If the genocide in the biblical book of Joshua is a fantasy, what should followers of Jesus do about that?
With the title of this post, am I trying to imply that the genocide in Joshua was just somebody's fantasy?
No, I’m not.
To be clear, I do accept the mainstream archeological view that the attempted genocides portrayed in Joshua probably didn’t occur, and can’t really explain the emergence of ancient Hebrews in Canaan at that time. The evidence indicates that Hebrew culture emerged in the highlands of ancient Canaan, especially after Egyptian power collapsed around 1200 BC.¹ These highland communities were relatively egalitarian² and non-violent³ compared to the Egyptian empire whose domination they escaped.
While there is always plenty to debate among scholars, a literal historical reading of Joshua simply doesn’t fit into the general picture that is drawn through careful examination of other scriptural sources, and from the other records we have found etched in stone and metal.
So I do think that Joshua is a fantasy, in part. But it is also more: something much worse, and much better. Here, I will explain how it can be all three of these: a fantasy, a horrific roadmap for genocide, and sacred scripture that can help prevent genocide.
Worse than a fantasy: a genocidal roadmap
The text of Joshua, as we have received it, bears many resemblances to the imperial religious texts of the Assyrians who conquered Northern Israel and subjugated Jerusalem in the 700’s BC. Influenced by this Assyrian dominance, which centered its cult on the high God Aššur, Joshua apparently reflects the aspirations of a Judahite faction who syncretized their traditions with Assyria’s brutal model of imperial religion.⁴ This group’s unrealized dream of genocidal conquest became a roadmap for real genocides later, especially here in North America.⁵
Better than a fantasy: sacred scripture
Given the troubling likely origins of Joshua, and the deadly history of how it has clearly inspired genocide, can I, as a follower of Jesus ethically and responsibly affirm it as scripture?
I think so.
Still, to accept such a text as scripture comes with a heavy burden of responsibility to oppose both genocide and genocidal interpretations of it. This is a responsibility that I believe followers of Jesus must carry. How can we manage it?
It helps to start by noting that the challenge of reading our scriptures well is not isolated to Joshua. Before any church settled on a biblical canon, Christians understood scripture as something difficult to read well.⁶ One interpretive challenge is that we cannot consistently interpret all of our scriptures in ways that are commonsensical, obvious and literal.⁷ This literalistic approach, which Christian Smith has called “Biblicist,” ultimately fails to provide a coherent hermeneutic that respects any of the Christian canons of scripture, whether Catholic or Protestant or Orthodox, for what they are. Anyone who actually pays attention to any of our various Bibles is eventually forced to reject Biblicism; Biblicism is ultimately self-defeating because each Christian Bible, in its bewilderingly beautiful diversity, confounds Biblicist hermeneutics.⁸
Can we find ways to read Joshua that are morally edifying, rather than morally repugnant, and honest about what we have learned?
I think we can. It helps to start by recognizing that this is a very old question in the Christian tradition. Origen, arguably the founder of Christian Biblical studies, wrote extensively on the way morally repugnant texts should not be read in a literal or “fleshy” way, and should instead be allegorized to refer to issues like the spiritual struggle against sin.⁹ This tradition of reading rests in the heart of Christian orthodoxy, through the work of figures such as Saint Gregory of Nyssa.¹⁰
This approach counsels us to explicitly reject any reading that takes Joshua to be about the literal slaughter of the Canaanites, on moral grounds. It might instead be taken to advise us to crush the “Canaanites” of greed in our hearts, which give rise to violence and genocide. These impulses are the true “Canaanites” who Christians are to oppose with real zeal.
The recovery of the origins of our sacred traditions and sacred scriptures in the highlands of Canaan can naturally spur a recovery of our hermeneutical traditions as well. Still, allegorical counter-reading is not the only alternative way to read and interact with these texts as sacred scripture. As a living and ancient tradition of counter-reading, it also provides a precedent for a range of other counter-readings, such as feminist, womanist, liberationist and queer readings.
Still, merely blogging about the need to read in ways that are morally and factually better falls short of the responsibility that comes with affirming the sacredness of such a dangerous text. How can appropriate reading move into the life of the church, so that texts like Joshua can become liberating, instead of providing a near occasion of genocidal sin?
I believe that a comprehensive and sustained effort over generations is required to thoroughly replace the dangerous, genocidal readings that remain so prevalent, in many places. This would involve consistent catechism, teaching, and practice, forming Christians to participate in our vibrant, living tradition of moral hermeneutics.
Anchoring this project, I see enormous value in Dr. Common’s proposal for a liturgical Season of Origins that would center our recovery of the history of the highlands community as part of our own true story.¹³ This season would begin in October, and would have weeks dedicated to inviting people into broader reflection, naming the truths of our own origins, repairing breaches, and imagining new and better futures.¹⁴
She has invited us all to think about what this might mean, in our own contexts. As a faithfully estranged Catholic and a member of The Open Communion,¹⁵ I offer the diagram below as a first step toward the extensive, intergenerational work that I feel her appropriately audacious proposal requires. It illustrates how the Season of Origins would bring a completeness and healing to the liturgical calendar itself, because it would align the liturgical calendar more consistently with seasonal cycles, Christian and Jewish scripture and tradition, and with the lifetime of Jesus.
Footnotes
[1]
“Newly Discovered History of Ancient Israel During the past century, archaeologists made such a finding when they unearthed a new history of the origins of the Hebrew people in Canaan (present-day Israel and Palestine), known as the Iron Age I Hebrew Highland Settlements. Archaeologists discovered and excavated hundreds of small villages, found scattered across the highland regions of ancient Canaan that date to the end of the Late Bronze Age and into the early Iron Age. Carefully excavated artifacts, like shards of pottery and layers of stones, now provide the foundation for a new history of the ancient Hebrew people in Canaan — a history that counters the story of conquest. Archaeological evidence indicates that the social process that led to the origins of the Hebrew people was not a violent military overtaking as the Bible depicts in the book of Joshua. Rather, the Hebrew people emerged in Canaan in a nonmilitaristic social response to extreme social and climate conditions.”
Kate Common, Undoing Conquest: Ancient Israel, the Bible, and the Future of Christianity, Orbis Books, Kindle Edition, 12.
In summary, the Amarna letters show that the Late Bronze Age in Canaan was filled with social turmoil, unrest, and competition between rival city-states. This unrest reached a pinnacle around 1250–1100 BCE when, according to archaeological evidence, the dominant Bronze Age civilizations suffered a major collapse, and Egyptian imperial control of the area began to wane. Furthermore, climate change contributed to this collapse.
Common, Undoing Conquest, 53.
[2] For a nuanced discussion on the relative egalitarianism of these communities, see:
Gottwald’s description of ancient Israel as egalitarian has been critiqued as being anachronistic, and he has since revised his description in naming the organizational structure of ancient Israel as communitarian. Carol Meyers explains that egalitarianism implies an anachronistic sense of equality that did not exist in the Iron Age. She suggests that the term “heterarchy” is a better descriptor, referring to a lateral organizational system where work and roles are spread out among community members and no steep hierarchies exist between men and women.
Common, Undoing Conquest, 75–76.
[3] On the topic of the largely non-violent development of the Hebraic highlands Hebrew culture, in the wake of the collapse of Egyptian empire in the region, see Common, Undoing Conquest, 141–142.
She also discusses the distinction between divinely enacted violence that uses non-human mechanisms, such as that in the Passover narrative, and violence enacted by humans. The distinction would correspond naturally to the experiences of a highlands culture who escaped Egyptian empire through a combination of climate change and assaults on Egypt by others, and is morally distinct from a text like Joshua which teaches that the perpetrators of genocide may themselves be the direct implement of divine “justice”.
[4] Because these claims are so significant and are likely to be jarring for many, I am happy to provide a substantial slice of the underlying research here, beyond what would normally fit into footnotes. It is especially helpful to know that there are quite a few contemporary records of Assyrian and even the previous Hittite traditions from those periods, thanks to their habits of creating imperial inscriptions and documenting their activities on durable clay tablets.
“As David Carr explains, long-sustained trauma likely played a part in Judah’s dreams for a unified state. After witnessing the Assyrians terrorize and destroy the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, Judah became a vassal state to Assyria for several decades and had to pay a steep tribute. Judah responded to decades of oppression by seeking to create a secure state in Assyria’s decline.30 Carr argues that the Deuteronomists were influenced by the text of the northern prophet Hosea, who blamed Israel’s destruction by Assyria on the worship of other gods. Judah appropriated Hosea’s Assyrian-influenced ideology and applied it to their own Judean context: perhaps if Judah could obey Yahweh, then they would be rewarded with regaining Israel in the north and be secured from attack and destruction. They were seeking control in an out-of-control environment. “Hosea,” Carr notes, “had called for an Assyrian-like love of Yahweh alone; Josiah enforced it.” Judah’s response is understandable after centuries of generational trauma inflicted by one of the most violent and terrorizing empires of their time. Yet, because of the way Western history unfolded, the Deuteronomistic texts, born from this communal trauma, lived far beyond their seventh-century Judean context in unimaginable ways. The Deuteronomistic ideology, directly influenced by the Assyrian Empire through Hosea, has had incredible impact throughout the last twenty-five hundred years, as their texts became part of the sacred book of Christendom.”
Common, Undoing Conquest, 98–99.
Common points toward the work of detailed exploration of this Assyrian connection in particular, with an extensive review of the large body of research reviewed by Richard Jude Thompson. This includes an extensive review of related primary sources and secondary literature. The aggregate weight of the evidence is powerful, and I will share some key elements of his thorough analysis here to help illustrate this point.
The main points of the preceding archaeological and historical sections lead to the following proposals. Scholars, who pay attention to facts outside the DH, accept the reality of the destruction and exile of the states of Samaria and Israel by Tiglath-pileser III and Sargon II (732–721 B.C.E.), the destruction and exile of the state of Judah by Sennacherib (701 B.C.E.), and the probable repopulation that followed it during the seventh century B.C.E. The present study refers to this period as Exile 1, since the devastation of the states of Israel and Judah during the eighth century B.C.E. and the isolation of the city of Jerusalem created conditions of exile for the authors of the DH. The Assyrian deportees from various nations across the empire threatened the existence and coherence of the city. At the same time, Jerusalem flourished in its status as a regional distribution center under the pax Assyriaca, and the loyal servants of Aššur and the scribes of Nabû would have prevailed. The goals of expansive nationalism and centralization of cult of the seventh century B.C.E. that emerged from Exile 1 reflect the imperialist values and central military command of the Assyrian overlords rather than native Canaanite values. Thus this study proposes that the authors of the Deuteronomistic History [including Joshua] … adapted the values of the empire to their situation in Jerusalem and wrote their history to reflect a new, Assyrian-style imperialism.
Richard Jude Thompson, Terror of the Radiance: Assur Covenant to YHWH Covenant, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 258 (Fribourg Academic Press, Fribourg: Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 196.
Stern calls the Assyrian impact on Judahite culture “revolutionary” in the sense that it brought an end to the “age-old Israelite-Phoenician tradition and introduced the Mesopotamian-Assyrian one instead.” The new population rebuilt the area, brought prosperity, and “made it different from its predecessor.” Although Stern presents just the physical changes in the landscape and the society that took place on the ground under the influence of the Neo-Assyrian Empire during the seventh century B.C.E., his archaeological analysis reminds one of Weinfeld’s assessment of Josiah’s “revolutionary” reform, which took place at the same time. Yet DH scholars could not explain either the provenance of the unifying political concept of Israel or how the great reformation of Josiah could give birth to a one-god religion. Finkelstein and Silberman maintain that Josiah’s revolution represented the climax of Israel’s monarchic history and the “greatest hope for national redemption … to reform the fallen glories of the house of Israel.” Their archaeological analysis of the history of Israel, however, found no unambiguous evidence that would verify Josiah’s reform. They could not explain the origin of a revolutionary imperial state in the hills of Canaan because they combined local archaeology with the information of the DH as real history. They did not consider the overwhelming political and religious influence of the dominant imperial power of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E. with its one-god holy empire. … The archaeological analyses of Stern, Mazar, and Na’aman confirm Sennacherib’s account of the destruction of Judah and deportation of the population after which a small city with a few literate members of the Jerusalem ruling class survived. The subsequent building up of the area, accomplished by Assyrian deportees, followed the Assyrian pattern of fortresses guarding the imperial trade routes. Although the DH account of conquest and cult centralization in a holy city minimizes the influence of Assyria, it still reflects the imperial worldview and presuppositions of its contemporaneous overlords from that other distant holy city at the center of a dominant empire….The Israelite exiles to Judah thus brought, in addition to the new pottery and architecture, an array of new traditions, which included exclusive covenant to YHWH, cultic and political centralization, a policy/law of conquest and annexation, and the extermination of the Canaanite-Phoenician culture…
Thompson, Terror of the Radiance, 123.
Polytheism and cult marked domestic Assyrian religion, but the imperial god Aššur ruled as king of gods, mankind, and the four quarters. Babylonian culture and the gods Ellil, Marduk, and Nabû influenced Assyrian religion. Tadmor’s literary analysis supports the importance of the imperial inscriptions that express a semiotic code in which the king represents the heroic principle of royal omnipotence acting under the command of the god Aššur to conquer and to expand the land Aššur … The kings perceived themselves as shepherds, who promoted world peace by spreading terror and fear and demanding obedience .
Thompson, Terror of the Radiance, 114–115.
The Assyrian example also helps demonstrate why scholars do not believe anything similar happened in the establishment of the Hebrew people in Canaan. Much evidence of Assyrian conquests exist, so we have an idea of what it looks like in the archaeological record. Its absence from the time of Joshua strongly suggests that, whatever else it was, this was a later fantasy: Joshua provides us with a substantially Assyrian-style ideology and religion, although the actual history of Canaan lacked an Assyrian-style conquest to go with it:
Evidence of mass deportations, enforced labor and urbanization, warfare and conquest, political and economic domination sustained by fortress colonies like that in Aribua, and collection of maddattu indicate that Aššurnaßirpal II enforced, and thus made law, his ideology and policy under the universal jurisdiction and authority of Aššur.
Thompson, Terror of the Radiance, 122.
These developments correspond to Judahite exposure to Assyrian models. Still, it should be noted that these Assyrian models also drew on older imperial forms and ideologies which might be described as “more polytheistic,” such as in the Hittite imperial tradition. The underlying point is that the turn toward an increasing elevation of a high, central god that we can also see in the Hebrew Bible, if in an especially intense form, reflected broader trends in the region. As is commonly noted in scholarship, there is a development in a variety of cultures, including among the ancient Greek philosophers, that sometimes moves from polytheism and into henotheism, the elevation of a single high god over a divine “court” of other gods, and monolatry (worship of one God). Centralization of religious worship naturally corresponded to an increasing degree of political centralization in Assyrian administration compared to their Hittite predecessors, and this sort of close association between governance and religion is ubiquitous in the region.
This present study finds that the arguments for the derivation of the treaty form of Deuteronomy from the treaties of the Hittites or from a common ancient Near Eastern source rest on formal literary grounds with little relation to history. Studies that link the DH to international treaty forms illustrate one of the problems in Mendenhall’s theory: they do not explain why a local Canaanite god would impose an international subjugation treaty on his own people rather than on the target population. In order to get a better sense of the possible relationship between the treaty ideology of the Hittite empire and that of the DH, this study proposes to learn more about the religion, the warfare, and the function of the imperial treaty. What purpose did it serve? What presuppositions does it make about the nature of the god, the imperial agenda, the gods’ relationship with the subjects, and the idea of legal conquest under the authority of the gods?
Thompson, Terror of the Radiance, 77.
This shift in the Deuteronomistic History is also acknowledged in texts that take a more apologetic posture toward a more “literal-ish” reading of the text. For example, see this discussion of “herem”, the “holy sacrifice” of peoples in an act of divinely ordained genocide:
It’s not until Deuteronomy that we see herem emerge as systematic policy regarding the entire Canaanite population. If you read straight through the Pentateuch, this policy shift is surprising. Thus far, Israel was commanded to destroy and smash idols, but not Canaanites! Numbers signals a turn toward the possibility of Israel engaging in herem warfare against its enemies, but on an occasional basis. Deuteronomy takes herem to the next level!
Matthew J. Lynch, Flood and Fury: Old Testament Violence and the Shalom of God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic: An Imprint of InterVarsity Press, 2023), 127.
[5] See:
The conquest narrative is a story that justifies patterns and practices of colonialism, land-taking, and even genocide in religious imagination. The story has enabled violent atrocities to be understood in the minds of primarily Christian perpetrators as not only justified but divinely sanctioned. The European genocide of Indigenous Peoples across the Americas and the apartheid state in South Africa are a few of the historical atrocities supported by the conquest narrative in colonial religious imagination. There are no land or peoples safe when any land can become the promised land and any people the Canaanites. These horrors do not remain in the past. They are part of our present, in large part because an imagination of conquest remains. But what do we do about a story so thoroughly embedded and entangled in the dominant faith, culture, and Western social imagination? How do we undo conquest? We cannot undo the past, but we must work toward undoing the legacies of conquest within our own communities.
Common, Undoing Conquest, 10.
I feel that I would be remiss if I failed to mention that this narrative also supports settler colonialism and dispossession of the Palestinians today, and that advocating for Palestinian human rights is surely not antisemitic.
See also:
David E. Stannard explains that “within no more than a handful of generations following their first encounters with Europeans, the vast majority of the Western Hemisphere’s native peoples had been exterminated. The pace and magnitude of their obliteration varied from place to place and from time to time, but for years now historical demographers have been uncovering, in region upon region, post-Columbian depopulation rates of between 90 and 98 percent with such regularity that an overall decline of 95 percent has become a working rule of thumb. . . . The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.” Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Cary, NC: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Common, Undoing Conquest, 127.
[6] Origen provides a good example of how scriptural interpretation was not treated as a simple, popular, straightforward activity. It was, instead, taken as a challenging exercise that required a non-violent and simple lifestyle as an integral element of Christian hermeneutics.
… In what follows I will argue that there were three distinct facets of this moral response: the interpreter’s exegetical virtues, the exercise of trust, and the practice of prayer. Some interpreters needed to be emboldened to apply themselves more inquisitively, attentively and diligently to vexing scriptural passages — to exercise what I will call exegetical virtues when studying Scripture. Still others needed to cultivate an enduring trust that a helpful message resided in Scripture. These were interpreters who were thwarted by difficult passages that had, in turn, triggered discouragement or even abandonment of inquiry. Finally, other interpreters still needed to turn in prayer to God for help in deciphering what appeared undecipherable. Each of these facets of the interpreter’s moral life played a leading role within the exegetical enterprise. And as we will see below, on a number of occasions Origen’s discussion of these topics turned autobiographical as he referred to his own often futile attempts to offer this heightened moral response.
Peter W. Martens, Origen and Scripture: The Contours of the Exegetical Life, ed. Gillian Clark and Andrew Louth, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 167
For more on the diversity and necessity of hermeneutics, see:
Daniel Heck, “What is hermeneutics? And why does it rule everything around me, including the Bible?,” Medium (blog), March 8, 2024, https://medium.com/@danheck/what-is-hermeneutics-and-why-does-it-rule-everything-around-me-including-the-bible-21e30b38a351.
[7] Here, I am paraphrasing and emphasizing some of the core elements of what Smith defines as “Biblicism.” His more complete articulation of the elements of this fuzzy set, and its fuzziness, is provided here: Smith, Christian. The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture (pp. 3–6). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[8] Here I am largely echoing Christian Smith:
To the extent that the critique of this present book is valid, however, biblicism forces a gap between what the Bible actually is and what its theory demands that the Bible be. Thus, it is hard to conclude otherwise than that biblicists are shamefully untrusting and ungrateful when it comes to receiving God’s written word as God has chosen to confer it. In effect, biblicists throw the Bible as it is back in God’s face, declaring that they know what scripture has to be like and that they will make sure that the scriptural texts that God gave us are treated and used not as what they are but as the biblicists insist they must be. Regardless of the actual Bible that God has given his church, biblicists want a Bible that is different. They want a Bible that answers all their questions, that tells them how to have marital intimacy, that gives principles for economics and medicine and science and cooking — and does so inerrantly. They essentially demand — in God’s name, yet actually based on a faulty modern philosophy of language and knowledge — a sacred text that will make them certain and secure, even though that is not actually the kind of text that God gave.
Smith, The Bible Made Impossible, 128.
[9] While much of patristic literature tended toward an unacceptable antisemitic posture, including through this type of reading, it is also true that Origen made no room for the promises of wealth and power, in this life or the coming life, that animate a fleshy reading of books like Joshua. In this, Origen’s approach is similar to the allegorical approach that a variety of Rabbis have also advocated.
Far from mere private ascetical piety, Origen’s posture proceeds from a recognition of how deeply material privilege is intertwined with domination and violence, as Kreider’s work on the early church, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, also helps make clear. Origen also understood that this made texts like Joshua difficult to reconcile with the cruciform morality of Jesus, but that these interpretive challenges could be overcome through a simple life of solidarity with the poor, soaked in prayer, preparing one for the gift of divine inspiration through proper biblical study. This posture is entirely incompatible with Biblicism. For example, see:
Thus we regularly find Origen alert to interpreters of baser character, warning them against approaching Scripture while still harboring expectations about its message that were little more than extensions of their own ignoble disposition. These warnings are especially acute when Origen confronts passages in these Scriptures that on the surface admit troubling moral interpretations. In On First Principles, for instance, he discusses the future eschatological state of souls and is eager to dismiss any scriptural interpretation that would have heaven populated with humans of flesh and blood who will marry, have children, and reside in a bejeweled Jerusalem. While there are passages in Scripture that conceivably admit such corporeal readings, it is only those interpreters who are already captivated by the pleasures of the corporeal world who would dare offer such readings. Those who “seek after the outward and literal meaning of the law, or rather, give way to their own desires and lusts, disciples of the mere letter, consider that the promises of the future are to be looked for in the form of pleasure and bodily luxury.” Those, in other words, who are already beholden to sexual and material pleasure offer scriptural interpretations that follow such preoccupations. Such interpretations, Origen adds, are out of step with the true “figurative and spiritual” sense of the Scriptures and, as a result, these readers “extract from them nothing that is worthy of the divine promises.”
Martens, Origen and Scripture, 164–165.
[10] This famous passage in the works of Saint Gregory of Nyssa is also highly relevant to our efforts, here, to wrestle with divine violence in the Exodus tradition:
91. It does not seem good to me to pass this interpretation by without further contemplation. How would a concept worthy of God be preserved in the description of what happened if one looked only to the history? The Egyptian acts unjustly, and in his place is punished his newborn child, who in his infancy cannot discern what is good and what is not. His life has no experience of evil, for infancy is not capable of passion. He does not know to distinguish between his right hand and his left. The infant lifts his eyes only to his mother’s nipple, and tears are the sole perceptible sign of his sadness. And if he obtains anything which his nature desires, he signifies his pleasure by smiling. If such a one now pays the penalty of his father’s wickedness, where is justice? Where is piety? Where is holiness? Where is Ezekiel, who cries: The man who has sinned is the man who must die and a son is not to suffer for the sins of his father? How can the history so contradict reason?
92. Therefore, as we look for the true spiritual meaning, seeking to determine whether the events took place typologically, we should be prepared to believe that the lawgiver has taught through the things said. The teaching is this: When through virtue one comes to grips with any evil, he must completely destroy the first beginnings of evil.
93. For when he slays the beginning, he destroys at the same time what follows after it. The Lord teaches the same thing in the Gospel, all but explicitly calling on us to kill the firstborn of the Egyptian evils when he commands us to abolish lust and anger and to have no more fear of the stain of adultery or the guilt of murder. Neither of these things would develop of itself, but anger produces murder and lust produces adultery.
Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nyssa: The Life of Moses, ed. Richard J. Payne, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978), 75–76.
[13] Common, Undoing Conquest, 154–163.
[14] Common, Undoing Conquest, 163–167.
[15] Daniel Heck, “Open Communion: A Gentle Revolution,” Medium (blog), December 10, 2022, https://medium.com/@danheck/open-communion-a-gentle-revolution-f540cdb0eb54.