The Canaanite conquest was genocide

Whatever you conclude about whether these events happened as written, the texts are explicit about the reason they give. They name a set of practices, chief among them child sacrifice, and never the Canaanites’ ancestry. The law of Leviticus forbids Israel to “give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech” and says the nations of Canaan are being driven out because they did these things (Leviticus 18:21, 24). Deuteronomy adds: “They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods” (Deuteronomy 12:31).

The same book insists that Israel has not earned the land: “It is not because of your righteousness or uprightness of heart that you are going in to possess their land, but it is because of their wickedness” (Deuteronomy 9:5). In Genesis, the story also says the judgment was held back for generations, because “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete” (Genesis 15:16).

The Christian writer Jonathan Noyes, of Stand to Reason, summarizes the traditional Christian reading: God “was enacting a form of capital punishment on a people that had committed capital crimes for centuries.” You may not accept that reading. It is still a claim about judgment for wrongdoing, which is different from hatred of a people.

You are right to suspect any account in which the winners say the losers deserved it. Propaganda of that kind flatters its own side. These texts do the opposite.

The same law that condemns the Canaanites warns Israel in identical terms: “if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it spewed out the nations before you” (Leviticus 18:28). Deuteronomy warns that if Israel takes up the same practices, God “will swiftly destroy you” (Deuteronomy 7:4). The later books of the Hebrew Bible tell the story of Israel’s own defeat and exile as that warning carried out.

The texts also let outsiders cross over. Rahab, a Canaanite woman of Jericho, sides with Israel, and “Joshua spared Rahab the prostitute, with her father’s household and all who belonged to her” (Joshua 6:25). She appears centuries later in the Gospel of Matthew’s list of Jesus’ ancestors (Matthew 1:5). The people of Gibeon make peace with Israel and are spared (Joshua 11:19).

A judgment that applies to the judge’s own people, and that a Canaanite family can escape by changing sides, is not aimed at a bloodline. That does not make the killing comfortable, and “ethnic hatred” still misdescribes what the texts claim.

Ancient Near Eastern kings described their victories in sweeping, formulaic terms. An inscription from the ninth century BC, set up by Mesha, king of Moab, boasts that Israel had perished forever, though the kingdom of Israel lasted more than a century longer. “No survivors” was how victories were reported, not a census.

The Bible shows the same pattern from the inside. Joshua 10:40 says Joshua conquered the whole region, “leaving no survivors.” Three chapters later, God tells him that “very much of the land remains to be possessed” (Joshua 13:1), and the book of Judges opens with Canaanites still living in Jerusalem and many other cities (Judges 1:21, 27-28).

The commands themselves point the same way. Deuteronomy 7 tells Israel to “devote them to complete destruction,” and in the next sentence, “Do not intermarry with them” (Deuteronomy 7:2-3). That instruction assumes the people will still be there. Elsewhere the language is of driving the nations out “little by little” (Exodus 23:30).

Hold this reading with care. The texts describe real battles against fortified cities, and it does not mean nobody died. What it rules out is taking “man and woman, young and old” as a literal record of every person killed, as if an ancient war report were a modern one.

The texts tie the conquest to one land, one generation, and one direct command. Nothing in them gives later believers a standing license to fight for their faith, and the New Testament explicitly rules it out. When two of Jesus’ disciples offered to call down fire from heaven on a village that had refused to receive him, “Jesus turned and rebuked them” (Luke 9:54-55). When one of his followers drew a sword to defend him, Jesus told him to put it away: “all who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52).

Christians have not always kept to this. Crusade preachers and some colonial settlers invoked the conquest of Canaan to justify their own violence. That history is real, and you are right to hold it against the people who did it. By the standard of the New Testament, they were wrong, and the texts they cited never gave them the authority they claimed.

One fear behind your objection is that a book containing these commands will produce people who carry them out. Christianity’s own teaching is that no one has that commission now, and that anyone who claims it is contradicting Jesus.

Even with all of the above, the texts include children among those killed, and that is where many readers stop. You should know what Christians say here, and where it runs out.

First, if the language of total destruction is formulaic, the picture of soldiers seeking out nurseries may not describe what happened. Second, Christians believe that God, who gives every life, has a right over life and death that no human being has, and that a child who dies is not lost but received by a God who is just. Abraham, in Genesis, puts your question to God directly: “Will not the Judge of all the earth do what is right?” (Genesis 18:25). The Bible does not forbid that question.

Those answers carry weight only if God exists and is good. If there is no God, these texts describe human warfare credited to a god, and your judgment on it stands against the people who carried it out. Whether God exists and is good is the larger question. Christians come to these texts believing God’s character is shown most fully in Jesus, who died for his enemies rather than killing them, and they read the hard passages in that light. Many still find them difficult, and saying so is not a failure of faith.