Learning From the Past

Joshua 1–12

Claim Your Story

"Welcome to Lake Woebegone, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." These familiar words by Garrison Keillor in his weekly radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, bring a smile—and maybe a chuckle—to his fans. In these words, we recognize our own penchant for romanticism and mythmaking when we reminiscence about family, community, and nation.

Our parents and grandparents hand down family stories of triumph during tough times—how we got through the Depression, how we participated in the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, how we managed when your dad lost his job. We tend to suppress the character flaws and missteps of those involved, although those flaws and missteps are integral to our identities. As a nation, we hand down stories of the first Thanksgiving with the Native Americans but suppress how the colonists later mistreated them. Nevertheless, that part of the story is as integral to our nation's identity as Thanksgiving itself.

Such accounts, while incomplete, give meaning to our past, help us to make sense of the present, and encourage hope for the future. They emerge from the way we string together certain events from our collective history to support our interpretation. For those of us who claim faith in God, how we do this reveals how we understand who God is and how God travels with us throughout life.

The Book of Joshua, written right before the Babylonians conquered the city and took the Jews into exile, reveals how the Israelites were interpreting their history with God. Joshua is a book about faith seeking understanding in the midst of impending doom—a spiritual discernment notebook written by the community. It is a collective reflection, but more than one voice is heard. Thus, Joshua doesn't conform to a set of comfortable faith lessons for today.

Speaking with more than one voice, the book invites us to see our lives in its reflection. It pushes us to consider what events and persons we exalt and/or suppress and for what purposes. How do we interpret how God has traveled with us?

Like Garrison Keillor's words about Lake Woebegone, the Book of Joshua helps us recognize our own mythmaking about our lives and faith in order to wring from it the truths that lie somewhere within—the truths that point us to God.

Enter the Bible Story

Introduction

The Book of Joshua was written a long time after the events it records. It's a faith document written for later Israelites who either were already in exile in Babylonia or were facing impending exile. They were trying to make sense of their present by looking back for something that could give them purpose, identity, meaning, and hope. Joshua tries to answer the questions, What did we do wrong? How can we be restored to fullness?

Joshua's text is not uniform but rather brings together various writings (stories, lists, exhortations, and so forth) that served different purposes and derived from diverse theological perspectives. While one overall narrator acts as the editor, the book has several storytellers with different perspectives of who God is and what God is doing.

Since the Israelites have lost their geographical identity and are living as strangers in another culture, the narrator reminds them of when God gave them the now-lost Promised Land. To discover where God is in their difficulties and why this is happening to them, the narrator recounts how their ancestors came to the land.

The different stories complicate the message of hope found in God's faithfulness to Israel. Counter stories interrupt the flow of divine conquest tales and challenge the traditional view of God's exclusivity to Israel and God's demand for ethnic purity as a pathway to a relationship with the Divine. Looking back to their glory days prompts the exile generation to consider their ongoing and ambivalent relationship with non-Israelites and ask, What type of allegiance and obedience does God truly desire? Is land and prosperity the reward of faithfulness? Is God accessible only to Jewish males, or does the Divine transcend these categories to have a covenantal relationship with women and non-Israelites as well? Was disposing of women and cattle truly what Yahweh desired?

These questions suggest that the Israelites were always a people of cultural and ethnic pluralism whose God blessed the faithfulness of both Israelites and non-Israelite men and women.

Joshua, Servant of God

Joshua, the main protagonist of this book, is unwavering in his fidelity to God, which was demonstrated in military excursions into the Promised Land. He obeys God's instructions even when they seem counterintuitive.

Moses changed Joshua's name from Hoshea, meaning "salvation," to Joshua, meaning "Yahweh is salvation" (Numbers 13:16). Hoshea alone cannot render salvation to the Israelites. However, as Joshua, he becomes Moses' successor in implementing Yahweh's salvation.

Like Moses, Joshua leads the Israelites to safely cross a river—this time the Jordan River—as God holds the waters at bay (Joshua 3). He sends out spies prior to taking the land (Chapter 2). He leads the Israelites to celebrate the Passover and renew their covenant with God (5:10-12). He comes face-to-face with a divine messenger who demands that he remove his sandals on holy ground. This vision prior to the fall of Jericho reinforces that God, not Joshua, is the one who saves Israel (5:13-15). "Yahweh is salvation" is the clear message of hope to remind the exile generation that God will not abandon them during the difficulty of captivity and landlessness.

Faithful Obedience Leads to Identity and Land

Salvation in the Book of Joshua is linked to obedience that is rewarded by the possession of land. In Chapter 1, God tells Joshua to be courageous, strong, and obedient as a sign of trust that God will give the land to Israel. The narrator puts forth what scholars call Deuteronomistic theology to make sense of the Israelites' life in exile. This theology holds that the Israelites' disobedience to God's law caused their defeat by the Babylonians. Therefore, the Book of Joshua reminds the Israelites of the time when they were faithful to God and when God was defeating their enemies and handing over land rights.

This theology prioritizes God's covenant to men such as Moses, Joshua, and the tribal leaders and seeks to demonstrate God's power and might. It is preoccupied with solidifying the identity of the Israelites in opposition to their neighbors by prohibiting intermarriages and cultural exchanges.

Therefore, the book condenses hundreds of years of settlement in Canaan into a brief timespan and offers a story of hope. It presses the importance of repentance and obedience by highlighting stories of harsh punishment for those who disobey God and reinforcing the importance of covenant renewal with God.

The dominant voice is that of the Deuteronomistic theologian, but counter voices reveal that the Israelites in exile did not find a simple faith formula sufficient for their complex reality. That reality included mixed-race kinships dating back to Abraham, Hagar, and Ishmael and Joseph and his half-Egyptian children.

The Taking of Jericho (Joshua 2–6)

The first counter story concerns the protection of Joshua's men on a reconnaissance mission to Jericho. The spies go to Rahab's house at the wall of Jericho, where the Common English Bible says they "bedded down" (2:1). The original Hebrew word has strong sexual overtones. The "spies are not above mixing business with pleasure" and meet Rahab, a prostitute (notwithstanding the narrator's theology that forbids intermingling with foreigners or prostitutes). The Deuteronomistic theology is confronted with the fact that Rahab, a Canaanite, has been overwhelmed by God's acts and comes to believe in God's power. Therefore, she not only protects the spies from Jericho's king but also faces the king's men alone, misdirecting them to buy time for the spies' escape. Before the spies depart, she declares, "The LORD your God is God in heaven above and on earth below" (2:11). She also extracts a promise from them to keep her and her family safe. The spies instruct her to put a red scarf in her window so that her home will be passed over during the battle. The red scarf is reminiscent of the lamb's blood on the doorways of those in Egypt during the first Passover (Exodus 12:13). The greatest outsider—a foreigner, woman, and prostitute—and her family profess belief in God and are accepted into the Israelite community.

This story challenges the dominant theology that God has insiders and outsiders. It embraces the Deuteronomistic theology that faithfulness to God leads to identity and blessing. It hints that the identity God seeks is not ethnic or racial but rather one of fidelity to right relationship with God and one another.

The spies' confirmation to Joshua that Jericho is ready to be taken launches a series of divine acts that reinforce that God is keeping faith with the Israelites. God directs Joshua how to use the ark of the covenant to keep the Jordan River at bay and allow the people to cross unharmed. God then directs Joshua to have the Israelites memorialize God's faithfulness and this miracle with a pile of stones. This is followed with the miraculous fall of the Wall of Jericho and the destruction of its inhabitants (except Rahab and her family). Each event is punctuated with symbols from Israel's faith. The ark of the covenant is God's presence among them. Seven is a sacred number for ancient Hebrews and means "completion." The world was created in seven days and the Walls of Jericho came down in seven days. The Book of Joshua is saying, "Remember the mighty acts of God and remember your faithful obedience."

Israel Defeated at Ai (Joshua 7)

Obedience to God is rewarded, but how about disobedience? In the story of Achan, the unequivocal answer is that disobedience leads to death. God instructed the Israelites to not keep any spoils of their pillage of Jericho. Thus, when Achan keeps some of the goods, God's wrath is poured out. Joshua understands that Achan's individual act has jeopardized the entire people. Achan's confession and punishment, therefore, absolves Israel. God demands that his entire clan share Achan's punishment, and they are all stoned to death. The narrator is asserting that the reason for Israel's exile is its disobedience to God.

There is another way to read the story of Achan. This is the second counter voice to the Deuteronomistic theology. Danna Fewell, an Old Testament scholar, notes, "[Achan] is the direct opposite of Rahab. Whereas Rahab, a Canaanite woman, saves her whole family, Achan, an Israelite man, is instrumental in destroying his." Faithfulness to God in Rahab's case is not tied to culture or ethnicity. Rather, Rahab's faithfulness is wedded to reverence for God.

God Protects the Gibeonites (Joshua 9)

Another counter story concerns Gibeonites who use trickery to obtain a promise of protection from Joshua and the tribal leaders. The Gibeonites hid their identity as Canaanites by pretending to be bedraggled nomads from afar who stumbled upon the military conflict. They sought protection and offered themselves as servants in exchange.

God indirectly sanctions the Gibeonites' decision to live among the Israelites through the oath Joshua swore on God's name. Even after discovering the deception, Joshua could not disavow the Gibeonites because doing so would be to disrespect God. Thus, Joshua protected the Gibeonites by making them servants to the Israelites. This story explains how it is that the Gibeonites came to live among the Israelites as servants well into the time when the Joshua narrative was written.

The Final Miracle (Joshua 10–11)

The miracle of when the "sun stood still" (10:13) tells of Joshua's military cunning that strategically leads Canaanite forces into the blinding sun as God sends lethal hailstones upon them. While God's might stands far above the power of the Canaanite gods, the fact that Joshua, not God, is the one to command the sun to stand still, underscores his divine anointment to take the land.

This colorful story of a miracle backing up military plans is followed in Chapter 11 by a recap of the conquest of the rest of the territory and the assassination of the remaining Canaanite kings. Chapter 11 ends with the statement, "So Joshua took the whole land, exactly as the LORD had promised Moses. Joshua gave it as a legacy to Israel according to their tribal shares. Then the land had a rest from war" (verse 23). The glory-days story of how God kept the promise of land and prosperity to an obedient Israel comes to an end.

Live the Story

We can identify with the desire and hope for a do-over when we make a mess of things. The Book of Joshua points to God's boundless love for the Israelites, and through them, to us. With the retelling of history, God gives the Israelites an opportunity for a do-over.

Second chances are opportunities to understand who God is and to see ourselves with new eyes. This opportunity, however, requires courage to look at uncomfortable truths and to turn away (repent) from the wrongs they show us. Only then can we experience transformation. Unfortunately, our human, sinful tendency is to gloss over, or worse, rewrite the uncomfortable truths and create rigid, exclusionary rules of order. Instead, we should strive to release ourselves into God's redemptive love to transform our mistakes and misjudgments.

In Joshua, we see how the Israelites fell into this same tendency toward rigidity and away from God's redemptive and liberating love. It retells the Israelites' history with a strong dose of judgment against their feeble faith in God and against anyone who didn't live under prescribed faith rules. The dominant voice wants to remember Israel's history of possessing the land by covering up their historical relationships with the Canaanites. Yet, by the grace of God, the counter-voice stories that disrupt this dominant-voice tendency manage to live within it and survive across centuries. They allow us to consider the questions, Is God's faithfulness for an exclusive group? How does God reveal God's self to humanity? Can those who do not know any teachings of God experience God?

We continue to ponder these important questions as we walk by faith with God. Yet, one thing that the Israelites settled for us is this: the greatness of their God is found in the power of God's love for all, and God's love and presence are not bounded by culture or land.

Similar to the dominant narrator's tendency to overlook certain aspects of Israel's history in Joshua, we are tempted to look away from our flaws and personal history and choose to hide the shame of abuse or violence in families or communities. Second chances and do-overs from broken relationships with others, from addictions, from immaturity, and from institutional abuses offer us the opportunity to find God's redeeming work within the difficulties, as well as clarity of mind to let go of hurtful patterns. (For example, collectively, we have uncovered the violence done to African Americans and Native Americans, which has resulted in healing for some.) If we choose to gloss over these flaws and abuses, we keep ourselves bound to the power of the violence. The moment when we expose them is when we are able to redirect our lives and gain a new vision of what God intends for us.

Will we take God's gift of a second chance to unclench our fists and open our hands to one another? Will we trust God's unfathomable love to lead to new imaginations for life together?

Expanded Horizons and a Renewed Covenant

Joshua 13–24

Claim Your Story

I remember being awestruck by the grandeur of the Basilica of St. Peter in Vatican City and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem when I traveled to both as a college student. Both houses of worship are immense and beautiful. The Basilica, built in the fourth century at the site of St. Peter's grave, is full of great works of art by Michelangelo, including the Pieta and the Sistine Chapel. Its frescoes, marble, and gold inspire reverence. The Al-Aqsa Mosque with its open courtyards peppered with flora of various types, calligraphy art, mosaics, and majestic columns evoke a different type of reverence. Built about 1,300 years ago, the mosque has 35 acres and 11 gates and sits on Temple Mount where the shrine of the Dome of the Rock (a golden splendor that is the hallmark of Jerusalem's landscape) was erected to mark the spot where the prophet Mohammed was lifted into the Seven Heavens.

The impulse to commemorate our experience of the Divine with the best sacred spaces that our minds, hearts, and hands can create is part of our human history. These spaces allow us to gather to share our sacred stories, remember God's faithfulness, and renew our commitment to and faith in God.

The second half of the Book of Joshua begins with a description of how the land was divided among the tribes that comprised Israel. It ends with the account of the Israelites' renewed commitment to God, and it is in these final chapters that we hear the essential message of this second half. There we read how Joshua exhorted the Israelites to recommit themselves to God in response to God's faithfulness. They solemnized their vow to Yahweh and created a sacred space within their sanctuary to bear witness to the generations that would follow (24:26-27). Prior to that, the Israelite tribes living on the east side of the Jordan River built a great altar they called a "witness" to bear testimony that "the Lord is God" (22:10-34). They are sacred spaces because they remind the Israelites that God's faithfulness to love and redeem extends to all humanity.