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Template:Books of the Old Testament

The Book of Joshua (Template:Lang-he) is the sixth book in the Hebrew Bible. This book stands as the first in the Former (or First) Prophets covering the history of Israel from the possession of the Promised Land to the Babylonian Captivity. The book of Joshua contains a history of the Israelites from the death of Moses to that of Joshua, and a description of the conquest of the land.

Authorship

Traditionally ascribed to Joshua, its central protagonist, the book is actually anonymous (it never names its author). Its date is also unknown, although recent studies point to the period of Josiah, when it was composed as part of the Deuteronomistic history of Israel (Deuteronomy to 2 Kings).

Structure

The book essentially consists of three parts:

1. The history of the conquest of the land (1-12).
2. The allotment of the land to the different tribes, with the appointment of cities of refuge, the provision for the Levites (13-22), and the dismissal of the eastern tribes to their homes. This section has been compared to the Domesday Book of the Norman Conquest (though significantly shorter and not the work of one man).
3. The farewell addresses of Joshua, with an account of his death (23, 24).

Summary of contents

Moses sends out twelve spies from Shittim to explore the city of Jericho. when they return only Caleb and Joshua give good reports, the other ten say the opposite. The Israelites disobeyed God and choose to listen to the ten other spies. They all took rocks and began to stone Caleb and Joshua. For Israel's punishment God made the whole generation who were born in Egypt wander in the wilderness for 40 years. Those born after the Exodus from Egypt could live and go into the Promised Land. The unfaithful Israelites who had come from Egypt would die before entering the Promised Land.

After Moses' death, Joshua, by virtue of his previous appointment as Moses' successor, received from God the command to cross the Jordan River. In execution of this order Joshua issues the requisite instructions to the stewards of the people for the crossing of the Jordan; and he reminds the Reubenites, Gadites, and the half of Manasseh of their pledge given to Moses to help their brethren.

Having re-iterated the duty to follow the mitzvah, Joshua orders the Israelites to set forth, and they leave Shittim. When they reach the Jordan River, Joshua states that the Ark will miraculously cross the Jordan. As soon as the Ark reaches the river, a miracle duly occurs, and the river stops flowing and rapidly dries up, so the priests carrying it halt, allowing the rest of the Israelites to cross as well. In commemoration of the event, Joshua orders two monuments to be erected: one in the river-bed; the other on the western bank, where the Israelites encamp.

The Israelites are circumcised at Gibeath-Haaraloth (translating as hill of foreskins). Those who had been born in the desert had not been circumcised. The people are therefore circumcised, and the area is named Gilgal in memory (Gilgal sounds like Gallothi - I have removed, but is more likely to translate as circle of standing stones).

The Israelites then commence with the Battle of Jericho. Placing Jericho under siege, the Israelites circle it once a day for six days, and on the seventh make seven circuits, each time loudly blowing horns and shouting. On the final circuit, the walls cave in, and the inhabitants, except Rahab and her family, are slaughtered. A curse is pronounced against rebuilding the city.

Ai is surveyed and pronounced weak, so the Israelite army sends only a small group to attack them. However they are defeated, causing Joshua and the people to despair. But God announces that the people have sinned: someone has stolen some of the spoils from Jericho which are meant to be for the temple. Consequently the Israelites set out to discover the sinner by casting lots, whittling them down first by tribe (Judah), then clan (Zarhites), then sept (Zabdi), then finally detecting it as Achan. Achan admits having taken a costly Babylonian garment, besides silver and gold, and his confession is verified by the finding of the treasure buried in his tent, so Achan is taken into the valley of Achor, where he and his household are stoned and burned to death.

Afterwards, 30,000 Israelites set an ambush of Ai overnight, and in the morning another Israelite force attack and then feign retreat, drawing the forces of Ai far away from the city. When Joshua raises his lance, the 30,000 men preparing the ambush strike, while Joshua starts attacking again, thus surrounding Ai's forces. The entire city is burned and its inhabitants slaughtered. The king of Ai, however, is taken alive and delivered to Joshua. He is then impaled on a stake for public display before being buried outside the city gates, following Hebrew guidelines for the guilty. (see Deuteronomy 21.23).

Joshua erects an altar on Mount Ebal and makes offerings upon it and carves into it the law of Moses. The people are arranged into two sections, with one facing Ebal and the other facing Gerizim. They each read the blessings and curses specified in Deuteronomy as appropriate.

The Hivites fool the Israelites into thinking them foreigners and gain a non-aggression treaty from the Israelites. Even after its detection, the fraud is not abrogated, though the Hivites are punished by being treated as the lowest social class (referred to via the Hebrew idiom "hewers of wood and drawers of water for the altar of Yhwh").

Adonizedek, king of Jerusalem, brings about an alliance of the "five kings of the Amorites" (the kings of Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, and Eglon, and himself), and they besiege the Hivites in Gibeon, whom they perceive as traitors. The Hivites implore Joshua's help, and so he launches a surprise attack following a night march, causing the Amorites to panic and flee as far as Beth-horon. A poem is quoted from the Book of Jasher, which states that the sun stood still at Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon, in order that Joshua could complete the battle. Despite the five kings' cowardly attempt at avoiding retribution by hiding inside a cave, they are discovered and trapped there until their army has been completely obliterated. Afterwards, the kings are brought to Joshua, who first humiliates them, then orders their death and has them impaled for public display. At sunset, the bodies are thrown back into the cave from which they hid, and the entrance sealed.

Jabin, king of Hazor, his army, and his vassals, rendezvous at Merom. Joshua, however, executes a swift attack and is able to defeat them. Pursuing them to a great distance, he hamstrings their horses, burns their chariots, captures Hazor, slaughters its inhabitants, and burns it to the ground. Lesser royal residences are also captured and their inhabitants slaughtered, although the cities on the hill remain.

Historicity of the conquest of Canaan

The book of Joshua is largely an account of the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites around 1200 BCE. However, the archaeological evidence for cultural continuity between the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age, and the lack of destruction layers at cities said to have been destroyed by Joshua in this period, has made the literal truth of the biblical narrative increasingly difficult to support.

The Israelites first appear in the archaeological record in an Egyptian inscription of c.1200 BCE, in which they are mentioned as a people of the northern highlands. Prior to that time the highlands had been largely uninhabited, but in the next two centuries the highlands saw an increase in village settlements, at the same time as the Canaanite cities suffered a prolonged period of crisis, many (but not all) of them being burnt and abandoned. The new highland villages are culturally indistinguishable from the settlements of the lowlands, and are called Israelite only because they appear in the area which later saw the emergence of the kingdom of Israel. With few exceptions, contemporary scholars accept that biblical Israel had its origins in Late Bronze Age Canaan.

Ethical issues

One difficulty arises out of the numerous commands from God recorded in the book for the Israelites to destroy people and animals in the land that they are occupying. This is related to the concept of cherem (set apart for God, or set under a ban) in which entire cities (such as Jericho; see Joshua 6:17-19) are recorded as commanded to be devoted to destruction.

Some theologians (including many adherents of liberal theology) see this as an ethically unjustifiable order to commit genocide, which is inconsistent with the overall view in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures of God as a loving, compassionate Creator. They see it as a theological polemic, with the majority of events invented during or after the Babylonian captivity, to encourage faithfulness to the Jewish creed at a time when it was being threatened. For instance, Morton says that Joshua "should be understood as a rite of ancient peoples (Israel among them) whereby within the context of their times, they attempted to please their God (or the gods)".

Others, including many conservative theologians who see the book as a historically accurate account written during or soon after the life of Joshua, explain the cruelty of the Israelites as God's way of making an example of nations that engaged in abhorrent practices. Although the book gives no explicit justification for the commands to kill, Deuteronomy 9:4 indicates that this is on account of the "wickedness of those nations". Some theologians have pointed to evidence of practices such as child sacrifice, although others argue that it may have been polemic invented at a later date in order to justify the act of extermination. Hence they believe that the message of Joshua was intended not only for the surrounding nations, but for the Israelites as well (e.g. the stoning of Achan due to his transgression of the cherem).

A Christian alternative viewpoint is to cite progressive revelation in which God reveals himself partially to Joshua and the Jews, but (in due time) fully through Jesus Christ. Proponents of this view argue that the description of war in the book of Joshua was culturally conditioned. For instance, Chapman suggests that the accounts of war and genocide are "the gradual process by which God works in the history of a particular people for whom war is an essential part of religion and culture". The Mennonite scholar John Howard Yoder suggests that the concept of cherem was unique in relation to the morality of the time not in its violence, but in ensuring that "war does not become a source of immediate enrichment through plunder", and hence was the beginning of a trajectory that would lead ultimately to the teaching of nonviolence.

See also

• Battle of Jericho
• The Bible Unearthed
• The Bible's Buried Secrets

Notes

1. K. Lawson Younger Jr, Joshua, in Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible (ed. James D. G. Dunn, John William Rogerson, Eerdmans, 2003), p.174
2. Golden, Jonathan M., "Ancient Canaan and Israel: new perspectives" (ABC-CLIO, 2004)pp.60-61
3. Lawrence E. Stager, Forging an Identity: The Emergence of Ancient Israel, in Michael D. Coogan (ed), "The Oxford History of the Biblical World (Oxford UP, 1998), p.91
4. Paula McNutt, "Reconstructing the Society of Ancient Israel" pp.69-70
5. Anne E. Killebrew, "Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity" (Society of Biblical Literature, 2005) p.176
6. Killebrew, Anne, "Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity: An Archaeological Study of Egyptians, Canaanites, and Early Israel, 1300-1100 BCE" (Society of Biblical Literature, 2005)p.149
7. Morton, pp. 324-325
8. John, Day (2002). Yahweh and the gods and goddesses of Canaan. Sheffield Academic Press. ISBN 1-85075-986-3.
9. Dodd, C.H. (1952). The authority of the bible. Nisbet & Co.
10. Colin Chapman, "Holy War", in Zondervan Handbook to the Bible (1999), ed. David Alexander
11. Yoder, John Howard. (1971). "If Abraham Is Our Father." In The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism. Wipf and Stock.

References

• Morton, William H. Joshua. The Broadman Bible Commentary, Vol. 2. Ed. Clifton J. Allen, et al. Nashville: Broadman Press, 1970.
• Halley, Henry H. Halley's Bible Handbook. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1927, 1965.
• Mazar, Amihai. The Archaeology of the land of the Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1990.
• Anati, Emmanuel. The Time of Exodus In the Light of Archaeological Testimony, Epigraphy and Palaeoclimate. Har Karkom, a guide to major sites, Capo di Ponte , 2005.

External links

• Book of Joshua article (Jewish Encyclopedia)
• Arguments in favor of historicity (Good News Magazine)

Translations

• Original text
  • יְהוֹשֻׁעַ Yehoshua - Joshua (Hebrew - English at Mechon-Mamre.org)
• Jewish translations
  • Joshua at Mechon-Mamre (Jewish Publication Society translation)
  • Yehoshua - Joshua (Judaica Press) translation at Chabad.org
• Christian translations
  • The Book of Joshua, Douay Rheims Bible Version with annotations By Bishop Challoner
  • Online Bible at GospelHall.org
  • Joshua at Wikisource (Authorised King James Version)

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Easton, Matthew George (1897). Easton's Bible Dictionary (New and revised ed.). T. Nelson and Sons. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Singer, Isidore; et al., eds. (1901–1906). The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

• Nevi'im
• Year of work unknown