Few passages generate as much objection to the Christian faith as Joshua chapter six. The Israelites, acting under divine instruction, destroy the city of Jericho and its inhabitants. To many readers, ancient and modern, this looks like exactly what critics call it, genocide commanded by God. We should not dodge this question. We should define our terms, examine the evidence, and answer it honestly.
We begin where every careful argument must begin, with a definition. According to the standard used in international law, genocide is the intentional extermination of all or part of a people group because of who they are, their ethnicity, their bloodline, their identity. This distinction matters enormously. Soldiers who die in war because of what they did, because they fought as combatants, are not victims of genocide. Civilians targeted purely because of their ethnic identity, apart from any action, are. The difference between these two categories is not a technicality. It is the entire question.
So which category describes Jericho? The text itself gives us the answer, and it is conduct, not identity. Long before Joshua ever crossed the Jordan, God told Abraham in Genesis fifteen that his descendants would receive the land, but not yet, because the sin of the peoples living there had not yet reached its full measure. That conversation happened roughly four hundred and seventy years before the events of Joshua six. For nearly five centuries, God withheld judgment on the Canaanites, giving them space, time, and repeated warning.
And the warnings were not silent. Scripture describes God sending signs ahead of Israel's advance, and by the time Israel actually arrived, the neighboring peoples already knew what had happened in Egypt and at the Jordan. Rahab herself testifies to this in chapter two, telling the spies that the hearts of her people were already melting in fear because they had heard what this God had done. This was not a surprise attack against an unsuspecting population. It was judgment that arrived only after centuries of patience and after clear warning had already gone out.
What, specifically, was being judged? The text and the broader Mosaic law are direct about this. The practices condemned among the Canaanite peoples included child sacrifice, offering their own children on altars to their gods. This was the conduct that had reached its full measure. God's judgment in Joshua six is tied explicitly to this behavior, not to bloodline or ethnicity. Israel was warned in the plainest terms in Leviticus that if they adopted these same practices, they too would be judged in the same way the Canaanites were being judged. The standard applied to conduct, applied equally regardless of which nation practiced it.
If this were genocide in the technical sense, we would expect the entire Canaanite population, everywhere, to be targeted for extermination simply because they were Canaanite. That is not what happened. Only a small number of cities were placed under this particular judgment, Jericho among them. Canaanite peoples remained throughout the land for generations afterward, appearing repeatedly through the period of the judges and beyond. And most tellingly, individuals who changed their allegiance, regardless of their ethnic background, were spared and welcomed in. Rahab and her household are saved in this very chapter. An entire Gibeonite population is spared not long after. Salvation in this narrative followed faith and allegiance, not bloodline.
We should not, however, pretend the passage is comfortable. The text plausibly includes the deaths of children within Jericho, and any honest reading has to reckon with that weight rather than explain it away. The framework that makes sense of this, uncomfortable as it is to a modern individualist mindset, is corporate. In the ancient world, guilt and deliverance were often understood as belonging to households and cities rather than only to isolated individuals. This does not remove the gravity of what happened. It does explain why judgment on a city's sustained, generational sin could touch even those too young to have chosen it themselves, in the same way that Rahab's faith extended salvation to family members who may never have personally declared allegiance to God.
The deeper theological claim underneath all of this is that God, as the just ruler over all the earth, has the right to judge persistent, entrenched sin, including sin that harms the most vulnerable among a population. What is uncomfortable about Joshua six is not, ultimately, whether God has that right. It is that He chose to exercise it through human agents rather than direct intervention, as He did at Sodom. But the moral logic is the same in both cases, judgment on sin that could no longer be tolerated, tempered even in its severity by mercy toward anyone who turned toward Him.
So is Joshua six genocide? By the definition that actually governs the term, no. It is judgment tied to conduct, delayed for centuries, preceded by warning, limited in scope, and open, even within its severity, to anyone willing to change allegiance. That does not make the chapter easy to read. It does make it defensible, and it makes clear that the God revealed here is neither capricious nor tribal, but patient, just, and willing to save anyone who turns to Him, even from inside a city already under judgment.
Dr. William C.K. Yomes is the founding apologist of Faith Makes Sense and the Senior Pastor of Catalyst Community Church in Wilmington, Delaware. This article is part of his ongoing teaching ministry at Catalyst Community Church.