Does God Condone Killing the Innocent?

In InterVarsity, we believe that the best way to understand difficult texts in Scripture is by digging in, asking honest questions, and contextualizing.  Of all the difficult texts in the Old Testament, the Conquest narratives in Joshua may be the most challenging. 

Joshua tells the story of the Israelites entering into and conquering Caanan, the Promised Land. As we read it, we are rightly troubled by a picture of ancient Israelite invaders marching into someone else’s homeland intent on slaughtering innocent people who were just minding their own business. 

It gets even worse when the justification for such genocidal injustice is supposed divine fiat: “Our god told us to do this, so that makes it right.” 

What I’ve come to understand is that the saga of the Conquest is not that simple. And in struggling to make sense of the Conquest narratives, a very helpful resource for me has been Matthew J. Lynch’s book Flood & Fury: Old Testament Violence and the Shalom of God. 

In his book, of all the things Lynch gives us to consider if we want to understand the God of the Bible that Jesus read, here are three that stand out to me. 

1. The book of Joshua paints a complex, layered picture of the Conquest. 

This may come as a surprise, but Joshua doesn’t speak with a unified voice about what happened when Israel entered the Promised Land with the goal of displacing its inhabitants. 

Consider these two statements: 

• So Joshua subdued the whole region, including the hill country, the Negev, the western foothills and the mountain slopes, together with all their kings. He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the LORD, the God of Israel, had commanded. (10:40) 
• Yet the Manassites [an Israelite tribe] were not able to occupy these towns, for the Canaanites were determined to live in that region. (17:12) 

So which was it: dramatic and total success, or mixed results against capable enemies? 

Joshua seems to report both! 

Lynch explains: 

“Israel engaged in occasional  warfare against major Canaanite strongholds, were often unsuccessful, and ended up settling the less populated central highlands of a land still full of Canaanites. 

Moreover, what Joshua reports as victories were often short-term victories over kings and not the annihilation of their subjects (Joshua12)” (Lynch, 2023, p. 120-21). 

The Conquest was anything but a quick and straightforward story of nationalistic triumph. 

Still, why did there need to be a conquest at all? 

2. The Conquest represented the completion of Israel’s exodus and their final liberation from the oppression of Egypt. 

To understand what this means, first look at history. 

In the time of Joshua, Egypt controlled the land of Canaan through a network of local kings who ruled city-states and whom they propped up in exchange for loyalty and tribute. As long as these kings cooperated with Egypt’s agenda, they got to run their own show and treat their local subjects however they wanted—which wasn’t great. 

When Israel entered the land that God had promised to them, Egypt was still in charge—and still a threat to this small, vulnerable group of Israelite former slaves—in Canaan. Overthrowing their network of warlord-like kings was not only necessary to their survival but also to demonstrate Yahweh’s victory over the false rival gods that kept people enslaved and oppressed. 

Next, look at the way the story is told. 

Biblical authors often employ a literary device known as a chiasm, one type of which has the events in a sequence reach a key point before retracing their steps back to the beginning. 

Rather than directly tell the reader what to think (“this is the main point…”), these authors brought out their emphasis through the way they structured their stories. It takes some work as a reader to notice this, but that’s an important part reading the Bible (or anything) well! 

Here’s what it looks like when we step back and squint at the entire Exodus-Joshua storyline: 

   A. Israel in Egypt (Exodus 1-10) 

      B. Passover and Crossing (Sea of Reeds), Manna begins (Exodus 11-16) 

         C. Journey in the Wilderness (Exodus 15:22-18:27)         

            D. Covenant at Mt. Sinai (Exodus 19:1 - Numbers 10:10)                     

         C'. Journey in the Wilderness (Numbers 10:11 - Deuteronomy)             

      B'. Crossing (Jordan River) and Passover, Manna ends (Joshua1-5)           

   A'. Israel in Canaan (Joshua 6-24) 

The Conquest completes the Exodus by finally breaking Egypt’s power. It’s the finale of a unified event of divine liberation. 

3. The book of Joshua subverts readers’ expectations of who’s an insider and who’s an outsider. 

The Conquest narrative, properly understood, cannot be reductively portrayed as an ethnocentric crusade. 

Paying close attention to the book as a whole, Lynch remarks: “Joshua is not a straightforward tale of genocide. The book complicates that sort of reading from the outset. In fact, the book is designed to critique the ethnocentric and nationalistic assumptions on which a genocidal ideology depends” (p. 109). 

If we assume that God is on Israel’s side and that therefore all Canaanites are unwelcome enemies who must be destroyed, we will end up puzzled by two stories that the Joshua narrative highlights. 

First, a Canaanite prostitute named Rahab shelters Israelite spies and enters into a covenant agreement with them to spare her family when the city of Jericho is conquered (Joshua 2). She is commended as an example of faithfulness and generations later, included in Jesus’ family tree (Matthew 1:5)! 

Second, an Israelite soldier named Achan breaks God’s command by stealing some of the plunder from Jericho to enrich himself. He and his family are put to death, cut off from the blessings of the community (Joshua 7). 

These stories are prominently featured for a reason: “By highlighting these two specific cases, Joshua sends a signal that ‘not all Israel is Israel; not every Canaanite is a Canaanite’” (see Romans 9:6) (p. 111). 

Yahweh’s intention is not to kill all the Canaanites and elevate all the Jews. Something else is going on. As God’s people settle in the land, the key distinguishing marker that will determine blessing versus destruction will not be ethnic identity but trust in Yahweh. 

Rahab the Canaanite is portrayed as someone who models exactly this quality. Despite our expectations, a foreigner is included while an Israelite is excluded.   

Complexity is certainly a key feature of the Conquest story, which includes a final plot twist. 

Plot Twist in the Conquest Narrative

In his farewell address at the end of his life and the end of the book, Joshua reveals that as a whole, Israel has actually failed to act in the ways that God instructed. 

As they are gathered for a covenant renewal ceremony, Joshua gives the people a surprising rebuke: “Now then,” said Joshua, “throw away the foreign gods that are among you and yield your hearts to the LORD, the God of Israel.” (24:14-28). 

This would be a completely unnecessary command—unless Israel was actively engaged in idol worship. The Conquest is not a simplistic narrative of triumph; despite Yahweh’s abundant goodness to them, Israel has been disobedient the entire time they were moving into his promise. Like a movie with a final-act twist, once you’ve read the whole book you can’t read it the same way again. 

The ending changes everything that came before it. 

Jesus’ Formative Curriculum 

Granted there may be more to this story than we first expected, but should we really be reading and embracing a story that sure looks like nationalistic propaganda? Don’t the risks far outweigh any rewards? 

How can something like this possibly exercise any authority or helpful influence in our lives? 

Remember that the Old Testament is the Bible Jesus read. Jesus grew up hearing and reflecting on all of it—including the stories of conquest recounted in Joshua. He sat at the feet of teachers and wise family members who talked about the Conquest in light of the entirety of Israel’s story. 

If, as Paul says to his young trainee Timothy many generations later, “all Scripture is God- breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16), we can trust that this part of the story of God’s people can and will also point us in the direction of Christlikeness as the Spirit works in our lives. 

This perspective of the Conquest narrative doesn’t erase the tensions we might feel when we read and reflect on it. But it does help us get a more faithful picture of the God who led his people out of oppression as part of his mission to rescue the entire creation from its bondage to sin and death.

Even though we are outsiders like Rahab, through the faithfulness of Jesus—the true and better Joshua—we are included in that story. For that we can be thankful.

Interested in further reading on this topic? Check out The Story of God, the Story of Us and Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric? from InterVarsity Press!