The Military Replaces the Priesthood: Final Reflections on Joshua

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Joshua is a book by, for and about ancient Jewism militarism. God is with the Israelites in battle - and if he is not, they will falter and fail. It follows that the army can again become the instrument of God - indeed the primary one, since battle is typically the most important masculine act in such a militarized society - and thus the priesthood itself, which I admit I once objected to, is isolated and marginalized not just from the people but from God. In its place are the generals.

This can be seen in Joshua not just by noting the newly central role of the soldier, but by asking where the priests have gone. With very few exceptions, they've virtually disappeared from the important active parts of the narrative, except where they're following the military around delivering blessings and battle prayers and what-not.

With the priesthood out of the way, the military is poised to become the central feature of Israelite society. I didn't the priesthood, but at least in my mind the military is a worse institution to place at the center and top of the social order. In a theocratic system, it makes the will of God discernible through battle - and therefore battle is necessary, since it permits God to show his will and his favour. One can't be a pacifist while worshipping a war god. Conveniently for the senior ranks of the military, it also means that eventually the generals are going to become kings. The priesthood couldn't really form the basis for a state, but the military can.

All of this, too, involves just my speculation about the implications of Joshua's stance. Even modern-day Christian militarists would generally have to admit, I think, that they don't have all that much interest in pursuing the kind of war that Israel pursues here. There's none of the contemporary bullshit about human security, humanitarian intervention, spreading democracy, etc., etc. This is about massacring foreigners, plain and simple. Again and again, the Israelites invade a nation and kill every human being - and sometimes every living animal as well. At one point, God tries to cap the power of the army by banning war profiteering by soldiers - but the moment that rule is violated, God appears to drop the restriction, even while he has the initial offender stoned. Where once the priesthood was both assisted by and could sometimes tame God's will, now, it seems, the army has supplanted them.

Strangely, this doesn't result in immediate lasting effects any more than the creation of the priesthood did before. As I recall from my last time in this part of the Bible, in the next book, Judges, the military doesn't hold together all that long either.
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Joshua Dies, and my Man's Bible Blows: Joshua 23-24

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

After a few years of peace, Joshua decides it's time for him to die. He assembles his people and delivers a speech. This is clearly an attempt to mimic what his mentor Moses did so many years before, though he's not nearly so skilled with words. The warnings are pretty familiar stuff: follow the laws and do not worship other gods, or else god will use the surrounding nations to punish and ultimately to destroy Israel.

Strangely, Joshua starts optimistically, noting that "until now" the Israelites have kept the commandments, and then, inexplicably he veers off into the cynicism of Numbers. An editorial shift, perhaps? In chapter 24, he finishes his speech and challenges the people to respond. They vow that they will serve God - and Joshua viciously responds that "you are not able to serve the Lord. He is a holy God; he is a jealous God. He will not forgive your rebellion and your sins." The people respond that they will indeed serve the Lord, so Joshua appears to grudgingly accept this promise.

Then, inexplicably, Joshua orders them to throw away all their gods and idols. What the hell? Why do they have these again already? The people are indeed foolish; idols just seem to fall into their hands by random chance.

After this, Joshua dies and is buried in Ephraim territory. Touchingly, at the same time the Israelites buy a field and bury the bones of Joseph, which apparently they have been carrying arould all these centuries without telling anyone.

My Man's Bible, stupidly, turns this into another opportunity to lecture today's men on the importance of marriage. They base this opportunity to reinforce the patriarchy on Joshua's final speech, which includes the famous phrase "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." Even before I was a feminist, this verse bothers me, since it's accepting Joshua's right to declare allegiance to divinity not just for himself but for others as well. Hidden somewhere below and beyond the social order I've been describing since Exodus are the vestiges of the patrimonial household.

Proving that some men haven't learned much at all, Mr. A. Dudley Dennison proclaims in the Man's Bible that as a man you are commander of the household but must temper your power. Among other things, including advice about sex, Dennision makes the truly idiotic claim that when talking about the "interests" of the household you should "always speak in the plural" to make your wife feel part of the decision. That's an interesting approach. A better one might be making decisions with him or her, not over them.
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The Reubenites Democratize Judaism: Joshua 22

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

The Israelite peace doesn't last long, even among themselves. Recall that a couple of thribes - the Reubenites, the Gadites, and some of the Manasseh - had decided not to come with the rest of Israel into the promised land, because they preferred the land they had already conquered over the land God was "giving" to them. Their armed divisions nevertheless went along for the Canaanite wars, but now that those are apparently over with for the time being, Joshua sends them home to their fields.

The three tribes immediately threaten the peace, apparently quite innocently, by constructing "an imposing altar" on the banks of the Jordan. The Israelites, naturally displaying very little faith in their brethren, immediately conclude that the tribes in question have turned to foreign gods and are breaking the Moses covenant, since they're seemingly planning on worshipping away from the central temple and the Ark of the Covenant. The response, to this society of warriors, is very simple: it's time to go to war and kill the offenders.

Fortunately, and to his credit, high priest Phinehas assembles a group of elders from the assembly and goes on a peace mission. He condemns the new altar and threatens divine punishment.

The accused respond that they still respect the God of Israel and did not intend to rebel in any way: the altar is an imitation model only, intended not for sacrifices but as a symbol to future generations of God's covenant. Phinehas is persuaded and actually blesses them for thinking of this.

This is a very interesting and revealing episode, even though it takes up very little space in Joshua. The Israelites have become so thoroughly militarized that the prospect a civil war with two and a half of their own tribes apparently arouses little real resistance.

On the other hand, and more significantly, the Reubenites and Gadites have taken an extremely significant step in diluting the power of the centralized priesthood and its control over access to the Lord. They have not created an alternative sight of worship, certainly, but they have created a replica which is certainly intended to fulfil at least a few of the functions of the central temple in terms of symbolizing the Israelites' relationship with their God. Over the last three books, God has become more and more closely linked to a singe physical space - the porta-temple and, more generally, the traveling camp of the Israelites. Now that the camp is beginning to disperse, the people devise a method to begin the process of de-linking the divine from a single space.

Strikingly, the idea for the temple replica doesn't come from God, or even from the priesthood - it comes from among the people. Independently, they take action intended to show and preserve their faith in God - a far cry from the incessant complaining and idol worship. And neither God nor the priesthood seem to mind on this occasion. I'm not sure whether this will come back later to haunt them, since I fully expect the Bible's pessimism about the people to return in full force at some point. For the time being, however, the people act of their own accord to cement their relationship with God, and the priesthood permits them to do it. It's a lot more uplifting than God's smiting of the Kohathite rebellion back in Numbers.

The fact that I consider this a positive incident might just show how desensitized I've become to the rigidly centralized, hierarchical religious order that has been established in Israel. After all, the temple replica is just that - a replica. Actual services, with actual sacrifices and actual blood-letting, will not be conducted there. And if it had been an effort to worship God in the full pattern of the ancient Israelites, apparently the rest of the nation were prepared to go to war and massacre their own brothers and sisters. Back in Genesis, violence among brothers was one of the signs that the patrimonial family-based social order was failing - or had always been a failure, since both the first (Cain and Abel) and the last (Joseph and his brothers) families described in Genesis are fractured by murder plots. Now, the Israelites are apparently perilously close to the same fate. Still, the Israelites resolve the dispute peacefully, and in doing so affirm the right of people outside the priesthood to choose some of the elements of their relationship with the divine. Such incidents are rare thus far in the history of Israel.
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Snore...: Joshua 13-21

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

It's time for another exciting series of real estate deeds! This is the Domesday Book, Ancient World edition. Joshua is getting old and God says there's still lots of conquering and killing to be done. In the meantime, he begins parceling out the lands of Israel. This goes on for several chapters. Along the way, Caleb shows up again all of a sudden, reminding Joshua of the time fifty years ago when the two of them infiltrated Canaan. Joshua rewards Caleb with some extra territory. The allotments are as detailed and exciting as any contemporary legislation and, like that legislation, carefully take account of each amendment; the daughters of Zelophehad earn another line and a half to receive the land given to them by special ruling of Moses.
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Militarism, Continued: Joshua 10:29 - 12

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Joshua's author has got so excited with the military exploits of his idol, general Joshua, that he forgets to include details for the next few massacres. There's a long list of conquered cities and kings - Libnah, Lachish, Eglon, Hebron, Debir, Hazor, and so on. Each time, the Bible writes a sentence about the battle, in which every soldier, civilian and lord is invariably "put to the sword"; and then solemnly pronounces that "everyone... they totally destroyed. They left no survivors."

The northern kings attempt briefly to form the same sort of alliance created by the treaty of Jerusalem, but it doesn't last long either. They actually manage to mobilize a considerable army, complete with heavy cavalry and chariots. The Bible hyerbolically claims that the army of the northern kings was "as numerous as the sand on the seashore." Joshua pulls off another successful surprise attack, this time without major assistance from the divine. Hazor's king is captured and executed, though not in the same gruesome detail as those of the last chapter.

The anti-profiteering law also has not been reinstated: the Israelite army continues to plunder, though now it has returned to "killing anything that breathes." Thus the militarist strain which was apparent early in Joshua is clearly starting to win out over the few remaining restraints. God began this book as a god of many things, including war; now he's practically a war god.

Clearly no longer concerned about God, except insofar as victory is taken to be a sign of the war god's pleasure, Joshua follows up with an extremely long list of kings - 31 in total, it reminds us at the end - which have been captured and executed, along with all of their people, by the increasingly blood-drenched army of Israel.
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Joshua Executes Prisoners of War: Joshua 10:1-28

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

With Gibeon out of the way, it's time for Israel to take on the Alliance of Five Nations (I've borrowed the term from the Iroquois Confederacy, which incidentally was also blown apart by religious foreigners). The alliance was hinted at in the previous chapter but now we learn that it was created by king Adoni-Zedek of Jerusalem (his name means Justice is my master, but in this case that isn't enough to redeem him from the high crime of being pagan). He makes treaties with the nations of Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish and Eglon, and considers attacking Gibeon first, since they spurned the opportunity to be part of the alliance.

In what might be an honorable move, Joshua marches his army back into Gibeonite territory to defend them from the five kings, which according to the Bible are Amorites. (I thought we'd killed them all back in Numbers, but my memory is clearly playing tricks on me.) He pulls an unexpected all-night march and - like the military genius he's regularly portrayed to be - catches the Amorite forces completely off guard.

In a somewhat dubious move, God decides that the battle looks like fun and gets involved himself. All of a sudden, he starts hurling "huge hailstones" which crush the Amorites. God's surprise storm, according to Joshua, kills more people than the entire Israelite army. Then, because there are still some Amorites left alive, God pulls another miracle out of his hat: he makes the sun "stand still" so that the Israelites have a few extra hours of daylight in which to finish massacring the Amorites. For this information, the book of Joshua actually cites its sources: a non-canonical source called the Book of Jashar. It's interesting and rare in the Bible. The writer of Joshua is supremely, arrogantly proud of God's miracles on this day, announcing that "surely the Lord was fighting for Israel!"

What follows, however, is even more dubious. The five kings of the unified alliance had fled the field and were hiding in a cave system. Since there are still some fleeing Amorites left to murder, Joshua orders the entrances to the caves barricaded until he had time to deal with the surviviors.

Once only some fortified cities - necessitating long sieges - remain, Joshua's forces return to the caves, and here is where the details get truly grisly. Joshua orders the kings brought out to the assembly of the Israelites then instructs his men to put their feet on the necks of the five kings. While the kings are thus pinned, he utters the absurd admonition that his Israelites should not be fearful or discouraged in battle. Then, he executed them all, and strung the corpses up in trees. Eventually the bodies were pulled down and thrown back into the caves. The cheerful, celebratory tone of Joshua's militaristic author as he recounts this barbaric event is truly disturbing.

I didn't like Numbers because it was pessimistic and sided with the priesthood, but at least in that story, Moses seemed a little uncomfortable at the extent of the slaughter. Here, the writers - and Joshua - are positively joyful.
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Israel Blows their Chance to Exterminate Gibeon: Joshua 9

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Israel's vicious and sudden aggression has prompted other kings in the region to consider an alliance against them. One nation, Gibeon, decides to spurn this alliance, reasoning that the Israelites and their magic god are much too powerful to oppose even in unity. They decide upon an alternative strategy, diplomacy.

Of course, diplomacy is difficult when your enemy has decided it must massacre you down to the last child, so some deception is in order. The Gibeonites send an envoy to Joshua and somehow manage to fool him into thinking that their nation is far away and not part of the lands Israel claims as its inheritance. Joshua and his aides clearly goof here; they're repeatedly sending spies out but somehow they missed an entire country! At any rate, Joshua agreeably signs a peace treaty with the Gibeonites.

Joshua learns of the deception only a few days later and the army marches to challenge several nearby Gibeonite cities. The rank and file is ready to attack, but Joshua and the elders hold them back, noting that they cannot simply break their treaty oath. However, they find what must be seen as a dubious technicality: the treaty never said in what condition the Gibeonites must live, just that it is a peaceful one; therefore the Gibeonites are to be reduced into slavery forever as "woodcutters and water carriers." Basically, they turn Gibeon into Canada (the description of the Canadian resource economy as "hewers of wood and drawers of water" is now so old and well-established that my considerable skill with Google couldn't identify who first drew the link).

I heard a pastor speak on the subject of the Gibeonites a few years ago and he drew the fairly standard evangelical conclusion that the Gibeonites were wicked and deceitful, and made Israel wicked by duping them (because they were supposed to kill the Gibeonites, according to God's standing rules of war). Thus the Gibeonites are a human serpent, tempting the righteous into sin. Perhaps, my pastor speculated, the Gibeonites might have essentially "converted" to the law of Moses and lived as free aliens among the Israelites by doing so. Perhaps Joshua ought to have sought God's advice before making a foolish oath - a good idea in principle though it's difficult for me, if demonstrably not for the pastor in question, to feel any regret that Joshua has muffed his chance to commit mass murder.

Joshua himself is unhappy too, and falls prey to the same strange disinterest or blindness about other cultures' interpretations of the Israelites that too many are today. He summons the Gibeonite envoys to return and asks them, sounding wounded, why they would have deceived the Israelites. He proclaims a "curse" in response: the Gibeonites will become servants. He displays a truly stunning lack of empathy, or even of any intelligent perception at all, in his questioning.

The Gibeonites seem surprised to have to justify their actions too, but explain that the choice seemed obvious to them: they could fight the Israelites and be slaughtered, or they could negotiate and live. Since that choice still applies, they quickly accept their future as servants.

It would be nice to say that this was an unusual case of the Israelites showing some mercy to their enemies, or some such, and therefore use the Gibeonite story to distract from the general carnage and bloodbaths of Joshua. On the other hand, the implications are in many ways no less disturbing than they would have been had the Israelites simply killed the Gibeonites. First, the Gibeonites aren't being given any favours here. The Israelites do everything in their power to oppress and subjugate the Gibeonites without completely breaking their word and attacking them outright. Even if the choice between death by the sword and eternal slavery was a fair and just one, it was not a choice offered to the Gibeonites; it was one they had to steal by guile.

Second, the story of the Gibeonites could easily be used to argue against compromise or tolerance. Make no treaty with the infidel, the subtext practically screams. If you do, you won't be able to defeat them properly later! The Israelites clearly aren't holding back out of mercy or reluctance to kill, but merely because if they slaughtered the Gibeonites they'd be breaking a vow. That is the sin, not the killing; and vow-breaking is a sin against God, not a sin against man. Therefore just strike down your opponents outright; do not negotiate and do not compromise. Church denominations have been following these rules in dealing with each other for centuries.
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War-Profiteering Returns After All, as Does Executing Prisoners: Joshua 8

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

"Real kings do not kill one another." - Salah al-Din


Joshua is good military fiction, the Tom Clancy novel of its day. We get detailed stories of espionage, battle tactics from the master himself (Joshua, the Hebrew Sūn Zǐ), a gripping court-martial, etc. Now we get a fantastic story about war, followed by one of the most questionable murder-executions yet.

With Achan stoned, it's time to take revenge for the few dozen Israelites who died in the last assault. This time, Joshua isn't playing around; he sends a force of thirty thousand to do what three thousand couldn't. Even without God's assistance, you'd think this would be sufficient. And it is, thanks in part to a trap laid by Joshua, which leaves the city temporarily undefended. While the men of Ai are out chasing Joshua, a second force sets the city alight. The Ai-men are then captured in a pincer maneuver and saughtered to a man, "leaving them neither survivors nor fugitives" (apparently there's a distinction). Then Joshua orders the city thoroughly demolished.

It's worth noting that, at least for the time being, God seems to have abandoned his notion of preventing war profiteering - not to mention his laws about slaughtering all life forms. On the way to Ai, God tells Joshua that he's decided the soldiers can take as much "plunder and livestock" from Ai as they can manage to "carry off." We've moved back to the Moab plan, with war as an excellent income opportunity for the army.

The battle is followed by the dubious execution of the king of Ai, who to his misfortune was captured alive during the battle. He's brought to Joshua, which is more due process than any of his men got, but Joshua has no mercy. He orders the king hung on a tree, then has the corpse thrown to the ground beneath the ruined city gates before the Israelites take their leave.
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War Profiteering Outlawed, and Early Jewish Militarism: Joshua 7

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Joshua's prohibition against war profiteering doesn't last long. One of the Judeans, Achan of Carmi, took some of the relics from Jericho. He took a sum that was a little more than piddling, though not immense - a few pounds of gold and silver, and a fancy Babylonian cloak. Unfortunately for Achan, God performed a pre-emptive audit on the loot, and knows something's missing from his treasury.

God makes his displeasure with Israel apparent through defeat on the battlefield: a small force of several thousand men goes to slaughter the people of Ai and are defeated by a small defence force. Joshua, like the average Israelite spoken of in Numbers, immediately concludes that God has betrayed them and that they should never have followed him across the Jordan river. (This despite the fact that the grand defeat in question saw the death of only 36 Israelites out of 3000, a pretty meager sum in any real battle.) The Lord seems almost disgusted by Joshua's whinging, telling him to get up off the ground and go back to work. He promises to reveal the sinner the next day.

God's method for finding the wrong-doer is long and probably nerve-wracking. The Israelite tribes are brought into assembly by Joshua and they choose one from their number - the method isn't clear but it's probably one of their usual divination methods, like drawing lots or using the Urim and Thummim. Whatever the method, apparent random chance - i.e. the hidden hand of God, who guides nations and D&D games alike - selects Judah, then the Zerahite tribe, then the Zimri family, and finally Achan's family from out of the Zimlis. Joshua demands an instant confession, and gets one. After they confirm that Achan did indeed steal what he said he did, Joshua orders the man's family and livestock brougth together and executed.

Remember when Moses said in Deuteronomy that God didn't want sons executed for the sins of the father? (Or daughters, presumably?) Guess Moses was wrong, because Achan's entire family is killed by stoning.

Beyond the context of this particular battle and the failure of the anti-war-profiteering system, Joshua is moving us to a new way of looking at God. In Exodus, Numbers, and Leviticus, God interacts with the people through the priesthood, and when he is angry, he punishes them directly, through plagues, snakes, fires, earthquakes, and the like. Now, we are expected to see God in the success and failure of military operations. It's a hint that the priesthood-centered social order is moving towards a state- and military-centered one, under cover of divinely willed conquest.

Maybe this was to be expected, but it also implies a further separation from God. God may speak to military commanders, but now, it seems, he need not speak even to priests if necessary. Obviously a priesthood can be fraudulent, too, but the Joshua approach leads at best to mere fatalism about military affairs, and at worst to an ideology which cloaks the success of the martial king in the language of divine blessing - in other words, we are spinning from theocracy into militarism. I didn't really like the first, but I doubt I will like the second either. Now the Israelites are to relate to God through battle and the slaughter of humans rather than animals? This is not an improvement. It seems like a useful pretext for making the military government structure permanent, i.e. by establishing a king or something similar - which is precisely what God tried to avoid in Numbers, and which Moses regarded as an unfortunate, sinful inevitability in Deuteronomy.
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The Massacre of Jericho: Joshua 5:13 - 6

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Ever remember singing the hymn about Joshua and the battle of Jericho? This is where it all happens. In retrospect, that's kind of a dubious hymn, really. How many songs of praise do we have that commemorate the bloody slaughter of the entire population of a large city? To make a comparison: nowadays we get excited when a couple of buildings get blown up by foreigners who claim they're acting in the name of God. Once upon a time, the Israelites were those foreigners - only they didn't stop with some skyscrapers.

In advance of the battle, Joshua is out for a walk and meets a strange man with a sword. He challenges the stranger, who says he is neither with nor against the Israelites, then identifies himself as an angel of God. This is an interesting statement. Are the angels not on the side of Israel?

God proposes a bizarre scheme for sacking Jericho, which brings us to the second reason why the Joshua battle hymn is stupid: Joshua doesn't do any glorious fighting, he just rushes inside in God's wake and starts murdering people. God demands that the Israelites march around the city in silence, once a day for six days; and then seven times on the seventh. After this they should make as much sound as they can, at which point the walls will collapse. Either God is attempting to invent an early acoustic weapon, or he's attempting to prove to the Israelites that he can fight their battles a lot more effectively than they can.

As promised, the walls collapse, and Joshua orders the stunned city taken. He orders Rahab to be protected - eventually she's permitted to come and live with the Israelites - but to kill everyone else. The Bible uses some very strange language to describe what happens next: "they devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it." I guess God isn't a big fan of human life anyways, at least within his "devoted" places, but then, given the amount of blood that's been spilled around the porta-temple since Exodus, probably this comes as no surprise to most readers.

When the Midianites were murdered way back in Numbers, the military and its soldiers profited immensely; only a reduced tithe was given to the priesthood. This time Joshua decides to completely reverse that balance: absolutely none of the "devoted things" of Jericho - gold, silver, bronze, iron - may be pocketed by fighters. Instead, everything must go to "the Lord's treasury" - in other words, to the priesthood.

There's an interesting shift taking place here, and it's not solely about demonstrating selfless devotion to God (though that appears to be part of it as well). The war may be genocidal, but God has ensured that none of those doing the actual fighting and pillaging stand to profit from the venture - unlike in Numbers, where the fighters took immense treasure while the priesthood looked on from a distance. Assuming this trend continues, it seems like an attempt to curb the power of the military-industrial complex. Today we debate whether oil, gas, or various other nefarious economic motives are behind America's military adventures. When God created Israel (at least according to Joshua), he deliberately made it impossible for the nation to profit from war. Except for the priesthood, of course, but they don't have control over the military: at least for the time being, general Joshua does.

It will probably come as no surprise that many of the elitist and usually pro-war contemporary formulations of Christian just war theory make no reference to Joshua's restriction here, though you'd think it would make wars much less likely.
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Killing Time with Rituals and Magic: Joshua 3 - 5:12

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

The Israelites are ready to begin the invasion, so the author of Joshua takes us through a number of events clearly intended to symbolize Israel's history prior to that long-awaited moment. Following exceptionally detailed instructions from God, the Israelites re-enact the crossing of the Red Sea, this time at the Jordan river, where the priests carry the magic Ark of the Covenant into the water and by doing so make all the waters pile up before them, creating dry land. The Israelites "hurry across."

This verse accidentally gives us another opportunity to estimate Israelite military strength. According to Joshua, the Manasseh, Reuben, and Gad settlers who won't be coming with the rest of the Israelites into the promised land send their full military divisions, totalling 40 000 men-at-arms. Assuming this is representative of Israelite arming trends generally, we can assume they have an army of a little over 200 000 men, organized in 12 divisions. With good tactics and training, this should easily make them superior in any full engagement. Major powers of the time, like Egypt, could raise larger armies through conscription, but would never have moved them all in one formation the way the Israelites seem to do routinely. Keep that in mind when the Israelites require divine aid at every turn - maybe they do, but if the numbers were given are historically accurate, they really ought to be pretty capable of fighting for themselves.

Anyway, the Israelites finish crossing the Jordan and the priests carry the ark out of the riverbed. When they do, the magic dam breaks and the river resumes its normal course.

Afterwards, the Israelites decide to re-establish circumcision. Actually it seems to be God's idea; he tells Joshua they will need a large number of flint knives for the task. According to Joshua, none of the people born in the desert had been circumcised. I wonder why not. What nullified the Abrahamic covenant? Helpfully, the Bible says that "they were uncircumcised beacuse they had not been circumcised." Presumably there's something we're losing in the translation, because that's not a very helpful explanation. Anyways, it's very convenient for the narrative, because after the men have recovered, God says their circumcision has "rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you" and returned Israel to a proper state with God. The Israelites name their camp Gibeath Haaraloth, which sounds a lot cooler when you don't check out the footnote to see that this means "Hill of Foreskins."

Finally, the Israelites celebrate Passover. For the first time, they eat bread and grain taken from conquered land. The next day, they get up to find that God will no longer be sending any manna. Now they will eat real food again, which must come as a relief to those who were tired of eating manna.
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All's Fair in Prostitution and War: Joshua 1-2

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Another day, another book. We've left the Pentateuch or Torah now, and passed into what the Jews call the Nevi'im. According ot my always-helpful NIV edition, as we read Joshua we should "make your own choice to serve the Lord, to do his will, and to depend on him to give you victory over the evil one." Sounds like a nice idea, though you'll have to remember to interpret carefully, since this lesson is being drawn from God's assistance to the Israelites in repetated genocidal massacres. Much the same is true of the daily devotionals, the first of which draws, from God's orders to the Israelites to prepare for battle, the need to pray with one another for God's guidance in our lives - most of which don't involve the mass murder of Gentiles, though I suppose killing pagans and getting money to pay the bills are more or less equivalent activities.

God anoints Joshua to be Moses's replacement as general of the army and orders preparations for the upcoming invasion. Joshua apparently gains the respect and consent of the governed tribes with little difficulty; they promise to execute post-haste anyone who rebels or disobeys his orders. Joshua's first action is to mimic what Moses did years before: he sends spies into the land. Only two, however - perhaps in memory of the fact that only two of the original spies came back and told the truth way back in Numbers. The spies go to Jericho and enact the famous story of meeting Rahab the prostitute, who is promised immunity from murder in exchange for assisting the Israelites. If you are a militarist rather than a pacifist, you'll probably like this kind of story, because it suggests that deception and treason are honourable behaviour if it's for a good cause (Rahab does both on behalf of her spies).

On the one hand, Joshua provides a somewhat more gripping narrative once again, which is kind of nice after pages and pages of dry regulations and ordinances. On the other, it rapidly becomes clear how difficult those regulations would be to apply in practice. Should Rahab be celebrated for her treason to her hometown of Jericho? Is merely aiding Israelite spies - which she certainly does - enough to somehow gain her magic immunity to God's original order that she and all of her people be massacred?

The opportunity of coming across yet another prostitute in the narrative has prompted me to reflect on why there are so many. Is it just another manifestation of the Bible's contempt for women? I doubt it. The Levitican laws pretty much removed women from any of the major political and social relations which the Bible is most interested in recording, now that we've moved on from the patrimonial household affairs of Genesis. The only women who remain in the open are the prostitutes, so we hear about them a lot. And the fact that we only hear about them reinforces the Bible's apparent misogyny. Women can be invisible, or they can be prostitutes; pick one. The last woman who had any influence was Miriam, and God smited her for a sin he was happy to ignore when simultaneously committed by Aaron. There are severe and divinely authorized consequences for women stepping into places of influence. Or so goes the story, anyways.

There's another way to twist this, however. I've always heard Rahab described as a prostitute, which is convenient for two reasons - the gendered prejudices that too much of the church continues to embrace, and the fact that starting from a long ways back makes your "salvation" all the more striking. This, incidentally, is why churches prefer to have striking, dramatic testimonies from people who've beaten drug addictions, left a life of crime (providing they've served time in jail), etc.

It wouldn't be nearly as dramatic if we accepted the footnote alternative, which is that Rahab was an innkeeper, not a prostitute. I don't pretend to know which is true, but logically there's more than a prostitute; she must be a madam at least (there's another disturbingly gendered term). She owns a house - a large, multi-storey house built up against the city wall. Evidently she's affluent.

The Israelite spies come to Rahab for information. This doesn't really offer much either way, though if she truly is a prostitute, one has to wonder what their intentions were in going to her in the first place. Rahab offers some interesting claims: she suggests that she and possibly most others in Jericho has realized that the Israelite God is supreme because of his previous mighty deeds and his nation's wartime excesses. Therefore they are fearful and their courage has failed. The Israelites spend the night and then head back with this important bit of intelligence.

The king of Jericho is particularly brilliant in this story. To add a bit of drama to the story, the writer of Joshua claims that the king inexplicably knew in advance that Israelite spies were in the area, and knew precisely where they are, as well. He sent the police to Rahab's house to arrest the spies. Fortunately, Rahab bears false witness and says that the men have already left, and the police go away without conducting a thorough search.
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