When most people read the Bible’s account of Israel wandering in the desert and eventually entering the land of Canaan, they hear it through the voice of the Israelites. It’s the story of God’s chosen people, promised a homeland, finally conquering their enemies. But what happens when we flip the script?
What if, instead of reading as an Israelite – or as a Christian – we step into the shoes of a Canaanite? What if your family, your city, your people were the ones wiped out in the name of someone else’s God? Suddenly, the story sounds very different.
The Moral Problem of Genocide
If God is truly loving and just, then commanding genocide is a direct contradiction. The biblical conquest narratives don’t describe a limited war against soldiers; they describe the total destruction of men, women, children, and even animals. Innocent lives were taken – not because of what they had done, but simply because of who they were.
How can a God who claims to be merciful also sanction mass slaughter?
A Double Standard
The Bible portrays the Canaanites as wicked and deserving of judgment. But if that was the standard, why wasn’t Israel held to the same measure? The Israelites themselves frequently fell into idolatry, injustice, and even child sacrifice. By their own scriptures, they were just as corrupt as their neighbors.
Why destroy one people for their sins while sparing another for the same behavior? The inconsistency suggests that morality here is not divine, but political.
Human Violence Projected Onto God
The ancient world was full of kings claiming their god had ordered them to destroy their enemies. Israel was not unique in this. The conquest stories fit the pattern of human wars dressed up in divine justification.
If that’s true, then what we see in Joshua and Deuteronomy is not the voice of God, but the voice of a nation writing its own history – and cloaking human violence in holy language.
Scripture Against Itself
Even within the Bible, there are passages that contradict the conquest theology.
- The prophets speak of God caring for all nations, not just Israel.
- Jonah shows us a God who has compassion even on Israel’s enemies.
- And in the New Testament, Jesus commands his followers to love their enemies, not annihilate them.
If Jesus reveals the true character of God, then genocide cannot be God’s will. The conquest stories become distortions of God’s nature, not revelations of it.
A Voice for the Victims
Imagine being a Canaanite mother in Jericho, watching soldiers slaughter your family while claiming it is the command of a “loving God.” To reduce your suffering to “God’s judgment” is to erase your humanity.
The Bible asks us to empathize with Israelites; justice demands we also empathize with those they destroyed.
The Canaanite Defense
The strongest argument in defense of the Canaanites is this:
If God truly commanded genocide, then God is not good. If God is good, then God did not command genocide.
This leaves us with two possibilities: 1. The conquest accounts are human propaganda, not divine command. 2. Or the God they describe is unworthy of worship.
Either way, the Canaanite perspective forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth: sometimes what people call “God’s will” is nothing more than human violence given a holy mask.