Having brought the people across the Jordan, God now tells Joshua to make flint knifes and circumcise the Israelites again. Again? How can you circumcise anyone twice? It sounds like a bewildering and terrifying prospect but it turns out that no one has been circumcised during the forty years of wandering, so what God is actually asking Joshua to do is circumcise the men who were born in the desert and have not already been circumcised. In this way, they will "[roll] away the reproach of Egypt". Circumcision was a symbol of the covenant, a sign that the Israelites were set apart. But signs and symbols alone are not enough. It was all well and good the men getting circumcised to signal their obedience to the covenant, but if they were not obedient, it was nothing more than an empty gesture. In the same way, we may wear a cross as symbol of our faith, but if we do not live out the truth of the cross, it means nothing.
While the Israelites are camped at Gilgal, they celebrate the Passover, eating the produce of the land of Canaan. That day or the following day, the manna that God had sent every morning stops appearing. It does not mean that God has stopped providing for them, just that that provision has changed - now He has brought them to a place where He can provide for them through the land. God will always be there for us, but He will be there for each of us in different ways depending on how we need Him at any given time. God does not operate a one size fits all system of support.
Around this time, Joshua meets a man with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua asks him if he is for them or their enemies, and the man replies that he is for neither, but he has come as the commander of God's army. Bearing in mind Israel's declared status as God's chosen people, and the fact that God has apparently destroyed Israel's enemies in the past, this apparent neutrality may be quite surprising. Maybe the servants of God do not share His partiality. Or maybe this a reminder to Joshua that God is for them as long as they are faithful and obedient to Him. Maybe, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, we should not worry about whether or not God is on our side, but whether or not we are on His.
And now we come to one of the best-known Old Testament stories - the Fall of Jericho. Like much of the Old Testament, it is doubtful that this ever happened - archaeologists have found no evidence that a city was destroyed at Jericho in this period - but the story was told for a reason and we can still learn something of God from it. In brief, God tells Joshua to instruct seven priests to march around the city, carrying the ark and blowing trumpets, accompanied by all the armed men of Israel. They must do this for six days, making no noise except for the sounding of the trumpets. Then on the seventh day, they must march around the city seven times, making as much noise as they can on the seventh circuit. They do this, and as the people begin to shout, the walls of Jericho fall, allowing the armed men to enter the city and kill everyone inside. It must have sounded like a mad scheme, but it worked. Sometimes God will ask us to do incredible and apparently insane things, and then it's tempting to ignore Him or dismiss those ideas as us getting things wrong, but He knows what He's doing. We just have to trust Him.
It seems like things are going well for the Israelites, but its not longer before someone manages to screw things up. A man named Achan takes some of the devoted things - the wealth of the city that was to be given to God - and God is not happy about it. The first sign that something is wrong comes when a group of three thousand Israelites attack Ai, confident that they can take the city, but are routed and about thirty six of them killed. The people are terrified, fearing that their new neighbours will believe them weak and attack. Joshua cries out to God, and God tells Him that the people have stolen and lied, breaking the covenant, and so they no longer have His protection, leaving them "liable to destruction". Does God remove His protection in anger? Or is it more a case of the people stepping outside of His protection by sinning? Either way, this seems to be in contrast to previous instances, where God actively punished disobedience with curse. So did God employ different methods for disciplining the people? Or is this simply a different interpretation of why things went wrong when the people disobeyed?
Putting those questions aside, God tells Joshua to present the people before Him tribe by tribe. The tribe He chooses must then be presented clan by clan. In the same way, the clan He chooses must be presented family by family. Finally, the family He chooses must be presented man by man. The man He chooses is the one who is guilty of taking the devoted things and he must be killed. The all-knowing, all-seeing God must have know who took them, but maybe He was giving Achan the opportunity to step forwards and confess. God knows everything we do, so there's no point in hiding from Him. We may as well give up our pretences and just be honest. It can be a scary idea, but it can also be extremely liberating.
So Achan is singled out and killed. Atonement has been made, and so God tells Joshua to attack Ai again, because this time they will have the victory. So under God's orders, Joshua sets up an ambush. He sends his best men out at night to hide close to the city, then he and the rest of the fighting men openly camp before the city walls. When the people of Ai see this, they rush out to meet Israel in battle. They have defeated them before, and they see no reason why they can't do so again. Joshua and his men turn and flee, luring the men of Ai away from the city, then at Joshua's signal the men who had been hiding rush into the abandoned city and set it alight. The men of Ai see this and realise they are trapped, as the fleeing Israelites and the ambush both turn to meet them, leaving them trapped in the middle with no hope of escape. And so the men of Israel kill the men of Ai and plunder their city. The Israelites had thought they were done for after the first attack was routed, but God turned the confidence this gave the men of Ai to the Israelites' advantage. There is no need to despair, because when things go wrong, God can find a way of turning that to good.
Finally, Joshua builds an altar on Mount Ebal and copies on stones the the law of Moses, then reads the law aloud to all the people. The subheading in my Bible calls this "The Covenant Renewed at Mount Ebal", and I think that this was about the Israelites taking possession of that covenant and that law for themselves. It had been given to Moses, and he had written it down, but now it was theirs. The law of Moses may not be ours, but it is our right and our privilege to take possession of the new covenant and of God's promises. They are for us as much as they were for the people to whom they were originally given.
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