In her book Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again, Rachel Held Evans says that growing up, she was firmly told not to question any part of scripture, and to believe that if the Bible depicts God doing or saying a thing, that thing is just, even when it sounds unjust to us:
“But accepting the Bible’s war stories without objection threatened to erase my humanity. ‘We don’t become more spiritual by becoming less human,’ Eugene Peterson said. How could I love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength while disengaging those very faculties every time I read the Bible?
So I brought my whole self into the wilderness with God – no faking, no halfway. And there we wrestled.”
Honestly, I’m concerned for anyone who reads through the Book of Joshua without being disturbed. As Daniel Delgado describes it:
“The Book of Joshua can be a tough read for many reasons. Not least of these is its very premise: G-d has commanded the Israelites (our ancestors!) to conquer the land of Canaan, exterminate the original inhabitants, and establish complete demographic and political domination. The text glorifies this sacred mission, at times seeming to revel in xenophobic brutality.”
This text does put genocidal commands in God’s mouth, and we should be deeply troubled by this fact — especially given the ways Joshua’s been weaponized to justify violence throughout the centuries.
If you recognize that there are many, many places in the Hebrew Bible where God is depicted as loving and a defender of the oppressed, it’s not antisemitic to recognize places where God is depicted otherwise; Jewish scholars and readers also notice and wrestle with these places! As the fantastic Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg explains,
It is the responsibility of all of us who have Joshua as part of our sacred canon to wrestle with the book and its fruits.
“We cannot pretend that this massive narrative arc is not here. We cannot pretend that it has not done innumerable damage to many peoples and places over the course of history.”
This isn’t to say that everyone has to do that Right Now As Fast As We Can. The best way to unpack heavy parts of Bible and faith is in community, and/or working slowly with lots of space for rest and reflection, interspersed with reminders of the good news of God in scripture, Creation, and in human relationship.
That being said, what follows are places to begin, looking at:
Joshua’s history of harm;
the sociohistorical context of Joshua;
and finally considering what good news can be wrestled out of the text.
Key examples of Joshua’s harmful recent history:
- 1200s: Louis IX constructed himself as a new Joshua, depicting Joshua as a fellow crusader ordained by God to “tame” the Holy Land, and Louis IX as part of that same Salvation history ordained to do likewise.
. - 1800s and Manifest Destiny: In Undoing Manifest Destiny, Daniel Hawk devotes a chapter to Joshua, explaining that “…the scripts of the Canaanite conquest and those against the Indigenous people of North America are nearly identical. For example, both narratives outline an invasion under a divine mandate, the use of mass violence against Indigenous peoples, and the reshaping of the land with new boundaries and memorials after it is emptied. Both narratives feature outsiders who play the role of Indigenous helpers. (In the American story, we have Pocahontas and Sacagawea; in Joshua, there is Rahab.) In both accounts, any remaining Indigenous populations that do not assimilate ought to be removed or relocated in order to safeguard settler populations.”
. - 1900s-today: “No biblical text has been more central to the politics of modern Israel than the book of Joshua.” Like settlers in the US, and drawing from the Zionist ideology first developed by imperial Britain in the 1800s (see chapter 1 of Decolonizing Palestine), Israeli settlers construct(ed) themselves as God’s chosen people and the people of the land they claim(ed) as “Canaanites,” in order to describe their settlements not only as acceptable but God-ordained.
. - Since October 2023: This ideology has been repeated over and over to justify the escalated violence and genocide of the Palestinian people.
So yes, we should be disturbed by this “text of terror” and its fruits. …And we can simultaneously put it in its sociohistorical context.
Two great accessible resources sharing this history are:
Summing up their main points:
- The genocide described in Joshua did not happen. There is no archeological evidence of such a mass murder; in fact, evidence points to Israelites settling in places with no ruins underneath them — i.e. they didn’t take over villages, they built fresh ones.
What is more, other books in the Bible and extra-biblical ancient texts talk of the Canaanites long after the supposed genocide Joshua describes!
. - We just don’t have the textual and archeological evidence to make conclusive theories, but Ruttenberg offers a couple that have nothing to do with invasion and mass murder: One is that the Israelites and Canaanites were once one ethinic group, with Israelites eventually settling outside original settlements. Or, similarly, Ruttenberg quotes Dr. Tzemah Yoreh with another option being “that they came from somewhere very early on, and settled [in these villages], and that there were wars, but not the genocidal ones posited by the biblical story, and that they were not conclusive ones. [The process was one of a g]radual settling over many generations, so [in many or most senses they were] virtually indistinguishable from the Canaanites.”
. - So…why did the authors of Joshua write this story of divinely-mandated invasion and slaughter?
One theory is that Joshua was written after Assyria had wiped the Northern Kingdom of Israel out completely, and after Babylon then swooped in, which would soon lead to the devastation of the Southern Kingdom of Judah and exile of royal and scholarly Judaeans to Babylon..
So Joshua’s authors living many centuries after the Joshua conquest narrative purportedly takes place, by an extremely traumatized people trying to make sense of empires’ conquest of them. Looking back on the “glorious” days when God let them be the conquerors is a trauma fantasy that offers a sense of identity and control where they had lost both those things. It by no means justifies it, but helps explain it.
In this case, Joshua also serves as “evidence” that the land truly does belong to the Judaeans by divine right — Assyrian and Babylonian conquerers, get the heck out! As Ruttenberg puts it: “in the face of threats from the mighty Assyrian Empire…the folks at Monarchy Central sought to […create] a militaristic narrative that could bring about a unified, nationalistic reality.”
So there’s some context that explains — though not justifies — this hyperbolically violent, militaristic nationalistic narrative.
____
So…what blessings might we wrestle out of Joshua?
Daniel Delgado offers a relational lens for wrestling with Joshua, first explaining that:
How do we make sense of this [conquest narrative]? For myself, I find satisfaction neither in ignoring it, nor in dismissing it as ahistorical (and then ignoring it), nor in simply rejecting it as abhorrent (and then ignoring it).
Sacred words demand attention. They are given to us—whether by the mouth of Divinity or the hands and voices of our ancestors—with something to teach.
He goes on to consider the conquest story as Warning: “If the Conquest Narrative is part of our Origin Myth, what does it tell us about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going?” … “ If we recognize the holiness of our “disgust and horror” at the Conquest Narrative, what can it teach us?”
Rachel Held Evans considers the Conquest narrative (and other biblical “war stories” from a similar angle:
It’s not always clear what we are meant to learn from the Bible’s most troubling stories, but if we simply look away, we learn nothing. …
If the Bible’s texts of terror compel us to face with fresh horror and resolve the ongoing oppression and exploitation of women, then perhaps these stories do not trouble us in vain. Perhaps we can use them for some good.
[…Second,] we are not as different from the ancient Israelites as we would like to believe.
‘It was a violent and tribal culture,’ people like to say of ancient Israel to explain away its actions in Canaan. But, as Joshua Ryan Butler astutely observed, when it comes to civilian casualties, 'we tend to hold the ancients to a much higher standard than we hold ourselves.’ In the time it took me to write this chapter, nearly one thousand civilians were killed in airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, many of them women and children. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki took hundreds of thousands of lives in World War II, and far more civilians died in the Korean War and Vietnam War than American soldiers. Even though America is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, it takes in less than half of 1 percent of the world’s refugees, and drone warfare has left many thousands of families across the Middle East terrorized.
This is not to excuse Israel’s violence, because modern-day violence is also bad, nor is it to trivialize debates over just war theory and US involvement in various historical conflicts, which are complex issues far beyond the scope of this book. Rather, it ought to challenge us to engage the Bible’s war stories with a bit more humility and introspection, willing to channel some of our horror over atrocities past into questioning elements of the war machines that still roll on today.“
Held Evans ends with a message on wrestling scripture that closes this too-long answer fittingly:
The truth is, I’ve yet to find an explanation for the Bible’s war stories that I find completely satisfying. If we view this through Occam’s razor and choose the simplest solution to the problem, we might conclude that the ancient Israelites invented a deity to justify their conquests and keep their people in line. As such, then, the Bible isn’t a holy book with human fingerprints; it’s an entirely human construction, responsible for more vice than virtue.
There are days when that’s what I believe, days when I mumble through the hymns and creeds at church because I’m not convinced they say anything true.
And then there are days when the Bible pulls me back with a numinous force I can only regard as divine, days when Hagar and Deborah and Rahab reach out from the page, grab me by the face, and say, “Pay attention. This is for you.”
I’m in no rush to patch up these questions. God save me from the day when stories of violence, rape, and ethnic cleansing inspire within me anything other than revulsion. I don’t want to become a person who is unbothered by these texts, and if Jesus is who he says he is, then I don’t think he wants me to be either.
There are parts of the Bible that inspire, parts that perplex, and parts that leave you with an open wound. I’m still wrestling, and like Jacob, I will wrestle until I am blessed. God hasn’t let go of me yet.
War is a dreadful and storied part of the human experience, and Scripture captures many shades of it—from the chest-thumping of the victors to the anguished cries of victims. There is ammunition there for those seeking religious justification for violence, and solidarity for all the mothers like Rizpah who just want an end to it.
For those of us who prefer to keep the realities of war at a safe, sanitized distance, and who enjoy the luxury of that choice, the Bible’s war stories force a confrontation with the darkness.
Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”
