Before the Israelites continue their campaign of conquest, we find ‘The Gibeonite Deception’, which sounds rather like an ancient Near Eastern equivalent of the Bourne series. It certainly has an appropriate amount of intrigue and double-crossing. The kings of the Canaanite city-states west of the Jordan hear about the Israelite victories at Jericho and Ai, and join together to make war against them and stop them in their tracks. The Gibeonites, however, have a different plan. They put on old clothes and shoes, and take cracked wine skins and dry bread, and trick the Israelites into believing that they have travelled a great distance in order to make a pact with them because they have heard of the incredible things that God has done. The Israelites seem a little sceptical at first, but they do not consult God, and so in the end they agree a peace treaty with the Gibeonites.
Three days later, the Israelites learn that the Gibeonites are really neighbours, and therefore among the peoples they were meant to destroy, but they can’t attack them now because they have sworn an oath in the name of God. Having been found out, the Gibeonites tell Joshua that they lied because they were scared of the Israelites, and they put themselves at his mercy. And so Joshua makes the Gibeonites water-carriers and woodcutters for the Israelites. Ignoring for the moment the fact that Plan A involved genocide and Plan B involved slavery, we see here that things went wrong because the Israelites did not consult God. We need to involve him in our lives and especially in our big decisions because He knows best. That doesn’t mean handing every decision over to Him and sacrificing our free will – the final call is always ours – but it doesn’t mean talking to God, asking what He thinks, and taking His advice because it’s the best we’re going to get.
The five kings of the Amorites – the kings of Jerusalem, Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish and Eglon – hear about the pact the Israelites and the Gibeonites have made, and they’re not happy about it. We are told that Gibeon is an important city with a strong army, and them joining forces with the Israelites can only be bad news for everyone else. Possibly believing that attack is the best form of defence, the five kings join forces and march against Gibeon. They may not have thought this all the way through because of course Gibeon calls on Israel, and Israel honours their treaty and marches to defend them. The combined army is thrown into confusion and driven back by the Israelites, and many of their men are killed by what must have been a freak hailstorm. And then Joshua calls on the sun to stand still, and it does until the enemy armies have been completely destroyed. At this point, the writer declares “Surely the Lord was fighting for Israel!” as if Israel were in charge and God were merely reinforcement. But it is not for God to fall in with our plans, and we must be careful that we do not treat Him as nothing more than backup or a lucky charm.
Now follows an account of how the Israelites trapped and killed the five kings, then went on to conquer cities in the north and the south of Canaan, wiping out entire peoples as they did so. We also have a list of the thirty-one kings defeated by the Israelites, the literary equivalent of a trophy cabinet. This is a huge campaign being described here, and in the end it amounts to wholesale genocide. Aside from being immoral and inhuman, it’s also totally impossible. I don’t want to spend too much time on exploring the historicity of the Bible in this blog – it’s an important issue that I feel it’s important anyone who reads the Bible, and especially anyone who bases their faith on it wrestles with, but here is not the place – but I will say quickly that there is no literary or archaeological evidence for such a campaign of death and destruction. The ancient Near East was a violent and war-torn place, and many cities were destroyed at various times, but there is nothing to suggest that the biblical account of a single people systematically conquering cities and wiping out their populations is true. In fact, there is much evidence to the contrary. Before we judge the Israelites based on the Bible, maybe we should consider the fact that history is a powerful tool for propaganda, and it is highly likely that the biblical authors invented or exaggerated parts of their history in order to present Israel as a powerful nation.
In between the battle narratives and the list of defeated enemies comes a single sentence – “Then the land had rest from war.” Entire chapters dedicated to war, then not even a whole verse devoted to peace. It seems a bit skewed, doesn’t it? And yet somehow it’s not entirely surprising. We’ve always been more interested in death and misery than in life and hope. You only have to watch half an hour of television or flick through a newspaper or poetry anthology to see that. But is that right? We shouldn’t ignore or shy away from the bad stuff – we have to face up to it and deal with it – but it’s not the whole picture. Seven years ago I read a book called Fran’s War which tells the story of a group of teenagers and young children trying to survive the Bosnian War, and it broke my heart. I couldn’t forget about what I read, and so I started to tell anyone who wanted to listen (and many who didn’t) about Bosnia because I wanted them to care too. And I read more. But the more I read, the more I saw that within the horror were stories of love and sacrifice, beautiful and powerful stories that revealed the best of humanity. And those stories are important too. They don’t make the horror around them any less, but they do remind us that war is not all. And so I began to tell those stories too. Peace deserves more than a single senten
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