Genocide in the Hebrew Bible
February 2026 | Vol. 14.2
By T.M. Lemos
Narratives of extreme violence bookend the corpus of biblical literature. In both the books of Genesis and Revelation, we find passages describing anthropocide, the destruction of the human race, with only a few humans seen as fit for survival.
Here, I focus on another form of biblical violence that is more limited in scope but no less disturbing — genocide. The term “genocide” has been defined in different ways, but the UN definition remains the most influential, for obvious reasons. According to this definition, acts of killing or other acts that prevent life are genocidal if they are “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Intention, rather than motivation or successful execution, are what matters, in terms of this definition. Another central consideration is whether members of the group are being targeted as such, which is to say, for being members of that group. While it might seem surprising to apply a UN definition developed in the 1940s to ancient societies, the scholar who coined the term “genocide”, Raphael Lemkin, himself applied it to ancient cases, and an increasing number of scholars have followed his lead in recent years, such as in the Cambridge World History of Genocide (2023), which contains chapters on ancient Israel, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome.
Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) is known for having coined the term “genocide” in the 1940s. Photo courtesy of the American Jewish Historical Society via Wikimedia.
It is not difficult to find biblical cases of violence that seem to fit this definition. At least a dozen books of the Hebrew Bible contain passages that could be characterized in this way. Understanding the nature and function of these texts in the biblical context can also elucidate the ways in which the Bible’s genocidal violence has been used in various historical contexts to justify such violence. Passages in Deuteronomy and Joshua are, for many, the parade examples of genocidal texts in the Bible. We read in Deuteronomy 20:16–17, for example:
But as for the towns that Yahweh your God is giving you as inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them—the Hittite, and the Amorite, the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite—just as Yahweh your God has commanded.
The terms being translated as “annihilate” come from the root ḥ-r-m, which refers to totalizing violence commanded by Yahweh and aimed at particular groups. In this and other passages, the groups in question are clearly named and are ethnic in character. Many of these passages use a closely related noun form, ḥērem, which also refers in the great majority of cases to exterminationist violence aimed at specific ethnic groups. This was ritualized violence, with texts such as Joshua 6 specifying not only that all humans from the specified group were to be slaughtered but also all of their livestock, with plunder of items restricted as well. In some biblical contexts, however, the concept of ḥērem differed in its details, as in Deuteronomy 2:34–35 and 3:6–7, which allowed livestock to be kept as spoil.
Deuteronomy 20, together with Deuteronomy 7:1–2, commands genocidal violence against the original inhabitants of Canaan, and other passages in Deuteronomy and Joshua describe such violence being carried out. For example, in Joshua 6, we read of the slaughter of Jericho:
And they carried out ḥērem against all who were in the city—man and woman, young and old, cattle, sheep, and donkeys—by the edge of the sword.
Deuteronomy 2:31–34 and Joshua 10:40–42 state explicitly that no survivors were left remaining. This contrasts with accounts of another group targeted for ḥērem, the Amalekites, the elimination of whom was apparently not quite total (1 Samuel 15; Deuteronomy 25:19), as Amalekites reemerge in various narratives in several different books to further vex the Israelites.
The repeated descriptions of mass killings that we find in the conquest narrative in Deuteronomy and Joshua follow a clear pattern: The Israelites, at the behest of their deity, annihilate the indigenous groups targeted for destruction. It is worth noting that archaeological evidence has not substantiated the historicity of these killings. In fact, the divergence between biblical accounts and archaeological evidence for the Bronze Age Levant is wide indeed.
One must ask, why would the Israelites develop a genocidal saga of origins, one complete with such a clearly articulated theological concept of exterminationist killing? The answer lies in some of the lesser-known examples of ḥērem we see not only in biblical texts but in sources from outside the Bible. It also lies not in the Late Bronze Age, in which the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua purportedly take place, but in ancient Israel’s monarchic period, during the Iron Age II (c. 1000–586 BCE), in which they were actually formulated.
Map of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah and surrounding kingdoms, ca. 9th century BCE. Map by Richardprins, CC By-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia.
Although scholars do not agree on the precise dating of Deuteronomy and Joshua, virtually no one dates these texts to any time before the monarchic period. There is, though, a text from outside of the Bible that features the same concept and terminology of ḥērem that we find within the Bible but that has a much clearer date. The Mesha Stele from Moab clearly dates to the ninth century BCE, during the monarchic era of Israelite history, and also describes extreme interethnic violence it calls ḥērem. During the period in which it was written, the southern Levant was marked by significant population increases, competition over resources, interethnic tensions between small polities (e.g., Israel, Judah, Moab, Ammon, and so forth), and ever increasing pressures and then brutal violence at the hands of the Assyrian Empire.
Stele of Mesha, King of Moab, 9th century BCE. Photo by Mbzt 2012, CC By-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Because the ḥērem concept is so clearly centered on possession and dispossession of territories, we should not separate the genocidal literature of the Hebrew Bible from the demographic, material, and social realities of the Iron Age II period. Competition over territories and resources led groups like the Israelites and Moabites, who were really not very different from each other, to mark their ethnic differences more and more starkly through military competition and interethnic violence of different kinds, most of which was not genocidal but often nonetheless extreme (e.g., 1 Samuel 11; Amos 1–2). We should not minimize the extreme violence involved, on which both the Mesha Stele — which describes the killing of not just enemy males but also pregnant women and infants — and biblical texts agree, even if the Bible does not always identify such brutal episodes with the practice of ḥērem.
Amos 1:13 exemplifies well the violence of this period: “Thus says Yahweh: for three transgressions of the Ammonites, and for four, I will not revoke [the punishment], because they have ripped open the pregnant women of Gilead in order to enlarge their territory.” This text not only describes what the Ammonites did but why they did it, something which is also obtrusive in the Mesha Stele — the Israelites and Moabites were fighting over territory.
Deuteronomy and Joshua, being set as they were in the idealized time of Moses and his successor, thus provided a template and theological justification for later ethnic violence. That these texts had the power to do this in the time of the ancient Israelites should come as no surprise, since they have functioned in this way in the modern eras well, as in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and colonial South Africa. In some cases, groups identified themselves as “Israel” and cast their enemies as “Amalek.” For example, the Puritan minister Cotton Mather referred to Indigenous people in New England as “Amalek” and settlers as “Israel” in a sermon motivating English fighters. Also, 19th and early 20th century descriptions of Boer attitudes toward Indigenous Africans make frequent reference to the use of Amalekite language in the discourse of Boers. The continued reappearance of the Amalekites in different biblical texts — a group that was never fully eliminated — made it all too easy for Amalek to become a weaponized symbol in later situations of violence where land claims have been involved.
Rev. Cotton Mather (1663-1728). Portrait by Peter Pelham (1727). Public Domain.
We have then an inversion. The Israelites crafted traditions of killing Canaanites — Canaanites who did in fact once exist but were not actually massacred by the Israelites — to justify later ethnic violence in the monarchic period. In these more recent cases, however, it is Canaanites and Amalekites who are invented — perceived enemies, who are in no way Canaanites and Amalekites, labeled as such to justify mass killings that are all too real. Biblical fictions of genocide become the genocidal realities of more recent eras.
T.M. Lemos is Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Diaspora and Transnational Studies and graduate director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She is a co-editor of The Cambridge World History of Genocide, Volume I (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2023) and author of Violence and Personhood in the Hebrew Bible and Comparative Contexts (Oxford Univ. Press, 2017), among other works.
How to cite this article:
Lemos, T. M. 2026. “Genocide in the Hebrew Bible“, The Ancient Near East Today 14.2. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/genocide-hebrew-bible/.
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