Truth Unites - The Conquest of Canaan: Answering Objections With Michael Jones (of Inspiring Philosophy)

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

Gavin Ortlund and Michael Jones from Inspiring Philosophy discuss the historicity and morality of the conquest of Canaan. Special Offer for the Worldview Bulletin: https://worldviewbulletin.substack.com/subscribe?coupon=3808421e Inspiring Philosophy's video on the conquest of Canaan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCstm5DYnb4 Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

Hey, everybody. This is a dialogue that I did with Michael Jones from inspiring philosophy. We talked about the conquest of Canaan and addressed a lot of the top objections about its historicity. Did it even happen? And then the morality concerns that people have. I've been interested in this topic, as you know, putting out a lot of videos. And I love partnering with people who are like-minded. I think Michael does a lot of great work. I'll link to one of his videos on this topic in the video description. I also am always trying to recommend good resources. Here's another one, the World View Bulletin newsletter. Do you know about this? I'll put up a picture. They have some incredible articles. If you're interested in apologetics, this is a great resource to know.

This is an article I was just reading this morning, what I learned from 100 atheists who converted to Christianity. Fascinating. Helpful. It's practical for evangelism. Addresses cultural things, all kinds of helpful material in there for apologetics. And in the video description, if you click right to this video description, you can get three free months. There's a special offer to start your first three months are free. So click on that and check it out. Right. Without further ado, here's our dialogue. Hey, everybody. Welcome or welcome back to Truth Unites. I'm here with Michael Jones from inspiring philosophy, and we're going to talk about the conquest of Canaan and other issues

of violence in the Old Testament, this concern of genocide, and kind of work through objections that people have. We'll spend the first portion of this on the historicity, especially of the conquest of Canaan, and then we'll spend the second portion of this on the morality of it. So that's where we're going. You can skip around on the time scam timestamps if you have one interest more than another. But actually those two things are kind of related. And that's what I've been learning is I've been getting into this. And Michael knows a lot more than me about the first of these two.

So I'll be asking a lot of questions early on. But Michael, thanks for taking the time. How are you doing? Oh, yeah. Glad to finally be on your channel. This is awesome. Yeah, I've been looking forward to it for a while. I appreciate your work.

And when did you start on YouTube and what motivated you to start a YouTube channel? Many moons ago. It was 2011. and basically most of the Christians I saw online were just younger as creationists or dealing with cringy atheists. And I'm like, there's got to be something better. The time I was just a security guard just sitting in a trailer ever night doing nothing. I got a time. I could make videos.

I started doing it back then. Fascinating. Have you found YouTube a fruitful and good place to engage and try to help people and do apologetics and that kind of thing? Oh, for sure. I get testimonies now weekly. So it's great to hear those. And so, yeah, it's just been, it's been, we've seen a lot of fruit to this ministry. We're just going to keep growing and moving in that direction.

Yeah. Similar with me, and I'm always kind of curious to hear what others' experiences are. But I sort of got onto YouTube just out of a sense of, oh, I, you know, there's some conversations happening. I'd love to see certain things happening. Maybe I can try to have a helpful role here. And then I found it to be kind of an amazing place, just the opportunities that it brings and the people you can reach. So I've been getting, you know, I do a lot of stuff kind of on theology topics, but then I apologetics as well, and not because I'm intellectually curious about them mainly. I've gotten into

these issues of kind of violence in the Bible, slavery in the Bible, these kinds of things. I know this is something you've done a lot of work on. In fact, if I can remember, I'll put up on the screen now a thumbnail of your video that we're going to be, especially talking about here, so that people can look out for that on YouTube. I think they'll find that really helpful. It's about basically the historicity of the conquest of Canaan. And I never woke up in the morning one day and said, wow, I'm just really curious to study the book of Joshua. But it's kind of similar to what you first said and what I was saying about YouTube. It's like you see a need.

You know, you see this issue that's come up that people are really, really wrestling with. So, well, let me just ask you that. How did the issue of the conquest of Canaan first come up for you that you wanted to put some work on this? Well, it was related to the Exodus. So the video is part of a three-part series on evidence for the Exodus. And there was so much I divided into three videos. one just for leaving Egypt, so Exodus Rediscovered, then evidence for the wandering period. And then the third one was the conquest itself. So Exodus rediscovered the conquest. And just putting all that data together just to show that there is overwhelming evidence, not just for the conquest, but for the Exodus from Egypt to support the historicity of the Bible.

Well, that's one issue that I know a lot of Christians have angst about their word. They've heard these claims. maybe that's the first thing I can ask you is give a summary of the scholarship on this in terms of did the conquest of Canaan actually happen? What is the overall state of scholarship on a question like that? Well, it seems to be shifting more in the direction of historicity. It definitely seems to be moving away from the old Deaver or Finkelstein idea that this was all mythology written later. Now, that still seems to be the consensus, especially among critical scholars for sure.

but the evidence overwhelmingly supports an historical conquest. A lot of what you're going to hear is that, well, there was no evidence of widespread mass destruction throughout Canaan. And Kenneth Kitchen, Old Testament scholar, says, duh, because that's not what Joshua says. It says three sites were burned, Jericho, I, and Hazor.

The rest were supposed to be used by the Israelites. They were supposed to just sort of come in, kick out the evil inhabitants, and take over. So we shouldn't expect to see a major difference. difference. So, you know, they'll claim the historicity of the conquest is just lacking. But when you get into the data and you compare to what Joshua actually says, there's overwhelming evidence for an exodus and a conquest in the 13th century BC, which would be the Ramazade period. Yeah, this is interesting because this is where, as I was looking into this question a little bit,

the historicity, it does tie into the question of the morality of these military strikes, because one of the points I was bringing up there that you referenced Kenneth Kitchens. Is it Kitchens? I think. No, kitchen. Just kitchen. Kenneth Kitchens. Okay.

But he's one among several others who have advanced this idea that the destruction of some of these cities. And I talked about Richard Hess. I think, man, suddenly my memory on these names. You know, it is you study for one thing after another. And this is like four topics ago. But anyway, Hess has this argument. He's talking about, you know, a lot of these cities, we. think of cities as like primarily residential like you think of like I live near the city of Nashville

so you think of right you know when we think of a city being completely destroyed we think of like you know an army coming through and like knocking people's doors down and killing families and this kind of thing and a lot of these scholars are saying no no no no these cities were primarily military forts or garrisons they weren't primarily residential areas the civilian population would have scattered before the military conflict and so forth so anyway that came up for me as like like, okay, this is obviously, if that's true, that's hugely relevant, it seems, to what you'd expect to find in the archaeology. Correct. And Richard Hess makes this point in numerous publications like his book, Israeli religions, commentary on Joshua as well. Cherokee was a fort. You wouldn't have women and children hiding

in there. They would have been out in the countryside hiding far away. This is not, we don't expect them to actually go into this giant city. The only non-combatants would have been people running the tavern or the brothel, like Rehab, for example. Yeah, and if people want to look into that a little more, I tried to summarize Hess. I quoted Paul Copan and a few others who are addressing this in my, that was my sixth argument in my video of the first point. So 1.6 of my video, people can check out for more. And Michael, I'm sure he addressed that as well. But maybe never wanting to be at all triumphalist.

Let's try to, can we steal man the opposing side? I mean, are there any, maybe the answer is no. Are there any arguments you found that are serious or formidable arguments against historicity? Or what's the best case that can be made on that side? Yeah, it's interesting. I've looked for arguments and I'll get a couple. You'll get, well, there's no evidence of mass migration of people moving out of Egypt. And Richard Elliott Friedman, who's no friend to conservative scholars, says, well, we've not done any major excavations.

in the Sinai. So of course we've not found evidence of a mass migration of people. We haven't looked. And, you know, there's just been a lot of erosion. There's been interference by later groups, which we'll talk about when we get to Jericho, for example. But that doesn't mean that there wasn't a mass migration of people. So this is just, it's just missing the whole point, misunderstanding how archaeology works in the state of archaeology itself. The other issue is they'll take the numbers in Exodus literally. So we should see like two million people leaving Egypt and moving into Canaan. And scholars like Kenneth Kitchen, James Hoffmeyer,

say that's not what Exodus is saying. The word for 1,000 can also mean military unit or tribe. Mitchell Medein says the numbers in the book of numbers. They're probably idealized numbers. They're not meant to be literal. So we're getting more conservative estimates, like 25,000 people were in the Exodus. David Falk says maybe somewhere between 100 to 200,000 at the most.

So they'll say, like, well, we don't see millions of people moving. And, yeah, but that's based on a fundamentalist reading of the Pentateuch and Joshua. We don't have to take that view. If you take a more scholarly understanding, it makes a lot more sense. So that's another one. And, of course, one of the biggest objections is they'll say, we don't see any evidence for the conquest in the time period the Bible says it occurs.

So if you go on what King says, it says that Joshua built the temple 480 years after the Exodus. And they'll go, okay, well, the end of the Exodus. go, okay, well, the Exodus should have happened, 1446 BC, Conquest 1406 BC. We look, no evidence there in the right. The problem is, is most scholars today recognize that number in Kings is an idealized number, which are often used in temple inauguration text from the ancient world. So we see this in Assyria, we see this in Egypt as well. So they're assuming, again, that the number has to be literal. And just check out booked by like Sasha Stern, time and process in ancient Judaism. They weren't using numbers like we do. They could be used for chronology or totals, but they

often use it for idealized purposes, symbolic purposes. They didn't always use them. So that objection also misses the mark. And if you look at what Egyptologists who actually believe in an Exodus will say, they say the only time it could have happened is in the Ramazide period. That's because Exodus 1 says they built the cities of Pithom and Ramaziz. Now, Ramaziz was not built until the beginning of the 19th dynasty of Egypt. So around the beginning of 1,300 BC or so around that time. Okay, so the Exodus had to happen after that, based on that saying, because you had to be there, the Hebrews had to be there to construct the city. It can't be an updated place name because it says they constructed that city. We know that city was built around 1,300 BC, so they had to be there

after that point. The only time the Exodus and conquest can really happen is in the 1300s BC. I think we ended up placing it in the documentary Exodus Rediscovered at 1265 BC, and then the conquest happens 40 years after that. Okay. Let us talk about what you mentioned a moment ago about idealized numbers, because I think this is an important point. You know, when I'm doing apologetics work, I feel a sort of pastoral burden to try to help shepherd Christians as we're working through these topics. And some people, I've learned, I've always known this, but I've seen how common this is, as I'm doing apologetics, I'm guessing you might be similar on this, is they have an instinct that it's sort of like the more conservative or the more literal reading of the Bible, the better.

And they feel nervous. You know, it's like, so we're going to talk about the ancient warfare rhetoric a little later in our discussion here. So we'll get to that. But even just Just recently I was addressing the issue of contradictions in the Gospels, and I was pointing out that, you know, some level of discronology or putting events in different order is accepted within that literary genre, and it's not an error, you know. But I know that makes some people nervous because they feel as though we're attacking the Bible or we're impugning the text or something like that. So maybe we can talk about this, this sort of a peripheral point to some degree, but it's related to this larger discussion of how can we help Christians understand that, It's not the idea that the more literal, the better is not actually the best way to read the Bible. It's not the most honoring to the Bible because the Bible doesn't always communicate in the most literalistic ways. And so to honor the text means we want to submit to how it is using language and to its intentions and sort of let go of our expectations and let the text guide us for when we interpret something more literally or less literally and so forth.

So I guess that's a pastoral concern I have in this trying to help Christians. Do you want to comment on that at all? And then we can move on. Yeah. Yeah. If anyone wants to see more, check out a video I did. Time is different in the Bible that the scholar Sautja Stern helped me write. But when we try to take this literal reading, we end up actually creating contradictions in the text or things don't make sense. The two examples, you know, it says if you take a literal reading of like Acts 7, Stephen's speech, Abraham would have been 40 when he left

Moses would have been 40 when he left Egypt, 40 when he left Midian and went back to Egypt. But if you read Exodus 4, it says that when he went back to Egypt, he put his two sons and his wife on a donkey. Okay, so if he's already been in Midian for 40 years, that poor donkey is carrying a grown woman and two grown men at this point. It's probably far more likely he wasn't in Midian for that long time. The number 40 was often used in ancient Israeli culture to just express it. an unknown period of time.

You know, like we say like, ah, about a week ago or so. They would say 40, just unknown specified time kind of thing. The other one is in Genesis 1717. Now, if you do the math based on when Abraham left Huron and moved into Canaan, that's when his father died, so Tara died. Tara died at 205. Abraham left there, that kind of thing. So Abraham should have been, or Tara should have been 135, I believe, when

Abraham was born because you got to do the math what Stephen says in Acts 7 and what we see in Genesis 12 when Abraham left Iran. The only problem is is that when in Genesis 1717, God shows up and says, you're going to have a son. Abraham laughs and says, shall a man who is a hundred have a child? Well, that's odd. Based on the math we get from Acts 7 in Genesis 12. Abraham should have been born when his own father was over 100. So why does he think it's impossible? Well, probably because Tara wasn't that age, they're using idealized numbers to describe the patriarchs to give them more honor. So, interestingly enough, when we take a fundamentalist reading, we create more problems in the text. If we interpret the Bible in its ancient Israel-like culture, it makes far more sense, and the text actually doesn't have these type of problems.

So we need to stop doing that kind of thing. And you can even see a problem with, if you take a literal reading of the numbers of Exodus, with Exodus 1 saying they built Ptham and Ramaziz. Because again, Ramaziz wasn't built to around 1,300 BC. We have to go with a literal chronology from the Book of Kings. The Exodus had happened in 1446 BC. It creates another problem. So it's better just to interpret the Bible in its cultural context.

And the Bible makes far more sense. And we have less issues to deal with. Yeah, you mentioned the words in its cultural context. That's an appeal I love to make to Christians, too, is just to understand, hey, if you go to a different part of the world today, there's going to be cultural differences. And you have to – it's good to be humble and open, you know, to consider. They are going to do things differently and not assume that my way of doing it is right. And there are these massive cultural differences with ancient text. So hopefully just that's an appeal that can encourage Christians to be set open to consider this and look into it, at least.

As I was watching your video, one of the points that came up that I wanted to follow up on and ask, because you know more about this question of historicity than I do. So I'll just ask you some questions here. So on the specific city of Jericho, I found this kind of interesting. There's lots of discussion about archaeological discoveries at Jericho. Maybe you could just give us a little overview of what the archaeology, what the dispute is and what you think the archaeology supports there with Jericho. Yeah, so there's a history. behind Jericho because when John Garstang first went there, he dated the destruction of Jericho

to the 15th century BC. And so early day proponents of the Exodus rejoiced. But then Kathleen Kenyon, more qualified archaeologists, I think, I don't even know of Garstang really did have any degrees in that area. She went there and she said, no, this destruction happened in 1550 BC or sometime around then. So that blew that out of the water. And everyone was very upstead. a later Associates for Biblical Research, working with Bryant Wood, came back and said, no, no, no, it's got to be in the 15th century around 1446. And so this is the big debate that was happening the past 30 years. Unfortunately, Bryant Wood never published his research or his full report.

So there was that. However, the problem with that destruction date that is probably 1550, Kathleen Kenyon was most likely right, it can't be Joshua's destruction. because the latest reports say that that destruction happened with battering rams involved. Joshua didn't use battering rams. It's also the wrong wall. It's a Cyclopean wall that fell. You can't live in a Cyclopean wall.

It says Rehab's house was in the wall. Cyclopean walls don't do that. The type of walls you need for that are casemate walls because it's like a dual wall and then they build rooms in between them. The wall that fell in Kathleen Kenyon's destruction is a single wall. There was no way anyone could live in that wall. So this can't be Joshua's destruction. Latest reports came out very recently, though.

And one of the things they note, though, is in the 13th century BC, the layer that represents that time period, it's missing because later builders came on the site and they cut into those layers during the Iron Age, during the Roman era, and they remove the evidence. So it's not that there is no evidence of a destruction. It's that the layer that could tell us if there was a destruction or not has been disturbed by later builders. So that's a problem. However, Lorenzo Nago, as also noted in his report, that after the earlier, so the 1550 destruction that Kathleen Kenyon mentioned, the site wasn't abandoned.

They rebuilt a new mud brick structure on top, and it was occupied. Then sometime in the 13th century, we don't know why, that mud brick walled structure disappeared, went away. Not sure why. And it's replaced by a small rural village in the 1100. Now, this doesn't confirm Joshua's conquest in the 13th century, but it is consistent with it now. It does cohere with it because the old idea was after the 1550 destruction that Kathleen Canyon identified, the site was completely abandoned, so when Joshua comes in, there was no one there. Latest reports say no. After that, they rebuilt a big mud brick-willed structure on top, and then it disappeared roughly about the time of Joshua,

and it's replaced by a small village after. So the latest reports from Lorenzo Niagara, the title of reports, if anyone wants to check this, it's called the Italian Palestinian Expedition to Tell S. Sultan, Ancient Jericho, archaeology, and the valorization of material and immaterial heritage. So latest reports seem to at least show us something that is consistent with the biblical record. One of the issues I've been studying is whether these cities like Jericho and I were residential areas mainly or whether they're you know that we talked about them as military forts or garrisons and so forth and I made the case I think it's better to see them as the latter what's your

take on that and what do you think is the best argument for that oh absolutely I mean when we when we've excavated these sites we found basically evidence of like military occupation we're not really seeing strong evidence this was met necessarily for residential aspects so this seems they have been more of like a fork kind of thing. But again, the layers that should tell us what was going on there in the 13th century are missing entirely. I know Richard Hess has written a lot about this, so he gives a lot of really good evidence for that. Same with I, though, is I seems to be based on the text of Joshua. It was like a military outpost for the city of Bethel.

So it was probably some small military outpost. It was hard to attack. Get there before you get to Bethel. Now, of course, the archaeology of the site of I, which is at hell, I believe, doesn't really give us any indications of a destruction in the 13th century either. However, based on what we now see with the latest reports on Jericho, of problems with erosion and problems with later builders or later occupants disturbing the sites, we shouldn't be surprised at the end of the day because this is just what's going to happen. We have this, we need to get rid of this image we have of archaeology, that we've combed the desert. We've studied every site in depth. And now we have a perfect picture of the way the world happened in the past.

That's just not true. Archaeology is messy. It's a lot of inferences. And a lot of the data gets disturbed by just people that have lived there over the past, you know, thousands of years. So even if we never find any evidence of eye, that is not evidence. There wasn't an attack on it in the 13th century. because of just what archaeology can reveal.

Skeptics sometimes exaggerate how much power archaeology has. It has a lot of power for sure, but that doesn't mean you can dismiss historical accounts just because we don't find any direct evidence. We know the Egyptians fought tons of battles in Canaan. We found very little evidence of a lot of those battles because, you know, they're not meant to leave behind material remains that are going to last 3,000 years. It's just not the way things work. Right.

And if we're dealing with a smaller group of people and a city that's really not a full city and what we think of in the modern sense of that term, it seems to reduce the overall expectation of how much archaeological data there could be to find. I mean, how much of this do you think would boil down to the axiom evidence of, no, I always get this backwards, absence of evidence doesn't equal evidence of. absence because it seems like that's what a lot of the opposing side is relying upon. We don't, in other words, it doesn't seem like there's actually any hard data that goes against the book of Joshua as much as there's simply at times a lack of attestation from everything I

can tell. Yeah, that's a good point because that is often what you see with a layman skeptics online. Absence of evidence is therefore evidence of absence, which is absurd. When you look at how little of archaeological sites have been fully excavated, you need to relax. But then they ignore sites like Hazor, which the scholarly consensus on that is that was destroyed in the 13th century BC. That was done most likely by the Israelites based on the way the site was destroyed. So as well as other places like the site of Abal seems have been built in the 13th century, and it seems to be a cultic site, which again matches Joshua. So they'll ignore the finds that confirm Joshua, Shiloh, Abal, Hazar, the latest reports on Jericho now supported at least.

least or at least cohere with it. And they'll just focus on things like the absence of evidence at eye or something. Like, come on, this is ridiculous. It's, it's, it's, it's not how archaeology works. We may never find evidence because the site was occupied after Joshua's conquest and people disturb sites just by living there. Well, there's some people who, um, especially those outside of the Christian faith, who see this area as a problem area who will say, uh, if, it's not a myth, but if actually there was a conquest of Canaan by the Israelites, that just makes it all the more of a problem because of the question of the morality of these strikes. So maybe we can talk about that a little bit as well here. This is an area where I'm very

interested to try to help people, especially Christians. Sometimes Christians get a bit knocked off balance when this topic comes up. So the two points that I've kind of emphasized in this, and Maybe we can, I'd love to talk about these two, but feel free to put out other points, too, if you want to talk about things here. But the two points is just the legitimacy of divine judgment, and then secondly, the nature of ancient warfare rhetoric. And in my initial video, I did them in reverse order, but I realized I think some people who criticized it on Twitter only got halfway through and they didn't watch the part on divine judgment. So I- Yeah, well, I would ignore those people because they're not, they're not looking for truth or

trying to represent our-sider position fairly. they're just looking for something to attack with. And so if that's the point, dust does the, you know, shake the dust off your feet, move on to the next town. Oh, yeah. My mentality. Right.

Totally. But it will be, maybe it is good to start with the point about divine judgment, because this is the kind of, this is the sort of macro umbrella category, I think, to think about, and I've found it most helpful in this context to think about the ancient world and just the context of the ancient world. And I think what is hard is to put ourselves back into that historical.

context and understand just how brutal it was and just how evil some of these people were. I mean, I read one of the books I was reading on this had a whole chapter on basically the tactics of torture and warfare. And I won't be the same person after reading that chapter and I won't even get into it. But it's pretty, pretty dark when you see what human nature is capable of absence of restrictions. And so in that historical context, I think if people can appreciate something of what the world was like, it can make the idea of divine judgment seem a little less objectionable. Because basically, at the end of the day, I think we need to affirm that, you know, there's differences among Christians. And I've never talked to you about this. So I don't know exactly,

you know, how you look at all the details of this. But I think all of us need to affirm, God is God. God can judge and God can intervene and put an end to horrific evil when he wants to. He's the Lord. You know, he can do whatever he wants. But starting off with this point, getting into the historical context helps with that. So maybe I can, well, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, because I would say basically the appeal that I made in my video is that the ancient Canaanites were just horrifically evil people. And the more you see that, the more it starts to reduce a little bit of the moral

indignation of how, especially if we get to the second point where we're going to, I think, try to make the case that this wasn't a genocide or an ethnic cleansing or the way it's described. But just starting off with the fact that God can put an end to horrific, evil. And in this case, in a world that doesn't have the UN and doesn't have police, he can use an instrument like the people of Israel to do that. So starting off with that point, I mean, what would you like to say about that point from your angle? Well, it seems that the morality of the conquest is often presented as like an internal critique of Christianity. Okay, well, we need to take the entire Christian worldview. You just can't say, take bits and pieces here and go, well, that's evil.

Well, no, we can take the entire Christian worldview. One thing, we don't say God, it's wrong for God to end life whenever he wants, especially sinful life. And we're all sinners. So if we misuse the life, God has given us, he has every right to take it away. Also, God is not like ending lives like humans do, because when we end lives here, like, they're off our plane of existence. No human ever really leaves God's presence or plane of existence because God is on all planes

of existence. I use the analogy of the movie Inception. So, like, if I were to kill you, it would probably. be bad, but if I killed you in a dream world of inception, that's not bad because you're just going to get put out, you're going to get put on a higher dream level or end up back in the real world. When God ends life, he's not ending life like humans are. He's just moving souls from one plane of existence to another, where he can judge if he sees fit or he can welcome them into paradise, if they are innocent or if they are worthy or if he's made them holy, that kind of thing.

So people take this out of context and they think, well, there's just absolutely whole. horrible. And I'm like, well, from whose perspective? Yeah, if humans do it because we're on one plane of existence and it's a different perspective from us, from God's perspective, it's far different. Furthermore, they don't take into account his foreknowledge. If God is able to see the future, he may know it's best to move people from our plane of existence to another one to make a better future. You can't assume somehow you have better foreknowledge than God. So that also needs to be taken into account. So when you start to look at the actual Christian worldview and the on of God, you start to realize these objections are not all they are thought to be.

They're often just appeals to emotion in a lot of ways. So, yeah, we teach God can in life, whenever he wants, especially sinful life. He's not really ending their lives like humans do because he's just moving them from one plane of existence to another, and he may be doing it out of his foreknowledge and out of his goodness to make a better future, out of mercy even. So you can't assume certain things. And these are powerful defeaters that show these objections are not all they were thought to be. So we need to take those into consideration. If you think it's somehow wrong for God

and lie, you need to make an objective argument for that. If this is an internal critique, it falls apart completely because God in Christianity has a right to end sinful life whenever he wants. Right. Yeah, that's well said. I mean, so on the internal critique point, that's an interesting point. So, I mean, I think there we can just push back and say, well, you need to just show us what is inconsistent in the rest of Christianity with the book of Joshua or with other aspects of divinely sanctioned warfare in the Old Testament because I think what a lot of times happens, and you see this from secular critics, but also from more progressive Christians, there's a pitting of the Old Testament and New Testament against each other as though.

The Old Testament is bad, and then Jesus comes along and sort of, you know, is the foil to that. But, you know, I think if you just read the New Testament, like if you read the book of Revelation, Jesus is perfectly capable of taking life as well. So in other words, I think the concern of an internal inconsistency here just doesn't actually apply because there isn't an inconsistency because the New Testament has the same kind of dynamics. I mean, Jesus threatens to kill the children of Jezebel in Revelation 2 as an act of divine judgment, you know. And the thing that I come back to, and then of course we've got Revelation 20 where Jesus comes as a warrior. with the armies of heaven and judgment. You know, I think we can help pastor people, though,

by helping them understand that God's judgment is not evil. God's judgment is good. It's against evil. Go ahead. Yeah, I would also say the real underlying issue in all of this, I think, is what is your view of humanity? When I see someone about to leave Christianity, it's, I often see this. They start to think humanity's good.

Why do we need a savior? Why do we need a judgment of God? When I see someone about to come into Christianity, they start to realize the weight of their own sin, and they're like, I need a savior and need help. So the real difference is here, how we view humanity. If you view humanity is good, you're going to look at God as evil. If you recognize humanity is evil, depravity is a thing, just study history. You're going to be like, geez, thank God.

God is judging because this evil needs to be dealt with. An analogy I use is, look at the world of Lord of the Rings, Middle Earth. What are humans in this world most like? not the elves, not the hobbits, not the humans. We're honestly most like the orcs. We build weapons of machinery. We build weapons of war, horrible machines. We pillage, rape, torture, do horrible things, mutilate.

Like, the orcs of Middle Earth far match our own human history. So could you think of Eruilu Vatar bringing judgment upon the orcs, and would you be sad about that? No, you'd be like, they deserved it. we don't think of ourselves that way because we don't like to think of ourselves as that bad. But the Bible teaches two truths. You're more evil than you realize and you're more love than you realize. And this is where, and these are met together at the cross. So we don't want to accept that we are most like the orcs.

And so we get mad that God judges us in that way. And then we don't understand his mercy either for that because we don't think we're like that. So when you have this wrong view of humanity, you don't. don't understand either his mercy and his grace or his judgment. But when you do understand it, you look at human history, you look at things like Milgram experiments, you realize humanity is just really, really evil. And by the grace of God, he has still saved us, like, even though we don't deserve that. So I think that's where the real core issue is going to be.

Yeah. Well, and it seems like it's probably easier for us to fall into this naive view of human nature as fundamentally good living in such a prosperous time. in such a prosperous world. And I think just, you know, honestly, just studying history will help people, just studying world history and ancient history. I can say for myself, and I'm curious how this strikes you, when I was studying, I was reading a couple of articles about the ancient Canaanites and just the ancient Near East,

because I'm not actually arguing that the ancient Canaanites were 10 billion times worse than everybody else, but they were very evil. And the things, the infant sacrifices, these infant burnings that were from the biblical, perspective, they're identified in three different passages as offerings to demons. When I was studying those things, I had a moment where I pulled back from my computer screen and the thought that came into my heart was, oh, that's what evil is because of the nature of these burnings. And the way, it was the way, and I won't even get into this because I know some of our viewers, they're sensitive to violence, but the way it was done and understood in that culture among the ancient Canaanites,

It was so horrifically terrible. It was bone-chilling to consider. And I think we need to know, as painful as it is to countenance, I think we need to know that to understand the world in which the book of Joshua makes sense. Yeah. If there was a crazy Christian group that thought they got revelations from God that they needed to do infant sacrifice. And there was a group of atheists on the outside. I think we're going to go in there, stop them, kill if we have to, and rescue those babies.

I would join them. I think anyone would. If the Bible is true and the Canaanites were performing infant sacrifices and you took some of these skeptics back to the ancient world, let's be honest. Whose side would you be on? Would you be like, no, Israel, don't come in. I think you'd be joining Israel in this. I mean, let's be honest. These were evil people.

Anyone who performs infant sacrifice is an evil person. There's no way around that. And that's just the beginning of it. I mean, they also did temple prostitution. they would raid, you know, this is just the ancient world. They would raid and attack, and then they'd kill all the men, bring the women and children back as slaves, used for whatever purposes. This is, we're not, again, we're talking about orcs here.

That's human nature. It's like the orcs of Middle Earth. Do you really think that God does not have a right to judge that? Yeah. And now some people will say, well, but the Israelites do the same stuff. And for example, they killed the Canaanite infants. They killed the Canaanite elderly, and that's where we need to get into this sense.

second point that I made in my video where I think we'll have some common concord here to just talk about this and kick this back and forth and just kind of just share our perspectives about it. But, you know, the, let me just recount. So I, if I could, I'll state my argument, then I'll state my six feces on it. And then I'll just pause and just let you kind of direct what you want to talk about on this. Because I think there is, I understand an English translation. People read the book of Joshua or, you know, numbers 31 or, you know, or 1 Samuel 15 with the Amalekites, Numbers 31 is the Midianites. So it's not just the book of Joshua.

But there's this language that seems absolutely universal. It will talk about kill. They left none alive. You know, it was man and women, young and child, sometimes this, even the animals sometimes and so forth. And they can just say, look, you're just watering down the Bible unless you admit that it's a universal destruction. And what I pointed out is six things.

Number one, outside of the Bible, we have the same language used where we know for sure. It's not a universal killing, including against Israel. There are a number of times where another nation or Pharaoh or something will say, I completely wiped Israel from the face of the planet. And we know that that's not true. Number two, so this is ancient warfare rhetoric that's basically describing a decisive military victory, not a universal killing of all of the non-combatants. So that was my first point, things outside the scripture. My second point was you've got all these commandments against intermarriage with the Canaanites right there, you know, Deuteronomy 7, three and four. It's like right together. It's kill them all and don't intermarry with them.

And it's like, well, who would there be to marry? You know, why would you need to say that? Third point is the same thing with the language of expelling. So it's like total destruction and then it drive them out, which doesn't make a lot of sense if total destruction means an ethnic cleansing or genocide or every single person dies. The fourth point is I just went through, you know, a number of examples where you have, it will say everyone died and then right after that it will describe how they're still alive. And, you know, you see that in judges and you see that in First Samuel as well and so forth. And then I talked about how the same language of complete destruction is used for the Babylonian exile in scripture where we know not everyone died. And then

I talked about what we've already mentioned, which is the cities that are being targeted are military forts or garrisons. So those are kind of the, that's how I made my case. I think we're thinking probably pretty similarly about this, but what for you are the things that make, that direct your thinking about this question of, is this language of destroy them all really universal or is it more sort of military language? Oh, I think you might be muted. No problem. Sorry about that. Yeah, I think it is military language for sure. I mean, this is one of Richard Hess points.

If you go to Joshua 6 and it says they went to Jericho and destroyed every man, woman, child, young, old. He notes this isn't even hyperbole. This is just a stereotypical phrase to say they went and destroyed everyone that was there. So it's not the idea that they were literally targeting children in there. This was a military garrison for it. And again, this is just the way you would describe this kind of thing. we see this again with the annals of Tut Moses, Ramesses, Sinakarib, you name it. Everyone talks about military conquest and this.

I remember the scholar Karen Raid and Mitt Najat said that, you know, you could see these like records where it says they utterly annihilated all the people in like a Mesopotamian context. And then it says like shortly after that, they brought back this many number of people to serve as slaves. Well, wait a minute. I thought you said you annihilated everyone. Why are you bringing them back to service slaves? that's just the language you would use. So to just assume that Joshua has to be literal, when we look at the surrounding context, the cultural context,

those aren't literal. Why does Joshua have to be literal? Why does Joshua have to stand out? You know, the only reason I could argue is that because you need the God of the Bible to be evil at this point instead of interpreting this stuff in its cultural context. You know, K. Loss and Younger Jr. says this. If scholars had realized the hyperbolic nature of the accounting Joshua, If they had compared it with other ancient or Eastern accounts of complete conquest, the image of the conquest as represented in Joshua would have emerged in a far clearer focus than it has.

And he says that in his book, ancient conquest accounts. So, yeah, this is just hyperbolic language. Yeah. Now, one of the objections, I didn't cut you off there, did I? No. One of the objections I hear is people say, but why would God himself use this language? Because they're saying, well, I can understand if, like, Joshua or some of the Israelites, described what they did with this language, but why would God himself use this language?

And here's how I respond to that. Then I'm curious if you want to comment on this. I would say, well, you know, this is the doctrine of revelation that God speaks in such a way that is intelligible to the people at that time. You know, when God speaks, it's always going to be in a way. If he's going to speak at all, it has to be intelligible to people. In the New Testament, Jesus, you know, in Matthew 24, for example, he's speaking an apocalyptic imagery in Matthew 24 when he's describing the...

destruction of the temple. And in verse 31, he talks about, you know, the four winds, gathering the elect from the four winds from one side of heaven to the other, and so forth. But this is imagery. And the fact that it's Jesus speaking doesn't mean that he's not going to use common apocalyptic imagery when that's the manner of his speech. So we shouldn't say, well, it's Jesus talking, therefore it must be literal. And I would say the same thing for Joshua, even though it's God's commandment, that doesn't mean we have to take it in a hyper-literalistic way. Rather, we can take it. It's just the normal idiom of the day. So that's one comment I would like to make. Anything you want to say about that concern? I mean, that's, and we see the text like Joshua 1020,

when Joshua and the Sons of Israel finished striking them with a great blow until they were wiped out, comma, and when the remnant that remained of them had entered the fort, wait a minute, I thought they were wiped out. How was there a remnant? Okay, clearly Joshua was using this language hyperbolicly. And talking about God using the language of that time, let's give an analogy. Let's say that we discovered an alien planet that was very primitive. If we wanted to convince them, we were gods. How are we going to do that? Are we going to use language from our planets to do that? Well, no, we need to use what they recognize as deities to convince them that we're deities. Let's say to them, deities look like clowns on our planet. Okay, well, we can't dress up like

a priest or a pope. We got to dress up like a clown to convince them of something they already believed to be a deity. It may be weird to us, but it's not going to be weird to them. So we need to keep that kind of stuff in mind. God is going to talk to people in the language that's going to understand them, just like we would do. When we go around, when missionaries go out, they use the language and the analogies of the cultures to convince them of Christianity. They don't try to force them to be Westerners first, then convince them. They go, where are these people meaning what's sacred to them what can i use as analogies to show them and then i'll use that why is it why is god have to be completely different why does he have to be writing to a modern audience and not an ancient

audience the bible as john walton always says the bible was written for us but it was written to us yeah yeah i love that little line from walton well um so so so here's just a thought that comes into my mind i want to share this and see what you think about this when i talk about this and i think we're kind of in a similar space on this issue. I'm often pushing against the kind of strongly progressive side of things who want to just sort of, you know, reject a lot of the Old Testament and say this isn't actually good what is happening. And it wasn't, well, maybe it wasn't even commanded by God or whatever. On the other side, though, from some strongly conservative Christians, there's this mentality of stop apologizing for God. Don't try to minimize this. You know, it's not wrong for God

to do whatever he wants. And I agree it's not wrong for God to do what he wants. But This concern about interpreting the language accurately and trying to reduce the pressure if we can, I mean, I think this is a totally legitimate concern to say, hey, if we don't need to envision the slaughtering of non-combatants, then let's not envision that. You know, like, because what we said earlier about the infant burnings happening there, I think we were saying the destruction of infants, or you think of the mentally handicapped or the elderly, you know, I think it's completely valid. to take this concern seriously. And I guess I'd just like to give you a chance to comment on that, too. But I guess for my angle, I would say just as an encouragement to Christians, don't be glib about this, you know?

Any sort of violence is something that we need to take seriously. But the originating concern is not to reduce what the Bible says, but to be accurate about what the Bible says. But the issues on the table here in terms of the killing of non-combatants, those are totally morally valid concerns, I think. Yeah, absolutely. And we shouldn't, I mean, we need to apply the principle of charity to the Bible. Let's not just assume, you know, the worst at all.

We don't do that in standard speech. If you were to tell me, you know, well, my wife can't be here. She's tied up. It would be wrong for me to go, what, you tied your wife up? Like, obviously you meant that as a metaphor. Why does that not apply to the Bible? Let's try to be charitable here, see things in a positive light when we can. And if there's a case that we can't, then we take that.

But it just seems like a lot of people don't approach the Bible with the principle of charity, but with a principle of hostility. Yeah. Going back to John Walton, and we're kind of near the end here, maybe two final comments or questions I'll throw out for you. You mentioned John Walton. One of the metaphors he talks about is if we want to understand Harem, this Hebrew word for total destruction, he gives the analogy of the Allied soldiers going into Nazi Germany at the end of World War II. And he's saying, you know, they're not killing every infant.

They're not breaking into every civilian center and killing off the elderly. That's not what's happening. It's a military advance. So he talks about, you know, the taking down of Nazi symbols, the disruption of political centers, the killing of soldiers and combatants, of course. And we're not saying war is neat and tidy, and we can even always know exactly what is happening in every case. But nonetheless, it's something other than an ethnic cleansing. it's this kind of decisive overturning. Is that how you would encourage people to think about this in terms?

Would something like that, like this metaphor of allied soldiers breaking into Nazi Germany, do you see that as kind of a helpful analog that might help someone conceptualize what's going on with the book of Joshua? Yeah, I mean, no one would think anything weird if I said the U.S. devoted to destruction, Nazi Germany. The U.S. utterly destroyed Nazi Germany. no one would be like, what are you talking about? You mean they killed literally everyone?

No, that's not what we mean. It's hyperbolic language, which was just the standard practice in the ancient world. We may not have the same standard today, but that's just the way the annals were written. So, like, this is just, no one looks at the allies bad for going in and doing that. It was necessary. Sometimes wars are necessary to stop abhorrent evil. We have a culture that's practicing infant. sacrifice, I would support any war to go in and stop that culture dead in its tracks.

Like, we don't tolerate that stuff. So why can't God bring judgment upon a people that were performing such evil things? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, a thought experiment is like, suppose, and it's hard to talk about these things that are so evil, but suppose that the Nazis had one and that there's continuing holocausts going on, who would possibly object to a military? military attack to stop the holocausts. And yet, I think at a smaller level, I think that it's legitimate to see that, something like what is going on with the book of Joshua. And I would say,

you know, the fact, a friend of mine put it with this metaphor, the Israelites were more like the David fighting Goliath here. The Canaanites were this huge power. They were advanced. This is why the Israelites are so afraid. And they're saying, we can't possibly do this. These are giants. They're huge. We can't possibly when they had to have all. all their courage just to obey God and do this. So we also shouldn't see this as a bully, you know, a stronger power just beating up on a weaker power. This is more like David fighting Goliath.

No, the Israelis just came out of slavery. They would have been come from lines that were not nourished properly versus people living in fortified cities. So basically it's a group of slaves that escape depression, now going in and destroying cultures that are killing infants and putting their young girls in temple prostitution. and yet somehow they're the bad guys in this. Like this just sounds like the modern liberal progressive story.

You know, someone breaks out of slavery and then goes and frees later to kill the people that are killing children. Like I don't understand what's wrong here. The problem is we just read the Bible hostily or like in a hostile way. And we are not charitable with it. We don't understand the hyperbolic nature. If those things are taking into consideration, Israel looks far better, although not perfect. They have their own problems. Just read Judges 1 and 2.

obviously. But the idea that this is just like an abhorrent thing God did is just really just missing context after context after context. And I want to end by talking about Christ because one of my goals in my YouTube videos is to be sort of wonderfully predictable in that I was want to leave people with a little bit of a focus upon the basic gospel message. And I would say that for anybody who still struggles with this topic, do see it in context like you're saying in the larger biblical narrative. This is one chapter and a story. This is not like the only thing that the Bible records. And if you look at the big picture, the ultimate message of the Bible is a God who was willing to come down and be a man and put himself in a position of extreme

vulnerability against violence as a victim as to be slaughtered. And he does this out of love and out of grace to save us. And I would say, see the parts in relation to the hall, see the, the little trees in relation to the forest, see Joshua in relation to the larger biblical story. I find that just a general, I know that's a simple point, but actually pastorally and devotion, I think that's a helpful thing to always remind people of. Yeah, well, also compared to God's foreknowledge. I mean, he may have known that this would have kept going on for generations and could

have gotten worse. He put a stop to it like, you know, when the sin of the Amarites reached to a point where it just it was unbearable, as he says in Genesis 15. So he goes in, stops it, probably could have prevented generations more just horrible. And what does he replace it with? An Israelite culture that produces the Messiah that produces the world's greatest religion that has given us the most beneficial change, just read Holland's book, Dominion, or check out a video I just did, how Christianity changed the world.

And I cited study after study showing that Christians made the world better by increasing education for not just boys but girls, creating more hygiene habits, building hospitals for people, creating economic prosperity across the globe. creating and spreading democratic values to even indigenous people, ending harmful practices like child marriage, boy brides. So like, God and his foreknowledge may have known that this needed to be done so that the timeline would eventually get to where it is now. So, like, you've got to take all of this stuff into consideration when you're considering these things. Yeah. The point about foreknowledge is a helpful one because, you know, one of the basic arguments for I was studying pacifism in the early church recently. and I was reading a bit about Augustine's arguments for just war.

And he was saying, you know, basically it's a sort of argument of sometimes taking one life can save three other lives or sometimes taking one life can save 300 lives and so forth. And I know that that line of reasoning can be dangerous in terms of how that can be misapplied. So we have to be so careful. But it's a valid point to say we also have to remember what we don't know. And, you know, who knows what might have happened, had the book of Joshua never occurred, you know, and the Canaanites are just rumbling forward in history. So I think that's an important point to remember as well. Yeah.

And this is a philosophical dilemma. If you study ethics of philosophy, like when I was getting my master's in philosophy, or one of my professors proposed the question, if you could go back and kill baby Hitler, would you do it? And you knew that not only that, it would make the world much better, millions of lives would be saved? Would you do it? And my honest answer was, I don't know. I can't answer that.

It's a difficult question. But I think we need to consider that when we're talking about ethics, these are difficult questions that we in our finite minds cannot fully grasp. God, who is perfectly just, perfectly good, has perfect foreknowledge, may have a far better grasp on what to do than we could do in these situations. So this is an internal critique that also needs to be taken into consideration. Take into consideration these difficult questions in ethics. A lot of utilitarians have said they would go back and kill baby Hitler.

as hard as that would be. On their utilitarian worldview, that would be better. So I'm not saying that is the right thing to do. I'm just saying that these are difficult questions that all need to be considered. And we can't simplify these things that just got evil for doing this kind of thing when there's a lot more complicated issues and ethics alone today. Yeah. Well, I appreciate your work on this and talking about this with you.

So if people want to follow up on this, they could check out my video. but also I think I want to recommend your YouTube channel for people as a resource. So I've mentioned, and I put up a thumbnail of the one video that we've been talking about the most, about the historicity of the Book of Joshua. But what would you like to encourage people to check out first in terms of maybe what are the top three videos or so or what resources have you put out that people could check out as the next step on this topic? Well, I mean, just some of the stuff that I've mentioned. You could check out the full Exodus Rediscovered series for all the

evidence for the Exodus. I can check on my video time is different in the Bible to understand that. You can also check out my series on the Mosaic Law. So I did three videos, the misunderstood mosaic law, the imperfect Mosaic Law, and the Revolutionary Mosaic Law. And I just sort of deal with a lot of these issues as well, talk about the issues of slavery in the Torah, for example, and how that relates to this. So maybe check out that kind of stuff. You could also check out some of the other videos I mentioned. Cool. Awesome. All right. All right, well, check out the video description for links to a lot of those things. Thanks everybody for watching.

Michael, thanks for the conversation. Thanks for the great work that you do. Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. All right, everybody. Thanks. We'll see you next time.