Catholic Commentary
Manasseh's Failure to Drive Out the Canaanites
12Yet the children of Manasseh couldn’t drive out the inhabitants of those cities; but the Canaanites would dwell in that land.13When the children of Israel had grown strong, they put the Canaanites to forced labor, and didn’t utterly drive them out.
Joshua 17:12–13 describes how the tribe of Manasseh initially claimed inability to expel the Canaanites from their assigned cities, but later, when grown stronger, chose forced labor over complete removal—a deliberate disobedience to God's command. The passage reveals that Israel's failure was not military incapacity but spiritual unfaithfulness, institutionalizing the forbidden pagan presence within their territory.
Manasseh didn't conquer the Canaanites—it hired them as slaves—and in doing so turned a commanded obliteration into comfortable compromise.
Joshua 17:12 — Inability or Unwillingness? The Hebrew root behind "couldn't drive out" (לֹא יָכֹל, lo yakol) is revealing. The same verb is used elsewhere in the Old Testament to describe genuine inability, but its context here is deeply ironic: Manasseh has just been granted a large and fertile portion of Canaan (vv. 1–11), and the LORD has repeatedly promised that the land's inhabitants will be driven out when Israel walks in obedience (Exodus 23:27–30; Deuteronomy 7:17–24). The note that "the Canaanites would dwell in that land" (the Hebrew imperfect suggests persistence and habituation) implies not a single military failure but an ongoing, settled tolerance of the forbidden presence. The cities named earlier in this chapter — Beth-shean, Ibleam, Dor, En-dor, Taanach, Megiddo — were strategically important, fortified, and located along fertile valleys (v. 11). Iron chariots are cited in verse 16 as the reason the tribe could not prevail. Yet the LORD's response to this objection in verse 18 is pointed: the hill country will be theirs, and the Canaanites will be driven out, despite the iron chariots. The problem is not military incapacity but spiritual insufficiency: a failure of faith in the God who parted the Jordan and leveled Jericho's walls.
Joshua 17:13 — Pragmatic Compromise as Disobedience Verse 13 represents a decisive moral descent from verse 12. The shift from "couldn't" to "didn't utterly drive them out" is damning. Growth in power — the Hebrew phrase kî-ḥāzeq, "when they had grown strong" — did not produce greater fidelity to the divine command; it produced a more comfortable arrangement. The Canaanites become mas, a levy of forced laborers. This same term (מַּס) is used for the labor battalions Solomon later assembles (1 Kings 9:15, 21), and it echoes the very condition from which Israel had been redeemed in Egypt (Exodus 1:11). Israel, once enslaved, now becomes enslaver — and in doing so, it institutionalizes into its social fabric the very peoples whose religious practices God had warned would become "snares and traps" (Joshua 23:13). The phrase "didn't utterly drive them out" (לֹא הוֹרִישׁוּ) directly contradicts the command of Deuteronomy 7:2 ("you shall utterly destroy them"). Complete consecration — ḥerem — was required; selective retention was infidelity.
Typological and Spiritual Senses The Church Fathers consistently read the Canaanite conquest as a figure of the soul's battle against sin and disordered passion. Origen, in his Homilies on Joshua, interprets each people group as a spiritual vice that must be entirely expelled from the "territory" of the soul. The half-conquest of Manasseh thus typifies the Christian who acknowledges the call to holiness but domesticates sin rather than eradicating it — keeping it useful, controllable, subordinate, rather than mortified. The forced labor arrangement is a telling image: the Christian who does not root out a besetting sin but merely "manages" it, putting it to work in some tolerated corner of life, has not conquered but merely rearranged the furniture of the soul. The Canaanites put to tribute will, in time, seduce Israel into idolatry (Judges 1:27–36; 3:5–6). Managed sin has a way of becoming master.
Catholic tradition brings several distinctive lenses to bear on this passage.
The Doctrine of Concupiscence and Incomplete Sanctification. The Catechism teaches that even after Baptism, concupiscence — the inclination toward sin — remains, and that "the struggle against the inclinations of the flesh" is part of the Christian life (CCC 1264, 2516). The failure of Manasseh is an enacted parable of this truth: the enemies are not destroyed at the moment of entry into the promised land; they linger, and the believer must persevere in driving them out. The Council of Trent (Session VI, Decree on Justification, Canon 23) insists that the justified person is truly called to growth in righteousness — a partial or "good enough" holiness is not the Catholic vision.
Origen's Allegorical Reading. Origen (Homilies on Joshua, Homily 15) explicitly treats the incomplete conquests of the tribes as figures of incomplete spiritual warfare: "Each one of us has within himself his own Jericho, his own Canaanites." The city not conquered is the vice not mortified. This reading was taken up by St. Gregory of Nyssa in The Life of Moses and echoed in St. John of the Cross, who warns that "a single disordered attachment... is enough to prevent the soul from coming to union with God" (Ascent of Mount Carmel, I.11).
The Social Dimension — Proximate Occasions of Sin. The Church's moral theology teaches the importance of avoiding the proximate occasion of sin (CCC 1451). The retained Canaanites are precisely this: a tolerated proximate occasion embedded in the social structure. Judges 3:5–6 confirms the catastrophe: Israel intermarried with these peoples and served their gods. What began as pragmatic economics became spiritual apostasy.
Vocation to Holiness. Lumen Gentium (§11) reaffirms the universal call to holiness: all the baptized are called to the "perfection of charity." Half-measures are incompatible with this vocation. The "forced labor" of Manasseh is a vivid emblem of the temptation to make spiritual mediocrity comfortable and permanent.
These two verses confront the contemporary Catholic with a searingly practical question: what Canaanites have you put to forced labor rather than driven out? The pattern here is not dramatic apostasy but incremental accommodation — the spiritual vice that is not mortified but managed, the near occasion of sin that is retained because it remains "useful," the habitual fault that one has stopped fighting because it seems under control. The digital age makes this temptation especially acute: we do not abandon our faith, but we negotiate treaties with distraction, pornography, consumerism, or pride, convincing ourselves that so long as these things remain "subordinate," they pose no threat. Manasseh's example warns us that growing stronger — in wealth, comfort, or even ecclesial involvement — does not automatically produce greater holiness. Power without consecration simply upgrades the size of one's compromises. The examination of conscience suggested by this passage is not "have I sinned gravely?" but the more demanding "have I stopped fighting?" Catholics are invited by this text to return to the Sacrament of Penance not merely as repair for catastrophic failure but as a regular renewal of the commitment to drive out — not merely restrain — what does not belong in the territory God has given us.
Commentary