I
Background
According to the Book of Joshua, when the Israelites were encamped at Shittim opposite Jericho, ready to cross the river, Joshua, as a final preparation, sent out two spies to Jericho. The spies stayed in the house of Rahab, a local prostitute. The king of Jericho sent soldiers who asked Rahab to bring out the spies. Instead, she hid them under bundles of flax on the roof. After escaping, the spies promised to spare Rahab and her family after taking the city, if she would mark her house by hanging a red cord out the window.After the Israelites crossed the Jordan, the king of Jericho ordered that the gates of the walls be closed. God commanded Joshua to go around the walls of Jericho for six days, once every day, and seven times on the seventh day. God commanded the city to be attacked by seven priests blowing horns, with the Ark of the Covenant in front of them and all the people behind the Ark of the Covenant. They encircled the wall of Jericho once a day for the first six days, and then encircled the city seven times on the seventh day. After the shofar (horn) sounded a great blow, the Israelites shouted, and the city walls fell beneath them.Following God's law, the Israelites killed every man and woman, the young and the old, as well as the oxen, sheep, and donkeys. Only Rahab, her parents, brothers and all "those who belonged to her" were spared. They were incorporated into Israel. Joshua then cursed anybody who rebuilt the foundations and gates, with the deaths of their firstborn and youngest child respectively. This was eventually fulfilled by Hiel the Bethelite under King Ahab's reign.
Academic consensus
A minority of scholars maintain that the biblical account is historical and that an Israelite conquest of Jericho may have occurred around the 13th century BCE,[17][18] but the strong consensus among scholars is that the Book of Joshua holds little historical value.[19] Its origin lies in a time far removed from the times that it depicts,[20] and its intention is primarily theological in detailing how Israel and her leaders are judged by their obedience to the teachings and laws (the covenant) set down in the Book of Deuteronomy.[21] The story of Jericho and the rest of the conquest represents the nationalist propaganda of the Kingdom of Judah and their claims to the territory of the Kingdom of Israel after 722 BCE;[3] and that those chapters were later incorporated into an early form of Joshua likely written late in the reign of King Josiah (reigned 640–609 BCE), and the book was revised and completed after the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586 BCE, and possibly after the return from the Babylonian exile in 538 BCE.[22] According to Ann E. Killebrew, "Most scholars today accept that the majority of the conquest narratives in the book of Joshua are devoid of historical reality".[23]
Are God's People Devoted to Destruction?
The Book of Joshua contains several passages where God is portrayed as commanding Israel to kill or “devote to destruction” (ḥerem, חֵרֶם) the inhabitants of Canaanite cities. These are among the most difficult and contested texts in the Hebrew Bible because of their violence.
Here’s a structured list of the main “killing” verses in Joshua (where the command is attributed to God or enacted under divine instruction):
Commands from God
These are passages where the narrator attributes commands directly to YHWH.
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Joshua 6:17–21 (Jericho)
The city and all that is in it shall be devoted to the LORD for destruction… They devoted all in the city to destruction, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword.
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Joshua 8:1–2, 24–26 (Ai)
The LORD said to Joshua, “Do not fear… I have given into your hand the king of Ai, his people, his city, and his land.”
Later, the Israelites struck down all the inhabitants of Ai, leaving none alive, about twelve thousand men and women.
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Joshua 10:8–11, 28–40 (Southern Campaign)
The LORD said to Joshua, “Do not fear them, for I have given them into your hands.”
The Israelites defeated the Amorite coalition, and the text repeats: “He left none remaining, but devoted to destruction all that breathed, as the LORD God of Israel commanded” (10:40).
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Joshua 11:6, 10–15 (Northern Campaign)
The LORD said to Joshua, “Do not be afraid of them… you shall hamstring their horses and burn their chariots.”
Joshua captured Hazor, struck its king, and “struck with the sword all who were in it, devoting them to destruction; there was none left that breathed” (11:11).
Summary verse: “As the LORD had commanded Moses his servant, so Moses commanded Joshua, and so Joshua did; he left nothing undone of all that the LORD had commanded Moses.” (11:15).
Narrative Summaries
These passages condense multiple campaigns, presenting them as divinely sanctioned or completed.
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Joshua 10:40–42
“So Joshua struck the whole land… He left none remaining, but devoted to destruction all that breathed, just as the LORD God of Israel commanded.”
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Joshua 11:16–23
“So Joshua took all that land… And Joshua made war a long time with all those kings… For it was the LORD’s doing to harden their hearts that they should come against Israel in battle, in order that they should be devoted to destruction.”
Key Hebrew Concept: ḥerem
The repeated term is ḥerem (חֵרֶם), usually translated “devoted to destruction.” It implies a ritualized extermination — total removal from human use and consecration to God, often by killing. This is not mere warfare; it is portrayed as sacred violence.
Summary
The main “killing verses” in Joshua are:
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Jericho (Joshua 6:17–21)
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Ai (Joshua 8:24–26)
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Southern Campaign (Joshua 10:28–40)
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Northern Campaign (Joshua 11:6–15)
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Summary Statements (Joshua 10:40–42; 11:16–23)
These are the core texts where the LORD is explicitly said to order or approve total destruction.
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| At what point should we question our idea of God? |
How Should God be Understood?
⚖️ From a theological, literary, and historical perspective, these verses have been deeply debated — whether as historical memory, ideological justification, mythic narrative, or theological metaphor. Many modern interpreters (especially in Jewish and Christian theology today) see them as problematic and in need of reframing.
⚖️ The line in Joshua 11:20 is one of the most striking and troubling:
“For it was the LORD’s doing to harden their hearts that they should come against Israel in battle, in order that they should be devoted to destruction and should receive no mercy, but be exterminated, just as the LORD commanded Moses.”
Why It’s Troubling:
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Parallels with Pharaoh (Exodus)
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The same language is used in Exodus about Pharaoh: “the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart” (Exod. 9:12; 10:20, etc.).
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In both cases, it seems to remove human agency: God ensures the opponent resists, thereby justifying their destruction.
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Theological Problem
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It portrays God as not only permitting violence but orchestrating it.
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This raises questions of divine justice: why would God cause resistance just to destroy those people?
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Literary Function
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In the narrative, it functions to absolve Israel of moral responsibility: they are not wiping out innocent people, but fulfilling God’s decree.
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It reinforces the idea of ḥerem (total devotion to destruction) as divinely mandated, not a political choice.
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Historical/Anthropological Lens
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Scholars often see this as ideological war language. Ancient Near Eastern inscriptions (Moabite, Assyrian, Egyptian) use the same rhetoric: “the gods hardened their hearts” or “the gods devoted them to destruction.”
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It elevates military victory into a sacred act, turning conquest into cosmic destiny.
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Process / Modern Readings
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Process Theology: A process view would resist the idea of God coercively hardening hearts. Instead, it might interpret these verses as Israel’s projection of divine will onto their history, an ancient attempt to explain the chaos of war.
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Literary-Theological Reframing: Many theologians read these texts as mythic war rhetoric, not literal history. The texts express Israel’s desire to see their survival as God’s doing, but those same texts also expose the danger of using God-language to justify violence.
✨ Summary Observation: The “hardening of hearts” in Joshua is not unique but part of a biblical motif that raises questions of freedom, divine justice, and violence. In Exodus, it’s Pharaoh; in Joshua, it’s the Canaanites. In both, the effect is to heighten God’s power but at the cost of human mercy.
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| How we have manufactured God into our own justifying Image |
IV
Is God a God of War and Destruction or a God of Love?
The question sits at the very heart of the Bible’s tensions — and it is as old as Israel’s wrestling with its own story. Let me lay it out carefully, in several perspectives:
1. The Two Portraits of God in Scripture
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God as Warrior
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In texts like Joshua, Exodus, Judges, and some Psalms, God is portrayed as a warrior leading Israel in battle, destroying enemies, and commanding ḥerem (“devotion to destruction”).
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Example: “The LORD is a man of war; the LORD is his name” (Exod. 15:3).
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These passages reflect a tribal, survival-oriented context: Israel, a vulnerable people, saw their God as one who fought for them.
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God as Loving and Merciful
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Other passages stress love, compassion, forgiveness, and covenantal mercy.
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Example: “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exod. 34:6).
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In later prophetic voices and in Jesus’ teachings, this vision of God dominates: love of enemy, justice, compassion for the poor, healing, restoration.
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2. Why the Contrast Exists
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Historical Layering: The Bible isn’t one book but a library, written over centuries by many communities. Each reflected a religious society's own fears, needs, and visions. As an ancient motif, such religious mindsets fall in line with Israel's neighbors who likewise had gods of destruction and warfare.
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Projection of Human Struggles: Ancient peoples often projected their wars into divine terms: if they won, God must have willed it. This is often the case with (binary) mindsets formed between "winners and losers."
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Evolving Theology: Israel’s understanding of God deepened over time. The God who once seemed tribal and violent gradually became the universal God of justice and compassion. Unfortunately, the church has continued this ancient mindset in its prosecution of its "divine cause" of oppression and warfare.
3. The Problem of “Hardening Hearts”
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Verses like Joshua 11:20 make God appear as the author of destruction.
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Process theologians (and many modern interpreters) would say: these are Israel’s words about God, not God’s eternal nature. They reflect ancient war-ideology more than divine reality.
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If we take seriously the New Testament claim that “God is love” (1 John 4:8), then the warrior-God imagery must be understood as a stage in humanity’s growing but imperfect perception of the divine.
4. Process View: God as Persuasive, Not Coercive
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In process thought, God never acts by unilateral coercion. God lures, invites, calls — but does not harden hearts in the sense of overriding human agency.
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Thus, the “God of war” stories are human interpretations of historical trauma. They are part of Scripture, but not the final word.
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The final word is relational love: God as companion, healer, and co-sufferer with creation.
5. A Synthesis
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The Bible gives us both portraits:
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God as warrior (human projection in times of war).
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God as love (a deeper unveiling of God’s actual nature).
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To reconcile them, we might say:
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God is not the author of destruction.
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But humans in ancient times interpreted survival through war as God’s doing.
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Over time, God’s true nature — love — broke through more clearly, culminating in Christ, who revealed God not with a sword, but on a cross.
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✨ Summary Observation: God is not essentially a God of war and destruction; those images reflect human projection in violent times. At God’s core, revealed most fully in Jesus and affirmed in process theology, God is love — always relational, always inviting, always healing.
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| Does Christianity serve a God of bloodshed and warfare? |
Why Does the Christian Bible End with a Violent God of Warfare?
What the Bible actually does at the end
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The New Testament book of Revelation contains vivid battle imagery (e.g., the rider on the white horse and the defeat of the beast in chapters like Revelation 19). Those images read like cosmic warfare.
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But the conclusion of Revelation is not endless warfare. The book ends with a vision of new creation: “a new heaven and a new earth” where God dwells with people, death is no more, and suffering is healed (Revelation 21–22). The final scenes picture restoration and intimacy, not perpetual bloodshed.
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Example: “He will wipe away every tear… death shall be no more.” (Revelation 21:4)
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The closing hymn and invitation (Rev 22) emphasize water of life, healing, and welcome, not eternal extermination.
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So the apocalyptic imagery contains warfare metaphors, but the terminal vision — the book’s telos (proposed future) — is restorative: healing, dwelling, and renewed creation.
Why the violent language exists (historical and literary reasons)
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Apocalyptic genre: Revelation is part of a literary genre filled with symbols, cosmic conflict metaphors, and coded language intended to encourage persecuted communities. It’s often poetic and symbolic, not a battle plan.
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Ancient honor/tribal worldview: Ancient peoples often thought of divine action as martial because they lived in war-saturated worlds. Claiming “my God fights for us” was a way of narrating survival.
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Polemic function: Some violent imagery condemns oppressive powers (Rome, imperial cult, corrupt elites). It can be read as God’s judgment on oppression rather than a license to slaughter ordinary people.
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Narrative theology: Victory language expresses hope that wrongdoing and injustice will not have the last word; it’s framed in apocalyptic metaphors of divine triumph.
Why this language is dangerous (and has been used badly)
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Triumphalism & Supremacy: If read plainly as “our God is bigger → you are unholy → therefore kill or subjugate,” the text can be (and has been) used to justify genocide, colonialism, forced conversions, and ethnic/religious violence.
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Theology of exclusion: Read literally and triumphally, such texts can sanctify the idea that some humans are “divotable” — morally and theologically unacceptable.
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Moral mismatch with Jesus: Jesus’ teachings (love enemies, turn the other cheek) make a literal, violent reading ethically problematic for Christians who want to be faithful to him.
How many religious readers and traditions respond
There are several major ways Christians have reframed or resisted a violent reading:
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Historicist / literal warrior reading — (rare today among responsible theologians) treats Revelation’s battles as literal future wars and can encourage militaristic theology. This is where triumphalist danger is greatest.
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Preterist / contextual reading — sees Revelation as symbolic of first-century struggles (e.g., Rome’s domination) and not a template for killing people today. It reads the “enemy” as imperial powers and systemic evil.
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Idealist / symbolic reading — reads the visions as timeless symbols of the struggle between good and evil, not instructions for violence.
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Christ-centered / ethical corrective — emphasizes Jesus’ nonviolence and reframes apocalyptic “war” language as God’s judgment on injustice, not on ordinary people. The goal is restorative justice, not annihilation.
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Process theology & nonviolent eschatologies — deny that God acts coercively; instead God is persuasive and works to heal. Apocalypse images are human-language about ultimate hope, not divine violence. Thinkers like John Cobb and David Griffin develop nonviolent eschatologies.
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Universalist or apokatastasis readings — some theologians (ancient: Origen; modern: advocates of universal reconciliation) interpret the goal as ultimate restoration of all—again undermining a theology of permanent divine extermination.
A constructive theological reframing (short)
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The violent imagery functions rhetorically: it confronts injustice with the language of final accountability.
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It is not necessarily a literal mandate for believers to enact violence; when Christians follow Jesus, the ethic is transformation and reconciliation, not extermination.
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Ethical hermeneutic: read troubling texts through the core revelation of God’s character shown in Jesus — love, vulnerability, and nonviolent self-giving. Passages that conflict with that core should be reread as products of culture, polemic, or genre rather than fixed divine commands to violence.
Practical implications (what you can do with this)
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If you study or teach these texts, always pair apocalyptic passages with Jesus’ ethics (e.g., Sermon on the Mount) and with restorative readings of Revelation 21–22.
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Push back on any preaching that uses Joshua or Revelation to sanctify violence; insist that historical context and literary genre matter.
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Advocate for readings that hold accountable oppressive systems (structural evil) rather than demonizing actual human groups.
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Use nonviolent theological resources to form faith communities resistant to religious violence.
Recommended starting readings / thinkers (scholarly + theological alternatives)
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On Revelation & apocalyptic: Elaine Pagels (Revelations), Adela Yarbro Collins (works on Revelation), N. T. Wright (readable treatments of Revelation in context).
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On violent texts in the Old Testament: Walter Brueggemann (prophetic and critical readings), Philip Davies (historical-critical perspectives).
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Nonviolent / process theology and reconciliation: John B. Cobb Jr., David Ray Griffin, and for universalist lines Gregory of Nyssa / Origen (historical) and modern theologians who explore universal reconciliation.
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Ethics of nonviolence: René Girard (violence, scapegoating, and sacrificial structures), Stanley Hauerwas (Christian nonviolence), Walter Wink (powers and principalities, Christus Victor reinterpreted nonviolently).
VI
Final, candid answer to the question of violence
Does the Bible end in God’s warfare against the world and therefore reinforce “my God vs your God” holy violence?
Not necessarily — it contains warfare imagery, and certain texts have been used to promote that tribal, violent view. But Revelation’s final vision is restorative (new creation). More importantly: the deepest and most credible Christian claim about God — as revealed in Jesus and affirmed by many mature theological traditions — is that God turns toward love, healing, and the transformation of enemies, not their annihilation. The texts that sound like triumphalist divine warfare are historically and rhetorically situated; read thoughtfully, they can critique empire and oppression rather than license human killing.
1. The Surface Problem
Yes — when read straightforwardly, the Christian Bible appears to end with God’s violence. Revelation’s battle scenes, culminating in the lake of fire and the destruction of enemies, can sound like the ultimate “my God is bigger than your God” story. That framing has, tragically, been used to sanctify exclusion, coercion, and even genocide in Christian history.
If this is the final word, then the Bible seems to circle back to the most ancient, tribal vision: our God kills, your people die.
2. The Narrative Tension
But the Bible itself resists this flat reading. Revelation doesn’t end in warfare. After the conflict imagery comes the New Jerusalem — the climactic picture is not carnage but healing:
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“The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” (Rev. 22:2)
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God wipes away tears, removes death, and welcomes all who thirst to drink freely of the water of life (Rev. 21:4–6).
So the text moves through conflict imagery but lands on restoration. The final tone is not one of endless holy war but of renewed creation and reconciled dwelling.
3. Why the Imagery of War Persists
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Genre: Revelation is apocalyptic, and apocalyptic speech is filled with cosmic battle imagery. It was the “political cartooning” of its day — meant to shock, encourage, and dramatize the fall of oppressive powers.
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Context: First-century Christians lived under Rome’s crushing empire. To them, God’s triumph meant Rome’s downfall. They borrowed the only language they had: war.
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Polemic, not blueprint: The war metaphors are less about telling Christians to kill, and more about assuring them that oppression will not win forever.
4. The Real Risk
Still, the danger is real: readers who flatten this imagery into a literal “holy war” see God as the ultimate tribal deity, sanctifying violence against “the other.” This reinforces the ancient mindset you named — that holiness belongs only to “us” and death is the fate of “them.”
This risk is not hypothetical; it has shaped crusades, colonialism, and nationalist theologies. That is why this question cannot be ignored.
5. A Reframed Reading
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God’s warfare = God’s judgment on injustice, not on people groups. The “enemies” in Revelation are empires, systems, and symbols of oppression (Babylon, the Beast), not ethnic neighbors.
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The true final act is healing. The story does not stop at the battlefield but moves to a city where death, mourning, and pain are no more.
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Jesus is the interpretive key. The warrior-Lamb imagery is paradoxical: the Lamb conquers not by violence, but by suffering, self-giving, and resurrection.
6. Candid Answer, Expanded
So: Yes, if read literally and triumphalistically, Revelation reinforces the most dangerous ancient mindset — God as warrior, us as holy, them as expendable. But No, that need not be its message. The deeper current of the Christian Bible — crystallized in Jesus — is that God conquers not by killing, but by absorbing violence and transforming it into life.
The final vision of Scripture is not “my God is bigger than your God,” but “Behold, I make all things new.” (Rev. 21:5).
👉 In other words, the Bible contains the old war-God voice, but it ends by transforming that voice into a vision of cosmic renewal. The challenge for us is deciding which vision we carry forward.
