Why did God command the killing of the Canaanites?

Naming the Difficulty Honestly

This is the objection that has driven people out of the faith, and it deserves to be stated at full strength rather than softened. In Deuteronomy 20:16–17 and the book of Joshua, God appears to command Israel to destroy entire Canaanite cities. Richard Dawkins called it genocide. Many thoughtful believers have privately wondered the same thing.

What follows is not a tidy resolution. There are serious responses, some quite strong, and a residue of genuine difficulty that honest Christians acknowledge. Anyone who tells you this is easy is not reading carefully.

1. The Conflict Is Framed as Judgment, Not Ethnicity

The text is explicit that this is not about racial superiority or land greed. God tells Abraham the conquest must wait roughly four hundred years because "the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure" (Genesis 15:16) — an extraordinary statement of delayed judgment. And Israel is warned repeatedly that they are not favoured and face identical judgment for identical behaviour: "It is not because of your righteousness... After the LORD your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself, 'The LORD has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness'" (Deuteronomy 9:4–6). This warning was later carried out — Israel was itself conquered and exiled for the same practices.

What practices? Archaeological and textual evidence indicates Canaanite religion included child sacrifice — the burning of infants to Molech, condemned throughout Scripture (Leviticus 18:21, Deuteronomy 12:31, Jeremiah 32:35) and attested outside it in accounts of related Phoenician practice. Whatever one concludes, the biblical framing is judicial: this is presented as judgment on a specific society for specific atrocities, at a specific moment, not a general licence.

2. The Language May Be Ancient Warfare Rhetoric

This is where recent scholarship has meaningfully changed the discussion. Scholars including Richard Hess, K. Lawson Younger, and Paul Copan have documented that ancient Near Eastern battle reports routinely used sweeping hyperbole — total-destruction language as a conventional way of describing a decisive victory. Egypt's Merneptah Stele declares "Israel is laid waste, his seed is not," centuries before Israel ceased to exist.

The internal evidence points the same way. Joshua 10:40 says Joshua "left no survivors" in the whole region — and then Joshua 15–17 and Judges 1 describe those same peoples still living there in large numbers. Joshua 10:38–39 destroys Debir; Joshua 15:15 takes Debir again. Either the book contradicts itself within a few chapters, or the totalising language was understood by its original audience as conventional overstatement, the way "we annihilated them" describes a football match today.

Additionally, the sites named — Jericho, Ai, Hazor — appear from the archaeology to have been small military and administrative outposts rather than population centres. The conquest may have been considerably more limited than the rhetoric suggests.

3. Driving Out, Not Wiping Out

The dominant verb in the conquest texts is not "kill" but yarash and garash — dispossess, drive out (Exodus 23:28–30, Deuteronomy 7:1). The stated goal is the removal of a religious system from the land, not the extermination of a people. Individual Canaanites who aligned with Israel were not merely spared but absorbed and honoured: Rahab of Jericho is protected with her whole household and appears in the genealogy of Jesus himself (Matthew 1:5). Ruth, a Moabite, becomes the great-grandmother of King David. That is difficult to square with an ethnic-cleansing reading.

4. A Unique, Bounded, Non-Repeatable Event

Whatever the conquest was, Scripture treats it as a one-time act of judgment tied to a specific covenant moment — not a model. There is no biblical warrant for religious violence afterward; Israel is never authorised to conquer beyond that context. In the New Testament the trajectory reverses entirely: "Love your enemies" (Matthew 5:44), "all who draw the sword will die by the sword" (Matthew 26:52), and "the weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world" (2 Corinthians 10:4). Christians who have used these texts to justify violence have misused them badly, and the history of that misuse is a real stain.

What Remains Genuinely Hard

Even granting all of the above, difficulty remains, and it should be named:

• Even hyperbolic language describes real violence with real casualties.
• Children in those cities did not choose their society's practices, and no framework fully resolves that.
• "God has knowledge we lack" is a coherent answer, but it is an appeal to trust rather than an explanation, and it should be offered as such.

The historic Christian position is not that this is easy but that it must be weighed against the whole: the same God is disclosed most fully in a Messiah who refuses violence, heals the servant of his own arresting officer, and dies rather than defend himself. If Jesus is the clearest picture of God's character — as Christianity claims (Hebrews 1:3, John 14:9) — then the conquest texts have to be read in that light, not the other way round.

If you are weighing Christianity and this is your sticking point, you are in serious company. It has been debated for two millennia and the debate is live. It deserves an honest wrestle, not a slogan from either direction.

"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.' But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." — Matthew 5:43–44