The Destruction of Jericho

Many historians note that archaeology has not confirmed a walled Jericho existed in the Late Bronze Age period associated with the conquest (ca. 1400-1200 BCE). Kathleen Kenyon's excavations found the relevant stratum nearly uninhabited.

Some scholars read the conquest narratives as later theological literature expressing Israelite identity rather than literal history, which relocates the moral problem from God's character to the text's rhetorical function.

Traditional apologists argue the Canaanites' extreme moral corruption (child sacrifice, cult prostitution, systemic violence) meant their judgment was just and long-delayed (Genesis 15:16 indicates God waited four centuries). The command was unique and unrepeatable , not a general license for war. Rahab's family was spared, showing the destruction was not ethnic but moral.

God as creator and judge has authority over life and death that humans lack.

Scholars like Peter Enns and John Goldingay argue the Old Testament reflects an "accommodated" divine revelation , God working within the brutal frameworks of ancient Near Eastern warfare to form Israel, while the full revelation of divine character awaited the New Testament. Jesus's teaching to love enemies represents the trajectory toward which the whole canon moves. The conquest texts are morally transitional, not morally normative.

Old Testament scholar K. Lawson Younger has shown that ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts routinely used hyperbolic language , "utterly destroying" a city while later references in the same text show its inhabitants still present. Joshua 10-11 uses the same formulaic language found in Assyrian and Egyptian war records, suggesting herem rhetoric is a literary convention rather than a literal report.