The conquest narratives in the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua contain some of the most morally challenging passages in the Hebrew Bible. According to these texts, God did not merely permit violence against the Canaanite peoples but explicitly commanded their total annihilation, using the Hebrew term herem, which means "devotion to destruction" or "the ban."1 The commands are specific and unambiguous: kill everyone, show no mercy, leave nothing alive that breathes. Unlike the flood narrative, where God acted directly, these passages present God ordering human beings to carry out the killing of men, women, children, and infants.2 This article examines what the biblical text actually says, the peoples targeted for destruction, the theological defenses offered, and the moral questions that remain.
The concept of herem
The Hebrew word herem (חֵרֶם) carries a specific meaning in the context of ancient Israelite warfare. The term derives from a root meaning "to ban" or "to devote," and in military contexts it refers to the complete destruction of a conquered people and their possessions as a sacred offering to God.1 When something was placed under herem, it was removed from ordinary human use and given entirely to the deity, typically by being destroyed.3
The practice appears in other ancient Near Eastern cultures, most notably in the Mesha Stele (c. 840 BCE), where King Mesha of Moab describes devoting Israelite captives to his god Chemosh through herem.4 The concept thus reflects a broader ancient Near Eastern practice of religious warfare, but what distinguishes the biblical accounts is their presentation as commands from the one true God, which gives them ongoing theological significance for communities that consider these texts authoritative.3
In the Hebrew Bible, herem warfare is not presented as a human decision or a cultural practice that God tolerated. It is presented as a direct divine command with divine enforcement. When the command was not fully obeyed, God punished the disobedience severely.5 The texts leave no ambiguity: God ordered the killing, God specified the targets, and God held his people accountable for complete obedience.
The explicit commands
The divine commands for herem warfare appear throughout Deuteronomy and Joshua. These are not ambiguous passages requiring creative interpretation; they are direct commands with explicit specifications about who must die.
Deuteronomy 7:1-2 establishes the general principle:
"When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you—and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy." Deuteronomy 7:1-2 (NIV)2
The Hebrew phrase translated "destroy them totally" is haharem taharim, an emphatic form of herem meaning "you shall utterly devote them to destruction."1
Deuteronomy 20:16-17 specifies the scope more precisely:
"However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded you." Deuteronomy 20:16-17 (NIV)6
The phrase "anything that breathes" (kol-neshamah) explicitly includes women, children, infants, and the elderly.7 This is not a command to defeat an army; it is a command to exterminate a population.
The text provides a rationale: "Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God" (Deuteronomy 20:18).6 The concern is religious contamination. But infants and young children cannot teach anything to anyone, and the rationale thus fails to justify their inclusion in the command.
The recorded conquests
The book of Joshua describes the execution of these commands against specific cities and populations. The accounts are detailed and explicit about the extent of the killing.
At Jericho, the first major conquest, Joshua 6:17-21 records:
"The city and all that is in it are to be devoted to the LORD... They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys." Joshua 6:17-21 (NIV)8
The text specifies "young and old" (minne'ar we'ad-zaqen), confirming that children and the elderly were killed alongside adults.9 The only exception was Rahab and her family, who had sheltered Israelite spies.8
At Ai, Joshua 8:24-26 records:
"When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai in the fields and in the wilderness where they had chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all the Israelites returned to Ai and killed those who were in it. Twelve thousand men and women fell that day—all the people of Ai. For Joshua did not draw back the hand that held out his javelin until he had destroyed all who lived in Ai." Joshua 8:24-26 (NIV)10
The total population of the city, 12,000 people, was killed.10
The northern campaign brought similar devastation. Joshua 11:10-12 describes the conquest of Hazor and surrounding cities:
"At that time Joshua turned back and captured Hazor and put its king to the sword. (Hazor had been the head of all these kingdoms.) Everyone in it they put to the sword. They totally destroyed them, not sparing anyone that breathed, and he burned Hazor itself. Joshua took all these royal cities and their kings and put them to the sword. He totally destroyed them, as Moses the servant of the LORD had commanded." Joshua 11:10-12 (NIV)11
Joshua 10:40 provides a summary statement of the southern campaign:
"So Joshua subdued the whole region, including the hill country, the Negev, the western foothills and the mountain slopes, together with all their kings. He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, as the LORD, the God of Israel, had commanded." Joshua 10:40 (NIV)12
The phrase "as the LORD, the God of Israel, had commanded" appears repeatedly, emphasizing that this was not Joshua's initiative but divine obedience.12
Major herem conquests recorded in Joshua8, 10, 11, 12
| City/Region | Passage | Stated casualties | Survivors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jericho | Joshua 6:17-21 | All inhabitants | Rahab's family only |
| Ai | Joshua 8:24-26 | 12,000 men and women | None |
| Makkedah | Joshua 10:28 | All inhabitants | None |
| Libnah | Joshua 10:29-30 | All inhabitants | None |
| Lachish | Joshua 10:31-32 | All inhabitants | None |
| Eglon | Joshua 10:34-35 | All inhabitants | None |
| Hebron | Joshua 10:36-37 | All inhabitants | None |
| Debir | Joshua 10:38-39 | All inhabitants | None |
| Hazor and northern cities | Joshua 11:10-12 | All inhabitants | None |
The Amalekite genocide
Perhaps the most explicit command for total destruction appears in 1 Samuel 15, where God orders Saul to commit genocide against the Amalekites. The passage is notable because it specifies infants and nursing babies, removes any ambiguity about the scope of the command, and records God's anger when the command was not fully obeyed.
1 Samuel 15:2-3 records the divine command through Samuel:
"This is what the LORD Almighty says: 'I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.'" 1 Samuel 15:2-3 (NIV)5
The Hebrew text specifies four age categories: 'ish (man), 'ishah (woman), 'olel (child/infant), and yoneq (nursing baby).13 The command to kill nursing babies leaves no room for claiming that only combatants were targeted.
Saul carried out the attack but made an exception: he spared King Agag and the best of the livestock:
"He took Agag king of the Amalekites alive, and all his people he totally destroyed with the sword. But Saul and the army spared Agag and the best of the sheep and cattle, the fat calves and lambs—everything that was good." 1 Samuel 15:8-9 (NIV)5
God's response was not gratitude for the partial mercy shown but anger at the incomplete obedience:
"Then the word of the LORD came to Samuel: 'I regret that I have made Saul king, because he has turned away from me and has not carried out my instructions.'" 1 Samuel 15:10-11 (NIV)5
When Samuel confronted Saul, he delivered this judgment: "Because you have rejected the word of the LORD, he has rejected you as king" (1 Samuel 15:23).5
Samuel then personally executed King Agag, completing the herem that Saul had left unfinished:
"Samuel said, 'As your sword has made women childless, so will your mother be childless among women.' And Samuel put Agag to death before the LORD at Gilgal" 1 Samuel 15:33 (NIV)5
The text presents Samuel's act of killing as an act of worship ("before the LORD") and as the fulfillment of divine will.
The theological implications are significant. Saul was not punished for killing too many people but for killing too few. Sparing even one life, the life of the king, was treated as a grave sin warranting the loss of his throne.14 The narrative presents complete genocide as the divine requirement and any mercy as disobedience.
The peoples marked for destruction
The biblical texts identify specific ethnic groups for herem warfare. Deuteronomy 7:1 names seven nations: "the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites."2 These peoples were to be completely destroyed, with no exceptions for age, gender, or individual virtue.6
The rationale provided is religious rather than military:
"Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods, and the LORD's anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you." Deuteronomy 7:3-4 (NIV)2
The concern is that contact with these peoples will lead Israel into idolatry.15
But this rationale creates a logical problem. If the concern is religious influence, then killing infants and small children serves no purpose since they cannot influence anyone's religious beliefs. A nursing baby cannot teach idolatry. A toddler cannot lead adults astray. Yet the commands include these children in the destruction. The stated rationale explains killing adults who might teach idolatrous practices; it does not explain killing children who cannot.
The Amalekites represent another case. God's stated reason for their destruction was an event from generations earlier: "I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt" (1 Samuel 15:2).5 This refers to events described in Exodus 17, when the Amalekites attacked the Israelites in the wilderness.16 But the command to Saul came centuries later, meaning the infants and nursing babies being killed had no connection to the original offense. They were being punished for their ancestors' actions, a form of collective punishment extending across generations.
Peoples commanded for herem destruction2, 5
Common theological defenses
Theologians and apologists have proposed various defenses of the herem commands. Each attempts to reconcile these texts with belief in a morally good God. Examining these defenses reveals significant problems with each approach.
The wickedness defense
The most common defense holds that the Canaanites were extraordinarily wicked, practicing child sacrifice, temple prostitution, and other abominations, and that their destruction was divine judgment on their sins. Deuteronomy 9:4-5 is often cited: "It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but on account of the wickedness of these nations, the LORD your God will drive them out before you."17
This defense faces an immediate problem: it cannot justify killing children. Even if Canaanite adults practiced every abomination imaginable, their infants and toddlers had done nothing wrong. The infant son of the most wicked Canaanite is morally innocent by any reasonable standard. Christian theology itself generally holds that young children are not morally culpable for sin, which is why many traditions affirm an "age of accountability" before which children who die are saved.18 Yet these same innocent children were commanded to be killed.
The wickedness defense also raises questions about proportionality. Even for guilty adults, is genocide a proportionate punishment? The most severe crimes in modern legal systems are punished by imprisonment or, at most, execution of the individual offender. The concept of killing an entire ethnic group, including all children, for the collective sins of some members has a name: genocide. The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."19 The herem commands fit this definition precisely.
The cultural context defense
Some defenders argue that these commands must be understood in their ancient Near Eastern context, where warfare was brutal and genocide was common. By ancient standards, the argument goes, Israel's conduct was unremarkable or even restrained compared to their neighbors.
This defense essentially argues that moral standards change over time and that God accommodated himself to the moral limitations of the age. But this creates significant theological problems. If God is the source of moral truth and if his moral character is unchanging, as traditional theology holds, then he should not command actions that are objectively wrong, regardless of what surrounding cultures practiced.20 The claim that God ordered genocide because genocide was culturally acceptable implies either that genocide was morally acceptable then (moral relativism) or that God commanded something objectively wrong (which undermines divine goodness).
Furthermore, the defense proves too much. Other ancient Near Eastern practices included slavery, the subjugation of women, and human sacrifice. If cultural context excuses divine commands for genocide, it could equally excuse any practice common in the ancient world. The argument provides no principled basis for distinguishing which ancient practices God genuinely commanded from which he merely tolerated from which remain binding today.
The mercy defense
A variation of the mercy argument applied to the flood appears here as well. Some apologists suggest that killing Canaanite children was an act of mercy because it spared them from growing up in a wicked culture and sent them immediately to heaven. On this view, early death was a benefit to the children killed.
This defense has the same fatal flaw noted in the flood article: if killing children before they can sin guarantees their salvation, then the most loving act a parent could perform would be to kill their children in infancy. The logic, consistently applied, would justify killing all children everywhere, since some percentage would otherwise grow up to reject God and face damnation. Christians universally reject this conclusion, which indicates that they do not actually accept the premise.21
Moreover, the manner of death matters. Being killed by the sword is not a peaceful passing. Ancient warfare involved bladed weapons, and death by sword was typically bloody, painful, and terrifying.22 The terror experienced by children watching their parents killed before being killed themselves cannot be described as mercy by any reasonable definition of the term.
The hyperbole defense
Some scholars and apologists argue that the conquest narratives use hyperbolic language common in ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts and should not be taken literally. On this view, "destroy everything that breathes" was a conventional way of describing military victory, not a literal command for genocide.23
This interpretation has support from the text itself. Despite statements that Joshua "totally destroyed" various peoples, those same peoples appear alive and well in later biblical books. Judges 1:21 notes that "the Benjamites failed to dislodge the Jebusites, who were living in Jerusalem; to this day the Jebusites live there with the Benjamites."24 If the Jebusites were completely destroyed, they could not be living in Jerusalem. This suggests that the conquest language may indeed be hyperbolic.25
However, the hyperbole defense does not fully resolve the moral problem. Even if the conquests were less complete than described, the commands themselves remain. God (according to the text) commanded that nothing that breathes be left alive, even if the Israelites did not fully obey. The moral question is not only about what happened historically but about what God allegedly commanded. If a father tells his son to kill all the neighbor's children but the son only kills half, the father's command remains morally abhorrent regardless of the degree of obedience.26
Furthermore, the 1 Samuel 15 account is difficult to read as hyperbole. The narrative turns on the distinction between killing almost everyone and killing absolutely everyone. If "totally destroy" was merely hyperbolic, Saul's sparing of Agag should have been unremarkable. Instead, it is treated as a grave sin worthy of losing the kingdom. This suggests the text means what it says: complete destruction was required.5
The divine sovereignty defense
The most philosophically sophisticated defense argues that God, as the creator and sustainer of all life, has the sovereign right to take life whenever and however he chooses. Since God gives life, he may justly take it. On this view, what would be murder if commanded by a human is righteous obedience when commanded by God.27
This defense encounters the Euthyphro dilemma discussed in the flood article. If actions are good simply because God commands them, then "good" becomes a meaningless term equivalent to "divinely willed." Killing children would be good if God commands it; saving children would be evil if God forbids it. Morality becomes entirely arbitrary, contingent not on any intrinsic quality of actions but solely on divine fiat.28
Divine command theory, which grounds morality in God's commands, faces this objection directly.28 If God's commands define goodness, then there is no independent standard by which to evaluate whether God is good. The statement "God is good" becomes the empty tautology "God does what God commands." Most theists resist this conclusion by insisting that God would never command evil because God's nature is good. But this response concedes that there is a standard of goodness to which even God's commands must conform—and that standard can then be used to evaluate the herem commands.29
The archaeological evidence
The archaeological evidence for the conquest of Canaan does not support the biblical narrative of a sudden, violent destruction of Canaanite cities. This is relevant because it suggests the herem commands may describe an idealized or legendary conquest rather than actual historical events.30
Archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, former director of the Tel Aviv University Institute of Archaeology, has argued that the evidence points to a gradual Israelite emergence from within Canaan rather than an external conquest. The highland settlements that appear in the archaeological record around 1200 BCE show cultural continuity with Canaanite material culture, suggesting the early Israelites were themselves Canaanites rather than foreign invaders.30
William Dever, professor emeritus at the University of Arizona and a leading Syro-Palestinian archaeologist, similarly concludes that "most of those who came to identify themselves as 'Israelites' were originally Canaanites."31 The archaeological evidence shows no destruction layers corresponding to the conquest narrative at most of the sites mentioned in Joshua.31
Jericho presents a particular problem. The site shows no evidence of habitation during the period when the conquest would have occurred (late 13th or early 12th century BCE). The famous walls of Jericho, if they existed, fell centuries before the Israelite period.30 Similar problems exist for Ai, which was uninhabited during the proposed conquest period—its name, in fact, means "the ruin" in Hebrew, suggesting it was already destroyed long before any conquest.30
This archaeological evidence is relevant to the moral question in a complex way. On one hand, if the conquest did not happen as described, then the infants and children were not actually killed, which is a relief. On the other hand, even if the events are legendary, the texts present God as the kind of being who would command the killing of children—and millions of people have worshipped this God as morally perfect for millennia. The question shifts from "Did this happen?" to "What kind of God is portrayed here, and should such a God be worshipped?"26
The moral question
The herem texts present a portrait of God that is difficult to reconcile with the concept of moral perfection. The commands are explicit: kill everyone, including children and infants. The enforcement is severe: Saul lost his kingdom for showing mercy to one man. The scope is ethnic: entire peoples are marked for extermination based on their identity.
By the standards of modern moral reasoning and international law, what the herem texts describe is genocide.19 The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines the crime as acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group," specifically including "killing members of the group" and "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction."19 The herem commands fit every element of this definition.
The texts do not present this as human initiative that God tolerates; they present it as direct divine command. The phrase "as the LORD, the God of Israel, had commanded" appears repeatedly in Joshua, attributing the killing directly to God's will.12 The punishment of Saul for incomplete obedience confirms that partial mercy was worse, in God's eyes, than complete killing.5
This creates a dilemma for anyone who holds both that God is morally perfect and that these texts accurately represent God's commands. Either the commands are not actually from God (which raises questions about biblical authority), or genocide can be morally good when God commands it (which makes morality arbitrary), or the commonly held view of God as morally perfect must be revised.
Some Christians resolve this by adopting progressive revelation, holding that earlier biblical texts reflect a more primitive understanding of God that was corrected by later revelation, culminating in Jesus.32 On this view, the herem texts tell us more about ancient Israelite beliefs than about God's actual character. This approach preserves moral coherence but requires acknowledging that not all biblical texts accurately represent God—a conclusion that conservative approaches to biblical authority resist.
Others resolve the dilemma by biting the bullet: if God commanded it, it was good by definition, regardless of how it appears to human moral intuition. This approach preserves biblical authority but at the cost of making morality incomprehensible. If killing infants can be good when God commands it, then "good" no longer has any connection to human wellbeing, justice, or compassion. The word becomes meaningless except as a synonym for "divinely willed."28
The herem texts thus force a choice: between moral coherence and certain forms of biblical authority, between human moral intuition and divine command theory, between a God recognizable as good and a God whose goodness is defined by power alone. Different readers will resolve this tension differently, but the tension itself is unavoidable for anyone who takes both morality and these texts seriously.