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95 chapTer 7 confronting canaanite Genocide and its Toxic afterlife The problem is that the book [of Joshua] endorses, and even promotes the kinds of attitudes and practices that have generated violence and suffering on a massive scale. The story the book tells—of conquest, extermination, and dispossession—is all too familiar to a world reeling from waves of genocidal violence and recovering from the effects of colonial imperialism. Some of these programs of conquest and exclusion have been aided and abetted by Christians who have imitated what they have read in the biblical story. —L. Daniel Hawk1 by any standard of measure, the narrative describing the conquest of Canaan in Joshua 6–11 is one of the most morally troubling texts in the entire Old Testament. Historically, it has also been one of the most toxic. This text has had an extremely harmful afterlife and has been used to provide religious rationale for some of the most heinous acts of violence in human history. People have repeatedly utilized the conquest narrative to justify colonialism and its attendant evils of warfare, killing, theft, and dispossession.2 As Eryl Davies puts it: “What this text has ‘done’ is to justify colonialism and exploitation, and to bring untold suffering to countless communities resulting, in some cases, in their virtual annihilation as a people.”3 This narrative has also created enormous theological problems for Christians who have struggled to reconcile its image of a merciless, genocidal God with other images of God in Scripture. After all, what kind of God would order the 96 The Violence of Scripture ruthless and indiscriminate slaughter of Canaanite men, women, and children? If there was ever a text begging to be read nonviolently, this is it! calling a Spade a Spade: it is Genocide The conquest narrative in Joshua 6–11 is regarded as the fulfillment of the divine promise to Abraham that he and his descendants would one day possess the land of Canaan. As the story goes, all of Abraham’s descendants travel to Egypt, where they are eventually enslaved. They cry out to God for help, and God selects Moses to be their deliverer. Speaking from the midst of a burning bush, God tells Moses: “I have come down to deliver them [the Israelites] from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land . . . to the country of the Canaanites” (Exod. 3:8). Although the Israelites are to inherit land occupied by others (Exod. 3:8, 17), nothing is said at this point about the fate of the indigenous population. But in the book of Deuteronomy, their fate is unmistakably clear: every inhabitant is to be exterminated.4 When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you—the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you—and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. (Deut. 7:1-2) The command to “utterly destroy” the inhabitants of the land, people who are sometimes collectively referred to as Canaanites, suggests more than just a summons to war; it requires an act of genocide.5 The picture that emerges from Joshua 6–11 largely seems to confirm this. We are repeatedly informed that people are utterly destroyed (Josh. 8:26; 10:1, 28, 35, 37, 39, 40; 11:11, 12, 20, 21), and the text claims that Joshua leaves alive neither survivors (Josh. 10:33) nor those who breathed (Josh. 10:40; 11:11, 14). While this description of total conquest is at variance with other traditions, such as those in the book of Judges and even some within the book of Joshua itself (Josh. 13:1-6a, 13; 17:13), it is hard to escape the conclusion that what is pictured here is genocide. Still, some interpreters object to calling this genocide, or at least caution against it. Christopher Wright believes this description “can be misleading.”6 He rightly notes that today, genocide is commonly associated with notions of racial superiority. Since Wright believes the divine command to kill Canaanites had nothing to do with their ethnicity and everything to do with their wickedness, he objects to using the term “genocide” to describe the...

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