The nomistic approach to the conquest narratives

A nomistic approach to the Bible sees the text as a collection of commands, demonstrations, and illustrations of principles that, if obeyed or imitated, will produce goodness.

This approach creates an immediate difficulty with passages like the conquest account, since such passages contain commands or record actions that we do not think produce goodness. Consequently, the tendency of many nomistic interpreters is to infer all manner of horrific crimes committed by the Canaanites in order to make Joshua’s actions seem good and thereby form the basis of a rule that we can feel comfortable imitating (“God commands us to remove evil from the world by taking action against evil people”). This interpretation is problematic…— The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest, 18