How Did Israel Conquer Canaan? (6 of 15)

This is the section of the Old Testament people most often get stuck on, and the difficulty is real rather than a misreading.

It is worth going through what the text says before deciding what to do about it.

How Did the Conquest Begin?

With a river crossing that deliberately echoed the sea.

Josh 3-4. The Jordan is at flood stage. The priests carrying the ark step into the water and it stops upstream, and the nation crosses on dry ground.

The parallel is intentional and the text draws it: the Lord did to the Jordan what he did to the Red Sea. One crossing took them out of Egypt, the other takes them into the land, and the generation that refused at the border is gone.

Twelve stones are taken from the riverbed and set up at Gilgal, with instructions about what to tell children who ask what they mean.

Then circumcision, then Passover, then the manna stops the day after they eat the produce of the land. The wilderness provision ends because it is no longer needed.

Who Was Rahab?

A Canaanite prostitute in Jericho who hid the spies and was spared.

Josh 2. She hides them on her roof, misdirects the search, and negotiates terms: kindness for her family in exchange for the kindness she is showing.

Her statement in Josh 2:9-11 is a confession. She has heard what the Lord did at the Red Sea and to the Amorite kings, everyone’s hearts have melted, and she concludes that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth below.

The scarlet cord in her window marks the house, and her whole household is spared when the city falls.

She then appears in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus, and in Heb 11 among the examples of faith.

The city that was destroyed contained one family that was not, and it was the family of a Canaanite woman who had drawn the right conclusion from the evidence.

What Happened at Jericho?

Six days of silent circuits, then seven on the seventh day, then a shout.

Josh 6. The instructions are strange by any military standard. March around once a day for six days with the ark and seven priests with trumpets, in silence. On the seventh day, march seven times, and at the trumpet blast the people shout.

The walls collapse and the city is taken.

The point of the method is that it is not a method. Nothing in the procedure could plausibly bring down a wall, which is the reason for the procedure.

What Was Achan’s Sin?

Taking devoted things, and the defeat at Ai that followed.

Josh 7. Jericho had been placed under the ban, meaning everything in it was devoted to God rather than to plunder. Achan takes a robe, silver, and gold, and hides them under his tent.

Israel then attacks the small town of Ai with a fraction of its force and is routed. Joshua tears his clothes and asks why.

The answer is that Israel has sinned, stated corporately before the individual is identified. The investigation narrows by tribe, clan, and household, and Achan confesses.

The execution includes his household, which is one of the harder passages in the book, and the place is named the Valley of Achor, meaning trouble. Hosea later takes that name and turns it into a door of hope.

Ai is then taken on the second attempt with a different strategy.

Did the Sun Stand Still?

Josh 10 says so, and the interpretation is genuinely disputed.

During the southern campaign Joshua speaks the words about the sun standing still over Gibeon and the moon over Aijalon, and the text says the sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day.

Readings include a straightforward miracle affecting the earth’s rotation, a local optical or atmospheric phenomenon, an extension of usable light, and a poetic or omen-language reading where the request concerns the celestial bodies withholding influence rather than motion.

The passage also notes that it is quoting the Book of Jashar, a source that no longer exists.

I do not think this one is settled and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Why Is the Conquest So Difficult?

Because the language of total destruction is in the text and cannot be removed from it.

That should be stated plainly rather than managed. Commands to devote cities to destruction, including their inhabitants, are present and they are attributed to God.

Several considerations are usually brought, and each carries some weight without dissolving the problem.

The delay in Gen 15:16, where Abraham is told his descendants will return in the fourth generation because the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure, frames the conquest as judgment on a specific and long-warned population rather than as ethnic clearance.

The practices attributed to Canaanite religion in the texts, including child sacrifice, are given as the grounds, and Israel is warned repeatedly that the same fate awaits them if they do the same, which happens.

Ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts routinely used totalising language that the same documents then contradict, and Joshua itself does this. Cities are described as utterly destroyed and then reappear as occupied, and Judges opens with substantial populations remaining.

And the Rahab account, placed at the very start, establishes that the ban was not absolute in the way the summary language implies. Anyone who joined Israel lived.

John Walton pushes that further and argues the ban was never about killing in the first place. On his reading herem targets identity rather than genetics. The objective is to remove Canaanite communal identity from the land, and death is one way of accomplishing that rather than the point of it.

Rahab is the test case, and Walton’s line on her is the sharpest thing in the discussion. She is not an exception to the herem. She is the embodiment of it. She abandons her Canaanite identity, joins Israel, lives among them, and marries into the line that runs to David and to Jesus. The identity she represented is gone, which is what the ban was for, so destroying her person would accomplish nothing.

The Gibeonites are the instructive contrast. Their persons are removed from ordinary use, assigned to the sanctuary as woodcutters and water carriers, but their communal identity survives, and 2 Sam 21 still calls them survivors of the Amorites rather than part of Israel. That unfinished business causes trouble for centuries. When Saul later tries to finish the job by killing Gibeonite individuals, he accomplishes nothing, breaks a treaty, and brings judgment on himself.

Walton is candid that conversion was not the expected outcome any more than killing was. The objective was the removal of those identities from the land, by one route or another.

None of that makes the passages comfortable. It does mean that reading them as a general licence, which they have been used for, misreads them at every level, including the level of what the text itself reports happening.

How Does Joshua End?

With a covenant renewal and a choice.

Josh 24 at Shechem. He rehearses the whole history, from Abraham’s father beyond the river through the exodus and the conquest, and then puts the decision to them.

Choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living. As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.

The people agree, and Joshua’s response is unexpected. He tells them they are not able to serve the Lord, because he is a holy God and will not forgive their rebellion. They insist. He makes them witnesses against themselves and sets up a stone.

The book of Judges then demonstrates that Joshua was right.

Part of a series following the Old Testament timeline.

Footnotes2

1. Rahab's placement at the start of the conquest narrative is structurally deliberate. Before a single city falls, the reader is shown a Canaanite who hears the evidence, draws the conclusion, and is preserved along with her whole household. Whatever the ban meant, it did not mean what a flat reading of the summary statements would suggest.
2. Joshua telling the people they are unable to serve the Lord, immediately after they have committed to doing so, is one of the strangest moments in the book. It is not encouragement and it is not a formality. It reads as a warning delivered by a man who has watched this nation for forty years.

Sources

The biblical texts cited: Josh 2-24, especially 2:9-11, 6, 7, 10:12-14, and 24:14-27, along with Gen 15:16, Hos 2:15, Matt 1:5, and Heb 11:31.

John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton, The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest (IVP Academic, 2017). Supports the reading of herem as targeting communal identity rather than genetics, the treatment of Rahab as the embodiment of the ban rather than an exception, the Gibeonite contrast, and the Saul episode in 2 Sam 21. Supplied in full.

Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide? (Baker Books, 2014), 103. Supports the account of ancient Near Eastern conquest rhetoric as hyperbolic summary language.

Barton Priebe, "Why Is the Old Testament God so Violent?" in Everyday Apologetics, ed. Paul Chamberlain and Chris Price (Lexham Press, 2020), 92-93. Supports the Thutmose III parallel and the internal contradictions in Joshua, including the Anakites destroyed in chapter 11 and driven out again in chapter 14.

Where the sourcing stops: the long-day account in Josh 10 has several serious readings and I have listed them without adopting one. The observation about totalising language in ancient conquest accounts is a standard scholarly point and is offered as context rather than as a complete answer to the moral difficulty, which I do not think it is.