Now Jericho was tightly shut up because of the children of Israel: none went out, and none came in.
Israel’s destruction of the people of Canaan was not merely for political or material gain. It had a religious and moral purpose in God’s plan. He had given the Canaanites time to repent, and the case of Rahab shows that any who turned from their sins and believed in the God of Israel could be saved. But for the Canaanites as a whole, their wickedness was now so great that the time for judgment had come (Genesis 15:16; Deuteronomy 7:1-5). In the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, God had used the forces of nature to bring destruction; in the case of the Canaanites, he used his people Israel.