Why Did God Command the Canaanite Conquest?

Question 2075.

The Canaanite conquest is the single hardest passage cluster in the Old Testament for most modern readers, the commands in Deuteronomy and Joshua to devote entire cities, men, women and children, to complete destruction. I will not soften this question or rush past it, because I think it deserves the same honesty I would want if I were asking it myself for the first time.

My settled conviction, after years of wrestling with these texts, is that the Canaanite conquest was a unique, time-bound act of righteous judgement on societies whose depravity had reached a point of no return, carried out at God’s specific command through Israel as His instrument, and it does not license or model ordinary human warfare in any subsequent era, however tempting it has occasionally been for later movements to claim otherwise.

I say all this as someone who takes the plain, historical reality of these narratives seriously. I am not going to reinterpret Joshua as pure legend to make the difficulty disappear. The conquest happened, in real history, at God’s real command, and the honest path is to face what that means rather than to dissolve the text into metaphor.

The Hebrew Word Herem

The technical term behind these commands is cherem, often translated ‘devoted to destruction’ or placed ‘under the ban.’ It describes something set apart entirely to the LORD, removed from ordinary human use or claim, in judgement rather than in worship. This was not casual warfare or plunder. It was a formal, solemn act of divine judgement executed through human hands.

Understanding cherem matters because it rules out reading these narratives as simple territorial conquest or ethnic hostility. Israel was not commanded to destroy the Canaanites because they were a different people group. They were commanded to execute judgement because of what those societies had become.

Four Hundred Years of Patience First

Genesis 15:16 tells Abraham that his descendants will not possess the land for four centuries, ‘for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete’ (Genesis 15:16). This single verse should reframe the entire discussion. God did not move against Canaan the moment an opportunity arose. He waited four hundred years, giving those societies centuries of opportunity to turn from the practices that would eventually bring judgement.

That is not the behaviour of a capricious deity looking for an excuse to destroy. It is the behaviour of a patient judge who delays sentence far longer than strict justice would require, exactly the pattern of divine patience Peter describes when he says the Lord is not slow to fulfil His promise but is patient, ‘not wishing that any should perish’ (2 Peter 3:9).

What the Canaanite Societies Had Become

Leviticus 18 lists the practices that had defiled the land before Israel ever arrived, including child sacrifice to Molech, in which infants were burned alive, and a range of other practices Scripture calls abominations. Deuteronomy 12:31 says the Canaanites ‘even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods.’ Archaeological excavations at sites including Carthage, a Phoenician colony sharing Canaanite religious roots, have uncovered infant burial grounds consistent with exactly this practice on a large scale.

This does not mean every individual Canaanite personally sacrificed a child. It means the societies as a whole had organised their religious and civic life around practices Scripture treats as uniquely defiling, to the point that the land itself is described as ‘vomiting out’ its inhabitants (Leviticus 18:25). This was judgement on a civilisation’s entrenched, institutionalised evil, not a verdict on individual innocence or guilt in the way a modern court would assess it, and it stands as one of the most sobering warnings in all of Scripture about where sustained, communal sin can eventually lead a whole society, generation after generation, until judgement becomes inevitable rather than simply possible.

Israel Was Warned the Same Fate Awaited Them

Crucially, Leviticus 18:28 warns Israel that the land will ‘vomit you out also, when you make it unclean, as it vomited out the nation that was before you.’ This is not tribal favouritism. The same standard of judgement that fell on Canaan later fell on Israel itself, exiled from the land for centuries for adopting the very practices the Canaanite conquest was meant to remove.

This universal standard matters enormously for how we read the Canaanite conquest. God was not simply clearing space for His favoured people. He held Israel to the identical standard, and when Israel later failed it, the consequences were just as severe.

Was This Command Ever Repeated?

No later prophet, apostle, or New Testament writer ever calls for another cherem campaign. The conquest of Canaan is treated throughout Scripture as a unique, unrepeatable episode in redemptive history, tied to a specific covenant purpose, namely establishing Israel in the promised land as the nation through whom the Messiah would come. Nothing in the New Testament authorises holy war, religious conquest, or the destruction of unbelieving peoples by Christians.

This distinguishes the biblical conquest sharply from later claims by other religious or political movements to have received similar mandates. The uniqueness of the historical moment, the specific covenant purpose, and the explicit divine command through a recognised prophet, Moses and Joshua, are not features any later claimant to holy war has ever been able to genuinely replicate.

Did God Command Something Immoral?

The deepest form of the objection asks whether commanding the death of children can ever be morally justified, whatever the covenantal framing. I want to answer this honestly rather than defensively. Human government could never justify collective punishment of children for their parents’ sins; Scripture itself forbids exactly this in ordinary human justice, saying ‘the son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father’ (Ezekiel 18:20).

But the Canaanite conquest was not ordinary human justice. It was a direct, specific act of the Judge of all the earth, the Almighty who alone has the authority over life and death that no human government possesses. Abraham himself, questioning God over Sodom, receives the answer built into his own question: ‘Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?’ (Genesis 18:25). The text invites exactly this kind of moral questioning and answers it by appeal to God’s own perfect justice, not by silencing the question.

I hold, with real weight given to how difficult this is, that a God who sees every heart completely, who alone knows what would have become of these children had they lived within these particular societies, and who alone has the authority over life itself, acted within His own rightful jurisdiction in a way no human government ever could. This does not remove all the difficulty. It locates the difficulty in the right place: in the incomprehensible weight of a genuinely universal Judge’s authority, not in an arbitrary or cruel decision.

Comparing the Canaanite Conquest to Modern Genocide

It is important to be precise about terminology here, since the word genocide, coined in the twentieth century, carries connotations of ethnic hatred and the elimination of a people simply for being who they are. The Canaanite conquest does not fit that definition on its own terms. Deuteronomy 9:4-5 explicitly tells Israel they are not receiving the land ‘because of your righteousness’ but ‘because of the wickedness of these nations,’ and adds that Israel herself is ‘a stubborn people’ who has no grounds for ethnic pride in the matter.

Modern genocide targets a people group for what they are; the Canaanite conquest targeted specific societies for what they had done, applying an identical standard to Israel that led, centuries later, to Israel’s own exile from the very land. That is a categorically different moral structure from the ethnic hatred the word genocide typically describes, even though the scale of violence involved remains genuinely severe and should never be minimised or explained away as though it were a minor historical footnote.

How This Fits Within the Larger Story of Redemption

It also helps to situate the Canaanite conquest within the larger arc of Scripture rather than reading it in isolation. The land was never given as a permanent possession secured by violence alone; it was given as the staging ground for God’s redemptive purposes, culminating in a Messiah who would extend salvation to Canaanites, Moabites, and every other nation once excluded from Israel’s covenant. Ruth the Moabitess and Rahab the Canaanite both appear in the very genealogy of that Messiah.

The conquest, in other words, was never God’s final word about Canaanite peoples. It was a severe, temporary act of judgement within a much longer story whose ultimate direction is inclusion, mercy, and the offer of salvation to ‘every tribe and language and people and nation’ (Revelation 5:9).

Rahab and the Door That Was Always Open

It is worth remembering that the Canaanite conquest narrative itself contains an exception that proves the rule. Rahab, a Canaanite living under the same judgement as the rest of Jericho, was spared, along with her entire household, because she turned toward Israel’s God (Joshua 2). She later appears in Jesus’ own genealogy in Matthew 1, a Canaanite woman grafted into the messianic line.

That detail tells us the judgement was never about ethnicity. It was about allegiance. Anyone within Canaan who turned to Israel’s God, as Rahab did, found mercy rather than judgement, exactly the pattern of grace that runs through the entire biblical story, from Nineveh’s repentance to the gospel offered to every nation today.

What About the Children Who Died?

This is, for most people, the single hardest strand of the whole question, and I will not pretend a tidy answer removes its weight. What I can say with confidence is that Scripture consistently treats those who die before an age of moral accountability as recipients of God’s mercy rather than judgement. David, mourning his own infant son, said, ‘I shall go to him, but he will not return to me’ (2 Samuel 12:23), confident of reunion in a place he himself hoped to enter.

If that confidence is well-founded, and I believe it is, then whatever befell Canaanite children in these campaigns was not eternal loss but an early, undeserved entrance into the mercy of God, a genuinely different outcome from what awaited the adults who had built and maintained the practices Scripture calls abominable. This does not remove the horror of what these children experienced in this life, but it reframes what it meant for their ultimate destiny, which I do not believe was destruction in any final sense.

Was Every Command Carried Out Literally?

It is worth noting, as many careful readers of Joshua have observed, that the Canaanite conquest narrative itself uses the sweeping, hyperbolic battle language common to ancient Near Eastern military reports. Joshua 10:40 says Joshua ‘left none remaining’ and ‘devoted to destruction all that breathed,’ yet Judges 1, describing the very same period, records Canaanite populations still very much present in the land, requiring ongoing campaigns for generations afterward.

This is not a contradiction to be explained away but a feature of how ancient conquest accounts were customarily written, using totalising language to describe decisive military victories rather than literal, absolute extermination down to the last person. This does not remove the weight of what did happen, but it does temper the picture of wall-to-wall infant slaughter that a flat, modern reading sometimes assumes was universal across every single engagement.

The Amalekites and the Limits of the Pattern

First Samuel 15, where Saul is commanded to destroy the Amalekites, is sometimes cited as evidence this pattern extended indefinitely beyond the original conquest generation. It is worth noting the specific charge against Amalek: an unprovoked ambush of Israel’s weakest stragglers during the exodus itself (Deuteronomy 25:17-19), an act of predatory cruelty that Scripture treats as its own specific offence deserving its own specific judgement, centuries later, rather than routine policy.

Even here, the command is bound to a direct prophetic word through Samuel, not a general standing policy Israel could invoke at will against any enemy nation. The narrow, exceptional nature of these commands, always tied to a specific divine word through a recognised prophet, is itself evidence against reading them as a template for ordinary warfare, and it is precisely this narrowness that Saul himself failed to respect when he kept back plunder and spared king Agag against the explicit terms he had been given.

What This Does Not Authorise Today

I want to be unambiguous here. The Canaanite conquest provides no warrant whatsoever for Christian violence, religious warfare, or the mistreatment of any people group today. It was a unique act, commanded directly and audibly by God through a recognised prophetic office that no longer operates in the same way, tied to a specific covenant purpose that reached its fulfilment. Christians are commanded instead to love their enemies, to pray for those who persecute them, and to advance the kingdom through the gospel rather than the sword.

Whatever difficulty this history presents, it is history, not a template. The weapon of the church today is the gospel, not the ban.

So, now what?

So, now what? I do not think this question resolves into easy comfort, and I would be suspicious of anyone who claims it does. What I hold onto is a God who waited four centuries before acting, who held His own covenant people to the identical standard, who spared anyone within the judged nation who turned to Him, and whose justice, however incomprehensible in its details, is never once described in Scripture as anything other than perfectly right.

I would add, as a closing thought, that the cross itself is where this question finds its deepest answer. The same God who commanded the conquest of Canaan chose, in the fullness of time, to bear the weight of judgement Himself rather than simply demand it of others, taking the very wrath His own justice required and absorbing it in the Person of His Son. A God willing to go that far to deal with sin is not a God indifferent to the moral weight of judgement; He is a God who takes it more seriously than we do. Can you trust the Judge of all the earth to do what is just, even in the parts of His story you cannot yet fully reconcile?

Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?

Genesis 18:25, ESV

For Further Study

For deeper engagement with the Canaanite conquest, see Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s writing on Israel’s conquest within the wider dispensational framework, John Walvoord and J. Dwight Pentecost on the theology of divine judgement in the Old Testament narrative, and Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology on the unchanging character and perfect, righteous justice of God Himself throughout. Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology offers a helpful treatment of God’s supreme authority and human moral responsibility that bears directly on this question.