would come, had to be protected from the corrupting worship of false gods.

4 For they will turn your sons away from following Me, and they will serve other gods; then the anger of Yahweh will be kindled against you, and He will quickly destroy you.

Here is the reason, stated plainly. The prohibition is not arbitrary. It is a guardrail to protect Israel from spiritual apostasy. God knows the human heart. He knows that a divided loyalty in the home will inevitably lead to a divided loyalty to God. The pagan spouse, with their ingrained worldview and religious practices, would be a constant temptation, a spiritual fifth column inside the camp. The result would be that Israel would "serve other gods." And this, in turn, would provoke the righteous anger of Yahweh. Notice the terrible irony: if Israel shows favor to the Canaanites and fails to destroy them, then God will "quickly destroy" Israel. By failing to be the instrument of God's judgment, they would become the object of it. The very curse they were commanded to execute would fall upon their own heads. This is what ultimately happened when Israel failed to obey, leading to the exile centuries later.

5 But thus you shall do to them: you shall tear down their altars and shatter their sacred pillars and cut their Asherim in pieces and burn their graven images with fire.

Having stated the negative prohibitions, Moses now gives the positive command. Israel's conquest is to be a work of thorough cultural demolition. They are not simply to defeat armies and occupy cities; they are to obliterate the entire religious infrastructure of the Canaanites. The altars, the places of sacrifice; the sacred pillars, likely phallic symbols of the god Baal; the Asherim, wooden poles representing the goddess Asherah; and the graven images, all of it must be torn down, shattered, cut, and burned. This is a religious cleansing. There is to be no syncretism, no blending of Yahweh worship with pagan practices. You cannot put a cross on top of a pagan altar. The ground must be cleared completely before a holy worship can be established. This is a picture of true repentance. It is not enough to stop sinning; the instruments and occasions of sin must be destroyed.

6 For you are a holy people to Yahweh your God; Yahweh your God has chosen you to be a people for His own treasured possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.

This final verse provides the ultimate foundation for all these commands. Why must Israel be so severe? Why the radical separation? Because of who they are. "For you are a holy people." Holy means "set apart." They are set apart to Yahweh, and consequently, set apart from the corrupt nations. Their identity is not their own; it is defined by their relationship to God. And this identity is not something they achieved; it is something they received. "Yahweh your God has chosen you." This is the doctrine of election, stated as plainly as anywhere in Scripture. Out of all the nations on earth, God sovereignly set His affection on Israel, not because of their strength or righteousness, but because of His own good pleasure. He chose them to be His "treasured possession," His special people. This high and holy calling is the reason for the high and holy demands. Because they belong to God, they must live like God's people and fight like God's army.

Application

How do we, as New Covenant believers, apply such a bloody text? First, we must recognize that the physical warfare of the Old Covenant has been transfigured into the spiritual warfare of the New. Our conquest is the Great Commission. The land we are to possess is the whole earth, for it has been given to Christ as His inheritance. Our enemies are not the Canaanites of flesh and blood, but the spiritual "principalities and powers" that lie behind all idolatry and rebellion against God.

Therefore, the command to "devote them to destruction" remains, but the object of our warfare has changed. We are to show no mercy to our own sins. We are to make no treaties with the world's corrupt value systems. We are not to be unequally yoked in marriage or in any other covenantal bond with unbelief. We are to tear down the altars of idolatry in our own hearts, in our homes, and in our culture, not with swords of steel, but with the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. The command to be a "holy people" is repeated and amplified for the church. We have been chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before Him.

This passage, then, should not make us squeamish; it should make us serious. It should fill us with a holy dread of compromising with sin. The Canaanites were destroyed for a set of practices that are becoming increasingly common and celebrated in our own day. God's hatred for sin has not diminished. But the great glory of the gospel is that the judgment we deserved, the herem that was upon our own heads, fell upon Jesus Christ at the cross. He was made a curse for us, devoted to destruction in our place, so that we might be brought into the holy land of God's presence. Our response, therefore, is to fight. We fight sin in our own lives, and we proclaim the gospel of the King who has already conquered, calling all men everywhere to lay down their rebellious arms and find mercy at the foot of His cross.