Gary North,
Inheritance and Dominion

The Whole Burnt Offering and Disinheritance

The Israelites were told to show no mercy to the nations inside Canaan's boundaries (Deut. 7:16). These nations had practiced such great evil that they had become abominations in the sight of God. "For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee" (Deut. 18:12). The language of Deuteronomy 20:10-18 indicates that every living thing inside the boundaries of Canaan was to be killed: "thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth." With respect to the first city to fall, Jericho, this law applied literally (Josh. 6:15-21). But it did not apply literally to the other cities of Canaan. After the destruction of Jericho, the first city inside Canaan to be defeated, cattle became lawful spoils for the Israelites. "And thou shalt do to Ai and her king as thou didst unto Jericho and her king: only the spoil thereof, and the cattle thereof, shall ye take for a prey unto yourselves: lay thee an ambush for the city behind it" (Josh. 8:2). The word "breatheth" did not apply to Canaan's cattle; it applied only to the human population. "And all the spoil of these cities, and the cattle, the children of Israel took for a prey unto themselves; but every man they smote with the edge of the sword, until they had destroyed them, neither left they any to breathe" (Josh. 11:14).

Jericho was the representative example of God's total wrath against covenant-breakers who follow their religious presuppositions to their ultimate conclusion: death.⁽³⁾ Jericho came under God's total ban: hormah.⁽⁴⁾ This was the equivalent of a whole burnt offering: almost all of it had to be consumed by fire. In the whole burnt offering, all of the beast was consumed on the altar (Lev. 1:9, 13), except for the skin, which went to the officiating priest (Lev. 7:8). Similarly, all of Jericho was burnt except for the precious metals, which went to the tabernacle as firstfruits (Josh. 6:24).⁽⁵⁾ Nevertheless, because God wanted His people to reap the inheritance of the Canaanites, He allowed them to confiscate the cattle and precious goods of the other conquered Canaanite cities. This illustrated another important biblical principle of inheritance: "A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children's children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just" (Prov. 13:22). Canaan's capital, except in Jericho, was part of Israel's lawful inheritance. The Canaanites had accumulated wealth; the Israelites were to inherit all of it. This comprehensive inheritance was to become a model of God's total victory at the end of history. Their failure to exterminate the Canaanites, placing some of them under tribute instead (Josh. 16:10; 17:13), eventually led to the apostasy of Israel and the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities, just as Moses prophesied in this passage (vv. 17-18; cf. 7:1-5; 12:30-31).

The annihilation of every living soul in Canaan was mandatory. "And thou shalt consume all the people which the LORD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare unto thee" (Deut. 7:16). This was a model of God's final judgment. But it was a model in the same way that Jericho was a model: a one-time event. Jericho was to be totally destroyed, including the animals; this was not true of the other cities of Canaan. Similarly, the Canaanites were to be totally annihilated; this was not true of residents of cities outside Canaan. In this sense, Jericho was to Canaan what Canaan was to cities outside the land: a down payment ("earnest") on God's final judgment -- final disinheritance -- at the end of time. This earnest payment in history on the final disinheritance is matched by the earnest payment in history on the final inheritance. This is surely the case in spiritual affairs.⁽⁶⁾ Debates over eschatology are debates over the extent to which these earnest payments in history are also cultural and civilizational, and whether they image the final judgment, i.e., to what extent history is an earnest on eternity.⁽⁷⁾

James B. Jordan
Judges: God's War Against Humanism

Hormah

17. Then Judah went with Simeon his brother, and they struck the Canaanites living in Zephath, and utterly destroyed it. So the name of the city was called Hormah. Now we see Judah making good her bargain with Simeon. The destruction of Canaanite Zephath was total, so that the place was called Hormah.

This is not the only “Hormah,” for we read in Numbers 21:1-3 of a place that was also “devoted to destruction,” and as a result was called Hormah.

Hormah means “placed under the ban, totally destroyed.” To be placed under the ban is to be devoted to death. Just as the Nazirite was devoted to God in life (for instance, Samson, Samuel), so the banned person or city was devoted wholly to God in death. To put under the ban means to curse and to devote to total destruction.

The preeminent example of a city devoted to total destruction is Jericho, the story of which is recorded in Joshua 6:15-19. Everything living was to be killed, all the treasures brought to the house of God, and the city was to be burned with fire. No personal booty was allowed.

More light is shed on this matter in Deuteronomy 13:12-18. The apostate city is to be banned, and “then you shall gather all its booty into the middle of its open square and burn the city and all its booty with fire as a whole burnt sacrifice to the LORD your God; and it shall be a ruin forever. It shall never be rebuilt” (V. 16).

From this we learn that it was God’s fire, lit by Himself from heaven (Lev. 9:24; 2 Chron. 7:1), kept burning perpetually on the altar, which was used to ignite the city placed under the ban. (See also Gen. 22:6 and 1 Ki. 18:38.) The fact that God starts His fire shows that the sacrifice is His sacrifice, the sacrifice that He Himself provides to propitiate His own fiery wrath. Man has no hand in it, and only an ordained priest may handle it. Man is impotent in his salvation, so that man cannot even light the sacrificial fire. If he dares to do so, God destroys him (Lev. 10:1-2).

All men stand on God’s altar. Those who accept God’s Substitute, the very Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, can step off the altar and escape the fire. Jesus takes the fire for them. He be- comes the whole burnt sacrifice. Those who refuse the Substitute, however, are left on the altar, and are burnt up by the fire of God. (See Gen. 19:24; Rev. 18:8; Rev. 20:14f.; and for further study, Heb. 12:29; Ex. 3:2-5; Heb. 12:18; Num. 11:1-3; Num. 16:35; Num. 21:6; Gen. 3:25; 2 Pet. 3:9-12; Rev. 8:3-5).

Thus, the destruction of Hormah was a priestly act, issuing from the flaming swords of the cherubic (priestly) guardians of the land, a revelation of God’s direct fiery judgment against the wicked. Not every city was to be destroyed in this fashion, but certain ones were, as types of the wrath of God. This horrible judgment, introduced here at the beginning of Judges, comes again in Judges 20:40, when it is an apostate Israelite city that is burnt up as a sacrifice to God.

R. J. Rushdoony argued that Exodus 30 -- a man's payment of half a shekel upon reaching age 20 -- was a head tax. He was incorrect. The payment went to the priests, not to a civil magistrate ("captain"). The tip-off was that it was calculated as a shekel of the sanctuary, which was a separate, ecclesiastical coin. This was blood money. It was paid on a man's entry into God's holy army, which was both priestly and civil. I discuss this in Chapter 32 of Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (1990).

The military was not necessarily a state function over against a Church function in the Old Covenant. Indeed, holy war was a specifically priestly function. The torching of cities is to be understood as taking God's fire off from His altar and applying His holy fiery wrath to his enemies. Thus, the torched cities were called "whole burnt sacrifices" in the Hebrew Old Testament (Deut. 13:16; Judg. 1:17, 20:40, in Hebrew). During the holy war, the men became temporary priests by taking the Nazirite vow (Num. 6; 2 Sam. 11:11 + Exo. 19:15; Deut. 23:9-14; Judg. 5:2, "That long locks of hair hung loose in Israel. . ."). This is all to say that the rendering of specific judgments is a sabbatical and priestly function, not a kingly one.... The sword of the state executes according to the judgments rendered by the priests....

Thus, the military duty is priestly, and a duty of every believer-priest. Both Church and state are involved in it, since the Church must say whether the war is just and holy, and the state must organize the believer-priests for battle. The mustering of the host for a census is, then, not a "civil" function as opposed to an ecclesiastical one, and the atonement money of Exodus 30 is not a poll tax, as some have alleged.
James Jordan, "Appendix D: State Financing in the Bible," in The Law of the Covenant, 231-32 (1984), at http://www.garynorth.com/freebooks/: HTML, DjVu.