book of Joshua is one of those books that is supposedly very familiar to
us—I mean, a lot of grew up hearing about Jericho, and we grew up
singing about the walls of Jericho falling down—but, you know, there is
also a sense in which most of us aren’t really familiar with the book—we
don’t really know much more than the story of Jericho, and even with that
story, we’ve sanitized it down so much that we don’t even bother paying
attention to the last horrifying piece of that story. The reality is that a lot
of this book has been ignored by our Sunday School teachers, and our
preachers—there is some disturbing stuff in the book of Joshua, stuff
that has often troubled its readers and the scholars who have studied
this book of the Bible. The last week or so I’ve been mentioning this this
book has a lot of blood and gore—there is plenty of that stuff in this
book, especially in the telling of the military campaigns of Israel, as well
as the stories of what happens afterwards to those prisoners that Israel
captures. In fact, Israel begins its own campaign of ethnic cleansing of
Canaan in which a lot of people are killed: women, men, children, old and
young alike, the blood flows from swords of the Israelites. But what is
disturbing for most of us is that this book of the Bible seems to imply that
God commanded such brutality upon the residents of Canaan, that God
endorsed the ethnic cleansing of the land. And so, there is a reason
why most of us don’t get the rest of the story, so to speak, ripping off
Paul Harvey, from our Sunday School teachers—the meaning of such
commands by God is just too disturbing for some of us.
Now, I’ll look at that issue a littler later in our study, but before I get there,
I wanted to give us a brief overview of the kind of writing style that
actually begins with the book of Joshua—actually, we get a whole new
way of writing in the Bible from this point on, and Joshua is the first of
many books where this new style will be used to tell the story of God’s
faithfulness to Israel. We’ve just finished off the first 5 books of the
Bible, called the Pentateuch and traditionally attributed to Moses, though
most scholars think it was written and edited by many different groups of
people from Israel’s past. This section was really about the beginning of
the people of Israel and how they were given the Law, the sacred ethical
and religious regulations that were to govern this new people God had
rescued from Egypt. Actually, when Jews divide up their Bible, they call
the first five books as a whole, The Law—they see these books as
ultimately being about the Law and how the people got this precious gift
from God, this new covenant and “deal” on how to be in relationship with
God.
Now, we’re about to begin a section of the Bible that gets them beyond
the Law—the details of the law will not be brought up in the next set of
writing, as it has been sporadically in the first five books of the Bible. We
are beginning what the Jews would call “The Writings” and what we see
here is the beginning of the sacred history of Israel—the story of Israel
for hundreds of years after Moses. Actually, most scholars call this type
of literature something other than “history”—they usually call it the
narrative literature of the Bible. That simply means that these books of
the Bible tell a story in a very straightforward sort of way, in a very
orderly manner. Unlike the first 5 books we get went through, the writers
in this style of writing won’t be mixing a lot of stories with religious and
ceremonial and ethical laws—that is one of the odd thing about the
Pentateuch—you get a story, and then all of a sudden you spend next
10 chapters or so on some religious laws about the tabernacle, or
something like that—the stories always get interrupted with the law stuff,
and it doesn’t flow easily in terms of trying to read it. Well, you will have
no problem with that from this point on, at least not through Esther—
everything is pretty much a story from now on, though it will sometimes
be a story that repeats itself, but we’ll get to that issue when get to the
books of 1 & 2 Chronicles. The point is that narrative literature is trying
to tell us a story, whereas other books of the Bible like Leviticus, or
Proverbs, or Isaiah, or Romans aren’t trying to do that—those books are
trying to get a point or points across, but they don’t rely too much on a
story all that much—but the books we’re about spend the next few
months on really do count on telling a story in order to get some sort of
truth or point to us readers. In the first five books, the stories we hear
really are meant to point us to the Law, of how the people of Israel got
the Law, and what that Law required of the people. The books after
these first 5 books start using stories in a different way—the Law itself is
no longer the point; actually, the story itself becomes the point, because
those story tells how faithful the God of Israel has been to the covenant,
and how the people of Israel have so often been unfaithful to that
covenant.
Now, there are other forms of narrative literature other than the ones we’
re going to be studying in the Bible—the Gospels and Acts, but the real,
head-on storytelling begins right here and right now. This part of the
Bible begins a story that Israel is telling about itself—a story that begins
with Joshua and Israel, standing on the shore of the Promise Land, and
finally ends with the story of how that Promised Land is lost to the hands
of Babylonian Empire, hundreds of years later, near the reign of King
Josiah. It is the story of a nation, or at least it is the story of when Israel
was a nation-state, from beginning to end, and all the drama that went
with it, good and bad, sad and beautiful. And the folks that are telling
this story have juiced up the drama to the nth degree, so to speak—and
it was probably a group of people, not just a single person. In fact, it was
probably the same group of people that Sharon mentioned last week in
her teachings about Deuteronomy—the Deutoronomist dudes, and they
were probably were dudes, and not dudettes. This group of writers had
done some editing in the first 5 books of the Bible, but this is the area
where they get really busy—they start taking over all the story-telling—in
fact, the books of Deuteronomy through 2 Kings are often attributed to
these folks, the Deuteronomists. As Sharon said last week, the book of
Joshua probably wasn’t written when it was all happening, when the
people of Israel were entering into the Promised Land. It was actually
probably written during the time when King Josiah ruled the country,
between 622-575 BCE. The thing with this group of people, these
Deutoronomist folks was that they were obsessed with the covenant
between God and the people of Israel, and especially, they couldn’t let
go of the idea that the people needed to be more obedient to God, that
they needed to be holy once again—you find that thread through all of
these books, from Deuteronomy through 2 Kings, and in parts of the
Pentateuch, the first 5 books, where we think they contributed some
editorial help. You see, King Josiah was all about trying to get the
people of Israel on the right track again, on reforming them and getting
them to obey the sacred and religious Laws of Israel—and so you see
the folks who wrote the book of Joshua and the subsequent books
through 2 Kings were struggling with getting the people to obey God
again to go back to being faithful to the covenant between God and
Israel. the people had kept dropping the ball, over the years, with God,
and the folks who wrote during King Josiah’s time, the Deuteronomists,
had this agenda in their storytelling and a lot of their plan was to telling
the story of Israel in a certain way in order to get the people to be faithful
again and to justify the way they were attempting to reform Israel. In fact,
scholars say that there are three main things the Deuteronomists want to
emphasize when they tell their version of the story of Israel (Three Main
Points The Deuteronomists Want To Emphasize), three main agenda
items they work into the text:
1) Obedience to the Law
2) Centralized worship in Jerusalem
3) Strong kingship as exemplified through David
The first we heard about last week—they want to emphasize obedience—
obedience to the traditional Law as handed down to Moses. The second
thing really hasn’t been brought up, but one of the issues that King
Josiah struggled with during this time was making a case that God should
be worshipped in Jerusalem, as opposed to various other places where
people were worshipping God during his time, especially in the Northern
part of Israel—long story and we’ll get to that drama in a few books from
now. But the third thing on this list of things the Deuteronomists want to
emphasize is a strong, very powerful kingship, as exemplified through
King David’s rule. The book of Judges, which Sharon will lead us into
next week, shows that the writers of this part of the Bible thought that
Israel needed a strong king, rather than the weak confederacy, a weak
alliance, under God’s direct rule, that Joshua left in place before he
died.
All this stuff you’ll see in the next few books, but I wanted to bring these
items ino order to emphasize a thread here, a thread about power and
control, that you will see weaved in the text, and how the writer of this
part of the Bible, the Deuteronomists, really wanted to emphasize that
the people should obey—they should obey the religious and ceremonial
law, they should worship in one place ONLY, and they should obey the
king without question, and if they don’t obey, then they should pay
heavily, if not with their life. King Josiah led a reformation movement that
emphasized all of these things, and the writers of his court, the
Deuteronomists, helped to emphasize and strengthen his case for power
and control by the particular way they decided to tell the story of Israel’s
past. 1 & 2 Chronicles actually tells a slightly different version of the
same story of Israel—, WITHOUT a lot of these things the
Deuteronomists wanted to make sure and emphasize in their telling of
Israel’s history—the writers of 1 & 2 Chronicles had a different point in
their re-telling of Israel’s history. Now, this sound awfully dry—and to
some degree it is, but its going to be very important in few minutes when
we start talking about one of the big issues that haunts us modern
readers of Joshua—the whole issue of the massacres of the Canaanites,
the ethnic cleansing that seemed to be ordered by God, at least
according to the writers of the Joshua, who were the Deuteronomists that
lived during King Josiah’s time.
But before we get there, let’s get some idea about where we are in the
great drama of the Bible. Well, as Sharon pointed out last week, we are
at the edge of the Promise Land when we begin the book of Joshua—
actually, some of the Promised Land had been taken already on the East
Side, but now the West Side is ready to be captured. Moses has died,
Joshua has been handed the leadership role, and the people are on the
edge of river, ready to begin battle. Now, I think you can basically divide
up the book of Joshua into three parts, though I think there are other
ways of dividing it as well, of course.
Chapters 1-12—Joshua conquers the land: Israel enters into the
Promised Land, defeats its enemies, and takes care of most of its
enemies.
Chapters 13-21—Joshua divides the land: the conquered Promised
Land gets divided up between the different tribes of Israel.
Chapters 22-24—Joshua speaks to Israel: like Moses, Joshua gets a
farewell speech encouraging the people to be faithful to God.
The middle part of Joshua is probably the driest reading for us modern
readers, chapters 13-21, though if you like geography and stuff like that,
its probably quite exciting for you—the Promised Land is carved up for
the conquering tribes of Israel. But the reality is that first 12 chapters
are what we are really most familiar with—in that first part of the book, we
have Joshua being told to be “strong and courageous” over and over
again—its almost as if God has to get Joshua pumped and ready to get
going: “I hereby command you: Be strong and courageous; do not be
frightened and dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you
go.” (Joshua 1:9) We have the story of another miraculous walking
through the water, like Moses and the Red Sea, with the ark being in
important in that story; and then we have the one story that most of us
can tell from the book of Joshua, the story of Jericho (INSERT VIDEO
CLIP). Before that dramatic conclusion, we hear of Rahab the prostitute
and her decision to help out the Israelite spies, and after that we see the
Israelites conquering yet another city, the city of Ai in chapters 7 & 8.
But I bet the piece that you didn’t hear about in Sunday School, when
Joshua and Israel were conquering Canaan was the stories about the
massacres, what happened after the walls came down in Jericho—“Then
they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both
men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.” (Joshua 6:
21) It’s a horrifying moment, especially for those of us in the Christian
faith—I mean, this is ethnic cleansing, this is an attempt to wipe out every
living and breathing soul of a city. And though sometimes we think of it
as being something far away, these just incredible, horrifying massacres,
they aren’t so far away from our reality—only a dozen years ago, we saw
the horror of Rwanda, with one tribe attempting to wipe out another one,
in Europe, in Bosnia, where one ethnic groups, made up of Christians,
tried to wipe out another ethnic group, mostly of Muslims. And of course,
there is the Holocaust, when Hitler and the Nazis attempted to “cleanse”
the land of the Jews.
And yet this is not even the end of the horrors—if you look at the next
city they conquer, the city of Ai, it gets even worse: “When Israel had
finished slaughtering all the inhabitants of Ai in the open wilderness whey
they pursued them, and when all of them to very last had fallen by the
edge of the sword, all Israel returned to Ai, and attacked it with the edge
of the sword. The total of those who fell that day, both men and women,
was twelve thousand—all the people of Ai…Only the livestock and the
spoil of that city took as their booty, according to the word of the Lord
that he had issued to Joshua” (Joshua 8:24-27) For most of us—
hopefully, all of us—this is horrifying—but its even more than just
disturbing because of the sheer brutality of it. What I think disturbs me
and I suspect a lot of people of faith is that it seems as if God is not just
standing on the sidelines or even silently endorsing it, but the writers
seem to imply that God is actually directing this ethnic cleansing, this
holy war, against the current residents of Canaan. The Deuteronomists
seem to want to us to believe that God told Joshua to do these things, to
commit what anyone in our age would call a “crime against humanity.”
Defeating someone in a war is one thing; slaughtering everyone,
including women and children is quite another thing. For most of us, it’s
just repulsive.
The sad thing is that the story of how Israel took possession of Canaan
has often been used by others to justify their own agenda, their own
decision to take over a piece of land, and then kick everyone out. The
reality is that many people, including our own country, have used the
book of Joshua as a justification for displacement and genocide of
another people—some Christians in our country used this book to make
an argument in the 18 & 19th century that white folks needed take and
even cleanse this country of Native Americans, because they were in the
land that God had given white people, and, of course, they didn’t share
the same faith as Christians—this somehow justified all the treaties we
didn’t keep with Native Americans, or our desire for a land was already
being occupied by others. The scary thing about all this is that some
Christians, usually more conservative Christians, have attempted to
justify the kind of God this story seems to say God is—some Christians
have taken the story of Joshua’s conquest of Canaan as a literal story
and so they feel almost obligated to justify God’s commandment to kill
everyone in Jericho and Ai in the text. They have argued that the
Canaanites that were there were so bad, so vile, so evil, that they
deserved to die, even the women, the children, young and old alike.
But the problem with this idea is that it’s a classic justification that every
group makes when they’re about to commit genocide against another
group—the Nazis say that they Jews are vile and evil and unredeemable;
one tribe in the Rwandan conflict says that the others side has
committed such horrible offenses that they deserved no mercy; the
Serbians say such things about the Bosnians, or vice versa in the
fragmented former Yugoslavia; and in this country, the white settlers of
this continent say something similar about Native Americans. This is a
very dangerous idea, the demonization of those “other people” to justify
the atrocities we are about to inflict upon them or are planning to visit
upon them. The reality also is that some people do that to us lesbian
and gay people in this country—because of the “disgusting” things
Matthew Shepherd supposedly did, those boys had ever right to
“defend” themselves on those Colorado back roads. I think all of us can
hopefully agree that genocide, ethnic cleansing, done by whomever and
to whomever is just wrong—and is not ever, EVER God’s will, even when
the Biblical text says that God said to do it.
But where does that leave us? Why did the writer or writers of Joshua
feel like they had to “cleanse” the land of Canaanites? Why did the
Deuteronomists in King Josiah’s time feel like they had to make that point
in this story about the early days of Israel? Well, I think there is a lot of
complicated reasons, but some of those reasons we can actually trace to
what was happening in Israel when this part of the Bible was being
written. King Josiah was trying to get Israel back on path, trying to get re-
claim its glory days they had experienced under David and Solomon.
And though Josiah’s motive is very good because, in reality, Israel had
been off-track for many years, the method that Josiah chose was
incredibly heavy-handed and violent, and very much rooted in power and
control. One of the things that Josiah did was to cleanse Israel of all the
competing religions and cults during his era, and we know that he often
used brute force to get the country on track. He wanted to centralize
worship again in Jerusalem, and so he went on a campaign in the
Northern part of Israel, destroying all the pagan temples and priests of
other religions, and he commanded that everyone must worship again in
the ancient city of David. King Josiah was a man focused on trying to get
the country on track because he was hoping that God would rescue the
nation from the Babylonians who were breathing down their necks. King
Josiah wanted the nation to go back to God, to become holy again in
God’s sight, but, sadly, all of his attempts at reforms during this time
eventually didn’t work—the last part of Israel finally fell to the
Babylonians in 597 BCE.
The reason why this larger context is important is that it gives us a clue
of why the writers of Joshua would put in those pieces about slaughtering
the residents of Canaan. King Josiah, like the Deuteronomists writers,
felt that Israel had to rid itself, cleanse itself, of all these negative, unholy
influences that had crept into the land—and Josiah himself, like the
stories of Joshua, does this cleansing in his own time, with a sword, and
with violence. The writers of Joshua are probably using this early
conquest of Canaan as a blue-print and justification for doing what they
were doing in Josiah time—cleansing the land of all holiness, so that they
could once again be God’s holy people. If they became holy again, then
God would rescue them from the Babylonian conquers right around the
corner. Remember, Israel understands holiness as being separate and
not being contaminated with religions and beliefs and practices of those
“other people” who were evil, vile, and spiritually dirty, so to speak. The
story of Joshua and the conquest, and, in fact, all of this larger story that
the Deuteronomists tell helps to justify King Josiah’s reforms hundreds of
years later—in fact, the story of Israel as told by the Deuteronomists has
been framed in such a way that it justifies all the reforms King Josiah was
trying to make in his own day.
Now, that may help explain it, it helps explain why such an awful thing like
ethnic cleansing is there in our Bibles, in our sacred text. But I don’t
know if it makes us feel any less disturbed about it—or maybe I should
say that it shouldn’t disturb us any less, even with this explanation. The
massacre of other people, even those who don’t share your religion or
your skin color, or your tribal background is never right, I believe, and I
suspect almost all of the Christian church, even the folks who try to
justify God in this text, would agree with that. I know I don’t believe that
God told Joshua to kill those people—I suspect that the history of Israel
and the conquest of Canaan, the past, was being molded in such a way
to justify the present, the reforms that King Josiah were doing while the
book of Joshua was being written—people have a tendency to do that
with history, even when they were trying to do good in the present, like
King Josiah was with his reforms, though perhaps he tried to make those
reforms happen through the wrong methods, like violence and the
sword.
So, what can we learn in this midst of this powerful and sometimes
disturbing story of the conquest of Canaan by God’s people? Well, even
in the midst of all the politicking going on in the background of the text,
there is still a lot of powerful lessons to learn from this book. Actually,
one of things we learn from this text, oddly enough, is probably the
opposite of what the writer intended for us to learn—which is that it really
isn’t OK to commit genocide, mass murder, even if you say that God told
you to do it—people justifying their brutality and inhumanity by saying
that God told them to do it, starts even here in the Bible. And the great
thing about Scripture is that it has a power of its own—and God
continues to work through it, even when the writers of the text fail us,
when they do what so many others have done, which is to justify their
sin, their act of ethnic cleansing. I mean, think about it—that is how
powerful the Spirit moves in these pages—it will even speak against
itself, it will even move us to confront and reject people like the
Deuteronomists who use their re-shaping of the history of Israel in order
to justify their brutality against their current enemies. The God of
Scripture is bigger than even Scripture itself, and so we Christians can
confront Apostle Paul when wrongly justifies slavery, or when this same
Paul uses God to justify keeping women in a secondary status. The
greater witness of Scripture tells of a God who only chapters earlier in
Leviticus tells the people of Israel to love their enemies, to treat even
their enemies with respect and care. Now, sadly, some Christians still
confuse the Bible with God, but I hope we won’t do that—we wouldn’t
have gotten the whole witness, the whole point of Scripture, if we ended
worshipping the Bible instead of the faithful God of whom Scripture
speaks, the God whom, Joshua, tells us about in his final words to the
people of Israel, right before his death: “And now I am about to go the
way of all the earth, and you know in your hearts and souls, all of you,
that not one thing has failed of all the good things that the Lord your
God promised concerning you; all have come to pass for you, not one of
them has failed.” (Joshua 23:14) Finally, the writer of Joshua gets its,
powerfully and purely in this moment—truly God is faithful to Israel and to
us, even when we have let God down, even when we try to blame God
for our often violent and brutal ways—again, “you know in your hearts
and souls, all of you, that not one thing has failed of all the good things
that the Lord your God promised concerning you…” Amen.
