Tag: Canaanite Genocide

In this sixth and final post on Joshua’s conquest, we will wrestle with God’s command to kill women and children in the conquest (Deut 20:16-18; cf. Josh 6:21; 8:25). It’s one thing to kill soldiers in combat, but to kill non-combatants is morally questionable to say the least. How...

In this fifth blog on the Canaanite conquest, we'll return to the issue we ended our last post with: some passages suggest that all the Canaanites were annihilated, while others suggest that they were not. What do we do with this? One option is that the Bible contradicts itself. And...

For three posts now, we’ve been looking into Joshua’s conquest and the ethical problems therein. How could the God who “loves His enemies” (Rom. 5:9-11) command a wholesale slaughter of the Canaanites (Deut. 20:16-18)? In this post, we’d like to consider the option that maybe He didn’t. Maybe God...

I’ve been wrestling with the ethical issues surrounding Joshua’s conquest for the last couple posts. In the last one, I set some groundwork regarding the people (Canaanites) and the land (Canaan). This doesn't solve all the moral problems, but it does put us in a better place to tackle...

In the last post, I started a series on the ethical dilemmas surrounding Joshua’s conquest. In this post, I’d like to set some groundwork by looking at two important facets: the people and the land, or the Canaanites and Canaan. The Canaanites. Many critics such as Richard Dawkins will describe...

The Old Testament is filled with various ethical dilemmas, but perhaps the most complex one is Joshua’s conquest of Canaan. God’s command to kill all the Canaanites—men, women, and children—has led Richard Dawkins, an atheistic philosopher, to state The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character...