The Conquest Problem

Start with Jericho, Tell es-Sultan, because it is the test case everyone quotes and almost nobody quotes accurately. John Garstang dug there from 1930 to 1936 and reported a collapsed city wall and a burnt city which he dated to around 1400 BC, close enough to a conservative conquest date to be treated for two decades as confirmation. Kathleen Kenyon re-excavated the site from 1952 to 1958 with far better stratigraphic method, re-dated Garstang's wall to the Early Bronze Age, and concluded that the great Middle Bronze city was destroyed around the middle of the sixteenth century BC, with only slight and unwalled occupation in the Late Bronze period when a conquest would have to fall. Radiocarbon work published by Hendrik Bruins and Johannes van der Plicht in 1995 supported Kenyon, placing the destruction of that city in the late seventeenth or the sixteenth century BC, roughly 1617 to 1530 in calibrated terms. They declined to give a tighter figure than that.

Bryant Wood argued in 1990, in Biblical Archaeology Review, that Kenyon had misread the pottery and that the destruction belongs around 1400 BC after all. His case has been taken seriously enough to be answered rather than ignored, and you should know it exists. It is also a clear minority position; the consensus of field archaeologists follows Kenyon. The honest summary is this: the Jericho of the Late Bronze Age was a small, probably unwalled settlement, and no excavated destruction layer there currently lines up with a thirteenth-century conquest.

Ai is worse, because the problem is the address. Joshua 7 and 8 describe a fortified city with a king. The traditional identification is et-Tell, dug by Joseph Callaway in the 1960s and 1970s, and et-Tell has a substantial Early Bronze city destroyed roughly a thousand years too early, then essentially nothing until a small Iron Age village appears in the period after any conquest. Some scholars have concluded that the story is an aetiology attached to a ruin, which is what the name ha-'Ai means: the ruin. Others have proposed a different site. Bryant Wood and Associates for Biblical Research have excavated Khirbet el-Maqatir since 1995 and argue for a small fortified Late Bronze site there; David Livingston proposed Khirbet Nisya. The identification of Ai is genuinely unsettled, which means Ai cannot be used as evidence by either side without saying so.

Hazor is where the picture changes. Tel Hazor was the largest city in Canaan, and Joshua 11:10 calls it the head of all those kingdoms. Yigael Yadin excavated it from 1955, found a violent destruction of the great Late Bronze city, and connected it to Joshua. Amnon Ben-Tor has directed renewed excavations since 1990 and confirms a thirteenth-century destruction by fire, with the striking detail that Egyptian and Canaanite statues were deliberately smashed and decapitated, which looks ideological rather than merely military. Ben-Tor considers incoming Israelites the most plausible agents. His late colleague Sharon Zuckerman argued from the same evidence for an internal collapse, a revolt from inside a declining city rather than an army from outside. That disagreement is live between two excavators of the same site, and neither is a fringe figure.

One more piece of data, and it comes from the Bible. Joshua 11:13 says that Israel burned none of the cities that stood on their mounds, Hazor alone excepted. That single verse dismantles the expectation that a real conquest should leave a carpet of ash across Canaan. Meanwhile some cities the text names are awkward in the other direction: Gibeon shows little Late Bronze occupation in James Pritchard's excavation, and Arad and Tell Hesban lack Late Bronze cities altogether. The evidence is patchy in both directions. Anyone who tells you the spade has settled this, either way, is selling something.

There is one fixed point outside the Bible. The victory stele of the pharaoh Merneptah, from around 1208 BC, lists 'Israel' among entities in Canaan, and writes the name with the hieroglyphic marker for a people rather than for a city or land. So a group called Israel existed in Canaan before 1200 BC and was significant enough for a pharaoh to claim he had crushed it. That is not a small thing, and it is common ground.

The first model is the conquest model, associated with William Foxwell Albright, G. Ernest Wright and Yadin. Israel came from outside and took the land by force in the thirteenth century, and the destruction layers at Hazor, Bethel and elsewhere are its footprints. Its strength is that it takes the text's own account seriously and that Hazor really was violently destroyed at roughly the right time. Its weakness is the pattern: too many named cities lack the right layer, and destruction layers in a violent century are not self-labelling.

The second is peaceful infiltration, argued by Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth. Semi-nomadic groups drifted into the thinly settled hill country over generations and coalesced there, with Noth proposing a loose tribal league bound by a shared shrine. Its strength is that the archaeology of Iron Age I really does show a wave of new small unfortified villages in the highlands rather than conquered cities. Its weakness is that it has trouble explaining why Israel remembered itself as having arrived with violence and from Egypt.

The third is the peasant revolt model, put forward by George Mendenhall in 1962 and developed on Marxist lines by Norman Gottwald in 'The Tribes of Yahweh' in 1979. Israel was largely indigenous: peasants withdrawing from the Canaanite city-state system, taking up Yahwism as the religion of a retribalising underclass. Its strength is that Late Bronze Canaan really was a collapsing network of exploitative city-states under Egyptian overlordship, as the Amarna letters show, and that Israel's earliest law is conspicuously anti-royal. Its weakness is that the class consciousness it requires is hard to evidence, and its supporters have largely moved to the fourth option.

The fourth, now the majority position in the field, is indigenous emergence: the highland villages of Iron Age I were formed mostly by local people, pastoralists and displaced farmers settling down as the Late Bronze order fell apart. Israel Finkelstein's survey work and William Dever's synthesis are the standard statements, though they differ. Dever allows a real component from outside and treats the exodus and conquest traditions as containing historical kernels; Finkelstein is more sceptical. Both point to the same material markers in the new villages: the four-room house, collared-rim storage jars, and a near absence of pig bones. Do not let a student leave thinking any of the three is an ethnic label. Four-room houses and collared-rim jars both turn up well outside any plausible Israelite zone, and zooarchaeologists have cautioned that a pig taboo marks a diet rather than a people. What the three together describe is a way of life in the hill country; whether they identify an ethnic group is a further step and a contested one. Adam Zertal's survey of Manasseh and his contested interpretation of a structure on Mount Ebal as an early altar sit inside this debate. Note finally that the date of the exodus is disputed on the same grounds: 1 Kings 6:1 with its 480 years points to around 1446 BC, while the city name Rameses in Exodus 1:11 and the Merneptah stele point to the thirteenth century. Both dates are held by serious people.

Here is what the text says, in its own words, with nothing rounded off. Deuteronomy 7:1 to 2: when the LORD gives the seven nations over to you, 'then you must devote them to complete destruction. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.' Deuteronomy 20:16 to 18: in the cities of these nations, 'you must not leave alive anything that breathes.' Joshua 6:21: 'they devoted to destruction everything in the city - man and woman, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.' Joshua 10:40: Joshua conquered the whole region, 'leaving no survivors. He devoted to destruction everything that breathed, just as the LORD, the God of Israel, had commanded.' 1 Samuel 15:3, on Amalek: 'Do not spare them, but put to death men and women, children and infants, oxen and sheep, camels and donkeys.'

Notice three features before any interpretation starts. First, the command is attributed directly to God, repeatedly, and the narrator's approval formula in Joshua 11:15 is that Joshua left nothing undone of what was commanded. This is not a story about Israel exceeding orders. Second, Deuteronomy 20 draws a legal distinction: cities far away may be offered terms and their women and children spared, while the cities of the land may not. That reads like legislation, with a considered exception, not like a boast. Third, the stated reason in Deuteronomy 20:18 is prophylactic, to keep Israel from learning Canaanite worship, and Deuteronomy 9:4 to 5 insists twice that it is not because of Israel's righteousness.

Notice also what the same books say against themselves. Rahab lives. The Gibeonites deceive their way into a treaty and Israel keeps it. Joshua 11:22 says the Anakim remained in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod. Joshua 13:1 says much of the land remains unconquered while Joshua is old. Judges 1 lists tribe after tribe that did not drive out the inhabitants. The book that reports total destruction also reports, within a few chapters, that the population was still there. That internal friction is the single most important datum in the moral argument, and both sides use it.

One thing must not be said, and this is where a teacher earns their keep. It must not be said that the difficulty is a modern squeamishness, or that it disappears once you understand the ancient context, or that people who find it unbearable have failed to read carefully. Origen found it a problem in the third century. Marcion found it so severe in the second that he rejected the Old Testament entirely, and the church rejected Marcion without ever claiming the problem was imaginary. If your answer is that there is nothing here to trouble anyone, you are not in the tradition.

The first is that the conquest accounts use the hyperbolic rhetoric standard in ancient Near Eastern war reporting. K. Lawson Younger Jr. demonstrated in 'Ancient Conquest Accounts' that Egyptian, Hittite and Assyrian campaign texts routinely claim total annihilation of enemies who demonstrably survived, and Kenneth Kitchen has pressed the same point. The Merneptah stele itself says Israel's seed is not, which was false. On this reading, 'anything that breathes' is the genre's superlative, the targets were fortified military and administrative centres largely emptied of civilians, and the real aim was dispossession rather than extermination. Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan have argued this at length, and Nicholas Wolterstorff reads Joshua as a stylised liturgical retelling rather than a battle report. Its strength is that it explains the friction in section 3 better than any rival: the texts contradict a literal extermination because they never meant one. Its weakness, pressed hard by Randal Rauser among others, is that hyperbole in a report is one thing and a command is another. Deuteronomy 20 does not read like rhetoric; it reads like a statute that deliberately withholds from Canaanite children a mercy it extends to foreign ones.

The second is divine judgement. On this reading the conquest is not ethnic cleansing but a legal sentence carried out on a specific society at a specific moment, and the text says so. Genesis 15:16 has God delaying the promise for four centuries because 'the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete'. Leviticus 18:24 to 28 says the land itself vomits out its inhabitants for their practices, and then warns Israel that it will be vomited out on the same terms, which is precisely what 2 Kings reports. Deuteronomy 12:31 names the practice at issue, the burning of children. Christopher J. H. Wright argues a careful version of this, stressing that the event is presented as unique, bounded and not a template. Its strength is that it is the text's own explanation, that it is even-handed rather than tribal, and that it forbids Israel any claim to superiority. Its weakness is not subtle: a sentence on a society still falls on infants who did nothing, and the sins named are ones Israel itself later commits without a herem being ordered against Judah. Whether a just judge may execute a corporate sentence that kills children is exactly the question, and this answer assumes it rather than settling it.

The third is the allegorical tradition, and it is older than either of the above. Origen preached a series of homilies on Joshua in which the Canaanite nations are the vices lodged in the soul, the land is the self to be reclaimed, and the true Joshua is Jesus, whose Greek name is the same word. Origen says outright that unless those physical wars carried the figure of spiritual wars, he does not believe the apostles would have handed these books to the churches to be read. Gregory of Nyssa reads Exodus the same way. This was not a fringe dodge; for something like a thousand years it was how Christians read Joshua, and the hymnody and preaching of the church still run on it. Its strength is that it makes Christ the criterion of reading rather than an add-on, and it refuses to let the text be used to license war, which allegory did in fact restrain. Its weaknesses are two, and both are serious. It can quietly evacuate Israel's history of any reality, and the tradition often paired it with contempt for Jews as the merely literal readers. And it does not actually answer the moral question, because if God did not command this, we must say what the text is doing when it says he did; and if he did, allegory has only changed the subject. Douglas Earl's 'The Joshua Delusion?' is a thoughtful modern attempt to hold a figural reading without that evasion.

The fourth is the refusal to resolve. This is a family of positions, not one. Its mildest form says: I hold these texts as scripture, I cannot square the command with the God revealed in Jesus Christ, and I decline every solution that would make the killing of children sit comfortably, because a solution that achieves comfort has proved itself false. Walter Brueggemann's insistence that scripture contains testimony and countertestimony belongs here. A stronger form, argued by Eric Seibert and by Thom Stark, says the violent portraits reflect the culturally bound convictions of ancient writers about their God and should be named as wrong rather than harmonised, with Jesus as the standard that judges them. Greg Boyd's 'Crucifixion of the Warrior God' tries to make that move while keeping the texts inspired, reading them as bearing God's willingness to be misrepresented by the people he was stooping to reach. The strength of this family is honesty and a refusal to trade the character of God for the defence of a text. Its cost, and you should feel it, is that once you can rule a passage out on moral grounds you need a very careful account of why your moral sense is a trustworthy judge of revelation, and of what is left of the authority of scripture when it can be overruled.

Two further answers deserve naming because your students will meet them. William Lane Craig has defended the command on the grounds that God, as the author of life, has a prerogative over it that no human has, that the Canaanite children were received by God rather than lost, and that the real burden fell on the Israelite soldiers. Give it its due: it is a coherent position with an ancient pedigree in Augustine's argument that a war commanded by God is just. Give the objection its due too: it can be extended to justify any atrocity that someone believes to be commanded, and many readers judge that a goodness of God with no recognisable content is not the God of the New Testament. The other is progressive accommodation, that God worked with Israel inside the moral horizon of its age, moving it rather than perfecting it at once, which is how John Goldingay and others frame much of the Old Testament's harshness. Its strength is that scripture demonstrably does move, from blood vengeance to cities of refuge to Ezekiel. Its weakness is that accommodation explains a permitted practice more easily than a commanded one.

You came into this lesson wanting a resolution and you are not getting one, and that is a decision rather than a failure of nerve. There are two dishonest ways to end a lesson like this. One is to pick the reading that makes the discomfort go away and present it as the settled Christian answer, which the hyperbole argument in particular is often used for, as though Younger's work on Assyrian rhetoric closed the file. The other is to hand students a book they cannot respect, which is what happens when the only tool they are given is to declare passages wrong.

What can be stated as settled is narrower than either side wants. It is settled that the text attributes the command to God. It is settled that the text also reports the Canaanites surviving in large numbers, so the book is not describing a completed extermination. It is settled that Israel's own scripture applies the same sentence to Israel, which rules out reading the conquest as divine favouritism. It is settled that no serious reading in Christian history has treated this as a model for how the church acquires anything.

What is not settled is the central thing: whether a good God could command the killing of Canaanite children, and if not, what the text is doing when it says he did. Every position above pays a price at that point, and the price is the most useful thing to teach. Make your students able to state each answer in its own best words, and to name what it costs. A student who can do that is in a better place than a student who has been given a conclusion.

One last observation, offered without being turned into a solution. Joshua ends with a Canaanite prostitute inside Israel and with a nation warned that it will be treated exactly as the nations it displaced. Matthew's genealogy of Jesus lists Rahab and Ruth the Moabite. The trajectory of the canon runs from herem toward a Canaanite woman in Matthew 15 who out-argues Jesus about the bread of the children and is commended for it. That trajectory is real and it is the church's, and noticing it is not the same as explaining Deuteronomy 20. Hold both. The alternative is to teach a Bible with the hard pages glued together, and your students will find the glue eventually.