Did God actually command Israel to conquer Canaan — or did a nation of refugees use 'God told us to' to justify one of history's oldest land grabs?

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  Noah1mo ago

  Here's what I can't get past: in Numbers 31, after the battle with the Midianites, Moses gets ANGRY that the soldiers spared the women. He then orders the execution of every male child and every woman who is not a virgin. Moses. Angry that they weren't violent ENOUGH. And this is presented as a direct command from God through Moses. If you can rationalize that passage without flinching, I genuinely want you to explain it to me because I have never heard an explanation that didn't require me to turn my brain off.

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  Riley1mo ago

  My grandfather lost family in a genocide. A real one, in the 20th century. So when Christians tell me the Canaanite deaths were 'morally justified' because of their sins, you'll understand if I find that framework more than a little difficult to extend in good faith. I'm still in the church. I still love Jesus. But I need my brothers and sisters to understand that this argument LANDS differently depending on your history.

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  Omar1mo ago

  I've been a pastor for twenty-two years and I preach through the whole Bible. I've preached Joshua twice. Both times I told my congregation exactly what the text says and exactly why it's hard and exactly why I don't have a clean answer. Both times I had people come up afterward in tears — not because it destroyed their faith, but because nobody had ever given them permission to find it difficult. The church does enormous damage when it pretends Scripture is easier than it is.

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  Yuki L.1mo ago

  This question genuinely kept me up at night for a year. I grew up hearing the conquest was righteous because God is sovereign. But then I read Deuteronomy 20 in full — like actually read it — and I had to put the Bible down. The instructions for what to do to cities inside and outside Canaan are different, and the INSIDE cities get total destruction. Women, children, livestock. God's name is stamped on every bit of it. I'm not an atheist. I still believe. But I refuse to paper over this with 'God's ways are higher.' That's not theology. That's flinching.

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  Hana B.1mo ago

  Calling it 'herem' instead of genocide is just renaming it in Hebrew. the children were still dead

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  Noah1mo ago

  Nobody ever asks what was happening in Canaan from the Canaanite perspective in any of these debates and that bothers me. These were real people. They had names. They had children. They had songs and stories we will never know because they were erased. Theological frameworks don't bring them back. I don't know where that leaves me on the question of whether God commanded it but I think the erasure of their humanity is the first thing we should correct.

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  Ravi B.1mo ago

  The Canaanites sacrificed children to Molech. That's not a small detail. God gave them 400 years — FOUR HUNDRED — between His promise to Abraham and the actual conquest. Genesis 15:16 literally says He waited until their 'iniquity was complete.' If you're going to prosecute God for the conquest, you should also prosecute Him for waiting too long to stop the child sacrifice. The moral math isn't as clean as skeptics pretend.

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  Elena M.1mo ago

  You know what's wild? The conquest story is used MORE by modern nationalists and land-claim movements than it was in the ancient world. Multiple modern conflicts have involved people quoting Joshua as justification. When your biblical interpretation has a body count in the 21st century maybe that should prompt some theological humility.

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  Leo1mo ago

  I asked my pastor about this when I was seventeen and he told me to 'trust God's character.' I asked him to help me understand God's character FROM this passage and he changed the subject. Took me fifteen years and a lot of honest reading to get comfortable sitting with the question without needing a clean answer. Some of you want resolution so badly you're willing to accept bad theology to get it.

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  Theo1mo ago

  if you disagree with the conquest and think israel made it up, explain to me why you think ancient people who were enslaved for 400 years, wandering a desert for 40 years, losing thousands to plagues and snakebites and the ground swallowing them alive, would VOLUNTARILY fabricate a god who punished them this severely just to justify getting some real estate. that doesn't even make propaganda sense. you invent a god who's on your side, not one who kills 3000 of your own people because someone built a golden calf

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  Riley1mo ago

  If God didn't command the conquest then you've opened a door you cannot close. Which other commands in Scripture are just Israel narrating their own desires and calling it revelation? All of them? Some of them? Who decides? Once you say 'this one they made up,' the authority of the whole book is in question. I'm not saying that to be dramatic. I'm saying that's a real hermeneutical cliff and you should know you're standing on the edge before you jump.

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  Iris1mo ago

  Numbers 31 is the passage that finally broke me from easy answers. I'm a seminary graduate. I've read the defenses. None of them work. What I've landed on — and I hold this loosely — is that God accommodates human violence the way Jesus said Moses accommodated divorce: not because it was ideal, but because the people weren't ready. That might be a cop-out. I genuinely don't know. I'd rather sit in uncertainty than offer you a tidy lie.

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  Reese M.1mo ago

  Honestly this whole debate is why I think Christians need to read the Bible more and talk about it less. Not because the questions are bad — the questions are essential. But so many people in these conversations are working from a handful of Sunday school memories and a podcast they half-listened to. Read the primary text. Then read three scholars who disagree with each other. Then come back. Most of us — including me — are not qualified to be as certain as we sound.

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  Theo1mo ago

  What fascinates me is that the text itself seems uncomfortable with the command. Rahab is saved. The Gibeonites trick Israel into a treaty and God honors it. There's this constant friction between the absolute command and the narrative pulling back from it. Almost like the writers themselves were working through what it meant. I don't think that's evidence of fraud. I think it's evidence of humans genuinely wrestling with God — which is very much a biblical theme.

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  Hana1mo ago

  One escape hatch for one woman and her family out of multiple entire civilizations isn't the counterargument you think it is, friend.

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  Nina L.1mo ago

  ok but 'they were worse sinners' is the exact same logic every colonial power used. like word for word. the British said basically the same thing about people in Africa. are we seriously still running that argument in 2024

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  Theo1mo ago

  The strongest argument for the 'God really did command it' side isn't apologetics — it's the cross. If you believe God ordered His own Son to die an agonizing death for humanity's sins, then a God who orders military judgment on a culture saturated with child sacrifice isn't doing anything out of character. The cross is MORE extreme than the conquest in some ways. If you've accepted the cross, you've already accepted a God who operates on a scale of sacrifice we don't fully understand.

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  Kofi1mo ago

  With respect, that 'slippery slope to nothing' argument proves too much. Christians already make distinctions between what's culturally conditioned and what's universal — we don't stone rebellious children, we don't avoid mixing wool and linen. We ALREADY decide some things were specific to a time and people. The question is just whether the conquest belongs in that category, not whether such a category can exist.

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  Leo1mo ago

  It tells us something about how we PRESENT the text, though. If the dominant reading of Joshua is 'God endorses violent territorial conquest when His people need land,' then maybe we should be more careful about what we're handing people.

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  Zara1mo ago

  The archaeological record is actually quite relevant here and most people in this debate ignore it completely. Kathleen Kenyon's excavations at Jericho showed the city was either unoccupied or very minimally settled during the period traditionally assigned to Joshua. Ai was apparently unoccupied for nearly a thousand years before the conquest. This doesn't disprove God — it might mean the texts are theological narrative rather than straight historical chronicle. Which actually HELPS the moral problem, if you're willing to let go of strict historicity.

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  Jamie _x1mo ago

  im just gonna say it. the conquest narratives read like a founding myth. every ancient nation had one. Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece — they all had a story where the gods handed them the land and endorsed the violence that secured it. that's not an insult to Israel. it's how founding stories WORK. the question is whether Christians can hold that as a literary and cultural reality without it destroying their faith. some can. some can't.

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  Yuki1mo ago

  I converted FROM atheism partly because I got tired of atheists making this exact argument and refusing to engage with the actual scholarship. Then I became a Christian and found out half the Christians I met ALSO hadn't engaged with the actual scholarship. Everybody's working off a Sunday school version of the story. Read John Goldingay on this. Read Peter Craigie. Read Tremper Longman. The conversation is a lot further along than this comment section suggests.

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  Diego M.1mo ago

  C.S. Lewis wrestled with this and essentially concluded that the Old Testament shows a progressive revelation of God's character — that early Israel genuinely experienced God but filtered that experience through a morally undeveloped framework. That's not calling them liars. That's called learning. Children have real experiences of their parents but misinterpret them all the time. We don't accuse the child of fabrication.

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  Nina1mo ago

  The 'divine accommodation' view has merit but it creates a serious problem: at what point do we say something in Scripture is accommodation versus command? And who has authority to make that call? It sounds humble but it's actually giving the interpreter enormous power to decide what God 'really' meant. That's not safer than taking the text seriously. It might be more dangerous.

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  Quinn1mo ago

  So your solution to the moral problem is 'it probably didn't happen'? That feels like cheating. If it didn't happen, why is it in Scripture presented as divine command? You've just moved the problem upstream — now we have a God who gave fictional instructions for genocide. How is fictional genocide better?

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  Priya1mo ago

  That's actually a fair point and I've never heard it framed that way before. Still not sure it resolves everything but it's honest theology.

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  Jordan1mo ago

  Lewis was a brilliant man who was not an Old Testament scholar and it shows in how he handled this. The progressive revelation framework is appealing but it requires you to say Jesus 'corrected' the Father — which is its own Trinitarian headache. And it doesn't explain why God let the misunderstanding stand long enough to wipe out multiple cities.

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  Hana S.1mo ago

  Herem. Look up the Hebrew concept of herem before you have this debate. It means something like 'devoted to destruction' and it was a religious-legal category — not a military doctrine. The framing of herem warfare in the ancient Near East is actually pretty well understood by scholars and it doesn't map neatly onto modern genocide. That's not a dodge. That's context. Words in ancient texts mean things specific to their time and you can't import modern legal definitions backward three thousand years.

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  Omar 921mo ago

  My priors are called 'reading the text.' I'm not importing anything.

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  Alex1mo ago

  The text says Rahab heard about what God did at the Red Sea and responded in faith BEFORE the Israelites arrived. If we're reading canonically, that matters. God's reputation preceded Israel. Rahab's salvation is in the story precisely to show the conquest wasn't about ethnicity — anyone who feared God could be spared. That's different from genocide. Genocide doesn't have escape hatches for belief.

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  Hana1mo ago

  ^ that comment right there is why this matters. it's not an abstract debate for everybody.

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  Liam1mo ago

  If you're comparing the Bible to generic ancient founding myths then you've already decided it's not special revelation before the conversation started. At least be upfront about your priors.

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  Drew1mo ago

  That's a consequentialist argument, not a hermeneutical one. Bad people misusing a text doesn't tell us what the text means.

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