How do we read the Canaanite conquest in Joshua honestly?
Question 60091
The Canaanite conquest narratives in Joshua are among the passages most frequently raised as moral objections to the Old Testament, and they deserve honest engagement rather than evasion. The texts describe God commanding the Israelites to destroy the Canaanite populations of the promised land, including women and children, and to leave no survivors in certain cities. A response that sidesteps the severity of what is described does nobody any good. What is required is a careful reckoning with the full biblical context and with the character of the God who acts in these events — and neither the severity of those events nor the holiness of that God should be minimised.
The Context: Four Hundred Years of Warning
The first thing that must be established is that the conquest was not a spontaneous or arbitrary act of violence. God tells Abraham in Genesis 15:16 that his descendants will return to Canaan only after four generations “for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.” God waits four centuries before the conquest begins. He is not destroying an innocent population; He is bringing judicial execution on a society whose wickedness has, in the divine assessment, reached the point of no return after an extraordinarily extended period of patience. The timing matters enormously. This is the execution of a long-delayed sentence, not an ethnic purge.
The nature of Canaanite society at the time of the conquest is relevant context that the biblical and archaeological record both confirm. The Canaanite religious practices described in the text include child sacrifice, ritual prostitution of both sexes, and forms of sexual violence embedded in the cult itself. These were not peripheral features but central elements of the Canaanite religious system. The god Molech, to whom children were burned alive, is referenced throughout the Old Testament as the specific abomination that defiled the land (Leviticus 18:21; 2 Kings 23:10). God is not judging the Canaanites for being Canaanites. He is judging them for practices whose wickedness He has tolerated for four centuries and can no longer permit to continue in the land He had designated for His covenant purposes.
The Availability of Mercy
The conquest was judicial and discriminating rather than blind. The example of Rahab is directly relevant here. She heard what God had done for Israel, she recognised that the God of Israel was the true God, and she acted on that recognition by protecting the spies (Joshua 2:11-12). She was preserved, together with her entire household. She appears later in the genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1:5). Mercy was available to anyone who sought it, and Rahab’s story demonstrates that the executing nation was not an ethnic group but the instrument of divine judgement, accessible to any who turned from the practices under judgement and aligned themselves with the God of Israel.
The Gibeonites present a different case: they deceived Israel into a treaty (Joshua 9:3-15), and they too were preserved. This further demonstrates that the herem — the devotion of populations to destruction — operated under specific divine direction in specific circumstances rather than as a blanket policy of extermination of everyone the Israelites encountered.
God as Creator and Judge
The deeper theological framework matters here. God is Creator and owner of all the earth. He has both the right and the authority to impose the death penalty, and the right to determine through what means it is carried out. Human judicial systems administer capital punishment as a delegation of divine authority. God needs no such delegation. The accusation that the conquest constitutes ethnic genocide misunderstands both who God is and what actually happened. The judgement fell on the Canaanites because of their practices, not their ethnicity, and the Israelites themselves were warned repeatedly that the same judgement would fall on them if they committed the same sins (Leviticus 18:24-28). The rest of the Old Testament is largely the account of what happened when they did — culminating in the Babylonian exile, which the prophets interpret as precisely the judgement the Canaanites had received being applied to God’s own people for the same categories of offence.
The herem warfare of Joshua also operates within the theological register of the sacrificial system. The burnt offering consumed the entire animal; the seriousness of sin required total commitment to God rather than partial settlement. The devotion of certain cities to destruction operated within this same framework, as a recognition that some things are so thoroughly corrupted that they cannot be incorporated into the life of God’s people. Within a dispensational reading, it is also worth noting that the specific command to execute herem warfare was given to Israel in a specific historical and covenantal context. The church has not inherited that command. New Testament warfare is spiritual (Ephesians 6:12), and the church’s mission is the proclamation of the gospel. The conquest belongs to God’s specific programme for Israel at a specific stage of redemptive history and does not constitute a general warrant for religious violence of any kind.
So, now what?
Honest preaching does not skip past Joshua. The congregation that never hears a serious engagement with the conquest narratives will be poorly equipped when those narratives are raised as objections to faith, and they will be raised — they are among the most common objections. More importantly, a theological framework that genuinely reckons with God’s justice in Joshua will be better positioned to understand the cross, where that same justice fell upon the Son rather than upon sinners. The conquest is not a pastoral embarrassment to be managed; it is part of the coherent biblical testimony to a God whose holiness cannot coexist with unrepented wickedness, and whose mercy is all the more astonishing because of it.
“Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” Genesis 18:25
Bibliography
- Copan, Paul. Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011.
- Waltke, Bruce K., and Charles Yu. An Old Testament Theology. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007.
- Kaiser, Walter C. Toward Old Testament Ethics. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1983.
