So the descendants went in and possessed the land, and you subdued before them the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, and gave them into their hands, with their kings and the peoples of the land, to do with them as they pleased.
I said to their children in the wilderness, “Do not follow the statutes of your parents, nor observe their ordinances, nor defile yourselves with their idols.
Why is the Lord bringing us into this land to fall by the sword? Our wives and our little ones will become plunder; would it not be better for us to go back to Egypt?”
And as for your little ones who you thought would become plunder, your children who today do not yet know right from wrong, they shall enter there; to them I will give it, and they shall take possession of it.
So it was their children, whom he raised up in their place, that Joshua circumcised, for they were uncircumcised because they had not been circumcised on the way.