Thanks Albert for addressing the exegetical difficulty of this part of the Old Testament. It illustrates well the importance of interpreting the Old Testament in the light of the New Testament, that is, according to the teaching of Jesus Christ the Son of Yahweh: The Old Testament can be considered God’s Word as far as it fits with the teaching of the Incarnate God’s word!
In this sense I think the following points may be of interest:
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Matthew 15:21-28: “The faith of the Canaanite Woman”. Jesus Christ is correcting here any possible interpretation of Joshua’s book as “God directing his ‘chosen people’ to commit genocide on the Canaanites”. Although Jesus refers to the Canaanites as “dogs”, it is clear from the context that he is not speaking seriously: He does it to challenge the woman’s faith and prove that also among the Canaanites there were people with great love, and finishes rewarding her strong faith through a great miracle.
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Similarly, one could say that Joshua 6:21 like other similar expressions in the Old Testament (e.g.: 1 Samuel 15:3) are hyperbolic warnings to prevent Israelites from forsaking Yahweh and worshiping Canaanites god’s. In this sense Joshua’s book has also to be read in the light of the following Judges book, where the Lord uses similar word against the Israelites, who have served Baal and other gods.
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One can even say that in Matthew 15:21-28 Jesus corrects Joshua’s views as he corrected Moses’ views regarding divorce.
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By becoming a human being in Jesus Christ, God (Yahweh) proclaims the dignity and uniqueness of humanity and any single human person.
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What was the content of the Ark of the Lord the Israelites carried around Jericho seven days before the walls of the city collapsed? God’s covenant with Moses, which according to Jesus Christ can be summarized in the double Commandment “love God and others as yourself”.
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All this means that any interpretation of Joshua’s book cannot contradict the foundation of law: Personhood and personal rights have to be defined through the belonging to humanity and not to a subgroup of it. Accordingly the texts have to be rather interpreted in the sense that when humanity loses the faith in God humans end by killing each other, in particular the weakest among them, i.e.: human beings at the beginning and end of life, as it happens today.
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In this context it is also worth mentioning that there have been several attempts in history to demonize the Old Testament and exclude it from the Canon of Revelation. Marcion did it as early as 144 AD, and was declared heretic. More important has been the demolition of the Jewish religion by modern thinkers like Spinoza, Voltaire and Kant (among many others). They laid the groundwork for the hatred against the God of the Old Testament, which actually played a key role in the generation of German Antisemitism (and noticeably not in the American version of a Henry Ford). The Nazi dehumanization of the Jews did not arise from mere eugenic ideology, but resulted from the fusion of the eugenic ideology with the “Völkisch” view that the Jew’s God is a perverse God. German Anti-Semites, in particular Hitler, they all learned from Theodor Frisch (“the leader of the German anti-Semites”, as Louis Marshall called him) to hate the “false God” Yahweh, and “his chosen People”: By condemning the Jews for things like the “genocide they committed against the Canaanites” they finished by committing genocide against the Jews. This historical fact eloquently shows that one should be careful when demonizing Yahweh.