Deuteronomy 7:1 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

Ver. 1. When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land— Moses, well foreseeing how apt the Israelites would be to fall into idolatry, thought it necessary to insist particularly upon this article: accordingly, in the sequel of his speech, he desires them to remember what it was that God expected they should do to the seven idolatrous nations of Canaan; and how they were to behave when he delivered them into their hands. In the promise made to Abraham, Genesis 15:19 there is mention of ten nations promised to his posterity; but, as this promise was above four hundred years before, it is easy to suppose, that some of those people, by affinities with their more powerful neighbours, might now be called by the names of that people to which they were joined. In Genesis 15:19 before cited, there is no mention of the Hivites; and, besides the other six here enumerated, we have the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kedmonites, and Rephaims, which seem to have been only lesser families included in mount Lebanon, as appears from Judges 3:3. The Hivites seem to be the people called Rephaims in Genesis 15. Bochart is of opinion, that the Kenites and Kenizzites were extinct between the age of Abraham and Moses: but that cannot be true; for we read of the Kenites, both in Moses's time, and long after, Numbers 24:21. Joshua 1:16. 1 Samuel 15:6 and Joshua 10:5-6. The dreadful execution to be done on the Canaanites by the divine command, has been urged as an act of the greatest cruelty and injustice. Some have endeavoured to extenuate this, by arguing from the present passage, compared with Judges 11:19-20 that conditions of peace were to be offered to them: but waving that, in consideration of verses 1, 2. 5. 16 and many other parallel texts, and comparing chap. Deuteronomy 20:15-16 with Joshua 11:6-7; Judges 11:23 it may with greater certainty, says Dr. Doddridge, be replied, 1. That God, as their offended creator, had a right to their forfeited lives; and, therefore, might as well destroy them and their posterity by the sword of the Israelites, as by famine, pestilence, fire and brimstone rained from heaven, or any other calamity appearing to come more immediately from himself. 2. That the wickedness of this people, especially as aggravated by the destruction of Sodom, was such as made the execution done upon them an useful lesson to neighbouring nations. Compare Genesis 15:16. Leviticus 20:27. Jude 1:4; Jude 1:7. Wis 12:3; Wis 12:7; Wis 12:3. That the miracles wrought in favour of the Israelites, not only at their coming out of Egypt, but at their entrance on Canaan, proved that they were indeed commissioned as God's executioners, and, consequently, that their conduct was not to be a model for conquerors in ordinary cases. 4. That there was a peculiar propriety in destroying those sinners by the sword of Israel, as that would tend to impress the Israelites more strongly with an abhorrence of the idolatry and other vices of these nations, and consequently subserve that design of keeping them a distinct people, adhering to the worship of the true God, which was so gracious to mankind in general as well as to them in particular. After all, had any among the Canaanites surrendered themselves at discretion to the God of Israel, a new case would have arisen, not expressly provided for in the law, in which, it is probable, God, upon being consulted by Urim and Thummim, would have spared the lives of such penitents, and either have incorporated them with the Israelites by circumcision, or have ordered them a settlement in some neighbouring country, as the family of Rahab seems to have had; Joshua 6:23. See Doddridge's Lectures, p. 354 and Waterland's Scripture Vindicated, p. 2. We refer to the end of the twentieth chapter for reflections on the destruction of the seven nations of Canaan.