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)
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