What About God’s Commands to Destroy Nations?

Question 1116.

The Canaanite conquest is the single hardest chapter in the Old Testament for most readers to sit with, because it involves God commanding Israel to remove entire nations from the land. I do not want to soften that fact or dress it up in language that makes it sound less serious than it is. What I want to do is set the Canaanite conquest in its actual biblical and historical context, because that context changes the picture considerably without changing the reality of what happened.

I have already written more broadly about difficult Old Testament material in my article on harsh passages of Scripture, and I would encourage reading that alongside this one. Here I want to focus specifically on the command itself, why it was given, to whom it applied, and what it does and does not tell us about God’s character. I want to work through the evidence properly rather than settle for a quick summary that leaves the hardest questions unaddressed.

The Canaanite conquest in the biblical text

The relevant commands appear chiefly in Deuteronomy 7 and 20, and are carried out in the book of Joshua. Israel is instructed to devote certain Canaanite cities to complete destruction, a practice the Old Testament calls cherem, meaning something set apart entirely for the Lord and removed from ordinary use, in this case through judgement. It is a severe word describing a severe act, and I am not going to pretend the Canaanite conquest reads as anything other than that on its surface.

It matters enormously, though, that the text itself gives extensive reasons for this command rather than leaving it as an unexplained decree. Deuteronomy does not present the Canaanite conquest as arbitrary. It presents it as judgement with named causes, which is the first thing worth taking seriously before asking whether it can be reconciled with a good God.

Why these specific nations

Moses is explicit about the reason. ‘Not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart are you going in to possess their land, but because of the wickedness of these nations the Lord your God is driving them out from before you’ (Deuteronomy 9:4-5). The Canaanite conquest is framed throughout as judgement on documented, entrenched practices, not as a land grab benefiting a favoured people. Israel is warned in the same passage that she is no more righteous than the nations being judged, and will face the same fate if she adopts the same practices.

The wickedness in view included child sacrifice to Molech, a practice archaeology has confirmed at multiple Canaanite sites, along with ritual prostitution and, according to Leviticus 18, patterns of sexual practice the text calls defiling to the land itself. This was not incidental immorality. It was religion structured around practices Scripture treats as uniquely abhorrent.

The archaeological record for child sacrifice among Canaan’s Phoenician cultural relatives is unusually well attested. Excavated tophet sites associated with Phoenician colonies, most famously at Carthage, have produced large infant burial grounds consistent with the ancient literary reports of child sacrifice to Baal and related deities, the same religious family the Canaanite nations belonged to. Reading Deuteronomy’s list of Canaanite practices, including the statement that ‘they burn even their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods’ (Deuteronomy 12:31), against that archaeological background makes it considerably harder to treat the biblical description as exaggerated polemic rather than an accurate report of what was actually taking place.

What cherem actually meant

The Hebrew term behind so much of this discussion is cherem, often translated ‘devoted to destruction’ or ‘utterly destroyed.’ As with other ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts, this language functioned partly as formulaic victory rhetoric. Egyptian and Assyrian royal inscriptions from the same broad period use nearly identical language, claiming total annihilation of enemies who reappear, very much alive, in later records. Joshua itself displays this pattern. Cities reported as utterly destroyed in one chapter have surviving populations mentioned in Judges only a generation later.

This does not mean nothing happened. It means the Canaanite conquest, read against its own literary conventions, describes a decisive military and religious victory rather than a literal, total extermination of every man, woman, and child in every city, which is how a modern reader unfamiliar with ancient conquest rhetoric tends to hear the language on a first reading.

The land itself and moral accountability

One detail often missed in discussions of the Canaanite conquest is that Leviticus 18 frames the land itself as bound up with the moral conduct of whoever occupies it. ‘The land became defiled, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants’ (Leviticus 18:25). Israel is warned in the very same passage that she will suffer the identical fate if she takes up the same practices, and history shows that she largely did, and was eventually exiled from the land for it. The Canaanite conquest, read this way, is not a special exemption granted to Israel. It is the first application of a standard that Israel herself would later be judged by.

This matters because it removes any sense that the Canaanite conquest reflects favouritism toward Israel over other nations. God is shown applying one consistent moral standard, first to Canaan, then, when Israel fails to meet it, to Israel as well, through the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles centuries later. The same justice that troubles readers in Joshua is the justice Israel’s own prophets later invoke against Israel, most sharply in Amos, who tells Israel that being chosen brings greater accountability rather than exemption from it (Amos 3:2).

Distinguishing judgement from what we would now call genocide

Genocide, in the modern sense, targets a people because of their ethnicity or bloodline. The Canaanite conquest targets specific cities and practices because of persistent, defined moral and religious corruption, tied explicitly to behaviour rather than to ancestry. The clearest proof of this distinction sits inside the conquest narrative itself.

Rahab, a Canaanite living in Jericho, hides the Israelite spies, professes faith in the God of Israel, and is spared along with her entire household (Joshua 2, 6:22-25). She is not simply spared. She is grafted into Israel and becomes an ancestor of King David and, ultimately, of Jesus (Matthew 1:5). If the Canaanite conquest had been a matter of ethnic identity, Rahab’s Canaanite blood would have disqualified her regardless of her faith. Instead her faith is what determines her fate, exactly as it does for anyone else in Scripture.

The Gibeonites and the limits of the command

A further check on how the Canaanite conquest actually functioned comes from Joshua 9, where the Gibeonites secure a covenant of peace with Israel through deception, pretending to come from a distant land rather than admit they were among the peoples under judgement. Israel, having sworn an oath, honours it even after discovering the deception, and the Gibeonites are absorbed into Israel’s community as woodcutters and water carriers for the sanctuary rather than destroyed.

This tells us something important. The command was not executed as blind, automatic annihilation regardless of circumstance. It operated within a framework where covenant, oath, and the possibility of turning toward Israel’s God carried real weight, even when the initial approach came through trickery rather than honesty.

Later biblical history reinforces the point. Centuries afterward, when King Saul breaks Israel’s covenant with the Gibeonites and puts some of them to death, God sends a famine on Israel as judgement for that broken oath (2 Samuel 21:1-2). The nation that carried out the Canaanite conquest was itself held accountable, generations later, for failing to honour a covenant made with Canaanite survivors. Whatever else this tells us, it confirms that the conquest was never treated as blanket licence to treat every Canaanite as beyond the reach of covenant mercy.

What archaeology adds to the picture

Archaeological work at sites associated with the Canaanite conquest, Jericho, Ai, and Hazor among them, has produced genuinely debated results, and I think honesty requires saying so rather than claiming more certainty than the evidence allows. Excavations at Hazor do show a significant destruction layer consistent with a conquest-era burning, and the site’s own scale matches the biblical description of Hazor as ‘the head of all those kingdoms’ (Joshua 11:10). Jericho and Ai remain more contested, with dating disputes that have run for decades among archaeologists working from different methodological assumptions.

I do not think the Canaanite conquest’s historicity or theological weight depends on resolving every archaeological dispute. Scripture’s own testimony is the primary evidence I work from, read carefully within its ancient Near Eastern setting, and archaeology functions as a supplementary and sometimes clarifying witness rather than the final court of appeal. Where the two appear to align, as at Hazor, that is a welcome confirmation. Where they remain disputed, that reflects the genuine difficulty of reconstructing events three and a half thousand years old from partial physical remains, not a defeat for the reliability of the text.

A unique, non-repeatable command

Nothing in Scripture treats the Canaanite conquest as a standing policy or a model for how nations, let alone individual believers, should treat their enemies. It is presented consistently as a bounded, one-time act of divine judgement tied to a specific moment in redemptive history, the establishment of Israel in the land promised to Abraham, in preparation for the coming of the Messiah through that nation. Once that purpose was accomplished, nothing in Scripture extends the command further.

The New Testament confirms this decisively. Jesus commands love of enemies (Matthew 5:44), Paul insists that the church’s warfare is spiritual rather than physical (Ephesians 6:12), and nowhere does any apostle appeal to the Canaanite conquest as a pattern for Christian conduct toward hostile nations or individuals. Whatever the conquest was, it was not meant to be repeated, and reading it as an ongoing mandate is a serious misreading of the text.

This is a point I want to underline because history is full of tragic examples of people misusing the Canaanite conquest to justify colonial violence or ethnic conflict centuries after the fact. Such uses have no biblical warrant whatsoever. The command belonged to a specific nation, at a specific moment, under specific and unrepeatable covenantal conditions, given directly by God through a recognised prophet, none of which applies to any modern nation or individual claiming similar justification today.

How this fits with God’s larger character

I do not think the Canaanite conquest can be understood rightly apart from the patience that preceded it. God tells Abraham, four centuries before the conquest takes place, that judgement will wait because ‘the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete’ (Genesis 15:16). Four hundred years of patience is not the profile of an impulsive or capricious deity. It is the profile of a God who judges only when patience has been exhausted and every opportunity to turn has been refused.

It is also worth remembering that the same God who commands the Canaanite conquest is the God who, centuries later, sends Jonah to preach to Nineveh specifically so that the city might repent and be spared. Judgement in Scripture is never God’s first instinct. Mercy consistently comes first, and judgement comes only when mercy has been rejected over and over again.

Objections worth answering directly

Some ask whether this account can simply be a later, mistaken theological interpretation Israel imposed on ordinary warfare. I do not find that persuasive, since it requires setting aside the text’s own claims about its origin in favour of a modern preference, and it does nothing to resolve the underlying moral question, since the text as we have it remains authoritative Scripture either way. Others ask whether a good God could ever command this. I would answer that a good God who is also just cannot indefinitely overlook the kind of entrenched, generational wickedness described in these chapters, and that the same justice which troubles us here is the justice we depend on when we ask God to set right the injustices we ourselves suffer.

The hardest objection, and the one I take most seriously, concerns children caught up in the Canaanite conquest. I will not pretend this is easy. What I can say is that the hyperbolic, formulaic language discussed earlier suggests the historical picture is less total than a flat reading implies, that cities of the period functioned primarily as fortified military garrisons rather than centres of civilian population, and that Scripture elsewhere gives real comfort regarding those who die in infancy or childhood, as when David says of his own dying son, ‘I shall go to him, but he will not return to me’ (2 Samuel 12:23), trusting God’s mercy toward those too young to be morally accountable for their own choices.

So, now what?

If the Canaanite conquest troubles you, I do not think the answer is to look away from it. I think the answer is to read it fully, in its own context, alongside the patience that preceded it and the mercy that runs through the rest of Scripture. Read Rahab’s story. Read Jonah’s reluctant mission to Nineveh. Read Paul’s insistence that our warfare now is spiritual, not physical. The Canaanite conquest sits inside a much larger story of a God who judges slowly and forgives quickly, and it makes far more sense there than it does read in isolation.

For a closer look at the specific archaeological and historical background, I would point you to my earlier article on the Canaanite conquest and Joshua’s account of God’s justice, and to my companion piece on harsh passages in Scripture more broadly.

I would also gently say this to anyone who has let the Canaanite conquest become a reason to doubt God’s goodness altogether. Look at what that same God does at the cross. There, the judgement that sin deserves falls not on a distant nation but on God’s own Son, willingly, so that anyone, from any nation, can be spared it. That is not a God indifferent to justice or careless with mercy. It is a God who takes both so seriously that He was willing to bear the cost Himself rather than simply pass judgement on us from a distance.

Not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart are you going in to possess their land, but because of the wickedness of these nations the Lord your God is driving them out from before you, and that he may confirm the word that the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.

Deuteronomy 9:5 (ESV)

For Further Study

For further study I would point readers to John Walvoord’s and J. Dwight Pentecost’s writing on the land promises to Israel and their fulfilment through the conquest narrative, to Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s work on Israelology for the covenantal background, to Charles Ryrie’s summary of dispensational distinctions between Israel’s unique commission and the church’s present calling, and to Millard Erickson’s broader treatment of divine judgement and the problem of evil in systematic theology.