The "Conquest" of Canaan.

One of the most common and potent criticisms aimed at the Bible and Christianity is that stories like many of those epitomized in the book of Joshua depict a bloodthirsty, genocidal deity, commanding the extermination of whole populations.  Such a god is not worthy of worship, and a community that does worship such a god is barbaric.  If we accept these stories as literal and historical, this is difficult to argue with. 

The movement of the Israelites out of the wilderness and into Canaan has been described as a “conquest.”  Worse, it has been held up as a kind of scriptural warrant for settler colonialism, as if these stories give powerful and violent people a divine authorization to steal the land and take the lives of any indigenous people they choose.  Thus it has been used ruthlessly against native peoples in America, South Africa, Palestine, and many other places.  

These stories start in Exodus and continue into the historical books of the Bible.  But read carefully and in context, they do not provide any kind of Biblical justification for land theft and mass murder.  Here’s why:

1. In the Torah, the Israelites are liberated slaves, on their way to their ancestral home from Egypt.  They are not a well-financed conquering foreign army.  Their goal is not to colonize the people and to place their land under cultivation to benefit a rich ruling class or some distant nation. 
2. The Israelites were from Canaan, where Jacob and his family had lived as nomadic herders; they were not aliens who came from a distance.  Abraham and Sara, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, Leah, and Rachel had been bedouin shepherds there.  Their return to Canaan was not so much an invasion as a homecoming. 
3. The named groups said to occupy Canaan mainly referred to the ruling classes of different city-states, who were largely allied with Egypt, and dominated the common people who lived in the countryside.  It was a stratified, class-based society.  We might understand them to be at least reflexively doing Egypt’s bidding in tempting the Israelites back into subservience.
4. Old Testament scholar, Norman Gottwald, suggests that what looks like a “conquest” could more accurately be understood as a peasant uprising, as local people from the countryside joined their relatives escaping out of Egypt to overthrow the oppressive rulers of Canaanite city-states.  It could even be said that the movement was a continuation of the despoiling of the Egyptians by robbing them of their allies and client regimes, and liberating the people.
5. They replaced these local monarchies, not with new kings (until much later) but with a flatter, more distributed, decentralized, and “democratic” tribal confederacy under charismatically selected, often temporary, judges, priests, and prophets.  Through them the people were governed by God’s law and Spirit rather than the whim of kings.
6. The accounts we have of these events were not actually written down for centuries, to address much later crises.  The stories were developed in a way that fostered a national and religious identity that was in danger of extermination.  They are therefore a kind of historical fiction that shapes the past to make sense of current events.  I compare these “conquest” stories to legends about historical figures which are embellished and reshaped to give courage, hope, and resilience to the people.
7. The Church early learned to take these stories “spiritually” in the sense that they are metaphors and allegories about conflicts in the soul.  The various Canaanite enemies represent temptations to idolatry and ego-centricity that have to be “wiped out” or at least controlled in one’s inner life.  The Church had to do this as a way to deal with the contradiction between the life and teachings of Jesus, and stories about apparent genocide and mass-murder.  The stories could not be taken literally, much less prescriptively, by people who understood Jesus Christ to be the Word of God to whom the Scriptures point. 
8. Finally, I wonder if these stories aren’t hyperbolic bluster, like we still hear from leaders in the Middle East and other parts of the world.  Indeed, we sometimes talk like this ourselves in some contexts, like when we use colorful language to describe sporting events: “The Cowboys shot down the Eagles,” or “The Red Sox laid siege to Yankee Stadium over the weekend, outscoring the Bombers 24-4.”  The point is not a sober, accurate historical account, but a deliberately colorful and emotional rendering designed to attract and excite readers.  Fwiw.  

Anyway, my point in all this is that the “conquest” of Canaan cannot reasonably or with integrity be taken literally or historically, let alone prescriptively, and used to justify practices in our time that Jesus and the New Testament categorically reject, like colonialism, bigotry, apartheid, or ethnic cleansing.

+++++++