If you have ever read 1 Samuel 15 or the conquest accounts in Joshua and felt something drop in your stomach, that reaction is not a sign of weak faith. Dr. Jo Vitale, an Old Testament scholar who came close to walking away from the faith over these texts during her graduate studies, says the discomfort is exactly right. The question is what you do with it.
Vitale’s answer is careful, honest and worth sitting with. It does not erase the difficulty. It gives you the tools to hold it.
Why Are These Texts Supposed to Be Hard?
Most apologetic responses to the conquest texts rush to make them feel manageable. Vitale’s first move is the opposite. She wants you to feel the weight.
I think we’re supposed to find these questions really hard. If we don’t feel the shock and the grief of it, it makes me worried we’ve become callous.
— Jo Vitale
She is not performing pastoral sensitivity here. She means it theologically. A God who commands the death of populations is a God who demands a real accounting, and if that demand no longer registers, something in us has gone numb. The goal of engaging these texts is not to get comfortable. It is to understand.
That said, understanding requires context, and the first piece of context is the nature of Old Testament law itself. Vitale is clear on this point: the laws of the Old Testament are not God’s ideal. They sit after the fall, inside a brutal ancient world, managing human violence rather than blessing it. They are not a blueprint for how God would arrange a world without sin. They are God working with the world as it actually is.
Dr. Paul Copan, who has written extensively on this question, makes a parallel observation: describing something is not the same as endorsing it. The same God who recorded and bounded these commands is the one who waited four hundred years before acting on them, who gave city after city a chance to respond before judgment fell. The biblical portrait is not a hair-trigger God. It is a patient one.
Was This a Precedent or an Exception?
The most important context Vitale offers is this: the conquest commands were bounded, exceptional and never intended as a model.
This is in no way set up as a precedent. This is not intended as justification for the Crusades. To read the text that way is a profound abuse of Scripture.
— Jo Vitale
God placed a hard wall around these commands. They applied to specific peoples, in a specific historical moment, for specific reasons tied to generations of moral catastrophe. Genesis says plainly that God waited until the iniquity of the Amorites was complete:
“But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full” (Genesis 15:16).
Four hundred years. Not a rash response. Not a template for holy war.
This matters because the most damaging uses of these texts have come from exactly the kind of reading Vitale names as an abuse: taking a bounded, historical command and treating it as transferable authority. The Crusades. Colonialism. The doctrine of discovery. Every attempt to read divine mandate for human conquest into these passages requires ignoring the boundaries the text itself erects.
The commands are exceptional in another way too: no other nations in the ancient Near East received comparable directives. This was not Israel’s standard operating procedure for warfare. The way Israel fought most wars, under the rules of Deuteronomy 20:10–15 for distant cities, looks entirely different from the Canaanite directives. The exceptional nature is written into the structure of the law itself.
What Did “Total Destruction” Actually Mean?
Here Vitale makes a move that surprises some readers: she takes the total-destruction language seriously as language, which means reading it in its ancient rhetorical context.
Joshua kills everyone that breathes in a certain area, and then a few chapters later he goes back to the same region and there are more people to fight. So it doesn’t seem like actually it’s everybody who breathes.
— Jo Vitale
Ancient Near Eastern battle accounts routinely used sweeping language to describe decisive victories. Pharaoh Merneptah’s victory stele declared that Israel was laid waste and its seed was no more, yet Israel had demonstrably not been destroyed. Egyptian and Assyrian annals are full of this kind of rhetoric. It was a way of claiming total triumph, not a literal body count. Vitale argues that the original audience of Joshua understood this, and that modern readers impose a literalism the ancient writers were not using.
This does not soften the moral weight of what the text records. Real violence happened. Real people suffered. The rhetorical context does not sanitize that. But it does resist a kind of hyper-literal reading that is itself anachronistic, and it explains the textual oddity Vitale points out: if the command was literal and total, why do the same groups keep reappearing in subsequent chapters?
It also keeps us honest about how we read ancient texts in general. We do not apply the same hyper-literal standard to the psalms’ language about God crushing enemies or to prophetic visions of God’s wrath. We read those as literary and theological, shaped by their genre. The conquest narratives deserve the same careful reading.
How Can Judgment Be an Act of Love?
This is where Vitale’s argument shifts from the historical to the personal. She had worked through the rhetorical and textual questions, but they did not settle the moral one for her. What shifted that was grief.
After watching someone she loved suffer a violent crime and watching the offender escape accountability, she felt something she had not expected: a longing for justice that was fierce and specific. The absence of justice did not feel neutral. It felt like a second wound. And that experience opened something in the text she had not seen before.
If I love somebody so much that I cannot stand to see them wronged, how much more must a God who loves every one of us be against the ways we destroy one another? Judgment is an act of love on behalf of the oppressed.
— Jo Vitale
This is not an easy reframe. It is a serious one. The theological claim is that a God who is indifferent to evil is not a loving God. Love that cannot bear to see the beloved harmed will be against the harm. Judgment and love are not opposites in Scripture. They are connected because the same love that warms toward the beloved turns against whatever destroys them.
The teachers of Humble Hermeneutic, Dr. Cynthia James and Yana Conner, make a parallel point when they look at the story of Esther: God’s hidden work in the book is not neutral. It is active on behalf of the vulnerable. The same night Haman builds the gallows, God turns the king’s attention. Divine action in Scripture consistently sides with the oppressed, and that pattern runs all the way through the Old Testament, including the parts that are hardest to read.
Dr. Esau McCaulley, writing on how African American readers have engaged the hardest parts of Scripture, makes a related observation: a people who have known genuine oppression often find themselves less troubled by a God who judges than by a God who does not. The desire for justice is not a problem to be managed. It is a theological resource.
Where Does God’s Patience Fit?
Vitale is careful not to leave the picture at judgment. The God who eventually acts against the Amorites is the God who waited four hundred years before doing so. That patience is not negligence. It is God’s character.
Genesis 15:16 puts this plainly: the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. God is tracking a centuries-long moral arc, not reacting quickly to provocation. The same God who judged is the one Exodus describes as “merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth” (Exodus 34:6). These are not two different Gods. They are one God whose patience and whose justice are both expressions of love.
And every thread, judgment and mercy both, runs to the cross. This is Vitale’s final move, and it is the one that holds the Old Testament together with the New. The God who judged at Sinai, who waited four hundred years, who bounded his commands against their misuse, is the same God who in Jesus absorbed judgment rather than dispensing it. The cross does not eliminate the reality of divine judgment. It shows where that judgment finally lands: on God himself, on behalf of the world.
Quick Answers
Do the conquest texts justify violence today? No. Vitale says they were an exceptional, bounded command that was never a precedent. Using them to license later violence is an abuse of the text the Bible itself warns against.
Did God really command literal total annihilation? Vitale notes that ancient war rhetoric often used sweeping language for decisive victory, and that the texts themselves show survivors reappearing, which suggests the surface reading is more complicated than it looks.
How can judgment be loving? Because love that cannot bear to see the beloved harmed will also be against what harms them. Vitale frames judgment as love acting on behalf of the oppressed, not love’s opposite.
Is God impatient? No. Vitale points to the four hundred years God waited before judging the Amorites. The same God who judged is described in Exodus as slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
How does the cross fit? The cross is where every thread of the Old Testament converges: God takes the judgment onto himself rather than endlessly dispensing it outward. It changes the shape of everything.
Listen to the Full Conversation
This answer comes from the Jude 3 Project’s Problematic Passages event at the Museum of the Bible, where scholars take on the hardest questions in Scripture. Dr. Jo Vitale holds a PhD in the Old Testament from the University of Oxford. She teaches and works in apologetics, addressing the questions most likely to push people out of the faith.