Also, I too have wrestled with whether God ‘learned’ that the Genocides were bad. I’m not, to be honest, all the comfortable with that answer. So I’ve not quite come to a conclusion yet on that matter.

I would say that the Syro story reveals that Yahweh’s character is loving and inclusive. That story more adequately reveals the character of God as found in the cruciform messiah than does the Genocides. This doesn’t come without its difficulties, but that’s where I’m at right now.

Interestingly Yahweh, who originally commanded the Canaanite genocide, is, in this text, informing us that power, dehumanization and domination are inadequate means by which to spread God’s kingdom.

So, what does this say about Yahweh? Sure, murder and genocide used to be cool, but not anymore! Did he learn his lesson? I am still wrestling with these implications.

You are quite right that we can’t lift this story and its “quotations”  out of the context that both Mark and later Matthew lay out for their readers. The context is the growing controversy between Jesus and the Pharisees about maintaining the Jewish codes of holiness. Every time this controversy arises  in the Gospels Jesus takes the side of those who are victimized by legalistic adherence to such codes. I think Mark and Matthew would have noticed the divergence in this story from the context in which they set it. Therefore, it is correct to interpret the strangeness in the story from the context, and assume that Jesus is using this offensive language in a subversive way.

The gospel writers are trying to drive home a point about a thorny issue that beset the late first century Jesus movement–the place of Gentiles in the church and the reign of God. Matthew, in particular, must have heard words exactly like the ones he put on Jesus lips from his own contemporaries fifty or sixty years after Jesus ministry. Matthew thus powerfully combats this view by having Jesus “bested” in an argument. With a woman. With a Gentile woman. From Jezebel’s country.

Note how Matthew changes Mark’s description from a “Syro-Phoenician” to a “Canaanite,” emphasizing the connection with Israel’s once-hated enemies.  It is precisely those who are considered thoroughly unclean–unable to even understand the difference between clean and unclean– that become the model of persistent faith that can change even the heart of God.

For those who don’t understand the term “dog,” it is derisive, but not in the way most people believe. A dog eats anything edible–indiscriminately–unable or uncaring to consider which foods might be ritually clean and which foods not. That’s why Gentiles are like “dogs” for observant Jews of Jesus time and earlier.

And that leads us back to the point of the story: In his quarrel with the Pharisees about eating only kosher foods, a view Jesus utterly rejects in the Gospels, this story with its use of the epithet “dogs” is meant to magnify Jesus opposition to using religious codes to  oppress and marginalize.

By the way, some historical perspective from our own recent past might help. In the early and middle years of the Civil Rights movement, we had to fight like crazy just to get people to see that black people were part of the human race. We had to argue without letup with editors and tv producers that such a view was not “political” but an established fact (they were so nervous about offending white bigots). During those years I heard similar uses of the word “nigger” by black and white preachers to their respective black and white congregations. Only by saying the word from the pulpit was the offensiveness of what most whites thought in their hearts finally revealed.

Thanks for your good work!