How should the Canaanites be treated?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

This is a four-answer contradiction and must be read structurally. The Pentateuch and Joshua give incompatible programs for the Canaanites: (1) YHWH himself drives them out gradually by hornets and an angel, with Israel essentially passive (Exod 23:28-32; 33:2; 34:11; Josh 3:10; 13:6; 23:5); (2) Israel must exterminate them totally, leaving "nothing that breatheth alive" (Deut 7:1-2; 20:16-17); (3) Israel drives them out and destroys their cult installations (Num 33:51-53); and (4) resident aliens dwelling among Israel inherit land alongside the tribes as naturalized citizens (Ezek 47:22). These are not stages of one coherent plan; they assign different agents, different fates, and different statuses to the same population.

The most serious harmonization, advanced by Copan, Flannagan, and Kitchen, is layered. First, the herem ("ban") commands are ancient Near Eastern war rhetoric — hyperbole not meant as literal demography. Second, the drive-out texts describe the normal means, with killing reserved for those who resisted. Third, Ezekiel 47 is eschatological restoration, not Mosaic law. Assembled, this is meant to yield a single escalating program with stylized exaggeration in the middle.

Each plank is vulnerable. The hyperbole defense collides with Deuteronomy 20:16-17's explicit limiting clause: in the cities of the land "you shall save alive nothing that breathes." That is not a rhetorical flourish but a legal specification, set in deliberate contrast to the terms-of-peace rules for distant cities (20:10-15). Deuteronomy 20 establishes two warfare regimes — siege-with-tribute for far cities, total herem for the cities of the seven nations — and the contrast is the opposite of careless exaggeration; it is a juridical distinction. The ANE-parallels argument cuts against its own user: the Mesha (Moabite) Stele records Mesha devoting the inhabitants of Nebo to Ashtar-Chemosh using the cognate root ḥrm, and it describes an actual massacre of seven thousand, not a literary trope. Lauren Monroe and Jacob Wright have shown that such devotion-rhetoric was understood programmatically, as describing real cultic destruction, not mere bombast. The comparative evidence thus makes the herem texts more literal, not less.

Source and redaction criticism offers a cleaner account. The "driving out" tradition reflects older non-Priestly strata: the drive-out promises of Exodus 23:20-33 and 34:11-16 belong to the Covenant Code and the so-called cultic decalogue (J/E material), not to P, and they envision gradual dispossession over time — Exod 23:29-30 even explains the delay ("lest the land become desolate, and the beast of the field multiply"). The total-extermination commands are Deuteronomic, composed centuries later and framed by the ideology of cult centralization and purity; the herem rationale in Deut 7 and 20 is explicitly to prevent religious contamination ("lest they teach you to do after all their abominations," Deut 20:18), the central anxiety of the Josianic program. Joshua's own narrative oscillates and then concedes failure: Josh 15:63, 16:10, and 17:12-13, and especially Judges 1:19-36, repeatedly admit that the Canaanites were not driven out but reduced to forced labor and continued to dwell in the land. Ezekiel 47:22, finally, represents a late prophetic inclusivism that grants the gēr a permanent landed inheritance "as born in the country" — a complete reversal of the herem. Friedman, Baden, and Römer treat these as literarily and historically distinct layers; Konrad Schmid's work on the formation of the Pentateuch (Genesis and the Moses Story; and the Gertz/Levinson/Rom/Schmid volume) likewise locates the conquest materials in separate compositional horizons. John Collins frames the resulting diversity as one of the clearest internal tensions in the canon.

No single Mosaic policy is recoverable; the final text stitches four programs from four periods. The harmonization succeeds only by treating the redacted whole as one authorial voice — the very assumption source criticism has dismantled. Even granting some hyperbole in conquest summaries, hyperbole cannot convert an explicit legal command to exterminate into a command merely to expel, nor can it reconcile expulsion with naturalized inheritance. Daniel Block, treating Ezek 47:21-23, notes how startling the inclusion of resident aliens as landed heirs is against the background of the conquest traditions; it is not an extension of the earlier program but a deliberate departure from it. The programs differ in agent (God vs. Israel), in fate (death vs. expulsion vs. coexistence), and in status (annihilated enemy vs. landholding citizen).

Where the critical reading lands: a genuine contradiction reflecting compositional layering, not a coherent escalating policy.