Canter Bridge

Just as the book of Joshua begins with a renewal of the covenant that binds Israel to YHWH and his chosen leader, so it ends. Joshua received the baton from the hand of Israel’s aged lawgiver Moses. He now prepares to hand it on to those largely unnamed Israelite leaders who will carry it forward. Joshua, in his own words, has grown old and ‘advanced in years’.

The time for another wrenching change has arrived. Israel will survive because of the strong glue that is covenant.

The form that such covenant-renewing ceremony takes in the pages of the Hexateuch (a term that attempts to recognize the continuity between the book of Joshua and the five ‘books of Moses’ (Pentateuch) that precede it elevates two themes to high visibility. They are scandalous to readers who have marinated in tolerance as the highest, even the absolute, value. The first of these is the dispossession of one group so that another can appropriate its land. The second is a threatening, jealous deity.

The rehearsal of the Lord’s deeds on his covenant partner Israel’s behalf forms the historical prelude to covenant renewal. In it, we are reminded that the Lord drove out the peoples who lived in Israel’s chosen portion of the Levant. Indeed, the lavishness of YHWH’s generosity to Israel is motive for the desired covenantal fidelity:

‘I gave you a land on which you had not labored, and towns that you had not built, and you live in them; you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards that you did not plant.’ Now therefore revere the LORD, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD.

YHWH had cleansed the land by ‘sending the hornet’, had enhanced the Israelite warrior’s reputation so that ‘one of you puts to flight a thousand, since it is the LORD your God who fights for you, as he promised you.’

What, then, is one to make of the fate of those nations—named, it is true, but rarely allowed any historical sympathy—that lost their land to the invading tribes?

It is a question that has troubled serious Bible readers for centuries. All that can be said here is that the biblical historian’s answer does not turn over this soil as carefully as one’s modern moral sympathies might wish the scrutiny to proceed. There are three, albeit superficial, attempts to consider these peoples’ fate.

The first is the recognition of what one might call ‘the righteous Canaanite’. Rahab, for example, gains notoriety when as Jericho’s iconic prostitute on the wall she anticipates YHWH’s victory on Israels’ behalf. Energized by this prescience, she goes over to the side of the Israelite spies whom she houses and the army that would follow them to Jericho. In doing so she saves her entire family from death and their property from pillage. The historian allows that even a Canaanite prostitute can, in the right circumstances, do the right thing.

The second is the assignment of a culpable level of depravity to the inhabitants of the land. This logic insinuates that the dispossessed nations had so contraverted even minimal levels of righteousness that their banishment was fully justified on moral grounds. A more explicit nod in this direction occurs in a proleptic promise to father Abraham about his descendants’ eventual coming into ownership of the land through which his nomadism took him:

Then the LORD said to Abram, ‘Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years; but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for yourself, you shall go to your ancestors in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.’

Finally, it is easy to observe that the emphasis of the historian’s prose falls markedly on the bonanza that this land will be to Israel. He simply claims that it is YHWH’s pleasure to remove title to the place from certain hands and to place it into Israel’s. Significantly, he does not justify this on the grounds of Israel’s heroic behavior, as might be expected. The biblical historian is peculiarly cognizant that Israel in no way deserves this gift, in fact he is at pains to convince Israel of this fundamental conviction.

The writer is at peace with YHWH’s right to move the chess pieces, a ‘macro’ perspective that is softened occasionally by the divine architect’s attention to foreign and vulnerable individuals like Hagar and Rahab. Though this may seem irresponsible and obscurantist from a modern reader’s viewpoint, it is not casual. Rather the biblical historian is persuaded that the YHWH’s character is righteous and true, thus his harshest acts are to be understood as the outworking of some just cause. It is almost unprecedented in such ancient literature that this conviction should be so overtly turned against Israel itself via the prolonged warnings to this newcomer on the scene that similar dispossession and exile among the nations shall in turn be its lot if covenantal fidelity does not shape their conduct in the land they are receiving.

Which brings one to the matter of YHWH’s jealousy:

But Joshua said to the people, ‘You cannot serve the LORD, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions or your sins. If you forsake the LORD and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you harm, and consume you, after having done you good.’ And the people said to Joshua, ‘No, we will serve the LORD!’

YHWH, in the biblical narrative, is a most demanding deity. He is jealous, which seems to mean most essentially that he is intolerant when religious affections lurch towards diversity and experimentation. He does not expect Israel to find its own way to shalom in the land. He means to instruct them. The historian does not empty the metaphysical skies of religious alternatives to YHWH. He simply warns his and future generations of YHWH’s Israel not to pay attention to them. Nothing good lies on that side of the metaphysical curtain.

Joshua is a scandalous book. One trusts YHWH and reads it with humility. Or one assumes the basic equality of diverse constructions of reality and reads it with horror. Israel’s historian is terribly misguided and culpable of fomenting through his juvenile historiography all manner of calamity by those who become intoxicated by YHWH’s alleged choice. Or he has traced bona fide patterns among history’s dust in a manner that sweeps dispassionate observation to the corner where historical truisms gather their mold.