Genocide Texts as Ancient Near Eastern Rhetoric

Joshua 6:21 reports that at Jericho, Israel 'devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it — men and women, young and old.' Joshua 10:40 summarizes an entire campaign: 'he left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded.' Read at face value in translation, this is a description of a divinely commanded campaign of extermination against named peoples, including children — language that critics from Richard Dawkins to more careful philosophers like Wes Morriston have argued is morally indefensible regardless of its source's claimed authority.

The difficulty is not merely modern squeamishness projected backward. Ancient readers, including later biblical writers, clearly knew these campaigns raised moral and theological stakes; the text itself frames them as acts of divine judgment (Deuteronomy 9:4-5) rather than routine warfare. The question this article examines is narrower and more tractable than the full moral question: what kind of text is Joshua's conquest narrative, and does understanding its genre change what it is actually claiming happened?

This matters practically because a great deal of popular argument, on both sides, proceeds as though the text obviously means exactly what a woodenly literal modern reading suggests. Getting the genre question right — even without fully resolving the ethics — is a necessary first step that both Christian apologists and their critics have strong reasons to take seriously rather than skip.

The Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian inscription from around 1208 BC, is the earliest extrabiblical reference to Israel. Among a list of defeated Canaanite peoples and cities, it declares: 'Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.' Yet Israel obviously continued to exist; the claim is transparently a boast of decisive victory rather than a literal demographic report, and every scholar who works with the text reads it that way without controversy.

The Mesha Stele (the 'Moabite Stone'), commissioned by King Mesha of Moab around 840 BC and discovered in 1868, is even more directly relevant because it uses vocabulary cognate to biblical herem. Mesha boasts that at the city of Nebo he 'utterly destroyed' the Israelite population — men, women, and children — 'for I had devoted them to destruction for Ashtar-Chemosh.' He further claims 'Israel has utterly perished for always.' The biblical and archaeological record makes clear Israel persisted as a nation for well over a century after this. Here we have an inscription, from Israel's own regional neighbor and using nearly identical religious-military idiom, independently demonstrating that 'utter destruction' and 'devoted to destruction' language in this cultural context functioned as a stock rhetorical formula of total victory, not a literal casualty count.

K. Lawson Younger's 1990 study Ancient Conquest Accounts systematized this observation across a wide range of Egyptian, Hittite, and Assyrian royal annals, identifying a shared 'transmission code': stereotyped phrases of totality ('none escaped,' 'left no survivor,' numbers rounded to rhetorically significant figures) that recur regardless of a campaign's actual outcome. Younger's work is philological and comparative rather than apologetic in aim, and it has been influential precisely because it treats Israelite conquest rhetoric as one instance of a broader, well-documented regional literary practice rather than as a unique problem requiring a unique (and therefore more suspect) explanation.

The strongest textual evidence for a non-literal reading may come from within the Bible itself. Joshua 10:40 claims Israel 'left no survivors' in the whole southern campaign, and Joshua 11:23 says Joshua 'took the entire land,' yet Joshua 13:1 immediately states 'very large areas of the land remain to be possessed,' and Joshua 15:63, 16:10, and 17:12-13 explicitly note that Jebusites, Canaanites, and other named peoples continued to live among Israel 'to this day.' Judges 1 opens by describing extensive, ongoing, incomplete warfare against many of the very peoples and cities Joshua had summarized as totally destroyed.

Richard Hess has argued further that many of the sites named in Joshua's conquest lists, based on toponymic and archaeological analysis, functioned as small fortified military and administrative garrisons rather than dense civilian population centers — meaning the 'men and women, young and old' formula may itself be a stock idiom for a comprehensively defeated garrison rather than a literal description of a city's demographic composition. This reading is contested (archaeological identification of specific sites like Ai remains debated), but it is offered as historical-critical argument, not merely theological convenience.

Eric Seibert has pushed back forcefully, arguing that this reinterpretation strains the plain sense of verses like Joshua 6:21 and 8:24-25, which explicitly narrate killing 'all the inhabitants,' and that treating these as garrison reports rather than what they say — the killing of a city's population including women and children — imposes a modern moral discomfort onto an ancient text that means exactly what it appears to mean. The disagreement here is genuinely unresolved among serious scholars, and readers should be suspicious of confident claims on either side that treat it as settled.

A further layer of the argument concerns the specific term herem, often translated 'devoted to destruction' or 'the ban.' Philip Stern's study The Biblical Herem: A Window on Israel's Religious Experience situates herem within a cultic framework: something placed under herem is irrevocably given over to the deity, unable to be reclaimed for ordinary human use. Susan Niditch's War in the Hebrew Bible similarly treats herem as an ideological category functioning within Israel's self-understanding of holy war, ascribing victory entirely to Yahweh rather than to Israelite military prowess.

That the Moabite king Mesha uses cognate herem language for his own god Chemosh is significant: it shows the category was not an idiosyncratic Israelite invention but a shared regional religious-military concept, which supports reading 'total destruction' formulas as conventional declarations of decisive, divinely credited victory rather than literal ethnographic reports.

This reframing changes what kind of claim is being made — a theological declaration about whose god won, rather than a demographic report — but it does not, on its own, tell us whether any actual civilians died in the underlying historical events, nor whether commanding herem against any population, however described, was itself morally permissible. That is a separate question this article does not resolve.

Even granting every point above, several difficulties remain untouched. First, Joshua's narrative episodes — not just its summary formulas — describe specific violent actions at Jericho and Ai involving named cities' inhabitants; a genre argument about summary rhetoric does not, by itself, explain away these more granular narrative claims. Second, whatever the demographic scope, the text presents such violence as divinely commanded, which raises the moral question of divine command theory independent of body count. Third, even a garrison-focused reading of many sites does not obviously apply to every episode Joshua narrates.

Wes Morriston's critique is important here: he does not dispute Younger's philology, but argues that popular apologetic use of the hyperbole thesis often overstates what it accomplishes, functioning rhetorically as though it fully answers the moral objection when it in fact narrows rather than eliminates it. Randal Rauser makes a similar point, arguing that Copan's project, while scholarly, risks functioning as a moral 'reframe' that lets readers stop asking hard questions before those questions are actually answered.

A responsible treatment, therefore, holds two things together: the comparative philological case for genre-conventional hyperbole in the totality language is genuinely strong and worth taking seriously as a corrective to naive literalism; and this genre point is compatible with real, unresolved moral difficulty in the specific violent episodes Joshua narrates and in the broader theology of herem warfare, which requires separate ethical and theological argument (concerning divine command, corporate judgment, and progressive revelation) to address.

The evidence from the Merneptah and Mesha inscriptions, combined with Joshua's own internal tensions, gives good reason to think the book's 'totality' formulas belong to a recognized ancient Near Eastern rhetorical convention rather than functioning as literal demographic reports of comprehensive extermination. This is a defensible, evidence-based historical-critical conclusion, not merely an apologetic convenience, and it should inform how both critics and defenders read the text.

But this conclusion is more modest than it is sometimes made to sound. It reclassifies the scope of what Joshua claims happened; it does not by itself show that what did happen, on the narrower reading, was morally unproblematic, nor does it remove Joshua's more explicit and specific killing narratives from moral scrutiny. Anyone invoking this argument, on either side of the debate, should be honest about exactly how much interpretive and moral work it is doing.