Previously I introduced the Deuteronomistic History. For convenience, I refer to its unknown author as “Sam.”
Sam’s first book, Joshua, begins where Deuteronomy ends, right after Moses’s death. The leadership of the Hebrews transferred to Joshua, and the Hebrews began to enter Palestine (then, Canaan) to take it over. Judges bridges the next 250 years after Joshua, when Israel’s leadership fell to tribal elders and the shofetím/“judges.”
Joshua.
Like Torah, God’s the main character of Joshua, not the man the book was named for. As capable as Joshua was, as numerous and battle-ready and clever as the Hebrews were, none of them were able to defeat their opponents unless they stayed tight by the LORD. Like Torah, they didn’t always have the strongest faith in him, and when they didn’t, they suffered failure.
Back and forth they went:
- Following God’s directions, they crossed the Jordan River during flood stage, then marched round the city-state of Jericho till its walls caved in.
- Violating God’s directions, Achan stole some of Jericho’s plunder, and the over-confident Hebrews were unexpectedly defeated by the nearby city-state of Ai.
- Following God’s directions, they found and executed Achan, then took Ai.
- Violating God’s directions, they made a peace treaty with some con men from nearby Gibeon, whom they were supposed to destroy. From then on they were obligated to defend the Gibeonis.
One of the more disturbing aspects of Joshua is the genocide, the destruction of entire ethnic groups. On certain cities, God declared everything in it kherém, usually translated “devoted to God,” but more accurately “off limits.” Everything alive in it—men, women, children, animals—was to be killed. Any metal object went directly into God’s treasury. Everything else was to be burnt to the ground, never rebuilt. (Jericho was one such city, which was regardless rebuilt some years later.) Had Israel completed the job of destroying Canaan’s pagan city-states this way, Sam taught, Israel would never have been tempted to worship their gods and fall away from the LORD.
Let’s be honest: Many people nowadays, myself included, consider genocide wrong. So we have problems with Joshua. Why would a good God order genocide? And would God still order genocide today? Some folks have said yes, with devastating results.
The usual explanation is this is an Old Testament thing, something God doesn’t do anymore in the current dispensation. But a lot of us (and, of course, non-Christians) aren’t dispensationalists, so we don’t buy that.
The next-most-common explanation is God regularly allows people to be wiped out in disasters. Usually natural disasters, like tsunamis and earthquakes and hurricanes and famines. In this case it just happens to be an artificial disaster, namely war. Sometimes God does this in judgment; sometimes not, ’cause disaster is just part of the fallen world we live in. But in Joshua, Sam claims it’s judgment: Canaan’s tribes had been given centuries to repent and turn to God, and they hadn’t. Had they followed God, like Edom, they could stay there, in peace with Israel. Since they didn’t, their end had come, for time had run out.
This explanation comforts some people… and I worry about such people. It doesn’t make Joshua any less disturbing. Like I said, some folks think genocide is sometimes okay, and point to Joshua as their example. I’m very loath to use Joshua as a basis for what to do with enemies, especially since Jesus instructs us Christians to love our enemies.
In no way is Joshua a form of prescriptive history—an example, from history, of how we ought to live. Unlike Acts. Sam didn’t write it to tell his people how to behave. Itcs to tell them only what happened; it’s descriptive only. The point of the Deuteronomistic History was to show the Jews why God let their enemies defeat them, and in many ways Joshua shows us how God let the Canaanites’ enemies—the Hebrews—defeat them, for the very same reason: The LORD had enough of their sins, and the End had come.
Doesn’t mean we’re to go and do likewise. The LORD alone has every right to decide who gets to live and who doesn’t. If we believe he’s good, we have to trust that his reasons are good ones. And if we believe in Jesus, our duty isn’t to punish people with the wrath of God: It’s to point them to Jesus, and get them to repent before the wrath comes.
Dividing the land.
A big chunk of Joshua is about how the Canaan was divided up among the Hebrews. They hadn’t even conquered the whole of Canaan before they started possessing territory, designating which cities the Levites would live in, and which cities were “cities of refuge”—cities where, if anyone accidentally killed anyone, they could escape to for a fair trial before the victim’s family killed them in revenge.
Three tribes (Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh) were located on the east bank of the Jordan River. As a reminder, lest the other Hebrews forget these tribes also followed the LORD, they put up a monument to God. One which nearly got ’em destroyed when the other tribes misunderstood its purpose.
Before Joshua himself died, he gathered the tribal elders together and reminded them of their covenant with God: They promised God to conquer Canaan the rest of the way. Which they did, till Joshua died.
Then that changed.
Judges.
The Hebrews continued to destroy the city-states of Canaan. But they slacked off. I suspect it’s partly because some of them were bothered by the genocide too. And partly it was greed: Enslaving the Canaanis was more profitable than destroying them.
Because of this disobedience, the LORD’s angel announced he’d no longer drive the Canaanis out for them. Instead the aborigines were to become a thorn in their side, and their gods were to become a temptation. And they were. Within a generation, the Hebrews were no longer worshiping the LORD: They’d turned to the Baals, the pantheon of gods which the Canaanis worshiped.
How’d they lose sight of the LORD so quickly? Some of it was syncretism, combining religions because you’re supposedly worshiping the same God. Fr’instance, some of the Cannanis worshiped El-Elyón, “the Highest God,” and others El-Shaddái, “the Provident God” (which we usually translate “God Almighty”). Of course, these names describe the LORD quite well. But the Canaanis, like most of us, had a lot of wrong beliefs mixed in with the correct ones, and as usual, the wrong beliefs were more popular than the right ones. If a worshiper of one of the Els believed El was part of a pantheon—or had a son, Baal—you could see how the Hebrews might slide into polytheism, then Baalism.
Then there was the temptation of the way the Baals were worshiped. Hadad and Asherah were fertility gods: To keep the land fertile, farmers would visit temple prostitutes, female or male, and have ritual sex with them. Sam described this as the Hebrews prostituting themselves for the Baals. He wasn’t using a colorful metaphor. That’s precisely what they did.
Sure, some Hebrews recognized a vast, significant difference between the LORD and the Baals. They tried to follow the LORD alone. But others would try to follow both: They believed the LORD was a war god, a desert god, and a mighty one at that. But here in Palestine, it wasn’t desert, and they were at peace, and it was much more fun to cavort with temple prostitutes. So they played both sides. It was the tolerant, politically correct thing to do.
But it violated the relationship the Hebrews had with the LORD, and there were consequences.
The Cycle.
Various scholars call this the cycle of repentance, the cycle of sin and consequence, the cycle of apostasy, and so forth. They all have “cycle” in common. It’s a cycle we see all over the Deuteronomistic History, and we still see it today. Goes like so.
- Apostasy. Israel abandons God for the Baals.
- Oppression. God permits Israel’s enemies to have at them.
- Repentance. The people remember God, and cry out to him.
- Deliverance. God sends ’em a judge, who rescues them.
- Peace. The people follow the judge… till she or he dies. Then they gradually return to apostasy.
A judge was a warlord. They weren’t at all the same as the judges we have today. Some of them, like Samson, didn’t settle cases, or enforce the laws of the land. They simply drove out Israel’s enemies, then ruled over Israel (or their own tribe) as an unelected, but God-appointed, dictator till they died. Unlike kings, the office wasn’t passed down to their kids. (Not that Gideon’s son Abimelech didn’t try. )
In the time of the kings, sometimes the king was the judge. Sometimes a prophet was, like Elijah, who worked despite the king mucking things up. But in Judges, they’re all judges, of course. They had the same job as Moses or Joshua.
The Cycle repeated until the Babylonians finally conquered Israel in 2 Kings, but that’s way ahead of the story.
Sam implies part of the reason for the Cycle repeating itself time and again in Judges was because Israel had judges, not a king. More than once he wrote, “Israel had no king, so all the people did whatever seemed right in their own eyes.” Supposedly a line of kings was more stable than these come-and-go judges. Supposedly a king would remind Israel of their covenant with the LORD more regularly than tribal elders or judges. When we read Judges, we notice the judges themselves were pretty ignorant of the Law sometimes.
Cases in point: Gideon made an efod, a ritual breastplate used to get answers from God—which only the head priest was supposed to have—and the Israelis grew to worship it. Jepthah sacrificed his own daughter to the LORD in thanks for a victory. Samson violated his vows of holiness to God multiple times. Micah (who wasn’t a judge, but was a leader in Israel nonetheless) dedicated silver to the LORD, which Micah then melted into an idol. And the last story in Judges is a nasty tale of a gang rape, which escalated into the complete moral and spiritual deterioration (and near destruction) of the tribe of Benjamin.
Judges is not a book to share with the kids in Sunday school. Not without some heavy bowdlerizing. (I made that mistake once.) Yeah, some children’s churches will tell stories about Samson and Gideon and even Jepthah, but they sanitize the heck out of these stories before they’re kid-ready. Unedited, they’re violent and nasty, and show us just how bad things can get when apostasy is combined with libertarianism. And that’s why we should read it.
It gets better, though. King David comes in the next book.