The Conquest Texts We Have to Face

Today's Reading

Read Deuteronomy 7:1-11, where God commands Israel, on the brink of entering Canaan: "When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you... and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction."

Then read Joshua 6:15-21 (the fall of Jericho — "they devoted all in the city to destruction, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword") and Joshua 11:16-20 (the summary of the conquest under Joshua).

Read Genesis 15:13-16, the older promise to Abram, in which God tells him that his descendants will sojourn in a foreign land for four hundred years before returning, "for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete."

Finally, read Acts 17:26-27: "And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place..." — Paul's claim, in Athens, that God assigns the times and places of every people, not just Israel.

Reflection

If you are going to talk about race and the Bible honestly, you have to deal with the conquest. You cannot read for ten days about the image of God in every nation while skipping the chapters where Israel is told to drive out, devote to destruction, and not intermarry with the peoples of Canaan. Pretending those chapters are not there is a worse strategy than admitting they are hard, because the people who hate Christianity have already noticed.

Three things have to be said clearly.

First: the conquest is not a generic license for ethnic violence. It is, in the Bible's own framing, a unique, time-bounded, geographically specific judicial action against a particular set of cultures whose practices — including child sacrifice, ritual prostitution, and what Leviticus 18 calls a defilement of the land itself — God had warned about for centuries. Genesis 15:16 is the verse that gets skipped. God tells Abram that his descendants will not enter the land for four hundred years, because "the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete." That is not a footnote. It is the moral spine of the conquest narrative. God waits. He waits a long time. The Canaanites are given centuries to repent, and Scripture treats Rahab's repentance in Joshua 2 — and the Gibeonites' repentance in Joshua 9 — as proof that the offer was real. The conquest is not about ethnicity. Rahab the Canaanite ends up in the genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1:5). Caleb the Kenizzite, of foreign extraction, becomes one of Israel's heroes. The line is not racial. It is moral and covenantal.

Second: Israel itself is warned that it is not exempt. Deuteronomy 9:4-6 is one of the most uncomfortable texts in the Old Testament for any reader who wants to make Israel the hero. Moses tells the people not to say in their hearts that the Lord has brought them in because of their righteousness. They are no better than the people they are dispossessing — and Leviticus 18 ends with a chilling warning: if you do these things, the land will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations before you. Which is precisely what eventually happens. The exile is the same judgment, applied to Israel. The conquest texts do not establish a master race. They establish the seriousness of God against any culture, including the covenant one, that builds itself on the destruction of human image-bearers.

Third: the conquest is typological, not transferable. This is where N. T. Wright's reading is helpful. Israel, in the Old Testament, is a unique people in a unique moment of redemptive history — the place where God is preparing the entry of his Messiah. What Israel is told to do at the boundary of the land is not a model the church is given for its own life. The New Testament is, on this point, almost ferociously clear: the church's weapons are not carnal (2 Corinthians 10:3-5), the kingdom does not advance by the sword (John 18:36), and the only "land" the church inherits is a renewed creation, not a tract of geography. When Jesus stands in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4) and reads from Isaiah, he stops mid-sentence — leaving out "the day of vengeance of our God" — because the time of that verse has not yet come. He is announcing a different mode. The day of judgment is real. It is not now. It is not ours.

C. S. Lewis, who took the hard Old Testament texts seriously rather than apologizing them away, made a related point: Christians who do most for the present world are precisely those who think most of the next. The reason is that they know vengeance is taken care of. They do not have to do it. The conquest texts say something true and terrifying about God's seriousness — and the cross says that he himself bore the weight of that seriousness in his own body. After Calvary, the church is not authorized to take up the sword on God's behalf, because Christ has taken the judgment into himself.

This matters because the conquest has been weaponized. The Spanish conquistadors waved Joshua over the Americas. The Boers in South Africa read themselves into the role of Israel and the Black African as Canaanite. American settlers wrote sermons casting the dispossession of Native peoples in the language of the promised land. Each of those was a misreading — not just a tactical mistake but a category error. The conquest is not transferable. There is exactly one nation in Scripture that is told to do that, and exactly one moment, and the Messiah it was preparing has come.

So what do the conquest texts authorize for the church? Three things, mainly. They authorize a sober reckoning with the holiness of God. They authorize trust that he is the judge, so we do not have to be. And they authorize the recognition that every culture — ours included — stands under the same standard, and that the iniquity of any people, ours included, is being measured by the patience of the same God who waited four hundred years for the Amorites and forty years for Israel before doing anything at all.

Going Deeper

Take the most uncomfortable conquest passage you can find and read it slowly with three questions in mind: What does this tell me about the seriousness of God? What does it not authorize me, as a New Testament Christian, to do? And whose side am I implicitly placing myself on when I read it — the conquering Israelite, or the trembling Canaanite who, like Rahab, hears that the God of these people is the God of heaven above and the earth below, and seeks mercy?

Most of us, if we are honest, read these chapters as natural-born Israelites. The gospel says we are natural-born Canaanites — taken in by mercy, grafted in by grace, given a place we did not earn. Read again from there.