Joshua 5-8

Joshua 5 has two major events that take place. The first is the circumcision of all the male Israelites who had not been circumcised in the wilderness. The generation that left Egypt had been circumcised, but the ones born in the wilderness had not, for some unstated reason. When one thinks of it from a human perspective, disabling all one’s fighting men immediately before a battle does not seem like a good way to win. However, God’s ways are not human ways, neither are his thoughts human thoughts. The whole point of this mass circumcision is that the Israelites will be consecrated before the Lord. It is the Lord who is calling the shots. God will lead his people into battle and he will give them the victory. All the people have to do is obey. The consecration of the people is deemed complete when the Lord says to Joshua, “Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt.” (Joshua 5:9)

The second major event of Joshua 5 is a meeting between Joshua and “the commander of the army of the Lord” who is, presumably, an angel. My favorite stained-glass window carries a depiction of this angel. (See image above.) It is one of the Tiffany windows in the Trinity Episcopal Church in Staunton, Virginia, which also boasts one of the most beautiful church sanctuaries I have ever seen.

I especially like in this incident when Joshua asks the angel, who he does not yet know is an angel, “Are you one of us, or one of our adversaries?” and the angel answers, “Neither”. It is always important to remember that the Lord is neither on our side nor on our enemy’s side. The Lord is on his own side. What is essential is for us to get with the Lord’s program, not to get him to approve ours.

Joshua 6 deals with the destruction of Jericho. As the children’s song puts it: “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, and the walls come tumbling down.” Once again, we see the Lord leading the Israelites to victory in a very unusual manner. I do not think there has been any other battle in history won by an army marching around a walled city seven times blowing trumpets. The Israelites are learning some important lessons about doing things God’s way, even when that way does not make sense to the natural mind.

Rahab the prostitute and her family are the only people rescued from Jericho, and that is because she harbored the Israelite spies and protected them. Can’t you just picture Rahab’s house on the wall of the city—the only structure left standing when the walls fall down—and the scarlet cord hanging from her window? From a Christian perspective that scarlet cord is representative of the blood of Christ. If we want to receive God’s protection in the midst of judgment, then we need to have the scarlet cord hanging from our window; we need to have our lives spiritually covered by the blood of Christ who was sacrificed for our sins.

Joshua 7 relates the sin of Achan. (I knew a Sunday school teacher who taught her students to remember this biblical name by saying, “Oh my Achan back!”) Achan did not follow God’s instructions to destroy everything in Jericho because he saw and coveted a beautiful mantle of Shinar, in addition to some silver and gold. Because of Achan’s sin, and Joshua’s presumption demonstrated by not inquiring of the Lord before attacking, Israel suffers a great defeat at Ai. However, once they deal with Achan’s sin, by stoning him, then the Israelites are able to move ahead in triumph, destroying Ai in Joshua 8. Again, the spiritual principle operative here is that if we want to experience victory then total obedience to the Lord’s commands is required.

Once again, the modern reader may have great difficulty handling the violence in these stories. Here we have a man who is subjected to capital punishment for the crime of theft, and we have whole cities being destroyed, including not just the fighting men but women and children as well. Historically, we must remember what modern scholars tell us: we have no archaeological evidence that most of these battles and widespread destruction took place at all. However, within the perspective of the story we must remember that this judgment is not handed down at human command, but from God. If God chooses to judge and condemn an individual, a family, a city, or a nation, who are we as humans to argue against the divine judgment? As difficult as it may be for us to accept, I believe this would be the perspective of the ancient Israelites on this matter.

Another way of looking at this violence in the Old Testament is to think that, perhaps, what was going on was that the ancient Israelites were projecting their own cruelty on to God. C. S. Lewis might have been agreeing with this perspective when he wrote in The Problem of Pain…

If, then, you are ever tempted to think that we modern Western Europeans cannot really be so very bad because we are, comparatively speaking, humane—if, in other words, you think God might be content with us on that ground—ask yourself whether you think God ought to have been content with the cruelty of cruel ages because they excelled in courage or chastity. You will see at once that this is an impossibility. From considering how the cruelty of our ancestors looks to us, you may get some inkling how our softness, worldliness, and timidity would have looked to them, and hence how both must look to God.

There certainly is great cruelty expressed in the Old Testament. While reading of these atrocities, one must remember, as Lewis says, that our sins are neither better nor worse. One must also remember that simply because the Bible reports these events, that does not necessarily mean that the one true God, who is above and beyond the Bible, would have approved of such viciousness, if it took place historically at all.

Joshua 8 concludes with the Israelites fulfilling Moses’ command to pronounce the curses and blessings of the law from Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim. Once again, the narrative presents Joshua as a worthy successor to Moses: “There was not a word of all that Moses commanded that Joshua did not read before all the assembly of Israel, and the women, and the little ones, and the aliens who resided among them.” (Joshua 8:35)