Welcome to the Wild Wild West

Welcome to the Wild Wild West
Joshua, Judges and Ruth for Everyone
JOSHUA 10: 28- 43


28That day Joshua took Makkedah and struck it down, it and its king, with the edge of the sword. He devoted them, along with every person there. He did not let any survivor remain. So he dealt with the king of Makkedah as he had dealt with the king of Jericho. 29Joshua and all Israel with him passed on from Makkedah to Libnah and fought against Libnah. 30Yahweh gave it, too, into Israel’s hand, it and its king, and [Joshua] struck it down with the edge of the sword, along with every person there. He did not let any survivor remain. So he dealt with its king as he had dealt with the king of Jericho. 31Joshua and all Israel with him passed on from Libnah to Lachish, camped against it, and fought against it. 32Yahweh gave Lachish into Israel’s hand. [Joshua] took it on the second day and struck it down with the edge of the sword, along with everyone there, just as he had done to Libnah. 33Then King Horam of Gezer came up to help Lachish, and Joshua struck him down with his people until he did not let any survivor remain for him. 34Joshua and all Israel with him passed on from Lachish to Eglon, camped against it, and fought against it. 35That day they took it and struck it down with the edge of the sword. Every person who was there he devoted that day, just as he had done to Lachish. 36Joshua and all Israel with him went up from Eglon to Hebron and fought against it. 37They took it and struck it down with the edge of the sword, with its king and all its cities and every person there. He did not let any survivor remain, just as he had done to Eglon. He devoted it and every person in it. 38Joshua and all Israel with him went back to Debir and fought against it. 39He took it and its king and all its cities. They struck them down with the edge of the sword and devoted everyone in it. He did not let any survivor remain. As he had done to Hebron, so he did to Debir and its king, as he had done to Libnah and its king.

40So Joshua struck down the whole country: the mountains, the Negev, the foothills, and the slopes, with all their kings. He did not let any survivor remain. Anything that breathed he devoted, as Yahweh the God of Israel had commanded. 41Joshua struck them down from Kadesh-barnea to Gaza, all the country of Goshen, as far as Gibeon. 42All these kings and their countries Joshua took at a single stroke, because Yahweh the God of Israel fought for Israel. 43Then Joshua and all Israel with him went back to the camp at Gilgal.


“Are you serious?” someone said to me on Thursday as we sat in a jazz club talking about interpreting the Bible and I made a statement she thought was outrageous (I think I had commented on the disastrous results of interpreting the Bible in light of the creeds). “Everything I say is serious,” I said, “even the funny things. Especially the funny things.” Yet quite often I may exaggerate. I have told myself a million times not to exaggerate. It’s called hyperbole: exaggeration in order to emphasize, to make a point more clearly and more forcefully.

“Joshua struck down the whole country.” It sounds as if he had completed the conquest of Canaan, though the context immediately makes clearer that “the whole country” doesn’t mean that. It does mean the whole of the area south of Gibeon, roughly the bottom half of the mountain heartland, the bottom third of the promised land as a whole (which also includes the part to the far north; the next chapter will come to that). The towns mentioned in chapter 10 pretty much cover the key places in this part of the country.

The broader context of Joshua will make something else clear. It will tell us, for instance, how Caleb got Debir captured on behalf of Judah (Joshua 15:15–19), how Judah couldn’t dispossess the Jebusites who lived in Jerusalem (Joshua 15:63), how Ephraim didn’t dispossess the Canaanites who lived in Gezer, though eventually they became a conscript labor force like the Gibeonites (Joshua 16:10), and how Judah attacked the Canaanites who lived in Hebron (Judges 1:10). All this is weird because Joshua 10 gives the impression that there should be no one left in Debir, Gezer, or Hebron; and talk of Joshua conquering the whole southland turns out to have a rather significant exception if it doesn’t include Jerusalem.

Historically, one consideration to keep in mind is that presumably the hapless inhabitants of these cities didn’t simply wait within them for Joshua to come and slaughter them. Cities under attack don’t do that. As the Old Testament observes elsewhere, when a city is under attack, its people run to the hills. They sit out the siege and the battle and the departure of the attackers, then come back home and start their lives over again when the attackers have gone. That helps to explain the way some cities and peoples have to be attacked, defeated, and annihilated on several occasions, like a monster in a sci-fi movie that you think you have destroyed but that has a mysterious power to keep regenerating.

Yet the story doesn’t draw attention to such facts. It lets the oversimplified, hyperbolic story stand. Why would it do that? The popularity of the Western or its more recent equivalent, the video game, helps us see some aspects of the answer. Entertainment will come into it; the Joshua story was written for people to enjoy, to make them smile and shout. Yet its inclusion in Scripture suggests that Israel saw more in it than that. With the Western and the sci-fi movie and the videogame, another factor is the way they often portray the victory of good over evil. The Joshua story expresses the truth that God is committed to putting down evil in the world. The kind of evil that Israel saw in the Canaanites, such as their willingness to sacrifice their children, is not one that God allows to go on forever. Wicked peoples get their comeuppance.

Admittedly this portrayal stereotypes people. Traditional Westerns picture Native Americans typically as “bad Injuns,” which helps European Americans justify taking their land and critique their attempts to hold onto it; we blame the victim. The Israelites stereotype the Canaanites. At the same time, the Old Testament is quite happy to let that stereotyping deconstruct. So Rahab was the “good Injun” and Achan was the “bad cowboy,” and when Israel goes in for practices such as sacrificing children, God treats it the same way as God treated the Canaanites. In other words, these stories function as warnings. Later Israel cannot afford simply to identify with Joshua’s Israel. It needs to see the fate of the Canaanites as potentially and actually its own fate.

The way the story itself speaks suggests that the hyperbole has at least two other functions. One is to glorify God for the way promises were fulfilled. There is a real sense in which no exaggeration is involved. The whole land did come to belong to Israel. The story simply compresses the process whereby this happened. There were later centuries when Israel could look proudly over this land that it had taken from the Canaanites, and the story then reminds Israel who gave it this country. When I had my first interview with my seminary principal on arriving as a student with a good degree from my undergraduate college, one of the first things he said was “Ah, what hast thou that thou didst not receive?” He was quoting from 1 Corinthians 4 in the King James Bible; that is how I still remember it. Israel needs to remember that it did not get hold of the country by its own achievement. God gave it.

There were other centuries (more of them, actually) when Israel had lost control of most of this land and it was under the sovereignty of an empire like that of the Assyrians or of other local peoples such as the Edomites. There would then be a certain poignancy or sadness about recalling how they once controlled the whole land. In reminding them that God gave them the country, it also reminds them that God had taken it away precisely because they had become too much like the Canaanites. But God could give it back to them.


Taken from Joshua, Judges and Ruth for Everyone – by John Goldingay