How should Christians understand the conquest narratives in Joshua?

Few parts of the Bible trouble modern readers more than the book of Joshua. Cities are destroyed, and God commands Israel to take the land of Canaan by force. Many sincere believers wonder how this fits with a God described elsewhere as slow to anger and abounding in love. This question deserves a careful, honest answer rather than a dismissive one, because the discomfort readers feel is not unreasonable.

Scripture is explicit that the conquest was not about Israel's superiority or about ethnicity. Moses told the people plainly that they were not entering the land because of their own righteousness but 'on account of the wickedness of these nations' (Deuteronomy 9:5). Those nations practiced child sacrifice and other atrocities that Scripture consistently condemns (Leviticus 18:24-25). This judgment was also not sudden; God told Abraham centuries earlier that his descendants would wait because 'the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure' (Genesis 15:16), showing remarkable patience before acting.

That the conquest was never about ethnicity is confirmed by Rahab, a Canaanite woman who trusted Israel's God and was spared along with her family, later becoming an ancestor of Jesus himself (Joshua 2; Matthew 1:5). Anyone who turned to the true God, regardless of nationality, found mercy.

It is also important to see that this was not an open-ended license for warfare. The command was specific to this moment and this land, bound up with God's covenant promise to Abraham. And Israel itself was warned that if it fell into the same sins as the nations it displaced, the land would 'vomit you out' just as it had vomited out the previous inhabitants (Leviticus 18:28). That warning came true: Israel was later judged and exiled for its own idolatry and injustice, showing that God held his own covenant people to the same standard he held the Canaanites, rather than showing favoritism.

Some of the most troubling verses in Joshua use sweeping language, commanding Israel to leave 'alive nothing that breathes' (Deuteronomy 20:16). Readers naturally take this as a description of literal, universal extermination of every man, woman, and child in every town. Yet the book of Joshua itself immediately complicates that reading: Joshua 10 and 11 describe Israel as having taken 'the whole land' and defeated 'all their kings,' while the very next book, Judges, opens with the Canaanites still living throughout the land, still contending with Israel for generations to come (Judges 1:21, 27-33). Both statements cannot be describing a completed, literal genocide.

This tension makes far more sense once we recognize that sweeping conquest language of this kind was a common convention in ancient Near Eastern military records, a way of declaring decisive victory over an enemy's political and military power, not necessarily a literal head count of every inhabitant killed. Many campaigns in Joshua targeted royal cities, garrisons, and fortified strongholds rather than sweeping through every village in the region. This does not soften the seriousness of the judgment described, but it does correct a common caricature of the conquest as the deliberate, total extermination of an entire people group down to the last child, a picture the biblical text itself does not fully support.

Nothing in the New Testament repeats this pattern or extends it to the church. When James and John wanted to call down fire on a Samaritan village, Jesus rebuked them (Luke 9:54-56). The Great Commission sends Christians out to make disciples through preaching, teaching, and love, not conquest (Matthew 28:19-20). Paul describes the believer's warfare as spiritual, waged with truth and prayer rather than weapons: 'The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world' (2 Corinthians 10:4; Ephesians 6:12). Any attempt to use Joshua to justify Christian violence against others badly misreads both the text and its place in the Bible's storyline.

Joshua's own name is the Hebrew form of the name Jesus, both meaning 'the LORD saves.' The rest that Joshua brought Israel into the land was real but incomplete, pointing ahead to a greater and final rest that only Jesus can give his people (Hebrews 4:8-10). Ultimate judgment on evil, likewise, is not something Christians carry out; it belongs to Christ at his return, when he alone will judge the living and the dead in perfect righteousness.

Read Joshua as part of a larger story rather than as a standalone battle manual. Notice God's patience before judgment, his mercy toward outsiders like Rahab who turned to him, and his consistent moral standard for every nation, including Israel. These chapters reveal a holy God who takes sin seriously and a faithful God who keeps his ancient promises, both truths that ultimately find their fullest expression at the cross, where judgment and mercy meet.