Reading Joshua as a story of the oppressed

My son's Sunday school, which I help teach, are doing Joshua this term.

If the bible and God aren't your thing, this blog post isn't (just) about the bible or God. It's about what to do with ancient cultural stories that seem to run the risk of radicalization. It also gets a bit long and technical, probably too much so, and contains too many presumptions, generalisations, prejudices, and (surely) downright errors. It would be better edited or split. You have been warned.

What the problem is with Joshua

Joshua is one of my least favourite bible books. Genocide is condoned - no - encouraged - no - commanded. An invading force waits on the border of an inhabited land. Their God tells them to go in, attack, and sack all the major settlements, "devoting" everything to him as they do. "Devoting" appears a more sickening euphemism than ethnic cleansing, as it includes destroying everything in the place, including slaughtering all the people, as if to start again from year zero and to avoid any influence from the disgusting locals. A few locals get away with not being destroyed and get to be enslaved instead. Ugh. As far as examples of the ugliness of the so-called Old Testament God, it doesn't get much worse. What on earth are we doing teaching it to children? Why are so many Christians keen to name their sons after this butcher?

On the other hand...what story could be more exciting to tell under 10s, mainly boys? March seven times round a city, yell, and the walls fall down - how cool is that? Spend spies into enemy territory and let them out of the window by rope to escape - fantastic! Guy secretly breaks the rules and God picks him out of a line-up of the whole nation - woah! Walk into the middle of a river and it stops flowing so all your mates can cross - can we try that?

There's none like good old Joshua

At the battle of Jericho.

Possessing the land - now and then

I remember loving the story at that age. It was only later, when I understood the implications more, that I started to feel uncomfortable with it. And then the task of trying to explain or excuse it began. During a gap year in Israel, for instance, I found it useful to contrast it to current Middle East politics. Some Zionist Jews draw maps of a greater Israel incorporating much of the territory of Jordan, Syria, and Iraq - ie the territory as far as the Euphrates that, according to the Book of Joshua, was bequeathed to Israel. Some Christians say that Israel's 20th century return to the promised land is a fulfillment of prophecy, and shows that God is allowing them to reclaim the land Joshua first claimed.

The story I heard repeatedly from secular Israeli Jews was more along the lines of, "We won and defended this land because we're clever and organised and we have the best army in the world"...and very good funding, some would add. It seems to me that the Joshua story, as part of a bigger narrative that runs through more of the bible, is different: God seemed to want to show his people that it was not their cunning, their strength, or their numbers that won them the promised land. No, it was entirely a gift from God unrelated to any action of their own - except the action of doing what God told them to, no matter how ridiculous it sounded (tramping round walls with nothing but trumpets, for goodness sake). The fact that Israel's reoccupation of the land has not proceeded on the same theocratic principles helps explain why some ultra-orthodox Jewish residents of Jerusalem do not recognise the state of Israel.

Even if Joshua provides a helpful commentary on current politics, that doesn't deal with the ethnic cleansing. Never mind that ancient Israel apparently didn't do much of it, even according to the text. Never mind that there's little archaelogical evidence for the colonisation it describes, or a fall of Jericho around that time. Joshua implies a God who wanted them to do it and was upset that they didn't. How are we to deal with this?

Literal or figurative

To complicate it for me personally, someone once prophesied that God wanted me to be a Joshua. That is, I was standing at the back of a meeting of the university Christian Union when the speaker, who'd never seen me before, told me in front of the whole room that God had told him that. Things like that happen occasionally in some churches. I asked him what it meant afterwards. He said he didn't know - it was just what he felt God was telling him. Even though both he and I were probably both, at the time, in a tradition which claimed to take the bible literally, neither of us thought it meant I was to go and command an army of insurgents to invade a bunch of cities. We assumed some more spiritual interpretation. I mulled over the interpretation numerous times in the years that followed. A friend thought it was coming true when they saw me enthusiastically debating God with philosophy students. I tended to focus on God's instruction to Joshua to be strong and courageous, and saw it as my moving on from being the gibbering wreck of some years ago, as well as (so I hoped) being a force for good in some specific ways among the people I lived and worked with.

Retelling Joshua as a story of the oppressed

Before I can work out how to tell the story to children, I want to think about how I would tell it to adults. The way I have thought about it recently is to consider how Joshua may have functioned as a story for the people of Israel. And my thoughts are that it was a story which probably became valuable at a much later date than the events it describes. It seems to me that it's a story of an oppressed people. This is how I would like to tell the story.

The time of telling - perhaps

Suppose that a long time ago there was a people who lived in fear of their lives. They lived on their own land, in their own houses, and grew their own crops. They were poor, and sometimes they didn't have enough to eat. Every now and then, scary people from over the hill would ride by on big horses and steal their crops, rape their women, and burn their houses down. The people couldn't do much about it because the raiders had better transport and better weapons. They spoke a different language and had a different culture and religion too. The people complained to the government, which was run by people who shared their culture, only sometimes the government seemed to side with the raiders and prefer their culture and their religion. Other times when the government was more in tune with the poor people's culture, it was actually pretty powerless, and it was the governments of the raiders that were really in charge and told the other government what to do.

From what I understand of the bible and ancient history, the people of Israel lived like that for good chunks of their history. But does any of this sound contemporary too?

Roll on a few generations, and things got even worse. A superpower invaded the land, installed their own puppet government, and looted a lot of the best resources and assets - including taking away many of the most able-bodied working men as slaves, and causing much of the population to become immigrants in a foreign land, where people didn't like them, didn't like their customs, couldn't understand why they wouldn't conform to the local customs. When they wouldn't conform, the state threw them to the lions or into fiery furnaces, mandated vigilante pogroms, or just generally bullied them - "Sing us one of the songs of Zion". The people were so traumatised that they wrote songs about it - "By the rivers of Babylon...we wept as we remembered Zion...How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" They were full of anger and vengeful thoughts too - "Blessed be he who takes your babies and smashes them on the rocks".

What?

"...just like you smashed our babies on the rocks..." is what they didn't go on to write. But I wonder if that's what they meant. Violence is socially learned behaviour.

In the land where the unwilling refugees found themselves, there was plenty to entice their children away from their culture. They would have asked their parents: Why do people bully us and spit at us in the market? Why does s**t always happen to us? Why are you clinging onto a God who didn't come through for us?

What do you tell children when they're saying all that? Many cultures and races have had to answer those questions throughout history, and they've dealt with it in different ways. What these children's parents told them was a very powerful story. It was a story of hope: that they could get out of the gutter again. A rags-to-riches-to-rags-again story, which could only mean that if the cycle had happened once, it could happen again. A story in which they took the courageous step of giving themselves responsibility for failure, rather than simply blaming their oppressors. A story in which, conversely, they did not attribute their own success to their military prowess, but the the generosity of their God: a move which may have helped prevent them from developing into an aggressive nation from then onwards, at least until the last century. The story was so powerful that these people did not lose their identity and disappear from history, or get absorbed in to the captors' culture, as many others did. Coexistence and assimilation has its benefits but remove distinctiveness. They preserved their identity and continue to preserve it to this day.

The way the story is preserved today makes it look as if it predates that time of being refugees. Perhaps it did. Perhaps it dates back to the time when the poor people were at the mercy of the cattle raiders - and possibly before then. But when identity is under threat, cultural narratives become more important for preserving it. I suspect the story first gained its importance, and began to be told more, during that time of being refugees - exile, as they came to call it. After all, it was during exile that the refugees from Judah began to define themselves as the Yehudim - Jews.

The story told - perhaps

The story was something like this.

Long ago we left these lands where we live now for a Better Place. We wandered around for generations without a home. All looked pretty bleak.

But there was Someone looking after us, who said we would be great - a blessing to all the world.

We started to grow. Things looked good. Then it got even worse. There was a famine and we looked like we might die.

But someone was looking after us.

We found a new home and grew more. But then it got worse. We became enslaved by a cruel superpower.

But Someone was looking after us.

We got broken out of slavery, only to be trapped between our captors and an impassable sea.

Someone was looking after us, got us miraculously across the sea and trapped our captors behind.

We were taken on a journey to a Better Place. When we were almost there, we sent some people to have a look. It was terrible. There were people living there already and they were all stronger and bigger than us. We ran away.

Someone was cross - didn't we know Someone was looking after us, and everything would be OK?

We wandered around homeless for another generation until we'd learned our lesson.

Next time we came near the Better Place (seeing a view rather like the one at the top of this page) we were ready to trust Someone.

There was another impassable water barrier. There were well-armed cities - many of them.

But we knew Someone was looking after us. And so Someone was.

Instead of being the conquered - as you see us now - we were the conquerors. Instead of being slaves we were free. Instead of being in danger of losing our identity, we were in a Better Place where we could develop our identity without being threatened by outside influences. Instead of being trodden on and kicked around, we were a Chosen People who could hold our heads up high.

Someone was looking after us.

But it went wrong. We didn't listen to Someone, and so the cattle-raiders came. We rejected Someone as our king and asked for a human king. Many of our kings didn't listen to Someone, and listened to someone else instead. Sometimes they did listen to Someone, and all went well. Mostly we - or they - did not listen, and forgot that Someone was looking after us.

Someone sent messengers to remind us that Someone was looking after us. We didn't listen to them.

The only thing that finally made us listen to Someone was being ripped violently from our homes and families and dragged to this place, and all the terrible unspeakable murders and torture and rapes and infanticide and cannibalism and theft and indignity and cruelty that happened along the way. Some of us blamed Someone, but others of us realised we could not blame Someone we hadn't listened to. We take full responsbility for not having listened, not having remembered that Someone is looking after us.

Because Someone is looking after us. It might not look like it. Things look pretty bad for us. But things have looked pretty bad for us many times before. Someone was always looking after us then. This story shows it. Someone is looking after us now.

This time, let us learn not to forget Someone is looking after us. Let us learn to trust Someone. Let us learn to listen to Someone.

What the story was for - perhaps

I've told it my way, but it comes from the story in the bible. The big story which puts Joshua in context. Not as an incitement to genocide, but as part of a story to give hope to oppressed exiles. The big people are on top now, but we are not the lowest of the low. We are better than that. We were once great. And more than that: We have got out of some tight corners many times in the past, and we can again, because the same God who got us out of the tight corners has not forgotten us.

This is not to say that the events in Joshua happened as described, or didn't happen. That, for example, the people of Israel massacred virtually the whole population of Canaan. Whether they did or not, large scale genocide surely must have happened fairly frequently at that time in history. After all it's still happening fairly frequently today, even if it's getting less frequent - or not. The question of whether the Joshua story happened precisely as it says (though they may have assumed this) was less important, I think, for the original writers and listeners, than the question of what it meant for them. And so for us.

It would be a terrible thing if the Jewish exiles, or their forebears, wanted to teach their children to commit genocide if they ever gained the upper hand again, or that God wanted them to commit genocide. I propose that they wanted to teach neither. What if the story of cities being "devoted" to God doesn't tell Jewish children to massacre all the Gentiles around them (an unrealistic prospect) but sets a historic example of keeping free from Gentile influence - eg eat kosher, obey the Torah, and find a nice Jewish boy/girl to marry? What if the story of the invasion of Canaan sets out not a model for future aggression, but the hope for a hopeless people of having a homeland once again? What if the long story of the process how they came to possess that land was meant to encourage not a re-armament process but faith in God? What if the main lesson was supposed to be that things will go well for you if you obey God, and badly if you don't? This is after all what is put to the people at the end of the book.

The sequels - perhaps

I think that sounds like a better story than taking Joshua on its own at face value. Though it still doesn't feel quite as I would like it to. Some parts still grate with modern sensibilities. The benefits of cultural assimilation versus distinctiveness are a current debate.

The story has a sequel for the writers of the books known as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The enslaved exiles returned to their own land, but became oppressed again by one superpower after another. The last of the superpowers seemed the most invincible Empire of them all. Still they held onto hope, and they vested that hope in promises of a Special One who would come and make all things well, giving the Chosen People their land and freedom back, and bringing about the blessing of the rest of the world that the old stories told of.

It was when another man called Joshua (Yoshua/Yeshua: vowels are very interchangeable in Semitic languages) crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land that people started to wonder if he was the Special One. According to Matthew he went about using language evoking the old stories, from a return from sorrowful exile to the possession of the land that was promised Joshua. In English we usually read that the meek shall inherit the earth. In fact it's a direct quote from the Greek version of the ancient Hebrew Psalm 37, which has several verses more usually translated as being about who will possess the land.

Which sounds the more political and which the more otherworldly spiritual: possess the land, or inherit the earth?

Trace Psalm 37 back to the original Hebrew, and you find that the verb and noun are precisely the same as those used when Joshua, and the people of Israel elsewhere, are instructed to invade and possess the Promised Land. "Possess the land" would be a truer reflection of what the phrase means elsewhere. It seems to me that Matthew describes Jesus as talking about who is going to possess the land. Of the various categories of people in Psalm 37 who are predicted land-possession, the ones often translated as "the meek" are chosen here. Elsewhere they're translated as something more like the oppressed poor - more a social position than a behavioural choice.

Whether they're poor or meek, the new Joshua makes it clear how the land will be won. If it was won by force by the first Joshua, this time it will be won not by force but by assertive non-violence: forgiving enemies, praying for persecutors, turning the other cheek, reasserting control over those who oppress you by going two miles when they make you go one, love instead of revenge. It has been noted that this is an alternative approach to several contemporary at the time, including the violent neo-Joshuan revenge approach of the Zealots. But take the bible as a whole, with Joshua pointing to Jeshua, and you have a very different message.

Quite possibly, the slaves who sang, "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho" didn't need all this explaining. They seemed to know it was about liberation from bondage. If the plantation owners thought the Joshua story said more about their own supposed rights to the new Promised Land, that stopped them understanding what their slaves were singing. That's why they sang it.

And now?

So...all I have to do is work out how to tell that story to children with 3-10 minute attention spans. Simples.

Some related thoughts, discovered after I wrote the above text, can be found here.

Read what happened here.

Please contact us if you'd like to comment. Comments from people more knowledgeable than I (teachers, storytellers, people of Jewish or Black heritage, scholars of Hebrew language, Middle Eastern history, or the Torah, etc.) are especially welcome.