In our world today, the idea that men, women, and children ought to be slaughtered in God’s name is indefensible. In the Book of Joshua, however, herem is God’s main directive to the people of Israel. There is a common double standard in rhetoric used to condemn violence found in other religions’ sacred texts compared with violence found in the Bible. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, for example, there were many public denunciations of sanctioned violence in Islam based on certain passages of the Quran. Yet the Bible’s record on sanctioned violence is far from clean. It is important to be honest about the role violence has played in our own sacred texts and histories.
The Book of Joshua has been used to instigate and justify violence and conquest in many times and places throughout history, including the United States. In fact, Joshua’s theology of conquest was conceptually baked into America’s founding. When the Puritans set sail for America, they saw themselves as making an Exodus-like escape from religious oppression in 16th-century England. They believed the Americas were the “new promised land” (new to them, anyway) and the indigenous people already living there were the “new Canaanites.”
Some of the earliest settlers argued that they could not kill the indigenous people who already lived on the land before them because, unlike the Israelites, they had not been given an explicit divine command to do so. Yet when indigenous people became sick with smallpox, it was interpreted as a “divine act” giving them permission to claim the land for themselves. The colonists continued to use Joshua’s logic in order to justify forcibly taking land from the people who already lived there. All of this was done in the name of God and was inspired by the biblical text.
Many have attempted to explain away or even justify the divinely ordained violence Joshua describes. One long-standing argument that has been used to justify the conquest is the idea that the Canaanites were especially wicked, decadent, immoral, etc. This interpretation essentially doubles down on the villainization of the Canaanite people found elsewhere in the Bible. There is no archaeological evidence, however, to suggest that the Canaanites were any “worse” than other groups in that area during that time, including the Israelites.
Some have also argued that the violence in Joshua advances a moral view of history. Yet there is no indication in the Bible that anyone other than the Israelites (such as the Ammonites, Moabites, etc.) were expected to follow the Torah.
Others assert that the violence in this story is beside “the point,” which was only to preserve the distinctness of Israel. Killing one’s neighbors is a rather heavy-handed approach to ensuring your community and its culture remain distinct. Even if the storyteller’s goal was to preserve Israel’s distinctness and inspire the people to follow the law, one still wonders why they chose to make their point in such a violently hostile way.
A modern explanation of this text that can be heard in both classrooms and churches alike is that, not only did the conquest not historically happen, but the text itself is also clear that these violent events described in this story are not meant to repeat themselves ever again. The conquest story represents an attempt to make sense of the absence of the land of Israel’s original inhabitants, and possibly to push some of the moral weight of the conquest off of Israel’s shoulders and instead onto God.
There is an inherent ambiguity in biblical texts because they contain contradicting ideas and competing values. Exodus, for example, is heralded as a great story of liberation and has inspired generations of people to fight for justice in the face of systems designed to oppress and dehumanize. Yet it is important to remember that the story continues. By the time we reach the Book of Joshua, the tables have turned and the liberated people of Israel are now the ones conquering and slaughtering innocents.
There is often a desire to “redeem” or explain away aspects of a sacred text that make us feel uncomfortable or confused. Although this impulse is understandable, attempts to rationalize biblical violence can also be harmful and even dangerous. Especially given the role the book of Joshua has played in inspiring conquest and genocide throughout history, one wonders if we are doing a disservice to both the text and ourselves when we try to provide explanations and/or excuse its implications.
“One of the appeals of the Bible is not that it gives us great ideals to emulate, but that it shows how awful we are,” Dr. Collins concludes in the video. “We shouldn’t externalize blame and say ‘this doesn’t apply to us’ because what makes this Scripture, in a way, is that it is our story” [15:14]. At a minimum we must recognize that there is something fundamentally wrong with the story of the conquest and, especially, the values which undergird it. The moral problem cannot be explained away.