Few biblical texts are harder than the conquest narratives.
Deuteronomy commands Israel to place certain Canaanite peoples under herem, often translated “devote to destruction.”
Joshua repeatedly describes cities being destroyed and leaving no survivor.
In 1 Samuel 15, Saul is commanded to strike Amalek and destroy men, women, children, and livestock.
A skeptic asks the obvious question:
If a modern army said God ordered this, would Christians call it genocide?
That question deserves more than a slogan.
Start by reading the severe language honestly
Christians sometimes say:
“God only told Israel to drive people out. Nobody was commanded to kill civilians.”
That is not adequate to the texts.
Deuteronomy 20 distinguishes ordinary warfare from the treatment of certain peoples in the land and commands total destruction in the latter case.
Joshua uses repeated language of striking cities and destroying living inhabitants.
1 Samuel 15 explicitly includes women and children in the command against Amalek.
Whatever theological interpretation follows, the rhetoric is severe.
What does herem mean?
The Hebrew root commonly transliterated ḥerem concerns something devoted or placed under a ban, often irreversibly given over to God and, in warfare contexts, destroyed.
It does not simply mean:
“Ask everyone politely to relocate.”
The concept belongs to an ancient world in which warfare, divine patronage, sacred space, and collective judgment were closely connected.
Understanding that world does not by itself justify it morally.
But interpretation begins with historical context.
Is “genocide” the correct word?
Modern genocide is a legal and moral category developed in the twentieth century, centered on intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such.
Ancient Israelites and Canaanites did not use modern international law.
So applying the word can be historically anachronistic if it implies that Joshua is describing a twentieth-century bureaucratic extermination program.
Yet the anachronism warning cannot become an escape hatch.
Texts describing intentional destruction of named peoples naturally raise questions similar to those raised by genocide.
The Cambridge World History of Genocide therefore includes the ancient Near East and biblical Joshua within broader scholarly discussion of exterminatory violence while also noting the difficulties of applying modern categories to ancient sources.
Were the Canaanites targeted because of ethnicity?
The biblical rationale is primarily theological and moral rather than biological race.
Deuteronomy and Leviticus portray the nations as judged for practices such as idolatry and other grave sins.
Israel is repeatedly told that it does not receive the land because of its own righteousness.
Israel itself can be expelled for similar covenantal rebellion.
This differs from an ideology claiming one race is intrinsically subhuman.
But the moral objection remains:
Even if judgment is based on wickedness rather than race, how can infants and children be included?
That is the hardest point.
The divine-judgment defense
A traditional Christian answer says God is the giver of life and righteous judge.
Human beings have no independent claim to immortality.
God may judge societies and may use historical agents to carry out judgment, just as biblical prophets interpret Assyria or Babylon as instruments of judgment.
On this view, the conquest is a unique act of divine judgment, not ethnic hatred or a universal model for warfare.
What the defense explains—and what it does not
If God truly issued the command and if God is perfectly just, the action cannot be morally equivalent to a human ruler inventing extermination for conquest.
That is internally coherent.
But the response depends on the very point under dispute:
Did the perfectly good God actually command these actions?
And it still raises the question of corporate judgment involving children.
Saying “God owns life” can explain divine authority over death.
It does not automatically make every narrated command morally transparent to us.
Ancient warfare rhetoric
Another important line of interpretation examines ancient Near Eastern military rhetoric.
Royal inscriptions could use sweeping formulas such as:
- destroyed completely;
- left no survivor;
- annihilated everyone;
without necessarily functioning as literal demographic census reports.
Modern readers also use hyperbole in warfare language: “we completely destroyed them” may mean decisive defeat rather than killing every person.
Some biblical scholars therefore argue that Joshua's totalizing conquest language belongs partly to conventional ancient victory rhetoric.
The internal evidence for non-total destruction
Joshua sometimes describes sweeping victory.
Yet later biblical books still depict many Canaanite populations living in the land.
Judges opens with tribes continuing to fight groups Joshua's summaries can sound as though they had already eliminated.
Joshua itself contains both totalizing summaries and admissions that much land remains unconquered.
This suggests the rhetoric should not always be read as a literal claim that every Canaanite individual was physically killed.
But hyperbole does not solve everything
It would be another apologetic overstatement to say:
“Scholars proved nobody was killed; it was all harmless rhetoric.”
Joshua is still a war narrative.
People die.
Cities are attacked.
The text celebrates Israelite victory and removal of peoples from the land.
And 1 Samuel 15's command against Amalek is difficult to reduce entirely to ordinary battle hyperbole.
Ancient rhetoric can lessen some claims of literal total extermination.
It does not turn conquest into a peaceful migration.
Archaeology and the historical conquest
Archaeology does not support a simple picture in which a massive Israelite army entered Canaan at one moment and destroyed every major Canaanite city exactly as a naive reading might imagine.
The emergence of ancient Israel was historically complex.
Many archaeologists understand early Israel as developing substantially from populations already within Canaan, though debates continue regarding migration, conflict, settlement, and the historical memories behind biblical traditions.
Cities named in Joshua present different archaeological problems and chronological debates.
Therefore the text is not a straightforward modern military field report.
Does that make the moral problem disappear?
No.
A biblical text can be theologically difficult even if its literary portrayal is not a direct archaeological transcript.
Christians still regard Scripture as sacred.
We still have to ask why Scripture depicts God through commands of sacred war.
Historical criticism changes the shape of the question.
It does not erase it.
Accommodation and progressive revelation
Some Christians argue that God revealed Himself within an ancient violent culture and accommodated human understanding over time.
The biblical writers may genuinely interpret warfare through the theological categories available to them without every human attribution of violence representing God's final moral will.
This approach becomes strongest when Christians read Scripture toward Jesus Christ.
Jesus says:
“Love your enemies.”
He refuses to call down destructive power on opponents.
He tells Peter to put away the sword.
He conquers through crucifixion rather than killing His enemies.
On this reading, Christ is the final criterion through which earlier violence must be interpreted.
The danger of the accommodation view
This position raises a difficult doctrine-of-Scripture question.
If biblical authors can attribute a command to God that does not perfectly reveal God's moral will, how should inspiration be understood?
Christians who hold a stronger inerrancy model will reject that solution.
Catholic and Orthodox interpreters may be more accustomed to reading difficult Old Testament texts through spiritual, typological, and Christological lenses, but they still affirm the Old Testament as Scripture.
No option is cost-free.
The early Church often spiritualized holy war
Christian interpreters did not inherit Joshua as permission for the Church to conquer unbelieving nations militarily.
Origen famously read Joshua typologically: the battles symbolize Christ's defeat of sin and the believer's spiritual warfare against vice.
The name Jesus and Joshua are forms of the same name, making the Christological reading especially natural in Greek Christian interpretation.
This does not tell us what historically happened in Late Bronze or Iron Age Canaan.
It does show how early Christians transformed the ethical use of the text.
The enemy for the Church became sin and demonic evil—not an ethnic population to exterminate.
Christian history has not always lived up to that reading
Christians have nevertheless invoked Old Testament conquest language in:
- crusading;
- colonialism;
- wars of expansion;
- and violence against indigenous peoples.
That history is a warning.
Any interpretation that turns ancient Israel's unique land narrative into a blank check for modern religious violence is dangerous and theologically indefensible.
Why Canaan and not everyone?
Within the biblical narrative, the conquest is limited to a particular land, peoples, and salvation-historical moment.
Israel is not commanded to travel the world exterminating pagans.
Deuteronomy contains different rules for wars outside the land.
Later prophets can announce judgment against Israel itself.
The conquest therefore functions as a unique judgment-and-land narrative, not a general Christian political program.
That limitation matters.
It does not remove the moral difficulty of the event itself.
What about the children?
This is the point where easy answers should stop.
Several responses have been proposed:
- the totalizing language may not describe literal killing of every noncombatant;
- ancient cities may often represent military or fortified centers rather than modern metropolitan civilian populations;
- divine judgment can operate corporately in biblical thought;
- God may receive children into His mercy beyond death;
- some Christians understand the command through accommodation rather than as God's final moral ideal.
Each proposal addresses part of the question.
None gives us a morally effortless verse.
A Christian should be willing to say:
I understand some of the theological framework, but I still find this text deeply difficult.
That is not unbelief.
It is moral seriousness.
Did God command genocide?
A precise answer requires defining terms.
At the level of the biblical narrative: God is depicted commanding the destruction of specific peoples and, in some texts, totalizing destruction.
At the level of modern terminology: calling this “genocide” captures the moral resemblance to group destruction but imports a modern legal category into ancient literature.
At the level of historical reconstruction: the archaeology and literary character of Joshua do not support treating every total-destruction formula as a literal demographic report.
At the level of Christian theology: major approaches include divine judgment, rhetorical limitation, accommodation/progressive revelation, and typological Christ-centered interpretation.
The final Christian criterion is Christ
Christians do not believe Joshua is the fullest revelation of God's character.
The New Testament says the decisive revelation is Jesus.
God's victory in Christ comes through self-giving love.
Jesus dies for enemies.
The apostles are sent to make disciples of nations, not destroy them.
Whatever Christians conclude about the conquest historically, it cannot authorize the Church to reproduce sacred war against unbelievers.
Conclusion
The conquest texts are morally severe.
Christians should stop pretending otherwise.
Ancient-war hyperbole may explain some totalizing language.
Archaeology complicates a literal sweeping-conquest reconstruction.
The biblical narrative frames the wars as unique divine judgment rather than racial supremacy.
Early Christians often transformed Joshua into spiritual warfare against sin.
And Jesus gives the Church a radically different mission toward the nations.
Still, difficult texts remain—especially commands that appear to include children.
There is no responsible apologetic reason to hide that.
A faith claiming that God is perfectly good should be willing to bring its hardest Scriptures into the light.
The Christian claim is not that every ancient war text is easy to understand.
It is that the God Christians finally see in full is the God revealed in Jesus Christ, who conquers evil by suffering for His enemies and rising from the dead.
Sources and further reading
- Primary texts: Deuteronomy 7; 20:10–18; Joshua 6–12; 13:1; Judges 1; 1 Samuel 15.
- Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible and Ethics, “Settler Mandates and the Book of Joshua”.
- Cambridge World History of Genocide, The Ancient World.
- Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible and Ethics, Narrative Ethics.
- Origen, Homilies on Joshua, for early Christian spiritual/Christological reception.
- Primary New Testament contrast: Matthew 5:43–48; Luke 9:51–56; John 18:36; Matthew 28:18–20.