Why is the God of the Old Testament so violent?
The hardest case is the conquest of Canaan, and it is worth facing rather than softening. Two things are true of it. It was judgement on what a society was doing — including burning its own children — not on who those people were. And the language of "utterly destroy" was the standard way ancient armies described a win, not a body count.
Someone reads the book of Joshua for the first time and stops. God tells Israel to go into Canaan and destroy the people living there. Men, women, children.
This is the passage that makes thoughtful people put the Bible down, and it should not be waved away. Christians who rush past it are not defending anything — they are just changing the subject.
Two answers have to be held together. One is about what the words meant. The other is about what was actually happening.
What “utterly destroy” meant to people who wrote it
Ancient armies wrote about war in a fixed style, and total-victory language was part of it. Egyptian, Assyrian and Moabite kings all describe wiping out nations that turn up alive in later records. The phrase was how you said we won decisively, the way a manager today says the other team was annihilated.
The Bible does this too, in a way that is easy to check. Joshua reports that he took the whole land and left no survivors. A few chapters later the same book has Canaanites still living there in numbers, and Judges opens with them very much present.
That is not a contradiction the editors missed. It is the ordinary use of a known idiom next to an ordinary description of the facts. Read one literally and you must call the other a blunder; read both the way the writers used them and they fit.
Add the archaeology and the picture sharpens further. Jericho and Ai look like military and administrative sites rather than towns full of families.
What the judgement was actually for
The second answer is harder, and more important.
The text never says the Canaanites were removed because of their ethnicity. It gives a reason, repeatedly, and the reason is what they did. Chief among it, child sacrifice — burning infants alive in religious ritual — alongside temple prostitution and the rest.
That distinction is not a technicality. Genocide targets people for being who they are. Judgement targets people for what they are doing. Israel is warned, in the same books, that if they take up the same practices the land will spit them out too — and centuries later it does exactly that, when Israel is conquered and carried into exile for the same sins.
A God who destroys one nation for child sacrifice and exiles his own for the same thing is not showing favouritism. He is applying one standard.
The four hundred years nobody mentions
Long before any of this, Abraham is told that his descendants will not receive the land for four generations, because “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”
Read that slowly. God says: not yet. There is a delay of centuries built into the promise, and the reason given is that judgement would be premature.
Whatever else this is, it is not a God with a short temper.
What it does not mean
It is worth being clear about the limits, because this passage has been abused.
The command was to one nation, about one land, at one moment in history. It is never presented as a pattern. There is no Christian principle here that anyone may take up arms for God, and the New Testament closes the door on it explicitly when Jesus tells Peter to put his sword away.
Every use of these chapters to justify later violence has been a misuse, and Christians should say so plainly rather than defensively.
Objections answered
Isn't the hyperbole answer just a convenient way out?
It would be, if it were invented for this. But the same idiom appears across the ancient Near East in texts nobody is defending, and the Bible undercuts its own literal reading two chapters later. The evidence for it is external and internal, and it was noticed by scholars working on Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions, not by apologists looking for an escape.
Even so, children died. How is that acceptable?
That is the part no answer makes comfortable, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What can be said is that this is the same problem as any death of a child anywhere — the objection is not really about Canaan, it is about a world where children die at all. And Christians hold that a child who dies is not outside the mercy of God. It is not a tidy answer. There is not a tidy one.
Doesn't Jesus contradict all this?
He fulfils it rather than contradicting it. The New Testament keeps the idea that God judges — Jesus says more about judgement than anyone else in the Bible — but it moves the sword out of human hands entirely. Judgement belongs to God, at the end, not to us, now.
Shared ground, and where traditions differ
All Christians hold
All the traditions read the Old and New Testaments as one story with one God, and all of them reject the ancient idea that the God of Israel is a different, lesser being than the Father of Jesus — a view the early church condemned by name.
Related questions
Inspired by Stand to Reason — "The Canaanites: Genocide or Judgment?". The argument is theirs; the words here are ours.
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