The Evidence Room · The Reading Room
Summary
This is the hardest thing in the Bible, several of the standard responses have real evidence behind them, and none of them makes the texts comfortable. A page that leaves you at ease here has not been honest with you.
THE CLAIM
The hardest texts in the Bible, with no comfortable answer offered.
WHERE IT STANDS
Real answers with real evidence, and a residue that stays.
debated confidenceThe objection goes first, at full strength, in the words its defenders would choose.
The command is to kill non-combatants. Not soldiers: everyone. Women, the elderly, children, infants. It is given as a direct instruction and it is carried out as narrated. If any other ancient document contained this, and it did not belong to our tradition, we would have no difficulty naming what it is. We would call it what we call it when we find it elsewhere.
And the moral discomfort is not a modern squeamishness imported into an old text. The text itself uses the language of total destruction and expects the reader to understand what that means.
A reader who is not troubled here has not read it. This page will offer several responses, each with real evidence behind it, and then it will tell you what remains after all of them have been given — because something does remain, and the response to that is not a further argument.
c. 840 BC
Musée du Louvre, Paris · Dhiban, Jordan, 1868
Moab's King Mesha tells his side of the war of 2 Kings 3. He names Omri king of Israel, Israel's occupation of Moab, and — in line 18 — YHWH, the earliest appearance of the divine name outside the Bible.
The exact reading
It is Moab's account: Mesha claims the victory that 2 Kings 3 records as an Israelite withdrawal.
c. 1208 BC
Egyptian Museum, Cairo · Thebes, 1896
Pharaoh Merneptah lists the peoples he crushed in Canaan. One of them is Israel — the earliest known mention of the name, written by an Egyptian scribe at the end of the 13th century BC.
The exact reading
The scribe marks Israel with the determinative for a people, not a city or a land — Israel is there, and not yet settled as a state.
Put the hardest verses on the table rather than paraphrasing around them.
Deuteronomy instructs that of the cities of these peoples, nothing that breathes is to be saved alive. Joshua reports the campaigns in the same terms: he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the God of Israel commanded.
There is no softening available at the level of translation. The Hebrew word usually rendered utterly destroy is a specific term, herem, meaning to devote something entirely, putting it beyond ordinary use, and in these contexts it means destruction.
Notice one more thing before any response is offered. The instruction in Deuteronomy about offering terms of peace to a city applies to distant cities, and the text explicitly exempts the Canaanite cities from that provision. That is a point against the gentler readings, and this page prints it here rather than leaving it out of the summary of the evidence.
“However, in the cities of the nations that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not leave alive anything that breathes.”
Deut 20:16→
“So Joshua conquered the whole region—the hill country, the Negev, the foothills, and the slopes, together with all their kings—leaving no survivors. He devoted to destruction everything that breathed, just as the LORD, the God of Israel, had commanded.”
Jos 10:40→
“and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you to defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.”
Deut 7:2→
The first response is that the total-destruction language of the ancient Near East was conventional. Kings said they annihilated their enemies the way a coach says a team was destroyed, as the standard idiom of a victory report, not as a body count.
This is not a convenient guess. We have the other nations' inscriptions. The Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah, around 1208 BC, recorded that Israel is laid waste, his seed is not, a claim of total extermination made about a people who demonstrably continued to exist for the next thousand years and more. King Mesha of Moab, around 840 BC, carved into a stone monument that Israel has perished forever. The convention is documented in the neighbors' own words, and the neighbors' own words are provably not literal.
Now the more interesting evidence, which comes from inside the Bible. The same book that reports total destruction goes on to describe the survivors.
Joshua says that he cut off the Anakim from the hill country and utterly destroyed them with their cities. The very next verse says none of the Anakim were left in the land of Israel, except in Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod, where some remained. That is one sentence later.
The same book says there remains yet very much land to be possessed, lists the peoples still living in it, and Judges opens with a catalogue of the groups that were not driven out: the Jebusites still living in Jerusalem alongside Benjamin unto this day.
Consider what that means about the writer. Someone assembled these texts and left both statements standing, adjacent, with no sense of embarrassment. A person trying to conceal an exaggeration does not do that. The most economical explanation is that the writer and his readers understood the total-victory formula as a formula, and that we are the ones importing a literalism they did not have.
“At that time Joshua proceeded to eliminate the Anakim from the hill country of Hebron, Debir, and Anab, and from all the hill country of Judah and of Israel. Joshua devoted them to destruction, along with their cities.”
Jos 11:21→
“No Anakim were left in the land of the Israelites; only in Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod did any survive.”
Jos 11:22→
“The Benjamites, however, failed to drive out the Jebusites living in Jerusalem. So to this day the Jebusites live there among the Benjamites.”
Jdg 1:21→
Long before any of this, Abraham is told that his descendants will not receive the land for four generations, and the reason given is startling: because the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full.
Read that carefully. It says the judgment is being withheld, deliberately, for centuries, because the case is not yet complete. Whatever else this is, it is not an impulse.
What was the case? The Bible names it: burning children in fire as an offering, and it is condemned in the same texts as an abomination that Israel is forbidden to imitate.
That charge has support from outside the Bible, and the support should be stated with its limits. The Phoenicians who descended from the Canaanite world established colonies across the Mediterranean, and at Carthage archaeologists have excavated a burial precinct containing thousands of urns of cremated infant remains, with dedicatory inscriptions to the gods. Greek and Roman writers describe the practice directly. A minority of scholars have argued the precinct is an infant cemetery rather than a sacrificial one; the majority reading is that it is what the ancient writers said it was.
This is offered as context, not as a settlement. Naming what a society did explains why judgment is described as judgment. It does not by itself answer the question of the children; that question is still coming, and it is the last section of this page.
Alongside the destruction language, the same books use another verb constantly: drive out. Dispossess. Send away before you. Whole passages describe the objective as removal from the land rather than extermination: one text has them driven out little by little, over more than a year, which is not how you describe a massacre.
Read together, the two vocabularies suggest the goal was the end of a society's presence in a territory, with the fighting aimed at the fortified military and administrative centers. That is also what the archaeology of the relevant sites tends to show: the places named are largely garrison and administrative centers rather than population towns.
Then there are the exceptions inside the narrative, and they are not marginal. Rahab, a Canaanite woman in Jericho, changes sides and is spared with her whole household, and Matthew's genealogy puts her in the family line of Jesus. The Gibeonites, an entire Canaanite people, sue for terms and get them; Israel keeps the treaty, and centuries later a king who broke faith with them is held accountable for it.
The narrative shape matters here. In a story about extermination as such, Rahab and Gibeon are unthinkable. In this story they are told approvingly, and one of them ends up in the Messiah's genealogy. Surrender was a live option and the text presents taking it as the right choice.
The honest counterweight, again: the peace-terms law in Deuteronomy explicitly does not extend to these cities. Rahab and Gibeon are exceptions granted inside the story, not a general policy the law provides for. Both facts are true and both belong on the page.
“And Joshua spared Rahab the prostitute, with her father’s household and all who belonged to her, because she hid the men Joshua had sent to spy out Jericho. So she has lived among the Israelites to this day.”
Jos 6:25→
“And Joshua made a treaty of peace with them to let them live, and the leaders of the congregation swore an oath to them.”
Jos 9:15→
This is the point most often missed, and it changes the character of the argument.
The reason given for the Canaanites' removal is not their ethnicity. It is what was done in the land. And the very same passage that says the land vomited out the previous inhabitants warns Israel, in the same breath, that the land will vomit them out too if they do the same things.
That warning was not rhetorical. It happened. The northern kingdom was destroyed and deported by Assyria, and the chronicler states the reason in exactly the terms used against the Canaanites: they walked in the statutes of the nations. Then Jerusalem fell to Babylon, the temple burned, and the covenant people went into exile.
So whatever this is, it is not tribal favoritism. The standard is applied to Israel with more severity, not less, and by the same God, in books written and preserved by Israelites who said so about themselves. A national literature invented to flatter a nation does not read like this.
That does not make the conquest texts easy. It does defeat one common description of them: that this is a god who protects his own people and destroys everyone else. On the Bible's own account, his own people got it worst.
Now the part that does not resolve.
Suppose every response above is granted at full value. The numbers are conventional. The judgment was delayed four centuries and the practices were real. The primary aim was dispossession. Mercy was available and taken. The same standard later fell on Israel.
The command is still in the text. Nothing that breathes. And there were children in those cities.
There are answers offered at this point. That death is not the final word for anyone, and a child who dies is not thereby lost. That God, being the author of every life, holds a prerogative over its end that no human being holds. That a society at its endpoint destroys its children either way, and that the alternatives available inside that world were all terrible. Each of these is seriously argued and none of them is silly. None of them is comfortable either, and if one of them settles the matter entirely for you, it is worth asking whether you have felt the question.
MannaFest is not going to close this with a sentence. Serious Christians who hold Scripture as the Word of God land differently here, and the range is worth describing without ranking it: some read the accounts as historical judgment on a specific society at a specific moment, never to be repeated and never a model; some read the conquest narratives as written in the idiom of their age, carrying a theological account of the end of a civilization rather than a battlefield record; some hold that the texts show God accommodating himself to a violent world he was in the process of moving out of; some conclude that the tension is not resolvable this side of seeing him, and hold it unresolved on purpose. These are not the positions of people who have stopped believing the Bible.
They are the positions of people who have read it closely and come out at different places.
One thing to add, and it must not be used to erase anything. When two of Jesus's disciples asked whether they should call down fire on a village that refused him, he turned and rebuked them. Some manuscripts add the line most people remember, ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of, and the honesty required elsewhere on this site requires the note that the earliest copies do not have it, while the rebuke itself is in all of them.
That rebuke is not evidence of a different God in the New Testament. The disciples were quoting Elijah, and the rebuke is not for believing the old story; it is for thinking it was theirs to repeat. Whatever the conquest was, it was not a template. It closed. And the same God who is said to have judged a civilization is said, in the same book, to have come and stood in front of the judgment himself.
Each objection below is stated the way the people who hold it state it, at the same type size as the answer. If you hold one of these and think it is put unfairly here, tell us.
THE ANSWER
The suspicion is fair and the timing point has some force, so the reply has to be evidence that does not depend on anyone's motives. Three pieces. First, the comparative material was not produced to solve this problem: Merneptah's stele and the Mesha stone were dug up and read for their own sake, and both make total-annihilation claims that are simply false about peoples who kept existing.
That is the convention, documented in someone else's writing, about someone else's wars. Second, the internal evidence is not a modern reading at all: the Anakim are destroyed and then found in three cities one verse later, and Judges opens by listing who was not driven out. Those sentences have been sitting next to each other for as long as the books have existed.
Third, the selectivity charge can be tested rather than asserted: the standard being applied is that a text's genre governs how it is read, which is why nobody reads the Psalms' mountains skipping like rams as zoology. Whether that standard is being applied honestly here is a fair thing to check, and the check is the internal evidence, which is public. Where the objection lands and stays landed: even if the rhetoric reading is entirely correct about the numbers, it does not touch the command, which is the next objection and the more serious one.
THE ANSWER
This objection is correct that it is the harder question, and the previous section conceded as much before it was raised. Two things can be said and neither is a solution. The first is a genre point that has to be made carefully: if the total-destruction formula is the standard idiom for a decisive campaign, then the command written in that idiom is a command to end a society's hold on a territory decisively.
The phrase carries the sense of the convention it is written in, not a separate literal sense the surrounding narrative then ignores. That is a real argument and it is not nothing. It is also not enough, because the text goes further than a formula in places, and a reader who feels that is reading correctly.
The second is to say where this actually leaves a believer, which is not at a solution but at a trust decision. Someone who has concluded on other grounds that God is good and that Jesus is who he said he is holds these texts as a difficulty inside a settled relationship rather than as a proof that overturns it. Someone who has not is under no obligation to start here.
What would be dishonest is to claim the difficulty has been dissolved. It has been located, and the location is that this is one of the places where trust is doing work that argument is not.
THE ANSWER
This is true history and it should be stated by Christians before critics have to. The text has been used that way, the users were often sincere, and people died. No amount of contextual reading undoes that, and a defense of these passages that skips it is not worth reading.
Two things follow. The first is a distinction the misuse always has to violate: on the Bible's own account this was a specific judgment on a specific society at a specific moment, announced centuries in advance, executed once, and never authorized again. Nothing in the Old Testament treats it as a standing policy, no prophet calls for its repetition, and the New Testament forecloses it, which is exactly what the rebuke to the disciples who wanted to call down fire is doing.
Every historical misuse required treating a closed event as an open permission. The second is that this cuts against a certain style of defending the text. If the practical danger is the deserved-it framing, then defenders should be more careful with it, not less, and should notice that the Bible itself immediately turns the same standard on Israel, which is the one move that makes the framing unusable as a weapon against somebody else.
A reading that leaves you feeling secure about your own side has already gone wrong.
THE ANSWER
The last sentence is a genuinely good criticism and it is the reason this page has tried not to reach for mystery early. On the alternatives: two of them are less clean than they look. Changing hearts by overriding them raises the same question that runs through the whole problem of evil, whether a world of real agents can be run by overriding agency, and if the answer is yes, the objection is really an argument against permitting any evil at all, which is a different and larger question with its own page.
Nineveh is the more interesting case and the objection is right to raise it, because it shows warning and repentance are on the table and do sometimes work. What Genesis says about the Amorites is that warning-and-waiting is exactly what was happening for four centuries first. That is not a full answer to why it ended as it did, and this page will not dress it up as one.
So here is the honest position. There is no argument on this page that establishes the conquest was the only or the best option available to omnipotence. What there is: reasons to think the accounts are not what they are usually taken to be, evidence that the judgment was neither ethnic nor sudden nor repeatable, and a residue that does not resolve.
Anyone who tells you the residue has been cleared is selling something. Where a Christian rests is not on having cleared it but on a person, on the conviction that the character of God was made visible in Jesus, and that whatever is unresolved here is unresolved about someone who has already shown what he is like.
WHERE IT STANDS
Real answers with real evidence, and a residue that stays.
The objection is strong and it is stated first on this page for a reason. These are commands regarding non-combatants, and a reader who feels nothing has not read them.
Several responses carry real evidence. Total-destruction language was the documented convention of the period, and the internal evidence is decisive on this point: the same book reports a people utterly destroyed and then names the cities where they remained, one verse later.
The judgment is presented as delayed four hundred years, aimed at a society's practices rather than its ancestry, described as often in the language of driving out as destroying, and open to surrender: Rahab ends up in the Messiah's family line. The counterweight is printed too: Deuteronomy's peace-terms provision explicitly excludes these cities.
The same standard falls on Israel, harder, in books Israelites wrote about themselves. That defeats the tribal-favoritism reading of these texts, though it does not make them comfortable.
After all of it, a residue remains, and naming it is not a failure of the page; it is the page. Serious Christians land differently here, and that range is described above without being ranked. Christ closed the possibility of anyone repeating it, and he did so without handing anyone permission to throw the Old Testament away or to imagine two different Gods.
What would overturn this Evidence that the total-destruction formula in the period was written and read as a literal count, which would take the internal reading away.
The limits
How far the conventional reading of the language covers every command in the text is disputed.
What would settle it Comparative work on more conquest accounts from the same period, read against the biblical ones.
The archaeological profile of the conquest is mixed, and the page says so where the objections stand.
What would settle it Excavation at the named sites with published stratigraphy and dates.
The moral residue is not removed by any response gathered here, and serious Christians land differently on it.
What would settle it Nothing on this page. It is stated and left standing.
11 works, each named in full. Follow one into the registry to see everything else on the site that leans on it.
The Egyptian victory inscription claiming Israel is laid waste, his seed is not; the earliest known extrabiblical mention of Israel, and a documented example of total-annihilation rhetoric.
King Mesha's inscription declaring that Israel has perished forever; the same convention in a neighbor's own words.
The comparative study of conquest-report conventions.
On the military and administrative character of the sites named.
The fullest popular statement of the responses gathered here.
A defender who declines to claim the difficulty is resolved.
A Christian philosopher arguing that the hyperbole reading does not remove the moral problem. Printed here because objection one deserves its ablest form.
A very different Christian landing, included so the range described above is not a range of one.
The objection in its best-known popular form.
The classical descriptions of Carthaginian child sacrifice.
The archaeological evidence and the minority dissent from its interpretation.
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