Did God actually command the slaughter of entire Canaanite nations — or have we been defending the indefensible for two thousand years?

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  Nina2w ago

  so we're just gonna say 'it's hyperbole' when God says kill the children but take the verses about tithing 100% literally? how convenient

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  Omar2w ago

  I'm so tired of the 'anachronism' defense. We're not asking whether the ISRAELITES thought it was wrong. We're asking whether GOD — who is supposedly eternal, omniscient, and the author of morality itself — should be judged by the standards He Himself supposedly built into creation. He doesn't get the 'product of his time' excuse. He's outside time.

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  Jordan2w ago

  My grandfather survived a genocide. An actual one. I grew up hearing what it does to families, to culture, to a people's sense of God. I want you all to know that this debate is not abstract to me. When I read Joshua 6-11 I feel physically ill. I have never been given an answer by a pastor that I could bring to my grandfather's memory. Some of you arguing about ANE hyperbole need to sit with the actual weight of this.

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  Kofi S.2w ago

  I'll say it plainly since everyone else is dancing around it: if a neighbor told me God told them to drive to the next town and kill everyone there, I would call the police. I would not say 'well perhaps there's an ANE context I'm missing.' The fact that we give the biblical account a completely different standard of evaluation than we'd give a contemporary claim is something every Christian needs to reckon with honestly. I'm not saying there's no answer. I'm saying the answer had better be extremely good.

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  Omar2w ago

  What breaks me is the children. I can construct a scenario where judgment falls on an adult civilization for real persistent evil. Hard, but I can try. But babies? Toddlers? Every answer I've ever heard for the children is a theological cope. 'God took them to heaven.' Okay. Then why does that only work as justification here? Why can't I apply that logic universally and decide who gets to die early for their own benefit?

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  Elena2w ago

  if this doesnt bother you at all you might want to check whether youve just been taught to not let it bother you. discomfort here isnt a lack of faith. it might be your conscience working correctly

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  Liam2w ago

  The hyperbole argument is actually really solid and people dismiss it too fast. Ancient Near Eastern warfare language routinely used 'utterly destroy' as a rhetorical formula. Archaeology shows Canaanite cities weren't even depopulated the way the text describes if read woodenly. This is well-documented in scholarship going back decades. The genre matters.

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  Maya K.2w ago

  Right, and what about the Canaanite children who were born into that culture and hadn't sacrificed anybody? What exactly did they do that warranted death? You can't convict a two-year-old of their parents' religion.

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  Drew2w ago

  The 'expulsion not extermination' reading falls apart immediately when you read 1 Samuel 15. Saul literally gets judged by God for NOT killing enough Amalekites. God was furious he kept the king alive and kept the livestock. That is not a metaphor about driving people out of your heart. That is a man being told he failed because he didn't kill enough people. Explain that one.

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  Avery2w ago

  That's a terrible comparison and you know it. We don't claim Homer was morally perfect or divinely inspired to command those things. The entire point is that Christians claim THIS God is perfectly good. That's the difference. You can't dodge the standard you set.

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  Noah T.2w ago

  The shadow of the cross changes everything about how I read the Old Testament violence. Jesus absorbs divine judgment on Himself. The entire logic of herem — the devoted thing meeting destruction — finds its endpoint at Golgotha. I'm not saying that answers every question about Joshua. But it reframes the whole trajectory. God ends up on the receiving end of the violence the Old Testament kept unleashing on others.

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  Marco2w ago

  I wrestled with this passage for almost three years. Almost left the faith over it. What brought me back wasn't a clever argument — it was sitting with Psalm 22 and realizing this is a God who also lets His own Son be abandoned and killed. He's not comfortable. He's not safe. But I became convinced He's real, and I had to trust what I couldn't fully understand. That's not intellectual cowardice. That's faith in the actual weight of the word.

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  Leo2w ago

  i just wanna know why this is the passage nobody preaches on. my church has been through the whole bible twice in twenty years and we did joshua in like three sundays and nobody ever touched chapter 11. that silence tells me everything.

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  Marco2w ago

  Divine command theory literally just means might makes right with extra steps. 'It's right because God said so' gives you zero ability to distinguish a good God from a powerful evil one. Euthyphro called. He wants his dilemma back.

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  Theo2w ago

  Marcion had an answer for all of this: the God of the Old Testament is not the same being as the Father Jesus preached. The early church called it heresy. But honestly? Read the Canaanite passages and then read the Sermon on the Mount and tell me those feel like the same person speaking. I'm not saying Marcion was right. I'm saying the church should admit why this is genuinely hard instead of acting like anyone who struggles is just faithless.

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  Avery2w ago

  You say: 'That's a serious question and I don't have a complete answer.' And then you mean it. Intellectual honesty wins more people than a confident half-answer.

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  Theo2w ago

  Here's my actual problem with every defense I read: they all assume the conclusion. You start with 'God is good' and then work backwards to justify the text. But that's not how honest moral reasoning works. If I read the text cold with no prior commitment to the God hypothesis, I conclude a tribal deity commanded ethnic cleansing. The prior belief is doing all the work, not the exegesis.

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  Drew 922w ago

  That's actually one of the more interesting theological moves I've read in this thread. I still don't think it fully resolves the problem but it's at least a serious attempt at coherence rather than 'just trust God' or 'ANE context' without any further work.

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  Alex2w ago

  Honest answer from a Reformed guy who's thought about this: I hold divine command theory. If God commands it, it is by definition righteous because God is the source of righteousness. I know that sounds circular and I know it sounds monstrous from the outside. But the alternative — that there's some moral standard above God by which we judge Him — means God isn't God. I'm not happy with my own answer. But I think it's the honest one.

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  Alex2w ago

  The deeper I go in studying this the more I think the real issue is biblical inerrancy. If you HAVE to defend every verse as equally inspired and equally reflecting God's character, you end up in these impossible positions. The moment you allow that some texts reflect the people's understanding of God more than God Himself — which even ancient interpreters allowed — a lot of this pressure releases. That's not liberalism. Origen was doing it in the 3rd century.

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  Morgan B.2w ago

  ^ This comment deserves 10x the likes it has. Thank you for sharing that.

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  Iris T.2w ago

  Not necessarily. There's a robust tradition in biblical studies of reading Joshua as theological narrative — meaning it communicates truth about covenant, land, and identity without being a Pentagon press briefing about actual troop movements. That's not 'the Bible is fiction.' It's recognizing the genre being used.

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  Riley2w ago

  Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan wrote a whole book on this. 'Did God Really Command Genocide?' If you haven't read it before firing off hot takes, you're arguing from ignorance. Their ANE context argument and the expulsion-not-extermination thesis is legitimately compelling. I don't agree with every move they make but the scholarship is serious.

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  Noah2w ago

  And if YOU read it cold you bring your own prior commitments — secular liberal humanist ethics that you treat as self-evident but that also have to be justified from somewhere. Nobody reads anything cold. At least be honest about your own priors.

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  Jordan K.2w ago

  Can we just admit that Joshua as a BOOK is actually questionable in terms of historical accuracy? Jericho's walls show no evidence of destruction at the time the text describes. Ai wasn't even occupied. If the historical events are disputed, maybe we should resolve the moral question by asking whether the commands were ever given at all rather than tying ourselves in knots defending them.

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  Priya R.2w ago

  We preached through Joshua verse by verse at my church. Took months. Pastor didn't dodge it. It was the most uncomfortable and most honest sermon series I've ever sat through and my faith is stronger for it. Find a church that doesn't flinch.

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  Yuki2w ago

  Marcion was literally condemned for this reason. The church didn't dismiss him because he asked uncomfortable questions — they dismissed him because his answer was to cut the Scripture in half. Progressive Christianity keeps reinventing Marcion and calling it brave.

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  Iris M.2w ago

  Once you start deciding which parts of Scripture 'really' reflect God, who decides? You? Your denomination? The Spirit tells me one thing and tells you another. That road ends with everyone's personal God who conveniently agrees with whatever they already thought.

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  Feli K.2w ago

  So your solution to 'God commanded genocide' is 'maybe God didn't command it and the Bible is partially fiction'? That's a bigger problem than the one you're solving.

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  Casey2w ago

  The Canaanites practiced child sacrifice to Molech. Ritual sexual violence in their worship. Archaeological record confirms some of this. God isn't commanding genocide the way a human dictator commands ethnic cleansing for power. He's executing covenant judgment on a society that had embedded child murder into its religion. That context doesn't make you feel better emotionally but it changes the moral question.

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  Jordan2w ago

  ok genuine question not trying to be smart here — if an atheist friend brings this up what do i even say? i believe the bible is true but i feel completely unprepared for this conversation and honestly a little sick reading it myself

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  Marco2w ago

  Every single civilization in the ancient world committed atrocities. The Assyrians. The Egyptians. The Babylonians. Nobody asks why we still read Homer after the Greeks did horrific things. The selective outrage aimed SPECIFICALLY at the biblical God is telling. People aren't having a moral crisis — they're looking for an exit ramp from faith.

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  Omar _x2w ago

  Euthyphro is a philosophy 101 argument that has been answered extensively for centuries. Natural law theory, divine simplicity, the Thomistic synthesis — look it up before acting like Plato ended the conversation. It didn't.

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  Sam2w ago

  Herem. Look up what the word actually means in its covenant context before making it into a 20th century war crime. The devotion of something to destruction in the ancient world was a ritual act that had specific legal and covenantal meaning. Ripping it out of that context and judging it by post-Enlightenment humanitarian ethics is an anachronism.

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