[Footnote A: Perhaps it will be objected, that the preservation of the Gibeonites, and of Rahab and her kindred, was a violation of the command of God. We answer, if it had been, we might expect some such intimation. If God had straitly commanded them to _exterminate all the Canaanites,_ their pledge to save them alive, was neither a repeal of the statute, nor absolution for the breach of it. If _unconditional destruction_ was the import of the command, would God have permitted such an act to pass without severe rebuke? Would he have established such a precedent when Israel had hardly passed the threshhold of Canaan, and was then striking the first blow of a half century war? What if they _had_ passed their word to Rahab and the Gibeonites? Was that more binding upon them than God's command? So Saul seems to have passed _his_ word to Agag; yet Samuel hewed him in pieces, because in saving his life, Saul had violated God's command. This same Saul appears to have put the same construction on the command to destroy the inhabitants of Canaan, that is generally put upon it now. We are told that he sought to slay the Gibeonites "in his zeal for the children of Israel and Judah." God sent upon Israel a three years' famine for it. In assigning the reason, he says, "It is for Saul and his bloody house, because he slew the Gibeonites." When David inquired of them what atonement he should make, they say, "The man that consumed us, and that devised against us, that we should the destroyed from _remaining in any of the coasts of Israel_ let seven of his sons be delivered," &c. 2 Samuel xxii. 1-6.] [Footnote B: If the Canaanites were devoted by God to individual and unconditional extermination, to have employed them in the erection of the temple,--what was it but the climax of impiety? As well might they pollute its altars with swine's flesh, or make their sons pass through the fire to Moloch.] In 1 Sam. 30th chapter, we find the Amalekites at war again, marching an army into Israel, and sweeping every thing before them--and all this in hardly more than twenty years after they had _all been_ UTTERLY DESTROYED! Deut. xx. 16, 17, will probably be quoted against the preceding view. "_But of the cities of these people which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: but thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perrizites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee_." We argue that this command to exterminate, did not include all the individuals of the Canaanitish nations, but only the inhabitants of the _cities_, (and even those conditionally,) for the following reasons.