Does God command genocide in the book of Joshua?

How can a good God command—and engage in—unspeakable horrors? To take perhaps the most salient example from the Bible, readers both ancient and modern have been perplexed by the notion that God commands the Israelites “not to let a soul remain alive” among the indigenous inhabitants of Canaan (Deut. 20:16). How does a God who is “good to all” and “whose mercy is upon all his works” (Ps. 145:9) command killing on such a massive scale?

Bible scholar Daniel Hawk is uniquely qualified to tackle the issue of biblical violence. He has spent the bulk of his career wrestling with the book of Joshua, arguably the Bible’s most troubling book, with its account of the conquest of the land. Hawk’s full-length commentary on the book, Joshua: Studies in Hebrew Narrative and Poetry (2000), is a model of close literary and theological exegesis. He now widens his lens to consider the question of violence more broadly.

Hawk doubts that “a definitive, all-encompassing explanation” of divine violence is available to us, and he thus makes no pretense of “solving” the problem of divine violence in the Bible. On the contrary, to his enormous credit Hawk rejects what he rightly sees as overly facile approaches to the problem.