Regardless of whether it ‘counts’ as genocide, God ordering the mass slaughter of perhaps hundreds of thousands of children is pretty hard to handle.
I am not familiar with the fellow you are refuting, and I agree that he overstates things and seems sloppy, but I suspect I mostly agree with his views at the end of the day.
You don’t think Joshua 11:23 is claiming this?
So Joshua took the whole land, according to all that the Lord had spoken to Moses, and Joshua gave it for an inheritance to Israel according to their tribal allotments. And the land had rest from war.
Of course chapter 13 contradicts this by mentioning a bunch of cities that were not captured.
I think this is probably just another case where the biblical writers and editors included views of different traditions even though they didn’t agree. So I agree with the Dr McClellan that the text is inconsistent, although his addition of the word ‘entirely’ might be problematic.
One very interesting thing about the conquest of the land of Canaan as presented in Joshua is that it very often contradicts the archeological evidence. At least that is what you hear from mainstream biblical scholars.
Pete Enns writes a few dozen pages on this in The Bible Tells Me So. But some folks aren’t fond of him because he is a ‘progressive’ Christian. In The Jewish Study Bible they also write about this. From the intro to Joshua:
The story of the conquest in Joshua does not accord, either in its general outlook or in its specific details, with the archeological data.
…
Archeology also contradicts the detailed stories of the conquest of the two cities, Jericho and Ai, which were apparently not inhabited during the late Bronze Age.
They actually write more about it (and also have a 10+ page essay on archeology and the Bible), but I think that gives the general idea.
How could the writers/editors claim to conquer a city that was uninhabited? One option is that it was written much later, like biblical scholars seem to think. Even the text itself seems to imply it was written a fairly long time after the events were supposed to have taken place, otherwise the multiple statements about things (like the stones placed in the Jordan in ch 4) that are ‘there to this day’ would not really mean anything.
So again I probably agree with Dr McClellan in that many of the events did not occur, and that they were written a long time after they would have occured. Whether or not they were written to be propaganda might be harder to say, though.
Getting back to how I started this post, in light of the archeological evidence I highly doubt that God ordered the mass slaughter of all of the Canaanites to include all of the children. It also goes against what Ezekiel writes (ch 18) about children not being punished for the sins of their fathers. Finally, I also cannot see Jesus ordering such a slaughter of children. But this is just my own opinion of course.