Genocide in Canaan?

Jan Smith

I know I am not alone in finding the Bible account of the conquest of Canaan a troubling part of the Old Testament because of its violence and bloodshed. It records the annihilation of entire native populations of men, women and children – and that’s the language of genocide today. And yet this is Scripture, which we accept as God’s message to us; it carries his authority and I can’t pick and choose what to believe. So am I just being squeamish about God’s judgment on wickedness? Should I simply accept that this is how God chose to remove the iniquity of the Canaanites to make way for his people to enter the promised land?

The problem is this: how do we reconcile a God who orders the annihilation of total populations with what we learn about him through his Son the Lord Jesus Christ, who said:

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven. (Matt 5:43-45)

We know that Jesus was the perfect reflection of his Father, the “exact imprint of God’s very being”, as Hebrews says. So how could a God of love command or approve of such violence?

I want to suggest that there is no contradiction or moral issue if we read the Old Testament carefully, and understand its language in the context of its time. By looking at the internal evidence of the Bible texts and also at the external evidence from archaeology, we see something very different from the simplistic picture of a violent conquest of the land and the annihilation of entire populations. For me, what emerges is a better understanding of the purpose of scripture, and reassurance that the God revealed through Jesus is the same as the God who revealed himself to ancient Israel.

The Challenge

At first glance, the texts seem very clear. Even before the people of Israel entered the promised land they are told this:

But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them – the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites – just as the Lord your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God. (Deut 20:16-18)

Then, when we read about the conquest of Canaan in Joshua, we find confirming passages like this about the fall of Jericho:

… they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys. (Josh 6:21)

There are many other similar verses throughout the Joshua account, and the language seems unambiguous; in each place they totally destroyed all who breathed, the inhabitants were wiped out, there were no survivors.1 So we are being told that the orders of Deuteronomy 20 were carried out, to the letter.

As thoughtful Bible students we have to take this seriously, and our understanding of these passages needs to be based on faith and on a respect for Scripture.

Divine violence

I’ve heard different ways of responding to what some call ‘divine violence’ in the Old Testament.

Some people find it so unacceptable that they reject the Bible and they reject God with it. Richard Dawkins has famously described the God of the Old Testament as, “… a bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a genocidal… bully.”2

Bible believers try to defend the conquest account in different ways, for example they say: “It was different then, they were violent times and we shouldn’t judge them from our modern viewpoint,” or, “The Bible says that’s how it was, so we must just accept it; God is sovereign and his will mustn’t be questioned: he has the right to punish wickedness in any way he chooses,” or “The Canaanites were so utterly corrupt that they and their detestable practices had to be rooted out totally before his people settled in the land, to avoid leading Israel into sin.”

Personally, I don’t find any of these explanations really satisfying.

Was life so different then? Yes, perhaps, but we look to the Bible for God’s moral teaching, and that is for all times, for every age. The principles of good and evil do not change. God is sovereign and he can do what he likes with his creation. However, if he sometimes punishes wickedness and is sometimes ready with compassion and forgiveness, as when he sent Jonah to Nineveh, that seems to suggest he is inconsistent; and that can’t be right, because we are told that God doesn’t change.

The most frequent justification I’ve heard is about the unredeemable wickedness of the Canaanites and their religion, and the Bible certainly does present a vivid picture of that. I’m not sure that there’s any evidence to show that their practices were so much more corrupt than the other pagan nations, but for now let’s assume they were, and address the main question: did God tell Israel to exterminate the Canaanites completely, man, woman and child?

Let’s look at what the Bible says in more detail.

Textual inconsistencies

When we do, the first thing to notice is that there are difficulties and inconsistencies within the Biblical text itself. The conquest of Canaan is described in Joshua 2-12, and in particular chapters 10-11, which describe the two military campaigns in which the Israelites took the whole of the land; first the campaign in the south (Joshua 10), and then the northern campaign which completed the conquest (Joshua 11). Here we have passages like this:

So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negev and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings; he left no one remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded. (Josh 10:40)

So Joshua took the whole land, according to all that the Lord had spoken to Moses… And the land had rest from war. (Josh 11:16-20)

It’s all over, Canaan has been conquered! But two chapters later, the picture presented is rather different:

Now Joshua was old… and the Lord said to him, ‘You are old and advanced in years, and very much of the land still remains to be possessed. This is the land that still remains… all the land of the Canaanites… all the inhabitants of the hill country… (Josh 13:1-6)

Furthermore, when we get to the first chapter of the book of Judges it says,

After the death of Joshua, the Israelites inquired of the Lord, ‘Who shall go up first for us against the Canaanites, to fight against them?’ (Judges 1:1)

Here, I am informed, the meaning in Hebrew is very clear; it is describing the start of something significant: a new campaign, not the continuation of something already begun. These verses are telling us that, despite what it says in Joshua 10-11, Joshua had not driven out all the Canaanites and he certainly hadn’t completely annihilated them. What’s more, we are told that the campaign hadn’t even begun when Joshua died. How do we reconcile all that?

I wonder if we get a hint of what God had in mind when we read,

Now these are the nations that the Lord left to test all those in Israel who had no experience of any war in Canaan… the five lords of the Philistines, and all the Canaanites, and the Sidonians, and the Hivites… So the Israelites lived among the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; and they took their daughters as wives for themselves, and their own daughters they gave to their sons; and they worshipped their gods. (Judges 3:1-6)

This suggests that God always intended Israel to live alongside the Canaanites, to test them, just as we are tested in our own world. Even more significantly, before Israel entered the land, God had said this in Exodus,

I will send the pestilence in front of you, which shall drive out the Hivites, the Canaanites, and the Hittites from before you. I will not drive them out from before you in one year, or the land would become desolate and the wild animals would multiply against you. Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased and possess the land. (Exodus 23:30)

That presents a very different picture. Firstly, it is God himself who is going to drive out the Canaanites ahead of Israel, and secondly it will be little by little, a gradual driving out of the native population, not the sudden and total annihilation we read about in Joshua 10-11.

So the internal evidence of these various Bible texts suggest that we may need to think again about the Joshua account. In a moment we will look at the Biblical language in the context of Ancient Near East writings – which I think is a clinching argument – but first, let’s look at the evidence we have from archaeology and see where that leads. It is quickly apparent that the majority of Biblical archaeologists suggest the rapid conquest described in Joshua 10-11 simply did not happen; there was no mass invasion and no sudden extermination of the Canaanites.

Archaeological evidence

First, it’s important to acknowledge that not all archaeologists agree. There are different views on the date of the Exodus and on the interpretation of the results of archaeological excavations, but here I will draw on the views of the current majority of archaeologists. My question is, to what extent do their conclusions support the Biblical record?

The scholarly consensus is that Israel arrived in Canaan towards the start of the period known as Iron Age 1, which is from around 1200 to 1000 BCE. We know that Canaan was under the occupation of Egypt during the late Bronze Age until the beginning of the Iron Age; interestingly there are no references at all to Egypt in the Bible account of the conquest, which confirms that Israel must have arrived later, or at least towards the end of Egypt’s power in the region.

The land of Israel has been more dug over by archaeologists than almost anywhere else, so there is plenty of evidence for settlements in Canaan, helping to pinpoint when the Israelites appeared in the region. At the end of the Middle Bronze Age there were 248 settlement sites in the hill country of Canaan. By the end of the Late Bronze Age in 1200 BCE that number had fallen dramatically to 29. The reason isn’t clear; it may be due to famine, but perhaps also depopulation by the Egyptian rulers. Whatever the cause, at that point everything began to change, and by 1000 there were 254 sites and then, by the end of Iron Age 2, there were 520 sites.3

Archaeologists are almost unanimous in suggesting the reason for this, that it’s at the beginning of the Iron Age around 1200 BCE that the Israelites began to appear in Canaan. Lawrence Stager says,

This extraordinary increase in population in Iron 1 cannot be explained only by natural population growth… there must have been a major influx of people into the highlands in the 12th and 11th centuries BCE… That many of these villages belonged to pre-monarchic Israel is beyond doubt.4

This fits with another compelling piece of evidence, the Merneptah stele discovered in 1896. This is an inscription which records the conquests of the Pharaoh Merneptah, dated to around 1206 BCE. Famously, it contains the earliest reference to the name Israel. Describing the Pharaoh’s military campaign in Canaan it says, “Canaan is plundered… Israel is laid waste – its seed is no more.” I’ll come back to the significance of that wording later, but for now just note that it confirms the presence of Israel in Canaan at that date. The archaeology therefore provides some really good supporting evidence, as we would expect.

However, the archaeology doesn’t confirm everything in the Biblical account; it also gives us some serious difficulties when we consider what is known about the settlements in Canaan around 1200 BCE.

Joshua 12 lists thirty-one towns or cities which it says Israel conquered. Of these, it says, 12 were captured without a fight, and 16 were destroyed by the Israelites. The problem is that the archaeological evidence looks very different. Of the 12 said to be captured without a fight, only 7 of them seem to have existed at this time, the other 5 sites show no signs of occupation at that period. Similarly, of the 16 which the Bible says were destroyed by Joshua, only 3 (or possibly 4) show any signs of violent destruction around 13th or 12th centuries.

Jericho definitely shows signs of settlement and destruction, but it wasn’t a city or even a large town. It had very few inhabitants at this time, and may have been a military garrison, where Rahab’s family could have been the innkeepers. If so, any inhabitants killed by incoming Israelites would be soldiers, not innocent men, women and children.

Bethel and Hazor also show signs of destruction around this time, but there’s no evidence for what caused the destruction: whether the Egyptians, or internal warring Canaanites, or perhaps the Israelites.

Lachish certainly was destroyed, but not until a century later, and therefore not by Joshua.

Neither Ai nor Gibeon show signs of occupation in Joshua’s time; they were established much later, after the Israelites arrived. Ai had existed earlier, but had been unoccupied for centuries.

In other words, the evidence from serious archaeology doesn’t line up with everything we read in Joshua. Some places didn’t exist at that date, and the destruction of others took place over a period of 200 to 300 years. The archaeology suggests that Israel came into the land gradually and relatively peacefully – “little by little” as Exodus 23 says.

And there’s a good reason why this was possible in 1200 BCE. At this time the power of Egypt in the south was declining, and the power of the Hittite Empire in the north was also coming to an end. That would have left a power vacuum in Canaan. In other words, this was the ideal time for Israel to arrive without much opposition; God’s timing is always immaculate! No massive invasion and no large scale destruction occurred, let alone ethnic cleansing or genocide, because the Canaanite highlands were largely empty in 1200 BCE.

William Dever, one of the leading biblical archaeologists in recent years, says,

We must confront the fact that the external material evidence supports almost nothing of the Biblical account of a large scale, concerted Israelite military invasion of Canaan.5

Is that a problem for us as Bible students? Is it contradicting what the Bible tells us? I don’t think it is. It certainly would be a problem if Joshua 10 and 11 were the only record of the Conquest that we have in the Bible, but the later chapters of Joshua, and Judges, and Exodus 23 present a very different account. They suggest a slower and more peaceful entry into the land – and that is what the archaeology supports.

Making sense of the Conquest narrative

How then do we understand the passages in Joshua and Deuteronomy? If there was no mass invasion and destruction, what do we make of the orders given in Deuteronomy 20 to annihilate all the inhabitants of Canaan. And what of the chapters in Joshua which describe it happening in very explicit terms? How do we make sense of that without rejecting the Bible record? The answer lies in understanding the context, the genre and the language of Ancient Near Eastern literature.

Firstly, none of these texts are eye-witness accounts. There is evidence within the text itself to show that the books of Joshua through to Kings were not written at the time of the events they describe, but much later. Old Testament scholars mostly agree that they were written or compiled during the later monarchy, possibly at the time of King Josiah. They were looking back at Israel’s early origins.

Secondly, these texts expressed meaning through the literary conventions of their time, using language differently from the way we use it today. The Bible writers use the formulaic language of other Ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts, which similarly talk about annihilating enemies when they simply mean that a victory was won. Think back to the Merneptah stele of 1206 which said the Canaanites were plundered and “Israel is made waste, his seed is no more.” If we took it literally, no one was left alive. But we know that was not the case. Israel survived and flourished. This exaggerated language simply meant that Pharaoh won a great victory. There are other victory accounts surviving from the Ancient Near East which use precisely the same pattern of language about tribes and peoples who, as their own later records show, continued to exist after their ‘annihilation’.

We see exactly the same language in the Old Testament. The account of the conquest in Joshua states that, “he left no one remaining, but utterly destroyed all who breathed.” Again, if it was meant literally, by the end of chapter 11 no Canaanites would be left alive. And yet in Judges they are still there! Judges 3 lists the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, Perrizites, Hivites and Jebusites, describing them as the nations the Lord left in Israel to test them.

When we are reading an ancient text, we shouldn’t read it as if it’s written like modern history. This is deliberately exaggerated language. It’s hyperbole. It wasn’t meant to be understood literally. The Canaanites were not actually annihilated. They were not wiped out. Israel occupied the land successfully without needing to exterminate the local population. All this would have been obvious to ancient Israel, and we make a serious mistake if we read it as our kind of literal and factual history.

Exhortation, not history

That prompts the question, how are we meant to understand these narratives? What are they for, if we can’t take them all at face value? The answer to that is to understand how ancient writers used events from the past to provide a lesson for the present. In other words, the lesson, the message, mattered more than the detail of what actually happened.

The Jewish scholar, Joshua Berman, explains this really well. He is an Orthodox rabbi and a professor of Biblical Studies in Israel who has great insight into Jewish thought and deep respect for the Scriptures. He says this:

… when people read accounts of the past, they were reading exhortation… Writers harnessed the deeds of the past ... to persuade readers to take action in the present, to believe, to inspire and instruct.6

In other words, we shouldn’t read Joshua to find the facts of what actually happened, but rather to learn from it what we ought to do today. We should be looking for the spiritual lessons in these accounts, which are there for us as much as they were there for early Israel. That’s what we should focus on.

The book of Joshua is a kind of telescoped account of a much longer historical process. It drew on memories of Israel’s past to help them to understand how important it was to root out false worship if they were to remain and prosper in their land. The Canaanites represent all the dangerous influences that should have been resisted but were still leading them away from God many years later. The book of Joshua said to Israel, “you should have rooted out all the Canaanites, because their false worship drew you away from God”. Jesus spoke in a similar way when he said,

If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. (Matt 5:30)

Neither statement was meant to be understood literally.

The book of Joshua ends with a very clear exhortation:

Choose this day whom you will serve, the gods your forefathers served … or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living … And the people said ‘We will serve the LORD!’ (Josh 24:15, 21)

That is the message for us to take too. We must choose to serve God, and not be distracted by our own false idols.

And finally

If we (mis-)read the conquest account literally it says that God told Israel to destroy whole populations of men, women and children, something that today we would describe as genocide! But there are good reasons for resisting a literal reading of these conquest passages.

Firstly, there are apparent inconsistencies within the Biblical text itself. Exodus 23:20 indicates that God intended a gradual and peaceful entry into the land. And then, despite the accounts of total annihilation in Joshua (particularly chapters 10, 11) later chapters of Joshua and the book of Judges show that the people who were apparently “utterly destroyed” were still in existence years later.

Secondly, while archaeological evidence supports Israel’s arrival in Canaan around 1200 BCE, it indicates a relatively peaceful and gradual entry into areas that were largely unpopulated; there is no evidence of a single conquest involving massive destruction. This aligns with the Biblical texts about entering “little by little”, and reporting the survival of the Canaanite people long after the days of Joshua.

Most significantly, we make a serious mistake if we read Biblical narrative as if it were as literal as modern history; ancient writers were not concerned with factual accuracy, but wrote about their past in order to provide a lesson for their present. Old Testament history is theology, and it should be read as exhortation.

So finally, there is no moral dilemma to resolve between the God of the Old Testament and the God revealed through Jesus who tells us to love our enemies and to show mercy and compassion. They are one and the same, for God does not change.7 If the God I think I see in the Old Testament does not look like Jesus – who came to show us the Father – then I know I must be misreading and misunderstanding the text.

When we read about the conquest of Canaan we need to take the Bible narrative seriously, but not necessarily literally. We must take account of all the conquest passages, with all their variations, and understand them within the context and language of the Ancient Near East.8

Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son… He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being. (Heb 1:1-2)

  1. Joshua 8:26; 10:28, 30, 32, 33, 35, 37, 39, 40; 11:11, 12, 21↩︎

  2. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion↩︎

  3. Nat Ritmeyer, Divine Violence (living-faith.org)↩︎

  4. Lawrence E Stager, The Emergence of Ancient Israel, Oxford History of the Biblical World (OUP, 1998)↩︎

  5. William G Dever, Who were the early Israelites and where did they come from? (Eerdmans, 2006)↩︎

  6. Joshua Berman, Inconsistency in the Torah: Ancient Literary Convention and the Limits of Source Criticism↩︎

  7. Malachi 3:6↩︎

  8. Other resources:

    Joshua Berman, Ani Maamin: Biblical Criticism, Historical Truth, and the Thirteen Principles of Faith (Maggid, 2020)

    Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God (Baker Books, 2011)

    Peter Enns, The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture has Made Us Unable to Read It (Hodder and Stoughton, 2019)

    Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible 10,000-586 BCE (Yale University Press 1992)↩︎