Does The Bible Condone Genocide?

Some critics allege that those who take the Bible as an authoritative guide for faith and practice cannot also condemn genocides such as those performed by Stalin or Pol Pot. Why? Because they argue that the Bible commands the same thing. In the account of Israel’s entrance into Canaan, they assert, God clearly requires genocide.

Importantly, the text doesn’t command modern Christians to engage in genocide. The laws of war in Deuteronomy 20 portray God giving ancient Israel a specific dispensation from the normal rules prohibiting killing non-combatants for a specific occasion. This occurred at a certain point in salvation history, and it was never intended as a command for all people in all times. Hence, in the absence of any reason to believe God issued similar exemptions to people like Stalin or Pol Pot, one isn’t required to support their actions.

Also of note is that the text doesn’t say God commanded genocide. In Joshua 10–11, at God’s prompting, the Israelites, under the leadership of Joshua, “completely destroyed everyone . . . leaving no survivors” in multiple northern and southern cities when taking the land from the Canaanites. The same narrative proceeds on the assumption that the Canaanites were not literally wiped out. Repeatedly the text affirms that the land of Israel was still occupied by the Canaanites throughout Old Testament history; they remained heavily armed and deeply entrenched in the same regions and even in the very same cities in which Joshua was said to have “completely destroyed everyone in it.” Such tensions are not subtle; they are stark and obvious. It is unlikely, therefore, that the author of Joshua intended his hyperbolic language, common in his day, to be taken literally.

In a comprehensive comparative study of ancient Near-Eastern historiography, Old Testament (OT) scholar K. Lawson Younger concludes that the OT uses the same literary conventions as other ancient Near-Eastern conquest accounts. He also establishes that within this genre the rhetoric of total conquest, complete annihilation, destruction of the enemy, killing everyone, leaving no survivors, and so on are frequently used as extravagant exaggerations. Younger concludes that phrases such as “they completely destroyed it and everyone in it,” and “he left no survivors” are to be understood as hyperbole. In Joshua’s day, such stereotyped phrases were commonly used to narrate warfare. Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen concludes that when such typical rhetoric is taken into account, what is described in Joshua is not a genocidal conquest of the entire region but is rather “essentially [a series of] disabling raids.”

Consequently, assertions that God commands genocide are overblown. What the text affirms is that on a particular occasion God exempted Israel from a moral principle, commanding them to kill non-combatants in some small scale raids. The question, then, is not how a loving and just God could command genocide. Instead, the question is whether such a God could, on rare occasions, grant exemptions from the principle of combatant immunity. It may well be that in such unusual occasions, God saw a larger picture in which a greater evil would prevail if such raids did not occur. Perhaps the non-combatants would propagate the hideous evils of their culture if left alive. We can trust that an omniscient, just, and good God would have some such reasons in these rare, isolated cases.