On today’s new episode of “The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast,” I speak with Kate Common on the nonviolent origins of the Hebrew community as she describes in her new book, Undoing Conquest: Ancient Israel, the Bible, and the Future of Christianity (Orbis).

Dr. Kate Common is the Assistant Professor of Public and Practical Theology at Methodist Theological School in Ohio, and the Theologian-in-Residence at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Northampton, MA. (katecommon.com)

“In the battle of Jericho, in the book of Joshua, Israel’s army kills everyone-- men, women, children and livestock. Suddenly, human violence—genocide--is condoned by God,” she explains. But decades of archeological evidence from the “highland settlements,” she reports, now prove there was no genocide as Israel entered the promised land.

Instead of conquest and genocide, the Hebrews originated from a peaceful, nonmilitaristic movement of indigenous people who formed egalitarian communities living outside the reach of the Egyptian empire.

“These people never had a conquest story until 500 years later in 722 BCE when Israel was terrorized and conquered by the Assyrian empire. Later, they wrote their origins story as a conquest of the promised land, portraying themselves like the brutal, genocidal Assyrians!”

That false narrative has been used ever since to justify violence and has led us to two of the great heresies of our time.

White European colonists who killed millions of indigenous people and enslaved millions of Africans invoked this image, as did the white racists who created South Africa’s apartheid, and the Israeli warmakers and Christian Zionists who justify the recent genocide in Gaza.

Secretary of War Hegseth recently invoked the genocide described in Joshua to defend the US and Israeli war on Iran.

Jesus, Kate Common concludes, was calling us back to the Hebrew ideals that renounced empire and created egalitarian communities of peace and

Listen in and discover new insights in the biblical origins of Hebrew and Christian peacemaking.

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