I've had this conversation more than once with people who grew up in church and only really read Joshua for the first time as adults, and the reaction is usually the same: quiet, a little stunned, sometimes angry. Fair. The book of Joshua describes Israel's armies taking Canaanite cities under explicit divine instruction, and the instruction, in places, is total. This page won't soften that or rush past it to get to a comforting conclusion; instead it lays out how serious people, scholars who take the text seriously rather than explain it away, have actually wrestled with it, because the wrestling itself is more honest than any single tidy answer.
The command, stated plainly
Deuteronomy sets the terms before Joshua ever executes them, and the language doesn't leave much room for a softer reading.
"But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee."
This is the plainest, hardest version of the command in the text. Any honest treatment of this question has to start here rather than somewhere gentler.
Joshua then carries this out, or at least narrates carrying it out, against a string of named cities. There's no getting around what's on the page.
One line of scholarship: ancient conquest rhetoric
A good number of Old Testament scholars, including believing ones, point to how ancient Near Eastern kings routinely described their own military campaigns. Victory inscriptions from surrounding cultures regularly used sweeping, total-annihilation language, "we destroyed them, all of them, leaving nothing," as a matter of standard battle rhetoric, closer to a boast formula than a precise body count. On this reading, Joshua's language borrows the conventions of its era's war reporting, and cities described as "utterly destroyed" in one chapter show up populated again a few chapters later, which the text itself doesn't seem to notice as a contradiction, because ancient readers weren't parsing it as literal statistics the way modern readers instinctively do. This view takes some real weight off the plain numbers without pretending the violence itself wasn't real or wasn't commanded.
Other serious scholars push back on leaning too hard on that explanation, noting that genre convention doesn't erase the fact that real cities, real families, real children are the subject of the command, whatever its rhetorical dress. Both groups are reading carefully. They land in different places on how much the ancient-rhetoric explanation actually resolves.
A trajectory the text itself seems to notice
A separate line of reading looks past Joshua to where the Old Testament's own moral arc eventually lands. The prophets who come centuries later spend enormous energy condemning violence, injustice, and the abuse of power, including violence committed by Israel's own kings. Micah collapses the entire weight of Israel's ritual and moral life into a single demand:
"He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"
Written centuries after Joshua, from within the same canon, weighing justice and mercy as the actual heart of what God wants.
Whether that later trajectory should be read as God progressively revealing more of his character over time, or as evidence the conquest material always needs to be read through the corrective lens of what comes after it, is itself a live question among people who hold Scripture with equal seriousness. It doesn't erase Deuteronomy 20. It does mean the canon doesn't stop there.
Jesus's own reframing
Whatever else is unresolved, Jesus's own words in the Sermon on the Mount are the sharpest possible contrast to a conquest ethic, and he delivers them as if he's correcting a widespread assumption, not just adding a footnote.
"Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you."
Jesus states this as his own authoritative teaching, not a repeal issued from outside the tradition, and Christians across nearly every tradition treat it as binding on how they're meant to live now.
Micah 6:8 in four voices — a taste of how Bible Voice reads Scripture
Not more rituals, not more performance. Justice, mercy, and staying humble. That's genuinely it, and it's harder than any checklist.
The shortness of this list is almost a relief. Not a system to master. Three postures to actually live: just, merciful, humble.
He already told you what's good. Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly. No further instructions needed, just the doing of it.
Sixty years in the church and I keep coming back to this verse whenever the rest gets complicated. Justice, mercy, humility. It's held up better than most of my certainties.
Why this page won't pick a winner
Christians who take the Bible seriously genuinely disagree on how to hold Joshua together with the God revealed in Christ. Some emphasize the ancient-rhetoric reading and its lower literal casualty count. Some emphasize divine judgment on a culture the text elsewhere describes as deeply corrupt, without claiming that makes the judgment easy to read about. Some emphasize the long canonical arc bending toward mercy and let Joshua sit as an unresolved, uncomfortable chapter within a larger story that ends somewhere else entirely. None of these views should be handed to you as the obvious one. Anyone who tells you this question has a clean, settled answer is usually skipping a step you'd notice if they slowed down.
For reflection
Practice without performance
A question like "Why is the Old Testament so violent?" can easily turn into another scoreboard. Spiritual practices are meant to open your attention to God, not prove that you are impressive at being religious.
- Choose a next step small enough to actually practice this week.
- Pay attention to whether the practice makes you more loving and truthful, not merely busier.
- Let failure become information for gentler obedience, not evidence that you should quit.
Prayer: Lord, free me from performing my faith. Teach me a way of obedience that is steady, humble, and alive to Your presence.
Deuteronomy 20 and Matthew 5 sit in the same book. Reading them side by side, out loud, is more honest than resolving the tension in a single tidy paragraph.
Bible Voice reads the hard chapters the same way it reads the comforting ones, in full, in a voice built for your generation, without editing out what's difficult.
Read the hard chapters yourselfThe violence in the Old Testament is real, commanded, and recorded without much apology from the text itself. What careful Christians actually do with that is disagree, thoughtfully, rather than paper over it, and that disagreement is a more honest response than pretending the discomfort isn't warranted.