Joshua 9 relates the story of the Gibeonites who,
upon hearing of the Israelites mighty conquests, approach Joshua and seek a
treaty. The Gibeonites, in reality, live in Palestine but they resort to a ruse
to make the Israelites think they are from far away so that the Israelites will
not destroy them. Joshua and the Israelite leaders sample the Gibeonites’ moldy
provisions but fail to inquire of the Lord.
You would think that by now the
Israelites would have learned not to act in the natural but to always seek the
supernatural answer from the Lord. However, the Israelites have not learned
their lesson and so Joshua makes a treaty with the Gibeonites. Once the
Israelites learn who the Gibeonites really are and where they live, they are
furious. However, having made a treaty with these neighbors, the Israelites,
properly, do not go back on their word. Still, nothing prevents them from
subjugating the Gibeonites and turning them into slaves.
Joshua 10 deals with Adoni-zedek of Jerusalem and
four other kings of the Amorites who decide to attack the Gibeonites for making
a treaty with the Israelites. Sometimes you just cannot win! The Gibeonites
appeal to Joshua who comes to their rescue. During the ensuing battle, Joshua
calls on the Lord to make the sun stand still so that he will have time to
finish off these five kings and their armies before dark.
This is one of many passages in the Hebrew
Scriptures that lead the modern reader to question what type of text he or she
is reading. Is it history? Is it a story like The Lord of the Rings? Or is this text a mixture of both?
I doubt that the author(s) of the book of Joshua
would have distinguished between myth and history quite the way we do today.
From my humble perspective it would seem to me that the important thing is not
whether this event happened historically (there would be great cosmological
problems if it did). The important thing is the message in the story, that
message being that the God of the Israelites is the almighty God of the
universe who can do anything, and who will do anything to help his people when
they turn to him for rescue.
C. S. Lewis gives a very helpful explanation of
the mythical elements in the Hebrew Scriptues in his book, Miracles….
A consideration of the Old Testament miracles is beyond
the scope of this book and would require many kinds of knowledge which I do not
possess. My present view—which is tentative and liable to any amount of
correction—would be that just as, on the factual side, a long preparation
culminates in God’s becoming incarnate as Man, so, on the documentary side, the
truth first appears in mythical form
and then by a long process of condensing or focusing finally becomes incarnate
as History. This involves the belief that Myth in general is not merely
misunderstood history (as Euhemerus thought) nor diabolical illusion (as some
of the Fathers thought) nor priestly lying (as the philosophers of the
Enlightenment thought) but, at its best, a real though unfocused gleam of
divine truth falling on human imagination. The Hebrews, like other people, had
mythology: but as they were the chosen people so their mythology was the chosen
mythology—the mythology chosen by God to be the vehicle of the earliest sacred
truths, the first step in that process which ends in the New Testament where
truth has become completely historical. Whether we can ever say with certainty
where, in this process of crystallisation, any particular Old Testament story
falls, is another matter. I take it that the memoirs of David’s court come at
one end of the scale and are scarcely less historical than St. Mark or Acts; and
that the Book of Jonah is at the
opposite end. It should be noted that on this view (a) Just as God, in becoming
Man, is “emptied” of His glory, so the truth, when it comes down from the
“heaven” of myth to the “earth” of history, undergoes a certain humiliation.
Hence the New Testament is, and ought to be, more prosaic, in some ways less splendid, than the Old; just as the Old
Testament is and ought to be less rich in many kinds of imaginative beauty than
the Pagan mythologies. (b) Just as God is none the less God by being Man, so
the Myth remains Myth even when it becomes Fact. The story of Christ demands
from us, and repays, not only a religious and historical but also an
imaginative response. It is directed to the child, the poet, and the savage in
us as well as to the conscience and to the intellect. One of its functions is
to break down dividing walls.[1]
At the end of this account, we have Joshua’s
execution of the five kings whom he hangs on trees until evening. I could not
help but think upon reading this story that the second
Joshua, rather than killing others and hanging them on trees, gave his life by
hanging himself on a tree for his enemies.
Joshua 11 treats of further battles that the
Israelites had in defeating the various tribal kingdoms scattered throughout
the Promised Land. At the end of the chapter we read of Joshua wiping out the
Anakim who are a race of giants. The presence of giants in the land reminds us
that the book of Joshua is of a piece with Genesis that has gone before and
historical books like 1 Samuel that follow after. In Genesis 6 we learn that
the giants are the product of angels mating with humans (another mythical element--an etiological myth explaining the origin of giants). Then in 1 Samuel we
see David killing off one of the last of the giants in the land: Goliath of
Gath. The story, as edited, is all of one piece. Joshua 12 concludes with a
list of the kings defeated by Joshua and the Israelites: thirty-one kings in
all.
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