The problem
If you're a proponent of nonviolence, you will definitely hear the question: what about the conquest of Canaan? How does this fit with the call to nonviolence? How does this “violent” God fit with the nonviolent Jesus?
The premise
The question is built on a premise it never states, and the premise is where it wins before the argument begins. The premise is that the conquest texts show you God — that when Deuteronomy records the command to leave alive nothing that breathes, you are reading God's character, God's will, God's own voice — and that your task, therefore, is to reconcile two portraits of the same God: the one who orders the slaughter of the Canaanites, and the one who tells you to love your enemies.
Grant the premise and you have already lost. You will spend the rest of the argument balancing. You will reach for progressive revelation — God met them where they were. You will reach for accommodation — the violence was the idiom of the age. You will reach for the descriptive defense — the text reports the conquest, it does not endorse it — while the text plainly endorses it, and counts the failure to finish the killing as sin. Each of these is the work of holding two portraits in one frame and calling the strain devotion.
Refuse the premise and the problem does not resolve. It dissolves. The question was never whether God is violent or nonviolent. The question is forensic: whose operation is the conquest, and how did it come to be signed in God's name?
The hand, the date, the function
You already know how to ask this question, because you have asked it of other texts. The conquest is not a war journal kept at the time. It is Deuteronomistic — composed and edited in the seventh century before Christ and after, centuries past the events it claims to record. And the archaeology refuses it. Jericho was unwalled and all but empty at the conquest horizon. Ai was unoccupied. Israel appears not to have poured in from outside to clear the land but to have emerged from within the Canaanite hill country, indistinguishable at first from the people it would later be told to exterminate. The conquest as Joshua narrates it did not happen as narrated.
What you are reading, then, is not the memory of a slaughter. It is a program — purity, boundary, the centralization of worship — projected backward onto a founding conquest to place the program beyond question. Hand, date, function: a later editor, a seventh-century reform, the authorization of a clearing. Where violence occurred, it came first. The divine command was written onto it afterward. This is the same operation you have already traced in other words that were changed to install a doctrine. The conquest is that operation performed on an entire history.
What the command says
Read the command itself, and read it the way you would read any warrant for atrocity.
Deuteronomy 20: in the cities God gives you, save alive nothing that breathes — and the reason follows in the next breath, lest they teach you to do after all their abominations. That is not the disclosure of a holy character.
That is the ordinary catalogue of the war body, with God's name written on the authorization line.
They are a threat. They will corrupt us. Cleanse the land of them. If we do not destroy them, they will do to us the thing we fear — they will turn us to their gods.
And over the whole catalogue, the move that closes it: we did not choose this; it was commanded; the weight of it belongs to the One who gave the order. The conquest command is every justification the killer has ever offered, put into the mouth of God.
What Jesus does
This is why Jesus is not the second portrait you must reconcile with the first. He does not stand for a kinder God set beside a fiercer one. He reads the violence back to its author and refuses it, by name.
When his disciples want to call fire down on a Samaritan village that would not receive him — and they reach, exactly, for the conquest idiom, for Elijah, for the fire from heaven — he turns and rebukes them. The rebuke stands in every manuscript. The line that names what the rebuke means — you do not know what spirit you are of; the Son of Man did not come to destroy — is contested, carried in many witnesses and absent from the earliest.
The sentence that disowns the conquest-spirit is the one the tradition could not hold steady. When Peter draws a sword to defend him, he does not bless the defense; he stops it: put up your sword; they that take the sword perish by it. He revokes eye-for-eye to its face — you have heard that it was said, but I say to you. He will not pick up the stone. He will not take up the scale at all.
None of this is a gentler position on the question of violence. It is the refusal of the question's axis. The proponent of nonviolence who argues that nonviolence is the better pole has already agreed to stand on the line the conquest drew. Jesus does not stand on the line. He names the line as the war body's and steps off it.
One fire
There is an old escape from the problem, and it is worth naming so that you do not take it.
You can decide there are two Gods — a lower, violent god of the conquest and a higher, loving Father of Jesus — and keep only the second. This is Marcion's solution, and the early church named it heresy, correctly, because it concedes the very thing that should be refused: it grants that the violent God is real and merely demotes him. The two-portraits problem is not solved by keeping one portrait.
Böhme held it as one God and dissolved it properly. One fire, two principles. The fire of wrath — contraction, consuming, the burning that has not yet turned — read as the whole of God, is the conquest's God. The same fire yielded at the pivot, become light, is what Jesus is. Not two deities to be reconciled. One fire, before and after the turn.
Paul says it as two laws, not two gods: the law of sin and death, which is the trespass operating under God's name, and the law of the Spirit of life, which is what stands when the trespass lifts.
You do not balance the two laws against each other. You tell them apart.
The proof-text
If this seems like a question for specialists, consider what the conquest of Canaan has actually been made to do. It is not a curiosity in the back of the canon. It has been the operative warrant of conquest itself, for four centuries running. The Doctrine of Discovery cited it. The Puritans cited it — themselves the new Israel, the continent the new Canaan, the people already here the Canaanites to be cleared. Manifest destiny ran on it. The Afrikaner read his own arrival into the promised land. Every settlement that needed God to have ordered the clearing reached for Joshua, because Joshua is where God orders the clearing.
This is why the forensic reading is not a footnote. As long as God commanded the conquest stands unexamined, the warrant stays loaded, available to the next clearing that needs it. Showing the warrant to be a later authorization written in God's name — hand, date, function — is not a scholar's nicety. It is the disarming of the text that armed the conquerors.
Returned to sender
So the answer to the question is not an answer on the question's terms. The violent God and the nonviolent Jesus are not two natures of one God to be reconciled across the testaments. The conquest is the war body attributing its own operation to God, in a text that can be shown — by its date, its hand, its function — to have done exactly that. Jesus is not the counter-portrait. He is the one who reads the attribution and sends it back.
The nonviolence the question tries to corner is not a position on the axis the conquest drew. It is the refusal to take up the scale the conquest is built on — the same refusal he performs when he will not call the fire, will not lift the sword, will not throw the stone. The God of the conquest was never God. He was the signature, and the signature was forged.
