𝐓𝐦𝐳 :
You’re presenting this as a forced dilemma, but it isn’t one. You’re assuming that if “destroy everything that breathes” isn’t meant as a literal claim that every infant was killed, then the biblical author must have fabricated God’s words, but that simply doesn’t follow from how ancient conquest language worked. You can see within Joshua itself that the language of total destruction is not always functioning as a modern, literal census of every person killed, because the same populations described with sweeping extermination language continue appearing afterward. So when Christians point to hyperbolic war rhetoric, they aren’t necessarily saying, “the author accidentally put fake words in God’s mouth”; they’re saying you’re reading an ancient literary convention as though it were a modern military report. And even if you reject that interpretation, your argument still has to establish that God cannot legitimately impose temporal judgment on a society, which is a philosophical premise you’re assuming rather than proving. The Christian position is not that Canaanite infants were personally guilty of their parents’ sins, because Scripture explicitly rejects inherited personal guilt, but that God can judge human societies in history while remaining the ultimate judge of each individual. So yes, Deuteronomy 20 is morally difficult, and pretending otherwise is weak apologetics, but jumping from “this passage is disturbing” to “therefore either God ordered the murder of babies or the Bible is unreliable” doesn’t actually get you there
2026-09-03 17:17:51