The smoke that rises from the valley of Jericho smells, to the victor, of absolute holiness.
To the Israelite soldier standing ankle-deep in the ash, wiping the dust and sweat from his brow, the annihilation of the city is the bitter, necessary perfume of obedience. He has been told that the ground beneath his feet is polluted, that the culture thriving here is a cancer, and that the order to strike down man, woman, child, and beast came straight from the heavens. In his chest beats a heart of absolute devotion. He is not a murderer; he is an instrument. The voice that commanded this slaughter is the voice that parted the sea, the voice that brought manna in the wilderness, the voice of the Creator, the Sustainer, the One True God. To question it would be spiritual suicide; to execute it is the highest form of righteousness.
Yet, divinity is notoriously dependent on the geography of one’s birth.
Look down at the same valley, but shift the perspective by a few yards, through the eyes of a mother sheltering her child in the ruins of a collapsing mud-brick home. To her, the advancing army does not represent a holy cleansing. They are the heralds of a cosmic horror. The orders they scream in the name of their desert deity sound not like divine law, but like the ravings of a blood-drunk fiend.
As the battering rams splinter the gate and the screams begin to echo through the narrow streets, what theological framework is available to her? If an entity demands the slaughter of infants, the evisceration of pregnant women, and the butchery of harmless beasts—not out of tactical necessity, but as a sacred ritual of total eradication—what separates that entity from the darkest definitions of a demon?
This is the chilling, gravitational paradox at the heart of ancient theological history: One person’s God is very frequently another person’s demon.
Humanity has long possessed a terrifying capacity to baptize its own tribal instincts, dressing them in celestial garments and calling them the Almighty. In the ancient Near East, warfare was not merely a clash of states; it was a proxy war between pantheons. Victory meant your god was stronger; defeat meant your god had abandoned you—or worse, that the enemy’s god was a monstrous usurper demanding your blood.
If we take the martial narratives of the Old Testament seriously—whether as historical record or as the deeply revealing psychological and spiritual autobiography of an ancient people—we are forced to confront an uncomfortable mirror. We see a deity who transcends the cosmos one moment, commanding radical compassion for the alien and the orphan, and yet appears in the next as a divine warlord, sanctioning total war.
For the insider, the cognitive dissonance is resolved by faith: God’s ways are higher than our ways; what we call cruelty, He knows to be divine surgery.
But for the outsider—the Canaanite, the Amalekite, the Midianite—no such theological gymnastics are possible. They do not experience the covenant; they experience the catastrophe. They do not hear the still, small voice of mercy; they hear the boots marching toward their nursery. To them, the invading God is not a shepherd; He is a devouring fire, a malignant force of cosmic malice, a terror in the night that hungers for innocent blood.
In the modern secular mind, this realisation often leads to a cynical dismissal of all religion. See? the sceptic argues. God is just a projection of tribal tribalism—an excuse to slaughter the neighbour while holding a blood-stained knife to the sky.
Yet, the question cuts deeper than mere scepticism. It forces believers and non-believers alike to grapple with the terrifying malleability of the divine concept. Throughout history, whenever men have become convinced that they are carrying out the explicit, unquestionable orders of absolute goodness, they have invariably unleashed absolute evil. The Spanish Inquisition, the religious wars of Europe, the modern iterations of holy terror—all operate on the same terrifying premise: Our God has commanded this.
And herein lies the eternal tragedy of the valley of Jericho. Two groups of human beings, both made of dust and breath, both capable of love and grief, locked in a butcher’s dance where each is performing a sacred duty. One sings hymns of praise to the God who delivers victory; the other gasps for air beneath the boots of monsters, cursing the demon that tore their world apart.
The tragedy is not just that they were fighting over dirt. It is that they were both looking up at the exact same sky, calling upon the exact same mystery of existence, utterly blind to the possibility that the voice they heard in the wind was not whispering from the heights of heaven, but either from the most troubled parts of the human mind, or perhaps even from the dark, ancient depths of Hell? And it seems clear, does it not, that this same disturbing attitude continues to cause mayhem in the Middle East, even today?
