Did the Israelites massacre children at Jericho?
Many know the famous story of the walls of Jericho. Maybe you’ve seen the Veggie Tales version. If you went to Sunday school as a kid, you probably heard it there as well.
It’s a very memorable story, found in Joshua 6: The Israelites were about to enter the promised land after 430 years of slavery in Egypt and 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. They came to the first town they were to conquer: Jericho. God told the Israelite army to march around the city once per day for seven days, then seven times on the seventh day. They did so. Then on the seventh day, after completing their seventh circuit of the city, the army made a loud shout, and the walls immediately collapsed. The Israelites easily captured the city.
But near the end of the story is this statement from Joshua 6:21:
At the edge of the sword they devoted to destruction everything in the city—man and woman, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.
This is undoubtedly a disturbing claim. Did the Israelites really go through the city of Jericho slaughtering everyone, including women, children, elderly, and infants? The battle of Jericho isn’t the only story that gives this sort of description of the Israelites’ victory. It’s indeed a widespread occurrence in the Old Testament, leading many to object why God would be so cruel as to endorse what some have called “genocide.” Apologists have had their hands full trying to address these undoubtedly troubling statements.
But if we want to interpret the Bible accurately, we need to know what the original authors were trying to convey. Was the author writing like a modern historian with careful attention to precise and literal detail? Or was he writing as a man of his time, in a way that his contemporary audience would understand?
Obviously, the latter option is far more likely. So how would we expect a writer in that time and place to convey an account of victory in battle to his audience? One of the best ways to find out is to look at how others did so. Thanks to the expansive discipline of archaeology, we can know that now better than ever.
War hyperbole
And what we find is the nearly universal usage of a literary style that some call war hyperbole. Historical accounts from that time and place feature this device all over the place. For example, here’s an account by the Hittite ruler Muršili II, who lived around the same time as Joshua, of his victory at the Battle of Kadesh:
All his ground was ablaze with fire; he burned all the countries with his blast…He took no note of the millions of foreigners; he regarded them as chaff…His majesty slew the entire force of the wretched foe from Hatti…I defeated all the foreign countries, I alone.
Obviously the Hittite king did not singlehandedly kill millions of people, nor did he conquer all the nations of the world or set every square inch of land on fire.
In fact, some of the earliest mentions of Israel outside of the Bible are hyperbolic claims by foreign leaders. The Merneptah Stele, written by the Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah and dated to about 1200 BC, claims, “Israel is laid waste; his seed is not.” The Mesha Stele, written by King Mesha of Moab around 840 BC, claims “Israel perished utterly forever.” Obviously neither of these were literally true, but they made their point. These rulers had won great victories that they wanted to emphasize to their posterity.
It wasn’t just ancient writers, either. We use war hyperbole just about every day, though you will often hear it not with reference to warfare, but to another form of competition: sports. Just think of the most common phrase you would use to say that one competitor defeated another: They “beat” them. We hyperbolically use a word for physical battery to indicate competitive victory. If a basketball or football team beats another team by 50 points, the sportscasters might even say they obliterated them or wrecked them. In just the last year, it’s been said that my Cleveland Indians have destroyed, annihilated, and massacred other teams. Obviously these other teams showed up for their game the next day. Nobody thinks those teams no longer exist or were literally murdered. That’s just how we enliven the stories of our team’s victories.
So why would the Bible’s accounts be any different? Why should we expect the biblical authors, who lived in a time and place where everyone documented their conquests hyperbolically, to do so in a mechanical, literal manner like a 21st-century American historian? Obviously, we shouldn’t. We should expect to see hyperbole and sensational descriptions in their accounts like we do with everyone else, because that’s what their audience would have understood. We should expect to see hyperbolic statements such as that in Joshua 11:23, which says, “So Joshua took the entire land, in keeping with all that the LORD had spoken to Moses,” along with accounts like that in Judges 1-2, which make it clear that there were many lands and peoples left unconquered in the land. It’s not a contradiction; Joshua 11:23 is a hyperbolic statement of Joshua’s decisive general success, and Judges 1 is a more detailed description of the whole picture. So when we see accounts in the Bible claiming that the Israelites obliterated every living thing in a city, it would be wise to recognize what’s really going on: the biblical authors are making their stories come to life with hyperbolic language.
What was the city of Jericho?
Furthermore, the best archaeological evidence at this point gives no indication of a large-scale settlement at Jericho around the estimated time of the Israelite conquest. Many have suggested this as evidence that the battle of Jericho is a myth, but it might be better explained by saying that Jericho was not a city as we would think of it today. Rather, it was probably a small military outpost, occupied by soldiers and people there for the service of soldiers and travelers, like Rahab the prostitute.
As such, what we see in Joshua 6:21 is very likely not an account of the indiscriminate massacre of civilians, but a decisive defeat of the contingent of soldiers manning an outpost.
This is not a catch-all answer to every passage documenting violent warfare in the Old Testament. There are still many questions to be answered. But it certainly does seem to explain many of them, including the famous story of Jericho.
