Concept

ANE Siege-Warfare Reality

Intro

The hardest Old Testament texts for modern readers are the conquest narratives. Joshua takes the land. "Joshua smote all the country... he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed" (Joshua 10:40). Critics call it genocide and ask, with real force, how a good God could command such a thing.

Two things have to be on the table before the texts can be read fairly.

The first is the literary convention. In the ancient Near East, every nation's military annals talked this way. The Moabite king Mesha (around 840 BC) boasts on a stone monument that he "destroyed Israel forever." Israel was not destroyed; the boast is conventional rhetoric. The Assyrian king Sennacherib (around 700 BC) claims he "trampled like dust" the surrounding peoples; the same peoples appear in subsequent campaigns. Egyptian pharaohs routinely claim total destruction of enemies who reappear in later inscriptions. This hagiographic hyperbole was the genre. The original audience knew it. When Joshua's annal says "all who breathed," it is using the speech-form of victory accounts of the time, not a literal census of corpses. Internally the Bible confirms this: Joshua claims total destruction in chapter 10, but Judges 1 says the Canaanites were still there in large numbers. The two texts only contradict if the first is read literally; on the conventional reading they coexist easily.

The second thing is the actual practice of ANE siege warfare. Bronze Age sieges, when literally executed, were horrific by modern standards. Mass enslavement, mass deportation, mass killing, sexual violence, and starvation of besieged cities were normal. Against that real-world baseline, the Mosaic war code in Deuteronomy 20 is striking for what it forbids and limits. Offer terms of peace first. Spare women and children of distant cities under specific conditions. Preserve fruit trees. Provide for the survivors. The OT code is not the floor of ancient ethics; it is the ceiling, restraining conduct that the surrounding cultures normalized.

These two moves together, hagiographic hyperbole as the genre, and ANE siege practice as the realistic comparison, do not make every difficulty in the conquest texts disappear. They do reframe the conversation. The honest position is that Israel's conquest narratives are using standard ancient war-rhetoric while constraining real practice more tightly than the surrounding world. The page below works the comparative material in detail, traces the contemporary evangelical scholarship (Paul Copan, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Matthew Flannagan, John Walton, Richard Hess), and shows how this framework engages the strongest forms of the genocide objection.

In full

The actual historical practice and rhetorical conventions of warfare in the ancient Near East, the comparative-context frame for engaging the OT conquest narratives (Joshua, Judges 1, the herem commands of Deuteronomy 7 and 20) without imposing 21st-century military-ethics expectations on Bronze-Age realities. The contemporary evangelical apologetic move (Paul Copan, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Matthew Flannagan, John Walton, Richard Hess) reads the conquest narratives against the standard ANE military-rhetorical conventions and the archaeological evidence of actual ANE siege practice, finding the conquest texts substantially more humane than their contemporary alternatives and substantially less literal in their extermination-language than naive readings assume.

This hub is the historical-realia companion to ANE Legal Codes, Comparative Context (which addresses ANE legal corpora) and God and the Killing of Children (which addresses the conquest narratives directly). The two together provide the structural apologetic engagement with the most morally-difficult OT material.

Two principal apologetic moves

Move 1, hagiographic hyperbole in ANE military rhetoric

The atheist objection cites Joshua 10:40 ("Joshua smote all the country... he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed") and similar texts as describing literal genocide. The comparative-ANE response: this language is the standard ANE military-rhetorical convention of the period, used routinely by Assyrian, Egyptian, Hittite, and Moabite military annals to claim victory regardless of the actual death toll.

Documented parallels from non-biblical ANE sources:

The Mesha Stele (Moabite, c. 840 BC), King Mesha of Moab boasts of having "destroyed Israel forever" (line 7); we know from the OT (2 Kings 3, plus subsequent Israelite history) that Israel was emphatically not destroyed. The rhetoric is standard ANE military boasting.
Sennacherib's annals (Assyrian, c. 700 BC), Sennacherib claims he "trampled like dust" the surrounding nations; standard hyperbolic claim that does not literally describe extermination.
Egyptian Pharaonic battle inscriptions (e.g., Thutmose III, Ramesses II), routinely claim total destruction of enemies; the same enemies appear in subsequent campaigns.

This rhetorical convention was so standard that the original ANE audience would not have read it literally. The biblical conquest narratives use this convention, Joshua's "destroyed all that breathed" is genre-standard military rhetoric, not a description of literal extermination of every individual including non-combatants.

Evidence within the biblical text that the conquest was not literal extermination:

Judges 1 records that the Canaanites continued to exist in the land after Joshua's conquest, many cities Joshua "destroyed" reappear in Judges populated by Canaanites whom Israel failed to drive out.
Judges 2:20-23 explicitly notes that God left some nations not driven out as a test for Israel.
The Rahab narrative (Joshua 2, 6) and Gibeonite narrative (Joshua 9) demonstrate that surrender + treaty was a valid alternative to extermination, the herem was not categorically applied to anyone meeting Israel in war.
The herem texts themselves include exemptions: women and children among non-Canaanite cities offering peace (Deut 20:10-15); fruit-bearing trees protected (Deut 20:19-20).

The internal-biblical evidence + the external ANE-rhetorical convention together imply that the conquest narratives are stylized military reportage in ANE-convention rather than literal-genocidal extermination accounts.

See Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide? (Baker, 2014) for the canonical evangelical deployment of this argument.

Move 2, the actual character of ANE siege warfare

When ancient siege warfare did occur in literal historical practice, it was routinely:

Total, Assyrian siege practice (the most documented in the period) included impaling enemy leaders on stakes, flaying captives alive, deporting entire populations, salting the earth. The "no quarter" practice was the default across the ANE.
Asymmetric, non-combatants were not protected by any ANE convention; the modern just-war distinction between combatants and non-combatants did not exist.
Gendered, women and children of conquered cities were typically taken as captives / slaves / concubines, sometimes killed.

The Mosaic conquest commands, read against this baseline, are substantially more restrained:

Cities outside the Canaanite list (Deut 20:10-15): peace-offer first; if accepted, the population becomes tributary; if rejected, only the adult males are killed in war, women and children spared.
The Canaanite-list herem (Deut 20:16-18): the explicit theological justification is preventing religious assimilation (the Canaanite religion involved child sacrifice, sacred prostitution, divination); the herem is targeted at the religious-cultural system, not at individuals.
The duration is bounded, the conquest period is a finite historical window (the Joshua-period campaigns), not an ongoing genocide. Once the land was taken, the OT explicitly forbids further such warfare.

The conquest texts represent a specific, bounded, theologically-purposed divine action within the broader ANE military framework, not a universal license for religious violence and not even the worst military practice of the period.

Where the apologetic still has weight

The comparative-ANE move handles much of the conquest-narrative difficulty, but not all of it. Genuine remaining difficulties:

Theological scandal of divine command for any killing of non-combatants, even granting hagiographic-hyperbole, the texts include divine commands to kill (at minimum) the male adults of conquered cities. The Christian framework must engage this theologically rather than handwave it away with the hyperbole reading alone.
Children specifically, the herem texts (Deut 20:16, 1 Sam 15:3) name children among those to be killed in some passages. Even granting hyperbole, the moral problem of these texts being in the canon at all requires a substantive theological response. See God and the Killing of Children for the engagement.
The pastoral handling, for the believer or seeker wounded by these texts, the comparative-ANE engagement is intellectually necessary but not pastorally sufficient. The cross + the suffering-God + the eschatological-judgment-frame must come into play. See Conversation Scenarios §funeral / §wounded ex-church for the pastoral protocol.

The apologetic position is: the comparative-ANE move + the hyperbole reading + the theological-context engagement + the cross-and-eschaton framing collectively form a coherent response, not that any single move suffices.