The walls of Jericho fell and God commanded every man, woman, child, and animal inside to be killed. How is that different from genocide — and can you worship a God who ordered it?

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  Riley1mo ago

  I've been a Christian for 41 years and I still cannot give my grandchildren a comfortable answer when they ask about Jericho. I just tell them 'God knows things we don't' and change the subject. That's not theology. That's avoidance. And I know it.

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  Morgan 211mo ago

  My grandmother fled ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe in 1944. Real children in real cities killed for being in the wrong place. When I read Jericho I do not find it abstract. I find it impossible to celebrate regardless of who commanded it. Maybe that's a failure of my faith. Maybe it's a failure of the theology. I genuinely don't know anymore.

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  Casey1mo ago

  grew up singing 'Joshua fought the battle of Jericho' in vacation bible school. never once was i told what happened AFTER the walls fell. feel like i was lied to by omission my entire childhood. that stays with you.

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  Hana R.1mo ago

  The road of accepting every violent command as literally from God also has consequences, friend. Just ask the Crusaders. Or the Inquisitors. They were extremely confident about which parts were verbatim divine.

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  Zara1mo ago

  everyone keeps talking about philosophy and theology and I'm sitting here thinking about how we still teach 5-year-olds this story with felt board cutouts and a song. maybe start there. maybe the problem is that we made it cute.

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  Reese1mo ago

  Context matters. Okay. Does the context make the children less dead?

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  Casey T.1mo ago

  Genocide is the deliberate killing of a people group. Jericho was divine judgment executed through human agents. The difference is not a technicality — it is the entire moral architecture of the universe. A God who sets the terms of life and death is not committing murder. Murder presupposes a moral authority higher than the killer. For God, no such authority exists above Him. QED.

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  Jordan R.1mo ago

  Not Christian here, just curious observer. What always gets me is how evangelical Christians who defend Jericho as righteous judgment would immediately call it genocide if literally any other religious text told the same story about any other god. The hermeneutic only works if you're already committed to YOUR god being the real one.

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  Drew1mo ago

  The 'Job' argument is fascinating because God actually VINDICATED Job's honesty in the end, not his friends who kept making excuses for God. So maybe asking hard questions IS the more faithful response.

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  Avery1mo ago

  Okay here's my actual challenge to anyone who's comfortable with the Jericho command: explain to me, using only biblical ethics, why a modern army that kills children in a city siege because their God told them to should be condemned. If your answer requires something outside 'God told them to,' then you've already admitted you have a moral framework that governs when 'God said so' is acceptable. Own that framework. Use it. Don't hide it.

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  Drew1mo ago

  What I want to know is why so many Christians who can defend God commanding the death of Canaanite children in a heartbeat are the same people who say 'God is love' like it's their Wi-Fi password. At some point those two things need to be reconciled, not just held simultaneously and never examined.

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  Ravi1mo ago

  I think the honest answer most theologians are too scared to say out loud is: the Israelites did terrible things and then said God told them to. Just like every conquering army in human history. The Bible records what they believed, not a verbatim transcript from heaven. I know that shocks people but it actually SAVES the character of God rather than destroying it.

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  Omar1mo ago

  if God can order the deaths of innocents when HE decides the time is right, then literally every atrocity in history becomes theologically defensible as long as someone claims divine sanction. this is not a slippery slope fallacy, this is exactly what has happened repeatedly in church history. you MUST have some moral floor beneath divine command or the whole thing collapses into 'God said so' being the answer to everything forever.

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  Kofi S.1mo ago

  My honest position, which I know will get me roasted: I think parts of the OT describe a developing Israelite understanding of God that was genuinely evolving, and they sometimes got it wrong. Jesus seems to suggest something similar when he says 'you have heard it said... but I say to you.' If Jesus himself corrects the trajectory, why is it heresy for me to notice the trajectory?

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  Riley1mo ago

  ^ That comment deserves way more respect than anything else in this thread. Thank you for sharing that.

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  Jordan1mo ago

  So babies in Jericho deserved death because... their parents lived in a city God wanted? Help me out here. Real question, no hostility.

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  Marco R.1mo ago

  Brother above — once you start deciding which parts of the Bible are 'what Israel believed' vs. 'what God actually said,' you've handed the authority to yourself. Congratulations, you're your own pope now. That road has no stopping point.

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  Elena1mo ago

  archeologically speaking, there's significant debate about whether jericho as described in joshua even existed as a walled city at the right time period. kathleen kenyon's excavations found no evidence of a late bronze age destruction layer matching the biblical timeline. so we might be having a moral debate about an event that didn't happen the way it's described. worth knowing before you either defend or condemn it.

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  Noah1mo ago

  lol at the guy above saying QED like he just proved something instead of just restating divine command theory and expecting applause. 'God can do it so it's not wrong' is literally the least intellectually satisfying answer to a moral problem i have ever heard.

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  Nina1mo ago

  Counterpoint: If you have a moral standard ABOVE God by which you can judge His commands, then that standard — not God — is your actual highest authority. You've made ethics sovereign over theology. That's a problem too. Both horns of this dilemma are uncomfortable. Welcome to the oldest debate in philosophy of religion. Plato called it the Euthyphro dilemma and people have been fighting about it for 2,400 years.

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  Theo1mo ago

  That's actually a fair point and I say that as someone who believes every word of Scripture. The burden of proof question is real. We do extend assumptions of innocence to our own tradition that we'd never extend to competitors. I think the right response isn't to abandon the faith but to take that challenge seriously and give better answers than 'but OUR god is real.' Because that's circular.

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  Yuki B.1mo ago

  Look, I get why people struggle with this but you have to understand the Ancient Near Eastern context. 'Devoted to destruction' (herem) was a very specific ritual concept in that culture — it wasn't arbitrary violence, it was a kind of consecration, the opposite of looting for personal gain. That doesn't make it easy to swallow but it at least means we're not reading a generic 'kill because you feel like it' text. Context matters enormously in ancient military literature.

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  Leo1mo ago

  Every time someone brings up archaeology in a Bible discussion someone else says 'absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.' Which is technically true. It's also conveniently unfalsifiable. At some point the archaeological record has to count for something.

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  Reese L.1mo ago

  That view is called Progressive Revelation and it's actually pretty mainstream in evangelical scholarship. You're not as radical as you think. The question is where you stop the trajectory — at Jesus, at the apostles, or do you keep going until you've revised everything inconvenient? That's the real debate.

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  Casey 211mo ago

  They're reconciled in the cross. God's justice and love meet at Calvary. The Canaanite judgment and the crucifixion are theologically connected — wrath is real, love is real, and the resolution costs God everything. That's the narrative arc. It doesn't dissolve the tension but it does address it.

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  Hana L.1mo ago

  Rahab survived. Her whole household. The text makes a real point of that. If this were simple ethnic extermination, why would the text include a Canaanite woman as a hero and even place her in the lineage of Christ? The moral complexity built INTO the narrative argues against reading it as flat endorsement of mass killing.

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  Marco M.1mo ago

  If God commanded it then it was righteous. End of discussion for me. I'm not going to put myself in the seat of judge over the Almighty. Job tried that and regretted it.

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