Genesis 15 to Joshua 11 · Featured Study
ASVThe Canaanite Conquest
Israel did not walk into Canaan because Israel was good, and Canaan was not emptied because of who the Canaanites were born as. Scripture names the ground of the judgment four hundred years before it falls: the iniquity of the Amorite was not yet full. This page follows that ground through the practices the Torah names, the Anakim who were in the land, the two kinds of command that stand side by side in the text, the door that stayed open for anyone who turned, and the thread that runs from Joshua’s report about Gath to the champion who came out of it.
Summary
Scripture gives the reason for the conquest four hundred years before it happens, and the reason is moral rather than ethnic: the iniquity of the Amorite was not yet full. This page sets out the practices the text names, the Anakim who were in the land, the two kinds of command that stand side by side, the door that stayed open to anyone who turned, and the honest state of the archaeology.
- Genesis 15:16 delays the conquest four hundred years and gives one reason for the delay, that the guilt was not yet complete
- Deuteronomy 9:4-5 forbids Israel to read the victory as a reward for being righteous, twice in two verses
- Leviticus 18 and Deuteronomy 12 and 18 name the practices: children burned to Molech, divination, necromancy, and a catalogue of sexual offenses
- Rahab and the Gibeonites both survive the ban, one by confession and one by covenant, so the ban was not applied by ancestry where the text narrates it
- Joshua 11:22 leaves Anakim in Gath, and generations later the champion who defies Israel comes out of Gath (1 Samuel 17:4)
The Cup of Iniquity
Genesis 15:16: the reason given four hundred years early
And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be sojourners in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years; and also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance. But thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace; thou shalt be buried in a good old age. And in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full.God tells Abram the conquest will wait, and gives the reason for the wait in the last line.
Speak not thou in thy heart, after that Jehovah thy God hath thrust them out from before thee, saying, For my righteousness Jehovah hath brought me in to possess this land; whereas for the wickedness of these nations Jehovah doth drive them out from before thee. Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thy heart, dost thou go in to possess their land; but for the wickedness of these nations Jehovah thy God doth drive them out from before thee, and that he may establish the word which Jehovah sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.Israel is told twice, in two verses, not to read the victory as a reward for being good.
The reason Scripture gives for the conquest is not military and not ethnic. God tells Abram his descendants will wait four hundred years, and the reason for the delay is stated in one clause: the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full. Amorite here stands for the whole pre-Israelite population of Canaan, the way the strongest tribe often names the rest. The land changes hands at a moral threshold, and the four hundred years are the patience before that threshold is reached.
Deuteronomy shuts the other door before Israel can walk through it. Moses tells the people not to say in their heart that they were brought in for their righteousness. He says it, then says it again in the next verse with the word notin front. Whatever the conquest is in Scripture’s own account, it is not a reward for Israel and it is not a verdict on Canaanite blood.
THE Amorites had indulged in the most degrading sin. God had observed this, but He did not at once execute vengeance upon them. He had determined that, as a nation, they should be destroyed and rooted out from under Heaven and that their land should be given to the seed of Abraham. But He tells Abraham that his seed must wait for it, for as yet the Amorites had not filled up the measure of their iniquity.
Charles Spurgeon· The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 3043, “Filling Up the Measure of Iniquity”, 1907Reformed Baptist
Genesis 15:16
The righteous God has determined that they shall not be cut off till they have persisted in sin so long, and arrived at such a pitch of wickedness, that there may appear some equitable proportion between their sin and their ruin; and therefore, till it come to that, the seed of Abram must be kept out of possession. Note, (1.) The measure of sin fills gradually.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible, 1710Nonconformist
Genesis 15:16
For the wickedness of these nations - So then it was not by any sovereign act of God that these people were cast out, but for their wickedness; they had transgressed the law of their Creator; they had resisted his Spirit, and could no longer be tolerated. The Israelites were to possess their land, not because they deserved it, but first, because they were less wicked than the others; and secondly, because God thus chose to begin the great work of his salvation among men.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible, 1832Methodist
Deuteronomy 9:5
- 400 yrsthe delay Genesis 15:13 names before the return
- Gen 15:16the ground of the judgment, stated in one clause
- Deut 9:5“not for thy righteousness”, said twice
- Lev 18:28the same standard held over Israel
The same standard is turned on Israel in the same chapterLeviticus 18:27-28
The strongest evidence that this is a moral standard rather than a tribal one sits in the same chapter that lists the offenses. After naming what the previous inhabitants had done, the text warns Israel that the land will do to them exactly what it did to the nation before them if they live the same way. The warning was not idle. Centuries later Israel was carried out of that same land, in two stages, on that same charge.
(for all these abominations have the men of the land done, that were before you, and the land is defiled); that the land vomit not you out also, when ye defile it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you.The land vomits out whoever defiles it, and the sentence is addressed to Israel.
What the Wickedness Was
the practices the Torah names, and what the ground outside the text can carry
Scripture does not leave the charge vague. It does not say the Canaanites worshipped the wrong god and stop there. It names specific acts, in lists, in more than one book.
And thou shalt not give any of thy seed to make them pass through the fire to Molech; neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am Jehovah.Children given to Molech, named in a chapter otherwise listing sexual offenses.
Thou shalt not do so unto Jehovah thy God: for every abomination to Jehovah, which he hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters do they burn in the fire to their gods.The charge stated as the reason Israel must not copy the local worship.
When thou art come into the land which Jehovah thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found with thee any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, one that useth divination, one that practiseth augury, or an enchanter, or a sorcerer, or a charmer, or a consulter with a familiar spirit, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For whosoever doeth these things is an abomination unto Jehovah: and because of these abominations Jehovah thy God doth drive them out from before thee.A named list: passing a child through the fire, divination, augury, sorcery, spirits, necromancy.
Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out from before you; and the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land vomiteth out her inhabitants.The land is spoken of as defiled by the acts themselves, and as expelling those who do them.
The land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants - This is a very nervous prosopopoeia or personification; a figure by which any part of inanimate nature may be represented as possessing the passions and reason of man. Here the land is represented as an intelligent being, with a deep and refined sense of moral good and evil: information concerning the abominations of the people is brought to this personified land, with which it is so deeply affected that a nausea is produced, and it vomits out its abominable and accursed inhabitants.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible, 1832Methodist
Leviticus 18:25
But of the cities of those people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance,.... The cities of the seven nations, six of which are mentioned by name in the next verse: thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth; the reason of this severity was because of their wickedness, the capital crimes and gross abominations they were guilty of, and for which they deserved to die; and on account whereof they were reserved to this destruction, when the measure of their iniquities was full, such as idolatry, incest, witchcraft, soothsaying, necromancy, &c. see Lev 18:3.
John Gill· Exposition of the Old Testament, 1748-1763Reformed
Deuteronomy 20:16
What the excavated evidence carries, and what it does notchild sacrifice: solid in the text, contested in scale
The textual charge is firm. The archaeological picture is stronger in some places than the popular version of it suggests, and weaker in others.
The Ugaritic ritual texts are often produced as proof, and they do not carry the weight put on them. The sacrificial lists from Ugarit describe offerings of cattle, small livestock and birds, and do not name child sacrifice as a ritual category. Paul Mosca, in his 1975 Harvard dissertation Child Sacrifice in Canaanite and Israelite Religion, remains the standard scholarly starting point and argues that a cult of child sacrifice existed in the region and was Canaanite in origin, but the direct Ugaritic evidence for it is thin, and an honest page says so.
The strongest physical case study is the tophet at Carthage, a Phoenician colony founded from Tyre and carrying Canaanite religion with it. The precinct holds more than twenty thousand urns of cremated infant and animal remains under stelae inscribed with vows to Baal Hammon and Tanit. The traditional reading, that this was systematic sacrifice, was strengthened in 2014 by a quantitative study of the age profile of the remains, which found a distribution that does not match ordinary infant mortality. A 2010 study argued the opposite, that the tophet was largely an infant cemetery. A 2024 review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review shows the argument is still live. Two further limits belong on the record: Carthage is centuries later than the conquest, and it is Punic rather than Canaanite proper.
A popular claim, checked: temple prostitutionthe terms and the prohibitions are solid; the fertility-rite reconstruction is disputed
Popular teaching has said for decades that Canaanite temples ran institutional ritual sex as a fertility rite. Two things have to be held together here, and one is not allowed to erase the other.
The Hebrew vocabulary and the biblical prohibitions are textually solid. Deuteronomy 23:17-18 bans the practice in Israel by name, Hosea 4:14 describes men sacrificing with prostitutes, and 1 Kings 14:24 says the same practice was in the land and calls it what the nations did. That is the text, and it stands.
There shall be no prostitute of the daughters of Israel, neither shall there be a sodomite of the sons of Israel. Thou shalt not bring the hire of a harlot, or the wages of a dog, into the house of Jehovah thy God for any vow: for even both these are an abomination unto Jehovah thy God.The prohibition itself, in Israel's own law.
What is genuinely challenged is the wider reconstruction built on top of those terms. Stephanie Budin, The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (Cambridge, 2008), argues that the picture of organized temple-sex fertility cults across the ancient Near East grew out of hostile Greek ethnography and out of mistranslated titles for temple personnel. Her work is widely cited and is not a fringe position. The honest statement is that the biblical prohibition is certain and the confident archaeological picture around it is not, so the page teaches the text and does not assert the reconstruction as established fact.
The Anakim in the Land
Numbers 13:33 and Deuteronomy 2-3: who the spies said was there
The spies came back from Canaan with two reports. One was about the fruit. The other was about the people, and it used a word the reader has already met once, in the chapter before the flood.
And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had spied out unto the children of Israel, saying, The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of great stature. And there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come of the Nephilim: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.The sons of Anak are said to come of the Nephilim, the word Genesis 6:4 used.
The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them: the same were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.The first use of the word, and the clause “and also after that”.
(The Emim dwelt therein aforetime, a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakim: these also are accounted Rephaim, as the Anakim; but the Moabites call them Emim.The same stature recorded east of the Jordan under other names, all reckoned Rephaim.
(For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of the Rephaim; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbah of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man.)Og of Bashan, the last of the Rephaim, with his iron bedstead measured out.
These are not stray details. Deuteronomy pauses the narrative twice to record that the peoples east of the Jordan had the same stature under different local names, and that all of them were reckoned Rephaim. It then gives the measurements of Og’s bedstead, which is the sort of thing a text records when it expects to be doubted. This site reads Genesis 6 as a real incursion, and the connection Numbers 13:33 makes is the text’s own: the sons of Anak come of the Nephilim.
There we saw the giants - נפלים nephilim. It is evident that they had seen a robust, sturdy, warlike race of men, and of great stature; for the asserted fact is not denied by Joshua or Caleb. Tales of gigantic men are frequent in all countries, but they are generally of such as have lived in times very remote from those in which such tales are told.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible, 1832Methodist
Numbers 13:33
Where the text stops, and this page stops with itthe silence named as silence
Genesis 6:4 says the Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that. That clause is the whole of what Scripture gives about how the same line is present on both sides of the flood. It does not explain the mechanism, name a second incursion, or trace a genealogy. Readers have filled that gap in several directions for a long time, and none of those answers is in the text.
The full case for reading Genesis 6 as an incursion of the sons of God, with the positions and their holders, belongs to Watchers and Nephilim and is not repeated here. What this page needs from it is only what Numbers 13:33 states outright.
Drive Out, and Destroy
two kinds of command, standing side by side, unreconciled by the text
Read straight through, the conquest material gives two different pictures of the same event, and it never stops to reconcile them. Both are printed below, side by side, because the tension is the text’s own and every serious argument about the conquest starts here.
When Jehovah thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and shall cast out many nations before thee, the Hittite, and the Girgashite, and the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; and when Jehovah thy God shall deliver them up before thee, and thou shalt smite them; then thou shalt utterly destroy them: thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them;Utterly destroy, make no covenant, show no mercy.
But of the cities of these peoples, that Jehovah thy God giveth thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth; but thou shalt utterly destroy them: the Hittite, and the Amorite, the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite; as Jehovah thy God hath commanded thee; that they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods; so would ye sin against Jehovah your God.Nothing that breatheth, limited to these cities, with the reason stated in verse 18.
So Joshua smote all the land, the hill-country, and the South, and the lowland, and the slopes, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but he utterly destroyed all that breathed, as Jehovah, the God of Israel, commanded.The narrative's own summary formula, in the same absolute terms.
And I will send the hornet before thee, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite, from before thee. I will not drive them out from before thee in one year, lest the land become desolate, and the beasts of the field multiply against thee. By little and little I will drive them out from before thee, until thou be increased, and inherit the land.Driven out little by little, deliberately not in one year, and for an ecological reason.
And Jehovah thy God will cast out those nations before thee by little and little: thou mayest not consume them at once, lest the beasts of the field increase upon thee.The same instruction, in the same book as the destroy command, four chapters earlier.
And I sent the hornet before you, which drove them out from before you, even the two kings of the Amorites; not with thy sword, nor with thy bow.Joshua's own summary at the end of his life: not with thy sword, nor with thy bow.
Notice what the second column is not. It is not a later softening added by a different hand at a different time. Deuteronomy 7:22 sits twenty verses after Deuteronomy 7:2, in the same speech. Joshua 24:12 is Joshua summing up his own campaigns. The two ways of speaking were written to stand together, and whichever reading of the conquest a person ends up holding has to account for both of them.
But thou shalt utterly destroy them - The above reasoning will gain considerable strength, provided we could translate כי החרם תחרימם ki hacharem tacharimem, thou shalt utterly subdue them - slaying them if they resist, and thus leaving nothing alive that breathed; or totally expel them from the land, or reduce them to a state of slavery in it, that they might no longer exist as a people. This certainly made them an anathema as a nation, wholly destroying their political existence.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible, 1832Methodist
Deuteronomy 20:17
If they were to be swept away like the antediluvians or the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, as incorrigible sinners who had filled up the measure of their iniquities, it mattered not to them in what way the judgment was inflicted; and God, as the Sovereign Disposer, had a right to employ any instruments that pleased Him for executing His judgments.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible, 1871Reformed
Deuteronomy 7:2
Clarke is making a translation point, not an excuse. The Hebrew verb behind “utterly destroy” carries a range that includes breaking a people’s existence as a nation, and he says the reasoning gains its strength only if that range is what the verb is doing here. Whether it is doing that is argued below, with the names on both sides.
The Door That Stayed Open
Rahab and the Gibeonites: the two cases the text actually narrates
Two Canaanite parties inside the conquest come through it alive, and the book tells both stories at length rather than mentioning them in passing. Neither survives by ancestry. One survives by confession and one by covenant.
Rahab, of Jericho
and she said unto the men, I know that Jehovah hath given you the land, and that the fear of you is fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land melt away before you. For we have heard how Jehovah dried up the water of the Red Sea before you, when ye came out of Egypt; and what ye did unto the two kings of the Amorites, that were beyond the Jordan, unto Sihon and to Og, whom ye utterly destroyed. And as soon as we had heard it, our hearts did melt, neither did there remain any more spirit in any man, because of you: for Jehovah your God, he is God in heaven above, and on earth beneath.A Canaanite in a doomed city states the confession the whole book is about.
But Rahab the harlot, and her father’s household, and all that she had, did Joshua save alive; and she dwelt in the midst of Israel unto this day, because she hid the messengers, whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho.She is saved alive out of a city under the ban, and lives in Israel.
Rahab is a Canaanite of the first city destroyed, and she is under the ban on every reading of it. She hears the same reports her neighbors hear. Her neighbors melt with fear; she draws a conclusion from them and acts on it. She is not reclassified as an Israelite before she is spared. She is spared because of what she said and what she did, and Matthew’s genealogy places her in the line of Christ.
and Salmon begat Boaz of Rahab; and Boaz begat Obed of Ruth; and Obed begat Jesse;The Canaanite of Jericho, named in the genealogy of Jesus.
The Lord your God, he is God - From the rumour of God’s miraculous interpositions Rahab believed, and makes the self-same confession to which Moses endeavors to bring Israel by rehearsing similar arguments Deu 4:39. Rahab had only heard of what Israel had experienced. Her faith then was ready. It is noteworthy, too, that the same reports which work faith and conversion in the harlot, cause only terror and astonishment among her countrymen. (Compare Luk 8:37-39.)
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments, 1832-1869Evangelical
Joshua 2:11
The harlot olive - For that general command of rooting out the Canaanites seems to have had some exception, in case any of them had sincerely and seasonably cast off their wickedness, and submitted to the Israelites.
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament, 1765Methodist
Joshua 6:25
The Gibeonites
And they answered Joshua, and said, Because it was certainly told thy servants, how that Jehovah thy God commanded his servant Moses to give you all the land, and to destroy all the inhabitants of the land from before you; therefore we were sore afraid for our lives because of you, and have done this thing. And now, behold, we are in thy hand: as it seemeth good and right unto thee to do unto us, do. And so did he unto them, and delivered them out of the hand of the children of Israel, that they slew them not. And Joshua made them that day hewers of wood and drawers of water for the congregation, and for the altar of Jehovah, unto this day, in the place which he should choose.They admit the deception, Israel holds to the oath anyway, and they live.
The Gibeonites are a harder case and the text does not tidy it up. They get their covenant by lying about where they came from. When the fraud is discovered, Israel treats the oath as binding anyway and keeps them alive, and assigns them permanent labor at the sanctuary. The point for this page is narrow and factual. A Canaanite city sought terms, obtained them dishonestly, and was still not destroyed, because a covenant had been made.
And so did he unto them - That is, he acted according to justice and mercy: he delivered them out of the hands of the people, so that they slew them not - here was mercy; and he made them hewers of wood and drawers of water for the congregation, and to the altar of God - here was justice. Thus Joshua did nothing but what was good and right, not only in his own eyes, but also in the eyes of the Lord. How long the Gibeonites were preserved as a distinct people after this, we know not.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible, 1832Methodist
Joshua 9:26
Thou shalt smite them, etc. - These idolatrous nations were to be utterly destroyed, and all the others also which were contiguous to the boundaries of the promised land, provided they did not renounce their idolatry and receive the true faith: for if they did not, then no covenant was to be made with them on any secular or political consideration whatever; no mercy was to be shown to them, because the cup of their iniquity also was now full; and they must either embrace, heartily embrace, the true religion, or be cut off.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible, 1832Methodist
Deuteronomy 7:2
The ban was also applied to Israelite townsWilliam Ford, “What About the Gibeonites?”, Tyndale Bulletin 66.2 (2015)
Deuteronomy 13 applies the same ban to an Israelite town that turns to other gods. The command that clears a Canaanite city can fall on one of Israel’s own, on the same ground, and that fact is hard to fit into a reading where the target is a bloodline.
William Ford, in the Tyndale Bulletin article named above, reads the Gibeonite episode alongside that provision and argues that the operating logic is the danger a population poses to Israel’s covenant loyalty rather than its ancestry. Cited by work; Ford is in copyright and is not quoted at length here.
The Gath Thread
Joshua 11:22 to 1 Samuel 17:4, and where it lands
And Joshua came at that time, and cut off the Anakim from the hill-country, from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, and from all the hill-country of Judah, and from all the hill-country of Israel: Joshua utterly destroyed them with their cities. There was none of the Anakim left in the land of the children of Israel: only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod, did some remain.Joshua cuts off the Anakim, and the text names the three cities where some remained.
And there went out a champion out of the camp of the Philistines, named Goliath, of Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span.The champion who comes out to defy Israel is named with his city: of Gath.
Joshua 11 is a summary chapter, and its last two verses are the kind of detail a summary usually drops. Joshua cut the Anakim off from the hill country of Judah and Israel. Then the text says exactly where they were not cut off: Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod. Those are Philistine cities on the coastal plain, outside the ground Joshua took.
Generations later a champion walks out of the Philistine camp to defy the armies of Israel, and Scripture gives his hometown in the same breath as his name. He is of Gath. The narrative that closes the book of Samuel returns to the same place and records four more men of the same kind there, one of them with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot, all of them born to the giant in Gath.
And there was again war at Gath, where was a man of great stature, that had on every hand six fingers, and on every foot six toes, four and twenty in number; and he also was born to the giant. And when he defied Israel, Jonathan the son of Shimei, David’s brother, slew him. These four were born to the giant in Gath; and they fell by the hand of David, and by the hand of his servants.Four men of the same line, at the same city, ended by David and his servants.
In Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod - The whole race of the Anakims was extirpated in this war, except those who had taken refuge in the above cities, which belonged to the Philistines; and in which some of the descendants of Anak were found even in the days of David.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible, 1832Methodist
Joshua 11:22
Four - Not necessarily meaning that they were brothers, but that they were all of the race of the Giant, all Rephaim. The word “four” is omitted in the parallel passage, only the three last being mentioned in that chapter.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments, 1832-1869Evangelical
2 Samuel 21:22
Follow the thread back and it does not stop at Joshua. Numbers 13:33 ties the Anakim to the Nephilim. Genesis 6:4 puts the Nephilim on both sides of the flood. And the first promise in Scripture sets two lines against each other and says how the war ends.
and I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed: he shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.Enmity between the serpent's seed and the woman's seed, declared in Eden.
Where the thread goes next
The height of Goliath, the readings of the Masoretic and Greek texts, and the full case for his parentage are argued at David and Goliath. The seed war itself, from Eden through the whole canon, is at The Seed. Neither argument is repeated here.
The Question Readers Bring
the moral objection, with the positions and their holders
Most readers arrive at Joshua with a question already formed, and the word they have usually heard for it is genocide. The question deserves a straight answer rather than a change of subject, so here is what the evidence above settles and what it does not.
What the text settles
The ground of the judgment is stated, and it is conduct. Genesis 15:16 delays the conquest until a measure of guilt is full. Leviticus 18 and Deuteronomy 12 and 18 name what filled it. Deuteronomy 9:4-5 refuses Israel any claim to deserve the land. Leviticus 18:28 holds the identical standard over Israel, and Israel was eventually removed from the land under it. Deuteronomy 13 turns the ban on Israelite towns. Rahab and the Gibeonites both live. Whatever else is disputed, the target named in the text is a practice rather than a bloodline.
What the text leaves open
How literally the destruction formulas are meant to be read. This is a real dispute among serious scholars who read the same chapters, and this page does not stamp a verdict on it. The two main positions follow, each with the works that argue it.
The formulas are ancient war rhetoric, and displacement is the realityYounger 1990 · Copan 2011 · Copan and Flannagan 2014 · Wright 2008 · Hess 1996
K. Lawson Younger Jr., in Ancient Conquest Accounts (Sheffield, 1990), compared Joshua’s conquest formulas with Egyptian, Hittite, Assyrian and Moabite royal inscriptions and found that phrases like “all the land” and “no survivors” are standard conventions of the genre, used to claim total victory rather than to report a body count. His study is comparative literature, not apologetics, and it is the foundation the rest of this position builds on.
Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? (Baker, 2011), and Copan with Matthew Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide? (Baker Academic, 2014), apply that finding: the targets were mostly military and administrative centers, the driving-out language describes the operative reality, and the stated ground is corrupt practice rather than ethnicity. Richard Hess, Joshua (IVP, 1996), argues from the Rahab and Gibeon precedents that Canaanite towns had a real option to come to terms. Christopher Wright, The God I Don’t Understand(Zondervan, 2008), grants that the framing as judgment on “a culture pervaded by child sacrifice and sexual perversion” makes a moral difference while making the events no less violent. All four are in copyright and are cited by work rather than quoted.
The moderating readings do not remove the difficultySeibert 2009 and 2012 · Rauser, Philosophia Christi 11.1 (2009)
Randal Rauser, in “Let Nothing that Breathes Remain Alive” (Philosophia Christi 11.1, 2009) and in a long public exchange with Copan and Flannagan, argues that once every moderation is granted, forcibly clearing a population under threat of destruction is still what modern usage calls ethnic cleansing, and that the hyperbole argument does not reach the command itself.
Eric Seibert, Disturbing Divine Behavior (Fortress, 2009) and The Violence of Scripture(Fortress, 2012), goes further and holds that the portrayals of God commanding these killings do not represent God’s character, leaning partly on the archaeological dispute over Jericho’s dating. Seibert has drawn substantial criticism from within his own field for letting a prior commitment set the reading and for drawing too sharp a line between the Testaments. Both authors are in copyright and are cited by work rather than quoted.
The two sides argue over the reach of the formulas. They do not argue over the ground the text gives for the judgment, and that ground is the part of the question a reader most often has never been told. The conquest in Scripture’s own account is judgment on named conduct, delayed four hundred years, refused to Israel as a merit, and turned on Israel by the same rule when Israel did the same things.
What the Ground Shows
the excavations, with the disputes named rather than smoothed
Two sites carry most of the argument about the conquest, and they pull in different directions. Both belong on the page.
Jericho: a destruction layer, and a fight about its dateGarstang 1930-1936 · Kenyon, Digging Up Jericho (1957) · Wood, Biblical Archaeology Review (1990)
Nobody disputes that Jericho was violently destroyed, that its walls came down, or that the city burned with full grain jars still in storage, which points to a short siege rather than a long one. The dispute is entirely about when.
John Garstang, excavating in the 1930s, dated the destruction to roughly 1400 BC, which matches the earlier and traditional date for the conquest. Kathleen Kenyon re-excavated in the 1950s with finer stratigraphic method and moved the date back to about 1550 BC, which would leave the site unoccupied when Joshua arrived. Her redating became the standard position for decades and is the basis of most claims that the conquest did not happen.
Bryant Wood re-examined Kenyon’s own pottery evidence and published the challenge in Biblical Archaeology Review in 1990, arguing that her conclusion rested on the absence of imported ware in a small and poor excavation area, and that the local pottery in the destruction layer points back to roughly 1400 BC. The argument has continued since, including over radiocarbon results, and it is not settled. The honest statement is that the destruction is certain, the date is contested, and the traditional date has a live and published case behind it rather than only a tradition.
Hazor: the one city Joshua says he burnedJoshua 11:13 · Yigael Yadin, Hazor: The Rediscovery of a Great Citadel of the Bible (1975)
Joshua 11:13 makes an unusual claim. It says that of the cities standing on their mounds, Israel burned none except Hazor. A text inventing a total conquest has no reason to volunteer that limitation, and it gives archaeology a specific thing to look for at one named site.
But as for the cities that stood on their mounds, Israel burned none of them, save Hazor only; that did Joshua burn.One city burned, and the text says so in the middle of its own victory summary.
Hazor was the largest city in the region, and Yigael Yadin’s excavations there uncovered a massive Late Bronze Age destruction by fire, with the Canaanite temples and palace burned and their statues deliberately mutilated. Excavation has continued at the site since. The identity of who burned it is argued, as it is at most such layers, and the date sits inside the same wider chronological debate as Jericho. What the ground shows is that the one city the text singles out for burning is the one city with an unmistakable burn layer.
The limits, stated plainlywhat the excavations cannot do
Several towns named in Joshua show no destruction layer at any candidate date. That is a real finding and it is not hidden here. It fits the second column of the drive-out material better than it fits the destruction formulas, which is one of the reasons the scholarly argument in the previous section is live.
Archaeology also cannot supply what people usually want from it. A burn layer records that a city burned. It does not record who lit it or why. Where a destruction layer lines up with a text, it is corroboration and not proof, and this page treats it that way in both directions.
The Voices
with the work named
The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 3043, “Filling Up the Measure of Iniquity” (1907) · CCEL edition, public domain
Preaches Genesis 15:16 as a whole sermon: God saw the sin, waited, and set the moment of judgment by the measure rather than the calendar.
Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710) · public domain
Draws the proportion out of Genesis 15:16: judgment waits until sin and ruin stand in some equitable proportion, and the measure of sin fills gradually.
Commentary on the Bible (1832) · public domain
Carries the evidence line across the whole page: the ground of the judgment at Deuteronomy 9:5, the range the herem verb allows at Deuteronomy 20:17, the open door at Deuteronomy 7:2, and the Anakim who stayed in Gath.
Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869) · public domain
Reads Rahab's confession as real faith on thin evidence, and identifies the four men of 2 Samuel 21 as one race rather than one family.
Exposition of the Old Testament (1748-1763) · public domain
States the reason for the severity of Deuteronomy 20:16 in the plainest terms available: named crimes, and a measure that was full.
Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765) · public domain
Reads Rahab as proof that the general command carried an exception for any Canaanite who turned in time.
Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) · public domain
Places the conquest beside the flood and Sodom as the same kind of judgment on the same kind of ground.
Marcus Brown's own commentary leads above all; within a tier, all voices are equal. Every quoted voice above is public domain. The living and in-copyright scholars who argue the moral question are named with their specific works and are cited rather than quoted at length. Excavation history is described from the general public record of the digs named in the sources line below.
Where it leads
Featured studies6
- Watchers and Nephilim: the incursion of Genesis 6
- The Seed: the war Genesis 3:15 declared
- The Fall of Jericho: the first city, and the city that argues
- Rahab and the Scarlet Cord: the Canaanite in the messianic line
- David and Goliath: where the Gath thread lands
- Caleb and the Twelve Spies: the report that named the Anakim
Built on the same Scripture1
Read it1
Where this happened1