Reading the Old Testament Wars Without Flinching

Your kid comes home from camp, opens to Joshua 6 because somebody dared him to, and hits the part where Jericho gets burned and nothing inside it survives. Then he looks up at you. You've got about four seconds before whatever you say becomes the thing he remembers about God and violence for the next twenty years.

Don't bluff. Don't change the subject to the Sermon on the Mount. And please don't say "that was the Old Testament," because he can read a table of contents and he knows it's the same Book.

Start by admitting the obvious: these passages are hard on purpose. They were hard for Augustine. They're hard for every pastor who has ever preached through Joshua. If your first instinct is to flinch, that instinct isn't unbelief. It's a conscience, and Scripture itself is what trained it.

Read what it actually says, not the summary

Deuteronomy 7:1-2 in the ESV: "When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you... then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them."

That's the command. Seven named nations, one specific piece of territory, one moment in history.

Two chapters later, the same book tells Israel exactly how to understand it. Deuteronomy 9:5, ESV: "Not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart are you going in to possess their land, but because of the wickedness of these nations the LORD your God is driving them out from before you."

Israel isn't the hero of this story. Israel is the instrument, and the text goes out of its way to strip the Israelites of any sense that they've earned the land. That single verse rules out the reading most skeptics arrive with, which is that this is a tribal deity blessing his favorite ethnic group. It's the opposite. It's a judgment, and Israel is told in advance not to get comfortable.

The clock had been running for centuries

Back in Genesis 15:16, God tells Abraham his descendants will return in the fourth generation, "for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete." Four hundred years of delay, written into the promise. Leviticus 18 describes what filled that cup: child sacrifice among the practices that made the land "vomit out its inhabitants."

And here's the part that settles whether this is favoritism. Israel gets the same treatment. The northern kingdom falls to Assyria. Judah goes into exile in Babylon. Amos 3:2, ESV: "You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities." Same land, same God, same standard, applied to His own covenant people with no discount.

Abraham had already established the principle when he argued with God over Sodom in Genesis 18:25: "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?" That question isn't rebuked. It's honored. The Bible invites the objection you're already making.

Ancient war reports didn't work like CNN

Joshua 10:40 says Joshua "struck the whole land" and "left none remaining." Three chapters later, in Joshua 13:1, God tells him, "there remains yet very much land to possess." Then Judges opens with a long list of Canaanite cities Israel never cleared out.

That's not a contradiction the editor missed. Total-victory language was the standard idiom of the ancient Near East. The Mesha Stele, a basalt slab dug up at Dhiban in Jordan in 1868 and now sitting in the Louvre, has the Moabite king Mesha boasting that he devoted an entire Israelite town to his god and killed everyone in it. Kings talked like that. It was the sports-page hyperbole of the Iron Age.

This is where sincere Christians land in different places, and you should say so out loud. One camp reads the conquest language as deliberate overstatement, with the real operation being the dismantling of Canaanite city-states and the driving out of their populations. Paul Copan's Is God a Moral Monster? makes that case at length. Another camp reads the commands straightforwardly and rests the whole weight on God's right as Judge to end human lives He gave. Both camps hold a high view of Scripture. Neither is dodging.

I'll tell you my hesitation with the first view: it helps a lot with Jericho and Ai, and it helps less with 1 Samuel 15, where Saul is told to strike Amalek and spare nothing, down to the livestock. You can soften the rhetoric. You can't make that verse comfortable, and you shouldn't pretend to.

What you can do is read Deuteronomy 25:17-19, where the Amalekites are remembered as the raiders who picked off the stragglers at the back of the column. The faint. The exhausted. Amalek wasn't a random nation. It was the one that hunted the weak.

Mercy is written into the same chapters

Deuteronomy 20 requires Israel to offer terms of peace to a city before besieging it. The Canaanite cities are the exception, and the reason given is spiritual contamination, not blood.

Then watch what happens when Canaanites actually respond. Rahab hides the spies, and not only survives but ends up in Matthew's genealogy of Jesus. The Gibeonites talk their way into a treaty with a stunt involving moldy bread and worn-out sandals, and Israel honors it. Joshua 11:19 notes that no city made peace with Israel except the Hivites of Gibeon, which tells you something important: peace was available, and it was taken.

The door was never nailed shut. People walked through it.

What it doesn't license, ever

Here's the line no Christian gets to blur. That command was given to one nation, under a covenant that no longer operates that way, for one stretch of land, at one moment. Nobody inherits it. No modern army, no movement, no country.

When James and John asked Jesus to call down fire on a Samaritan village, Luke 9 records that He turned and rebuked them. Matthew 5:44, ESV: "But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." Paul closes the matter in 2 Corinthians 10:4: "the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh." The Church has never been given a sword. It's been given a table and a baptismal font.

Any man who reads Joshua and comes away feeling authorized has read it upside down.

Sitting across from your kid

Four things that work better than a lecture.

• Name the discomfort before he does. "Yeah. That one's brutal. I've thought about it a lot." You lose him the second he suspects you're spinning.
• Make him read the surrounding chapters aloud. Not the verse. The book. Deuteronomy 9:5 and Genesis 15:16 do more work than any argument you'll construct.
• Separate what happened from what's commanded. The Bible reports polygamy, betrayal, and butchery without endorsing any of it. Teach him to ask which mode a passage is in.
• Say where you're not certain. "Some solid Christians read the numbers as hyperbole. Some don't. I lean one way. I could be wrong." That sentence buys you more credibility than a hundred airtight answers.

He doesn't need you to win. He needs to see that a grown man can hold a hard text, turn it over, refuse to lie about it, and still kneel.

The God who ordered Jericho is the God who walked into Jerusalem on a donkey and let the sword fall on Himself instead. Hold both. That's the whole faith.