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A review by ryanjjung
Joshua (Bible #6), ESV by
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With Moses dead and the Israelites having slaughtered their way through tribe after tribe of innocent people, invading their cities, taking advantage of their agriculture, and raping their goats, someone has to take them through the final imperial push across the River Jordan and into the land of Canaan. That man is Joshua, so sayeth the LORD, who remindeth us that it's Joshua and his tribe's divine right to crush his enemies underfoot.
Joshua sends two spies into the promised land, and they stay the night at the house of a harlot named Rahab, who hides them from the king's men when they come looking. Rahab agrees they have divine right to pillage her people. "I know that the LORD hath given you the land," she says in 2:8, justifying it with a summary of the Israelite war campaign and the violence and desolation left in their wake. For her help, they promise not to kill her family when they raid. They'll tell their men not to go after the people in her house, marked by a red ribbon, which is a step up from lamb's blood. The spies don't really learn anything, but report that "all the inhabitants of the country do faint because of us." (2:23)
A few days later, the heat on their necks having cleared up a bit, they hold service in the tabernacle of the covenant, praying that God destroy seven different tribes of people in their raid tomorrow. "Thou shalt not kill."
Come morning, they cross Jordan. The waters part for their entrance. The twelve tribes carry a large stone apiece across the river and there place them as a monument to the miraculous parting. "And they are there unto this day." (4:9)
I took a moment to do some Googling about that. I cannot find a single article about the stones that does not come from a blatantly religious source. There appears to be no evidence of a twelve stone monument still present along the Jordan River. A few Jewish/Israeli news outlets and Jewish cultural publications (Jerusalem Post and Haaretz for example) reported on the discovery of a large cave along the river of apparent archeological significance. These outlets want to call this Gilgal, the name the Bible gives the Israeli encampment where the monument was erected. I'd be more inclined to believe it if I could find a more scientific source of the information, or if there were any corroboration to the story of Jews escaping Egyptian slavery and wandering the desert subsisting on magic manna flakes for forty years. Those manna flakes dry up in 5:12, by the way, since the tribe has finally arrived.
A previous passage (that I can't find the reference to right now, sue me) had the Israelites promise not to circumcise people until they reached the promised land, and in Chapter 5, they've crossed the river, and it's time to take care of all that. So there's a "hill of the foreskins" where they use "sharp knives" to perform bronze age surgery on the penises of every person born in the wilderness. Just pause for a moment to imagine a hill of bloody foreskins with a line of dudes with pupices waiting their turn to add theirs to the pile.
So they besiege the city of Jericho and "utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword." (6:21) They do spare Rahab and her family and safely... kick them out of their own town. "And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD." (6:24)
At the beginning of Chapter 7, one person (named Achan, of the tribe of Judah) "took of the accursed thing". This is a reference to Jericho, but this is also the last bit of detail we get about what he took until 7:21 when Achan is making amends, where we discover it was "a goodly Babylonish garment, and two hundred shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold of fifty shekels weight." God is so mad about it that the next time Joshua sends a gang of thugs to overtake a town (Ai), God lets thirty-six of them die. Achan is then made to first repent, then remove all of his things from their encampment, and then "all Israel stoned him with stones". They burn all of his property and kill him. "Thou shalt not kill."
Murdering Achan appeases god, so he will now let the Israelites win a battle against the folks in Ai. They plan an ambush where it looks like they're going to lose, drawing the Ai - Ai-ians? Ai-ites? I'm not sure of the demonym - out of the city. Then they raid the unguarded city and "smote them, so that they let none of them remain or escape." They do capture the king of Ai, but end up killing twelve thousand men, keeping their cattle, and burning Ai to the ground. The king of Ai gets strung up from a tree.
This is a chapter I'm torn on. Its morality is as appalling as the rest of the Bible's, but it was also a pretty engaging and entertaining chapter. There's a military strategy planned and executed, and that's more than you can say for most of the rest of this thing.
Now all the other kings of tribes on this side of the River Jordan band together to try and make peace with Joshua and his men. They bring bread and wine to bribe them, and promise to bow down to the Israelite god. This is good enough for the Israelites to allow those tribes to begin to live among them. The message here is clear: be one of us, worship our god, and we won't murder you by the thousand and burn your cities down.
It is then decided that these new people should be slaves to the Israelites. Joseph labels them "cursed" into "being bondmen" and these other tribes are pretty ok with that, for some reason. They literally walk up and turn themselves into slaves. But there are some other kings who are mad that they've done so, and they mount up against the Israelites. Joseph takes up arms in return and leaves a trail of blood across several cities. God kills some folks himself by "cast[ing] down great stones from heaven upon them." And their people? Well, first, "more ... died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword." (10:11) Then Joseph casts a magic spell that causes the sun and moon to stand completely still so they can have some daylight while they kill everyone. (10:13) They chase the kings down into a cave and block them in for a while, eventually letting them out to George Floyd them to death. They bury the dead bodies in a cave and then destroy their cities. Thou shalt not kill.
The rest of Chapter 10 plays out with Joshua leading the tribes to destroy several other entire cities. Lachish. Gezer. Eglon. Hebron. Debir. "Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD God of Israel commanded." (10:40)
Chapter 11 is no different. "Joshua took all that land, the hills, and all the country, and all the land of Goshen, and the valley, and the plain, and the mountain of Israel, and the valley of the same; Even from the mount Halak, that goeth up to Seir, even unto Baalgad in the valley of Lebanon under mount Hermon: and all their kings he took, and smote them, and slew them." (11:16-17) "There was not a city that made peace with the children of Israel." (11:19)
Chapter 12 details more killings. Thirty-one kings, as detailed in 12:9-24. In Chapter 13, God admits Joseph is getting on in age, but laments that there is still land left to conquer. He lists off several more tribes they need to genocide. They divide the land up among the tribes, but not everybody gets some. The Levites, for example, get no "inheritance." I don't like the use of that word, either. It implies it's their land at the expense of thousands of murders. It implies a divine imperial right to the land. Might makes right, but thou shalt not kill.
Chapter 14 introduces us to Caleb, who comes before Joseph to plead his case for an "inheritance," which Joseph grants him. It's not until 14:15 that "the land had rest from war."
Multiple references are made in these chapters to the "valley of the Giants" and some other commentary about descendants of the giants. Some nice fantasy elements.
In 15, Caleb puts a bounty out on the town of Kirjathsepher. Whoever takes the city can take his daughter for his wife. Women as chattel again. "Othniel the son of Kenaz, the brother of Caleb, took it: and he gave him Achsah his daughter to wife." The rest of the chapter is about fifty verses describing how the Israelites break up the land they've conquered. That continues through the middle of Chapter 17, at which point some folks get up the idea that they don't have quite enough land. Joshua, of course, tells them if they want more land they should just take it by force. Common theme here. Thou shalt not kill.
Joshua lets some others parcel out other parts of the land on their own, but won't let the Levites have anything. Borders are drawn up through the end of Chapter 19 when they finally "made an end of dividing the country." (19:51)
Previously, I believe in the back half of Exodus, God had described how Israelite cities should have exterior cities of "refuge" for people who have accidentally killed other people while they await trial. In Chapter 20, he reiterates a lot of these rules and provides some specifics on those cities and the laws surrounding accidental murder. The Israelites do this, appointing various cities to be cities of refuge.
The Levites finally get a little inheritance around Chapter 21, each other tribe giving portions of what they took. And finally, after years of constantly raiding civilizations, murdering scores of people, burning cities to the ground, "the LORD gave them rest round about, according to all that he sware unto their fathers: and there stood not a man of all their enemies before them; the LORD delivered all their enemies into their hand." (21:44)
But in Chapter 22, the tribes of Rueben, Gad, and Manasseh build an altar to the gods of the Canaanites, so of course the rest of the Israelites go to kill them all. This is the cult mentality of not allowing anyone to step out of line. If you're not with us, you're against us. And we'll kill you. But the offenders explain themselves, give a long reason why they built the altar, explain it's not against the God of Israel, etc. and they don't get killed after all.
Chapter 23 has Joseph growing old and nearing death. He blesses his tribe one last time, promising that God will "expel [enemies] from before you, and drive them from out of your sight; and ye shall possess their land, as the LORD your God hath promised unto you." (23:5) He commands the tribe to continue following the violent, bloody, disgusting path of their LORD. He admits to the tribes that he's dying, using what is actually a nice, poetic verse: "going the way of all the earth." (23:14)
Several verses in Chapter 24 beautify their campaign of genocides as Joseph extols his own virtues, couching said genocide in more pleasant terms, like how Joseph "gave [the Amorites] into your hand." He reiterates that they will not serve "the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood."
This is an interesting verse for two reasons. First, because it's another example of people acknowledging the existence of other gods. Judaism and Christianity do not appear to be the monotheistic religions they purport to be. They are actually polytheistic, choosing to worship only the one deity.
Second, there's a common theme among writings from this era, something you see in the Gilgamesh Epic as well - the treatment of "the flood" as an historical terminus. When you're nearly pre-historic and your systems of writing are not particularly permanent or long-lasting, it's hard for your people to maintain a long history. Stories about "the flood" speak to a people who are forced to live alongside rivers to survive in what is otherwise a desert. I'm sure the Tigris and Euphrates rivers would flood from time to time when unusual amounts of rainfall came, and I'm sure that caused a lot of destruction to crops and livestock which would have also had to be kept near the rivers. But it's also a convenient excuse as to why we don't have history written down. The real truth is that clay tablets don't tend to last long. It's a miracle (sue me) that any have survived, much less paper-bound scrolls. The flood serves as a reason for not having a long-standing history of the people.
Joshua dies in 24:29. His bones are buried in Shechem, which Joshua's descendants inherit. The last thing to happen in the Book of Joshua is that Eleazar, Aaron's son, dies. The end.
All in all, this book gets a few points for at least being more engaging in certain passages than previous books in the Bible. Certainly there are some of the boring listings of borders and parceling out of land and cattle and things, but none of the passages in Joshua are as bad as the second half of Exodus. It loses a lot of points for being a long, drawn-out justification for the rape and pillage of literally dozens of entire tribes of people. The notion of "thou shalt not kill" continues to be ignored for the fourth book in a row. Honestly, it's getting old. I'm tired of reading about people killing each other. I am told by Christians that the Bible is the only book I ever need to read, but this kind of thing makes it obvious that either these people haven't read the book I'm being assigned or that Christians conveniently ignore enormous swaths of their holy text to feel superior to others.
Next up is Judges, which I've never read, but which I have heard some pretty wild things about. We'll see...
Joshua sends two spies into the promised land, and they stay the night at the house of a harlot named Rahab, who hides them from the king's men when they come looking. Rahab agrees they have divine right to pillage her people. "I know that the LORD hath given you the land," she says in 2:8, justifying it with a summary of the Israelite war campaign and the violence and desolation left in their wake. For her help, they promise not to kill her family when they raid. They'll tell their men not to go after the people in her house, marked by a red ribbon, which is a step up from lamb's blood. The spies don't really learn anything, but report that "all the inhabitants of the country do faint because of us." (2:23)
A few days later, the heat on their necks having cleared up a bit, they hold service in the tabernacle of the covenant, praying that God destroy seven different tribes of people in their raid tomorrow. "Thou shalt not kill."
Come morning, they cross Jordan. The waters part for their entrance. The twelve tribes carry a large stone apiece across the river and there place them as a monument to the miraculous parting. "And they are there unto this day." (4:9)
I took a moment to do some Googling about that. I cannot find a single article about the stones that does not come from a blatantly religious source. There appears to be no evidence of a twelve stone monument still present along the Jordan River. A few Jewish/Israeli news outlets and Jewish cultural publications (Jerusalem Post and Haaretz for example) reported on the discovery of a large cave along the river of apparent archeological significance. These outlets want to call this Gilgal, the name the Bible gives the Israeli encampment where the monument was erected. I'd be more inclined to believe it if I could find a more scientific source of the information, or if there were any corroboration to the story of Jews escaping Egyptian slavery and wandering the desert subsisting on magic manna flakes for forty years. Those manna flakes dry up in 5:12, by the way, since the tribe has finally arrived.
A previous passage (that I can't find the reference to right now, sue me) had the Israelites promise not to circumcise people until they reached the promised land, and in Chapter 5, they've crossed the river, and it's time to take care of all that. So there's a "hill of the foreskins" where they use "sharp knives" to perform bronze age surgery on the penises of every person born in the wilderness. Just pause for a moment to imagine a hill of bloody foreskins with a line of dudes with pupices waiting their turn to add theirs to the pile.
So they besiege the city of Jericho and "utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword." (6:21) They do spare Rahab and her family and safely... kick them out of their own town. "And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD." (6:24)
At the beginning of Chapter 7, one person (named Achan, of the tribe of Judah) "took of the accursed thing". This is a reference to Jericho, but this is also the last bit of detail we get about what he took until 7:21 when Achan is making amends, where we discover it was "a goodly Babylonish garment, and two hundred shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold of fifty shekels weight." God is so mad about it that the next time Joshua sends a gang of thugs to overtake a town (Ai), God lets thirty-six of them die. Achan is then made to first repent, then remove all of his things from their encampment, and then "all Israel stoned him with stones". They burn all of his property and kill him. "Thou shalt not kill."
Murdering Achan appeases god, so he will now let the Israelites win a battle against the folks in Ai. They plan an ambush where it looks like they're going to lose, drawing the Ai - Ai-ians? Ai-ites? I'm not sure of the demonym - out of the city. Then they raid the unguarded city and "smote them, so that they let none of them remain or escape." They do capture the king of Ai, but end up killing twelve thousand men, keeping their cattle, and burning Ai to the ground. The king of Ai gets strung up from a tree.
This is a chapter I'm torn on. Its morality is as appalling as the rest of the Bible's, but it was also a pretty engaging and entertaining chapter. There's a military strategy planned and executed, and that's more than you can say for most of the rest of this thing.
Now all the other kings of tribes on this side of the River Jordan band together to try and make peace with Joshua and his men. They bring bread and wine to bribe them, and promise to bow down to the Israelite god. This is good enough for the Israelites to allow those tribes to begin to live among them. The message here is clear: be one of us, worship our god, and we won't murder you by the thousand and burn your cities down.
It is then decided that these new people should be slaves to the Israelites. Joseph labels them "cursed" into "being bondmen" and these other tribes are pretty ok with that, for some reason. They literally walk up and turn themselves into slaves. But there are some other kings who are mad that they've done so, and they mount up against the Israelites. Joseph takes up arms in return and leaves a trail of blood across several cities. God kills some folks himself by "cast[ing] down great stones from heaven upon them." And their people? Well, first, "more ... died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword." (10:11) Then Joseph casts a magic spell that causes the sun and moon to stand completely still so they can have some daylight while they kill everyone. (10:13) They chase the kings down into a cave and block them in for a while, eventually letting them out to George Floyd them to death. They bury the dead bodies in a cave and then destroy their cities. Thou shalt not kill.
The rest of Chapter 10 plays out with Joshua leading the tribes to destroy several other entire cities. Lachish. Gezer. Eglon. Hebron. Debir. "Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD God of Israel commanded." (10:40)
Chapter 11 is no different. "Joshua took all that land, the hills, and all the country, and all the land of Goshen, and the valley, and the plain, and the mountain of Israel, and the valley of the same; Even from the mount Halak, that goeth up to Seir, even unto Baalgad in the valley of Lebanon under mount Hermon: and all their kings he took, and smote them, and slew them." (11:16-17) "There was not a city that made peace with the children of Israel." (11:19)
Chapter 12 details more killings. Thirty-one kings, as detailed in 12:9-24. In Chapter 13, God admits Joseph is getting on in age, but laments that there is still land left to conquer. He lists off several more tribes they need to genocide. They divide the land up among the tribes, but not everybody gets some. The Levites, for example, get no "inheritance." I don't like the use of that word, either. It implies it's their land at the expense of thousands of murders. It implies a divine imperial right to the land. Might makes right, but thou shalt not kill.
Chapter 14 introduces us to Caleb, who comes before Joseph to plead his case for an "inheritance," which Joseph grants him. It's not until 14:15 that "the land had rest from war."
Multiple references are made in these chapters to the "valley of the Giants" and some other commentary about descendants of the giants. Some nice fantasy elements.
In 15, Caleb puts a bounty out on the town of Kirjathsepher. Whoever takes the city can take his daughter for his wife. Women as chattel again. "Othniel the son of Kenaz, the brother of Caleb, took it: and he gave him Achsah his daughter to wife." The rest of the chapter is about fifty verses describing how the Israelites break up the land they've conquered. That continues through the middle of Chapter 17, at which point some folks get up the idea that they don't have quite enough land. Joshua, of course, tells them if they want more land they should just take it by force. Common theme here. Thou shalt not kill.
Joshua lets some others parcel out other parts of the land on their own, but won't let the Levites have anything. Borders are drawn up through the end of Chapter 19 when they finally "made an end of dividing the country." (19:51)
Previously, I believe in the back half of Exodus, God had described how Israelite cities should have exterior cities of "refuge" for people who have accidentally killed other people while they await trial. In Chapter 20, he reiterates a lot of these rules and provides some specifics on those cities and the laws surrounding accidental murder. The Israelites do this, appointing various cities to be cities of refuge.
The Levites finally get a little inheritance around Chapter 21, each other tribe giving portions of what they took. And finally, after years of constantly raiding civilizations, murdering scores of people, burning cities to the ground, "the LORD gave them rest round about, according to all that he sware unto their fathers: and there stood not a man of all their enemies before them; the LORD delivered all their enemies into their hand." (21:44)
But in Chapter 22, the tribes of Rueben, Gad, and Manasseh build an altar to the gods of the Canaanites, so of course the rest of the Israelites go to kill them all. This is the cult mentality of not allowing anyone to step out of line. If you're not with us, you're against us. And we'll kill you. But the offenders explain themselves, give a long reason why they built the altar, explain it's not against the God of Israel, etc. and they don't get killed after all.
Chapter 23 has Joseph growing old and nearing death. He blesses his tribe one last time, promising that God will "expel [enemies] from before you, and drive them from out of your sight; and ye shall possess their land, as the LORD your God hath promised unto you." (23:5) He commands the tribe to continue following the violent, bloody, disgusting path of their LORD. He admits to the tribes that he's dying, using what is actually a nice, poetic verse: "going the way of all the earth." (23:14)
Several verses in Chapter 24 beautify their campaign of genocides as Joseph extols his own virtues, couching said genocide in more pleasant terms, like how Joseph "gave [the Amorites] into your hand." He reiterates that they will not serve "the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood."
This is an interesting verse for two reasons. First, because it's another example of people acknowledging the existence of other gods. Judaism and Christianity do not appear to be the monotheistic religions they purport to be. They are actually polytheistic, choosing to worship only the one deity.
Second, there's a common theme among writings from this era, something you see in the Gilgamesh Epic as well - the treatment of "the flood" as an historical terminus. When you're nearly pre-historic and your systems of writing are not particularly permanent or long-lasting, it's hard for your people to maintain a long history. Stories about "the flood" speak to a people who are forced to live alongside rivers to survive in what is otherwise a desert. I'm sure the Tigris and Euphrates rivers would flood from time to time when unusual amounts of rainfall came, and I'm sure that caused a lot of destruction to crops and livestock which would have also had to be kept near the rivers. But it's also a convenient excuse as to why we don't have history written down. The real truth is that clay tablets don't tend to last long. It's a miracle (sue me) that any have survived, much less paper-bound scrolls. The flood serves as a reason for not having a long-standing history of the people.
Joshua dies in 24:29. His bones are buried in Shechem, which Joshua's descendants inherit. The last thing to happen in the Book of Joshua is that Eleazar, Aaron's son, dies. The end.
All in all, this book gets a few points for at least being more engaging in certain passages than previous books in the Bible. Certainly there are some of the boring listings of borders and parceling out of land and cattle and things, but none of the passages in Joshua are as bad as the second half of Exodus. It loses a lot of points for being a long, drawn-out justification for the rape and pillage of literally dozens of entire tribes of people. The notion of "thou shalt not kill" continues to be ignored for the fourth book in a row. Honestly, it's getting old. I'm tired of reading about people killing each other. I am told by Christians that the Bible is the only book I ever need to read, but this kind of thing makes it obvious that either these people haven't read the book I'm being assigned or that Christians conveniently ignore enormous swaths of their holy text to feel superior to others.
Next up is Judges, which I've never read, but which I have heard some pretty wild things about. We'll see...