Charles Ellicott Commentary Judges 1:28

"And it came to pass, when Israel was waxed strong, that they put the Canaanites to taskwork, and did not utterly drive them out." — Judges 1:28 (ASV)

Did not utterly drive them out. —This is mentioned as a point of blame, as the cause of their future sins and disasters (Judges 2:2; Joshua 16:16; Joshua 17:13). Regarding the morality of these exterminating wars, we must bear in mind that men and nations must alike be judged by the moral standard of their own day, not by the advanced morality of later ages. We learn from unanimous testimony that the nations of Canaan had sunk to the lowest and vilest depths of moral degeneracy. When nations have fallen this low, the cup of their iniquity is full; they are practically irreclaimable.

To mingle with them would inevitably mean learning their practices, for their worst abominations would find an ally in the natural weakness and corruption of the human heart. The Israelites therefore believed that it was their positive duty to destroy them, and the impulse that led them to do so was one that sprang from their best, not their worst, instincts. It must not be forgotten that the teaching of Christ has absolutely changed the moral conceptions of the world.

It intensified, to a degree we can hardly estimate, our sense of the inalienable rights of humanity and of the individual person. In these days, there is scarcely any amount of evidence that would convince us that we were commanded to exterminate a whole population and involve women and children in one indistinguishable massacre.

But neither the Israelites nor any other ancient nations, at this early stage of their moral development, had any conception corresponding to those that would rightly horrify us, were we to receive a command like that given by Moses, that thou shalt save nothing alive that breatheth (Deuteronomy 22:16), or by Samuel, Slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass (1 Samuel 15:3). We would instantly declare it to be impossible that God—as Christ has revealed to us the character of our Father in heaven—should give us commands that would conflict with our sense of justice as much as with our sense of compassion.

To quote such commands as an excuse for, or an incentive to, such horrible acts of wickedness as the Sack of Beziers, or the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, is ignorantly and recklessly to obliterate the entire results of God’s progressive moral education of our race. It is to ignore the fact that we are living under a wholly different dispensation, and to disavow every blessing that has accrued to humanity from the broadening light and divine revelation of three thousand years. But the ancient Israelites, living as they did in the days of ignorance which God winked at (Acts 17:30), had never attained to that idea of human individuality—that sense of the independence and infinite worth of each human life—that would have shown them that they knew not what manner of spirit they were of (Luke 9:56).

The wild and passionate sense of severe justice, the comparative indifference to human life, the familiarity with pain and death that blunted the keen edge of pity, “the deficient sense of individuality, the exaggerated sense of the solidarity that united a criminal with all his surroundings and possessions,” prevented them from regarding the execution of their ban on guilty nations, cities, or families in any other light than that of the zeal for righteousness that impelled it. Their deeds must be estimated by the elements of nobleness that mingled with them, and not indiscriminately condemned by standards of judgment of which neither they nor the age in which they lived had any conception.

They firmly believed that in exterminating Canaan they were acting under Divine commands, and there was nothing in such commands that would in that day have shocked the moral sense of the world. “They did not look unnatural to the ancient Jew; they were not foreign to his standard; they excited no surprise or perplexity; they appealed to a genuine but rough idea of justice that existed, when the longing for retribution upon crime in the human mind was not checked by the strict sense of human individuality” (Mozley, Lectures on the Old Test., p. 103).