The authors warn that a careful theological understanding of the Old Testament book, Joshua, is vital in reading the accounts of warfare between the Israelites and the Canaanites, particularly as one reflects on more recent history and present day experience of racial prejudices.
"It is impossible to ignore what is routinely viewed as the grave moral problem of the book of Joshua, namely, the action of the Israelites in exterminating the Canaanites. The sad history of the Crusades, what colonial powers did to indigenous peoples, the Jewish holocaust, recent examples of ethnic cleansing, and the terror perpetrated by jihadist groups on people going about their daily lives have rightly made us sensitive about what looks like an ancient example of the same thing in the Bible itself."
https://www.crossway.org/articles/was-violence-against-the-canaanites-a-matter-of-racial-prejudice/
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