The hardest page in your Bible, read honestly
Sooner or later somebody hands you the book of Joshua and asks you to defend it. Usually it is not a philosopher. It is a coworker, or your own son, and the question is not academic. Your God ordered the extermination of entire towns. Women. Children. How is that different from anything we call a war crime?
Most Christians do one of two things with that question. They change the subject, or they answer too fast. Both are failures. The person asking has read the text correctly — the commands are there, they are severe, and no amount of cheerful deflection makes them go away. If your faith cannot look directly at Deuteronomy 20 and Joshua 6, then your faith has a room in it you have never entered, and someday somebody will kick the door in.
So let us enter it.
First, Refuse the Two Easy Exits
The first easy exit is to say the Old Testament God is simply a primitive tribal projection that Jesus later corrected. That is not Christianity. Jesus quoted these Scriptures as the word of His Father, said they could not be broken, and spoke about judgment more often and more vividly than any prophet before Him. You cannot rescue the Son by disowning the Father He worshipped.
The second easy exit is to shrug and say God can do whatever He wants, so the question is illegitimate. That answer is technically about power and says nothing about goodness — and it is not how Scripture itself handles the problem. Abraham stood in front of God and asked, out loud, Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? (Genesis 18:25, KJV). God did not rebuke him for asking. The Bible invites the question it is accused of dodging.
What the Text Actually Says It Is
The conquest is never presented in Scripture as ethnic cleansing, land hunger, or divine favoritism. It is presented, every single time, as judicial — a sentence carried out on a specific civilization for specific crimes, after a specific delay. That framing is not a modern apologetic invention. It is stated in Genesis, four centuries before Joshua was born, when God tells Abraham his descendants will not receive the land yet:
But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.
Genesis 15:16 (KJV)
Read that slowly, because it reverses the usual accusation. God delays four hundred years — He delays the deliverance of His own enslaved people — because the guilt of the Canaanites has not yet reached the point where judgment is just. That is not the behavior of a deity looking for an excuse. That is a court granting an extension.
And Israel is explicitly warned that they are not the point of the exercise:
Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess their land: but for the wickedness of these nations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee.
Deuteronomy 9:5 (KJV)
Then the warning is turned on Israel itself. Leviticus 18 lists what the land was being judged for and ends by telling Israel that the land will vomit you out as well if they do the same things. And it did. Israel was later dispossessed by the same standard, which is the strongest possible evidence that this was never a claim of racial privilege. The nation carrying the sentence was told in advance it was under the same law.
The Crimes Were Not Vague
We are conditioned to imagine the Canaanites as innocent villagers minding their own business. Scripture and archaeology tell a harder story. The indictment in Leviticus 18 and Deuteronomy 12 centers on institutionalized child sacrifice — infants burned in the fire to Molech as an act of civic religion — along with ritual prostitution and incest codified into worship.
For every abomination to the LORD, which he hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the fire to their gods.
Deuteronomy 12:31 (KJV)
Here is the uncomfortable symmetry the objection never notices. The modern critic is outraged, rightly, at the thought of children dying in the conquest. The text says the culture being judged had been feeding its own children to a furnace for generations as a matter of policy. You are not choosing between a world where children are safe and a world where they are not. You are looking at a judgment on a society that had made the killing of children a sacrament, and asking whether the God who stopped it should have let it run.
Mercy Was Available and Somebody Took It
If this were genocide, defection would be impossible. It was not. Rahab of Jericho — a Canaanite, a prostitute, living inside the first city to fall — heard what God had done, believed, and asked for mercy. She got it. She and her whole household were spared, and she appears in the genealogy of Jesus Christ in Matthew 1.
For we have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red sea for you… And as soon as we had heard these things, our hearts did melt.
Joshua 2:10–11 (KJV)
Rahab tells us two things. First, the Canaanites knew. Word of the Exodus had reached them forty years earlier; they had a generation of warning and the whole city knew the story. Second, the line was never ethnic. A Canaanite who turned was taken in. An Israelite who did not — Achan, in the very next chapters — was not spared. The dividing line ran straight through both nations, exactly where Scripture always puts it.
About the Sweeping Language
One more honest note. Joshua says whole regions were utterly destroyed and nothing was left breathing — and then Judges, a few pages later, describes those same peoples as still present in numbers. That is not a contradiction the skeptics found and the church hid; it is sitting in the text, and serious Christians read it two ways.
Some hold that the totalizing language is the standard idiom of ancient Near Eastern military reporting — the way a coach says his team was annihilated — and that the actual targets were fortified military and cultic centers, not civilian villages, with the population largely driven out rather than hunted down. Others hold that the language is straightforward and the later survivors are simply evidence that Israel disobeyed and failed to finish what it was given. Both readings are held by people who take the text as God’s word. Neither reading makes the conquest a tribal land grab, and you should not pretend the question is settled when it is not.
The Question Underneath the Question
Now let me turn the table, gently. To call the conquest evil, you have to be standing on something. You have to believe there is a real moral law that binds even God, that human life carries actual weight, that cruelty is not merely unfashionable but wrong. Where did that come from?
If we are matter in motion, then the Canaanites were rearranged atoms and so are you, and the word atrocity is a noise we make. The moral outrage that fuels this objection is borrowed capital — and it is borrowed from the very Scripture being indicted, the one that says every human being bears the image of God and that the shedding of innocent blood is a defilement of the earth itself. The objection is only devastating if the Bible is true about human worth.
That does not dissolve the difficulty. It relocates it. The real question was never is God allowed to judge? It is am I comfortable living in a universe where He does?
Where This Actually Lands
Here is what you should not do with this material: use it to win. The conquest is not a trophy passage. It is a warning shot, and the New Testament aims it squarely at us. Paul says these events were written down for our admonition. Peter says the God who did not spare the ancient world knows how to reserve the unjust for judgment. The message is not look what happened to them. It is look what sin is, and look how long He waits.
Four hundred years He waited on the Amorites. Then, at the fullness of another appointed time, judgment fell again — not on a city, but on His own Son, standing in the place of every guilty party who would take Rahab’s way out and ask for mercy.
For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.
2 Corinthians 5:21 (KJV)
That is the answer to the moral-monster charge, and it is not a debating point. A God indifferent to evil would have had no reason to send anyone to a cross. The severity in Joshua and the mercy at Calvary are the same attribute seen from two sides: God takes wickedness seriously enough to end it, and He loves sinners enough to absorb the ending Himself.
So when the question comes — and it will — do not flinch and do not swagger. Say the hard thing plainly. Then tell them about the scarlet cord in Rahab’s window, and where the way out is still hanging.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist