Minor Thoughts from me to you

After three months, Anna and I have finally grown confident enough about the stability of our lives here in Korea that we've entered into a contract for internet service in our apartment. This means I'm listening to podcasts on my iPod again after about six months' abstinence from them. Here are my favorites:

Common Sense with Dan Carlin - It may surprise those who know me (or who have read any post about politics on this blog) that my favorite podcast about politics - indeed, the only one I still bother to regularly check - is by an independent centrist who supports socialized health care. But that's just proof of how great a communicator and honest a thinker Dan Carlin is: you don't have to agree with him to find his show consistently fascinating. Give it a listen.

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History - Dan Carlin also has a second, far more popular podcast on the less contentious subject of History. Listen to the show once and you'll soon find that you've consumed the entirety of its program backlog and are now waiting in agony along with the rest of us for the next, traditionally late installment of the best monologue on the web. My favorite podcast.

Reasonable Doubts - I've sifted through a lot that's on offer in the world of podcasts concerning the world's theologies and (later on, after I stopped believing) arguments against it. The three liberal, atheist professors from Michigan who run this show are the only (anti-)religious partisans with whom I still keep up. They are unabashed in their contempt for stupidity and ignorance among theists, but even while I myself was a theist I found them very willing to hear out other views and award them credit where it was due.

Free Talk Live - I don't listen to Ian, Mark, or their revolving guest hosts very often anymore, but that's mainly because I agree with it too often and it's way too effective at pushing my buttons. The program's nightly reports on how much injustice is really going on in my native country often enrages me to a degree I am certain is unhealthy. That said, it's still a great show, mainly because Ian and Mark are not only utterly authentic but also inhumanly patient, never failing to live up to their promise to discuss whatever their callers want to talk about. Sometimes this results in utter hilarity, since the policy inevitably draws the craziest people our society has to offer. For instance, one regular is a believer in every antisemitic conspiracy theory out there.

All of them are available for free on iTunes.

Above: "Summer reading list" by Kimberly Applegate.

Counting up how many books I've read in the last 3+ months, I find that I've just passed my reading list's halfway point; I'm on my nineteenth entry out of thirty-six.

A commute to work by bus has its advantages.

Let's throw some ratings into the mix here. We'll use a five-star system:

1 - being God-awfully inept and offensive. 2 - being so flawed that it lacks entertainment value. 3 - being entertainment, but a clearly flawed work. Inoffensive and forgettable.
4 - being a perfectly respectable example of How It's Done, but falling short of Art. 5 - being something special, a superior achievement.

FICTION

The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett - I paid a visit to the former chair of the Shorter College Humanities Department recently and we naturally flung books at each other before parting. This was his selection. Finished. 4 stars.

Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan - The movie looks like a great deal of fun, but in general I'm a firm believer of reading the book first. So I will. Finished. 2 stars..

Up in the Air, by Walter Kim - Another book purchased simply because the previews for the movie greatly intrigue me. Finished. 3 stars. Loses points on the dismount with a tacked-on "shocking revelation".

Native Son, by Richard Wright - Because I like my reading lists to have some diversity and realized I didn't have any great African-American novels on it. I love Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Ellison was connected with Wright, so I selected this to fill the gap.

War & Peace, by Leo Tolstoy - I'm probably being absurdly optimistic in purchasing this book and putting it on my reading list for this year; as anyone can tell you, it's huge, and God knows the block of time it'll require has plenty of other claims on it, the rest of this list included. Still, I've really wanted to read it ever since finishing The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and having it readily available is the first step, so just maybe...

Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky - And buying Tolstoy made me think of Dostoevsky, whose The Brothers Karamazov I finally finished when I last visited Korea.

The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, by John Steinbeck - I've already read Grapes, but I did it back in high school, which really is more or less equivalent to having not read something at all (children are all Philistines; their souls have not yet developed). One of Steinbeck's other novels ranks as an absolute favorite of mine, The Winter of Our Discontent, and one of the particularly proud moments of my time in college was when I had the honor of introducing my Creative Writing professor to it, who afterward declared it one of her all-time favorites as well.

The Angel's Game, by Carlos Ruis Zafon - Zafon's other novel, The Shadow of the Wind, is one of the most enjoyable books I read in '09. My wife's already read this one and told me it's darker, which disappointed her and somewhat disappoints me - Shadow was one of those books where you bounced in your bed at the ending, which is a rarity for me - but so it goes; no doubt it will still be, as Stephen King called Shadow, one gorgeous read.

The Baroque Trilogy (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World) and Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson - Apparently a force with which to be reckoned in science fiction, which accounts for why I haven't heard of him. I've received a lot of recommendations from friends who are into the genre, though, and Snow Crash made TIME's "100 Greatest Novels of the 20th Century", so I feel pretty confident these'll be enjoyable. Finished with Snow Crash. 5 stars.

The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman - I've always been curious about the His Dark Materials trilogy, a fantasy series that's often referred to as the anti-Chronicles of Narnia. I'm not willing to blindly plump for all three, but I'm pretty sure the first installment is a self-contained story, like The Lion, The Witch, & The Wardrobe. So it turns out that the first book was not self-contained, but it was so good Anna and I immediately purchased the next two. I'm on the third volume now. Grade So Far: 5 stars.

The Magicians, by Lev Grossman - What if a bunch of today's adults found out Hogwarts and Narnia were real? Sounds fun. Finished. 4 stars.

Supreme Courtship, by Christopher Buckley - On the strength of his Thank You For Smoking. Finished. 4 stars.

A Farewell to Arms and The Son Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway - I'd never actually read Hemingway until I picked up_ For Whom The Bell Tolls_ at the airport on my way to my honeymoon destination. I am now of course very much looking forward to reading the rest of his body of work. In March I accidentally found and finished The Old Man and the Sea.

This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald - Obviously I'm taking the opportunity to fill in a few shameful gaps in my reading experience.

Riding Lessons, by Sara Gruen - Because her Water For Elephants is utterly charming.

Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer - I consider it sort of a duty to read anything that gets as popular as this book. Plus my wife's read them all and wants to be able to discuss them with me. Hey, who knows? I didn't want to read the Harry Potter books, either. Finished. 2 stars.

Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger - On the strength of her first book, The Time Traveler's Wife, which reminded its readers of how great science fiction can be when it's not just left for geeks to write. Finished. 3 stars, but not for any observable deficiency; the narrative simply doesn't compel.

The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton - Since all of her novels are in the public domain now, Amazon asks only ninety-nine cents in return for all thirty-one of them. I actually finished this particular book back in January (we're over a month into '10, after all). Verdict: enjoyable, but The Age of Innocence is far more rewarding to the modern reader. 3 stars.

Between, Georgia, by Joshilyn Jakson - My mother's recommendation. I honestly have no idea.

Being Written, by William Conescu - One of several impulse buys. A minor character in a book realizes his nature and struggles with the author to achieve greater prominence. Finished - and boy, this book wasn't what I thought it would be at all. 4 stars, but I'm disturbed..

Persona Non Grata, by Ruth Downie - My trial installment for a light-hearted series in which an ancient Roman doctor and his slave girl solve mysteries.

Tipperary, by Frank Delaney - In preparation for my Kindle spree I walked about a Barnes & Noble, just letting covers leap out at me. My wife tells me this one did. I naturally no longer remember.

The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth - A tale set in an alternative history in which the Fascists gained political power in America prior to World War II. Why not? Finished. 2.5 stars. Undeniably the work of someone who knows what he's doing, but its message is extraordinarily deceitful and the pace of the plot sometimes unforgivably slow.

NONFICTION

The Art of Biblical Narrative, by Robert Alter - Assigned by my Old Testament professor at college, this is one of the books that spearheaded the (re-?)introduction of literary analysis of the Bible to universities in the last century. Obviously I've read it (got a "B" - Dr. Wallace wasn't easy), but I'd like to read it again at a more leisurely pace. And maybe take notes this time. An assured 5 stars.

Foreskin's Lament, by Shalom Auslander - A memoir from an author who has written only one other book to my knowledge, an anthology of short stories collectively entitled Beware of God, which was so side-splittingly hilarious and poignant I'll probably be buying anything with his name on it for the foreseeable future. Finished. 4 stars.

The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel..., by Israel Finkelstein - A survey of what modern archaeology has to say about the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah and their Biblical records. Finished. 3 stars. Fully half the book is dull summarizing of the Bible stories themselves. The rest is very interesting.

Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick - Six North Korean refugees describe life beyond the DMZ, and how they escaped it. Being in such close proximity to what may be the most evil regime on this planet almost demands an interest in it, so I've always known that when I returned to Seoul I'd be bringing along more reading material about the DPRK. Finished. 5 stars and very moving.

The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, by Dr. Robert "The Bible Geek" Price - A biblical scholar's assessment of the four gospels' authenticity. Finished. 4 stars.

On Writing, by Stephen King - The best book on writing fiction I've ever read, written by the writer's writer. I owned a physical copy but gave it away.

Brotherhood of Warriors, by Douglas Century - A look into Israel's special forces. Already read this one too, but I need to comb through it again for research purposes. Finished. 4 stars for what it is - but what it is doesn't happen to be that audacious, so don't take that as a strong recommendation.

So I'm poking around the internet for a directory of given names for Midianites or Amalekites and I find this - a step-by-step, program-assisted guide to creating whatever Canaanite name you want.

Apparently it was created as a tool for people playing roleplaying games in an ancient Canaanite setting - that is, playing Dungeons & Dragons or something of the sort in Biblical scenery. Even as a scion of the whole Comics/RPG/Sci-Fi/Fantasy culture, I've never heard of that, but imagining how such a thing might play out entertains me immensely.

UPDATE: After a little more digging about, I've learned that there is indeed a fairly new role playing game produced for enthusiasts of Biblical mythology, aptly named Testament. And there's a magazine named - I kid you not - Targum that contains supplementary information for it.

The game features character classes such as "desert hermit", "Levite priest", and of course "champion of Israel" (that is, a judge). Characters have piety ratings and glorious opportunities for advantages like the "Nazirite feat", which "adds +8 to an attribute of your choice, as long as you don’t drink alcohol, drink wine, cut your hair, or let your Piety drop below 10 (by, for example, dallying with a Qedeshot dancer and letting her cut your hair)."

I want to buy this game just to read the rest of its instruction manual.

Above is a picture of Testament's cover.

The foreword written afterward

About two weeks ago, the inexplicable bug bit me to write a daily commentary on the Book of Judges. I wanted it to have a conversational tone, with its tongue often straining at its cheek, and I wanted it to largely eschew the "spiritual metaphors" and "hidden meanings" that pastors, priests, and rabbis see in it in favor of discussing... well, what interests me: its influences and sources, its composition, its historicity. Everything that most people can spend their entire life faithfully attending church every Sunday without once hearing mentioned, but which scholars have enjoyed discussing for over a hundred years.

Below's what happened. It's not by any means exhaustive; in fact, it's intentionally the opposite, a light skip along Joshua's pages rather than a labored dissection of the ancient work. It's also certainly not authoritative. I've never attended seminary, nor was I even a Religion major in college; my knowledge of Biblical criticism comes from a few courses I took in college as electives and the reading I've done for pleasure since. And even if I was formally trained, the fact is that Biblical criticism is a field in which everyone does the best they can with the clues available, a lot of which are circumstantial. My college professor often concluded a discussion of a particular item in the Scriptures by saying, "I only know two things for sure: I don't know and you don't know."

That's not always true, of course. There are some things I think serious students of the Bible can now declare in total confidence - for instance, that Joshua's campaign as described in the Bible just doesn't match the archaeological evidence we have. But views such as mine on the origin of the Levites are easily debatable with DNA evidence and simply good questions, such as my wife's, who just asked me why Levi's featured in stories like Genesis 34 if he never really existed.

With those caveats outta the way, here's hoping you find something worthwhile in the study. I did. It's just as they say: "The best way to learn is to teach."

The Commentary Index

Joshua 22-24 - About the altar of Gilead.

Joshua 21 - The secret origin of the Levites.

Joshua 20 - On the six cities of refuge.

Joshua 12-19 - How the twelve tribes truly came into possession of Canaan.

Joshua 11 - The Anakim and other tall tales.

Joshua 10 - Joshua's greatest hit.

Joshua 9 - Anti-Gibeonite propaganda.

Joshua 7-8 - Why knowing God's will for your life may be easier than you think.

Joshua 5-6 - On the fall of Jericho.

Joshua 2-4 - Why Rahab deserves a better rep and how important God's parting the waters really is.

Joshua 1 - On the authorship of the Book of Joshua and Joshua's possible secret heritage.

And welcome back to the Internet’s greatest Bible commentary, in which Yours Truly reads through the Bible and explains its many mysteries as best my limited education allows. I encourage you to read the Good Book along with me, because my time’s too valuable to write summaries. Here we go!

Today's entry is our grand finale. Stay tuned for another bookend post akin to the one which began this series.

22:10. And they came to the regions of the Jordan, that are in the land of Canaan, and the children of Reuben and the children of Gad and the half-tribe of Manasseh built an altar there by the Jordan, a great altar to look upon.

As Dr. Robert Price would admonish us, the first question we'll ask ourselves about Chapter 23 is the most important: what use did the writer of this passage's contemporary audience have for it? What's its function?

The answer's not difficult: this story explains why, at the time of writing, there existed altars to the LORD in the land of Gilead which matched Jerusalem's in age and grandeur. Their existence and the love of the populace for them is a sticking point for the YWHists, who have said that God desires His worship to be centralized in Jerusalem.

What the writer has come up with is pretty clever. The altars were legally built, but the original intention was never to worship with them. They're just to remind you that you're supposed to be worshiping the LORD over in Jerusalem. So: you don't have to knock 'em down, but don't use 'em!

Chapter 23 is of course "The Story Thus Far". Since the story of Joshua and other important scrolls were not collected in one volume until well after the time of Jesus, it was important to include a summary of previous events within the work.

23:15. And it shall be, that as all the good things that the Lord your God has spoken to you have come to pass, so shall the Lord bring upon you all the evil things, until He has destroyed you from this good land, that the Lord your God has given you.

23:16. When you transgress the covenant of the Lord your God, that He has commanded you, and you will go and serve strange gods and you will bow to them; then the wrath of the Lord will burn against you, and you will perish quickly from upon the good land that He has given you."

This is a reference to Assyria's destruction of Israel and/or Babylon's of Judah. If you're a Christian, you likely believe that this is an example of prophecy; if you have a secular view of the Scriptures, these verses show that the Book of Joshua was either written or revised later than Canaan's foreign domination.

Chapter 24 has some fun working of the crowds by Joshua. "Choose for yourself, People, but I'm going to serve the LORD." "We will, too!" "You? Pfffft. You can't handle it." "Yes, we can! We're going to serve the LORD!" "Alriiiight... Did everyone hear that? You said it, not me."

It's worth pointing out, because I think it's one of the simplest admissions that many evangelical Christians tend not to consider but are willing to make, that "the people" didn't really all say the dialogue ascribed to them here. The author clearly made the words up in order to get across the crowd's sentiments in a stylish way.

24:33. And Eleazar the son of Aaron died; and they buried him in the hill of Phinehas his son, which was given to him in Mount Ephraim.

As previously mentioned in this series, Eleazar should already have died in the desert.

NEXT: An afterword, but I don't blame you if you don't want to stick around. Thanks for reading.

Bible Translation: Judaica Press's Tanach with Rashi commentary, courtesy of Chabad.org.

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES:

Joshua 21

Joshua 20

Joshua 12-19

Joshua 11

Joshua 10

Joshua 9

Joshua 7-8

Joshua 5-6

Joshua 2-4

Joshua 1

I'd planned to finish up my commentary on the Book of Joshua today - there's little enough material in the last chapters that I think I can do it in one entry - but my father sent me a very hefty e-mail and I ended up writing a day's worth of words for him instead.

The subject on which we're writing each other is actually related. I told my father a little over a week ago that I was an atheist. He didn't come after me during the actual Skype conversation in which I said it, but his first salvo of Christian apologist answers to atheists - all of which you've probably heard before if you're interested in such things - started appearing in my e-mail box within 48 hours. I'll be answering them until he tires out. That might be bad news for the commentary if we weren't so close to the end, but I'm sure I can squeeze out one more post in the next day or two.

TTFN.

And welcome back to the Internet’s greatest Bible commentary, in which Yours Truly reads through the Bible and explains its many mysteries as best my limited education allows. I encourage you to read the Good Book along with me, because my time’s too valuable to write summaries. Here we go!

I like how another blog I ran across while researching today's post started its own entry on this subject:

Who the hell were the Levites?

I may have to steal and modify it into my standard opening, or maybe the title format for my posts here. "What the hell are the cities of refuge?", "Who the hell is Joshua, son of Nun?", "Who the hell wrote the Book of Joshua?", etc.

21:1. And the heads of the fathers' [houses] of the Levites approached Eleazar the priest, and Joshua the son of Nun, and the heads of the fathers' [houses] of the tribes of the children of Israel;

22:2: And they spoke to them in Shiloh in the land of Canaan, saying, "The Lord commanded through Moses to give us cities to dwell in, and the open land around them for our cattle."

Among the twelve tribes of Israel, the Levite tribe is uniquely cursed, uniquely blessed, and uniquely fictional. Their curse is to inhabit forty-eight cities situated throughout land belonging to the other tribes, rather than possessing a whole region to call their own. Their blessing is to be a people comprised entirely of the LORD's ministers - His priests, His temple workers, their support staff. Their history as described in the first five books of the Bible and their identification there as a separate people, ethnically related to their eleven (or twelve) brother tribes, is the invention of tradition with an assist by the priesthood's writers.

It's possible the Levites might as well have been their own tribe by the time the Book of Joshua was written; it's not difficult to imagine an exclusive caste of intermarrying priests, temple workers, seers, and their servants developing in Canaan during the Late Bronze and early Iron ages. Nor is it difficult to imagine the great advantage that being seen as a people gave them. As a race instead of just an organization they had an additional claim to land and temporal power over it, which made disdain for their authority in their power bases not only a violation of holy ground but also of a nation's sovereign borders. Again, you can compare the status they desired with that of the Catholic Church in its heyday, when it was very literally God's kingdom on Earth, with its own citizens, borders, and troops, along with numerous embassies - that is, churches - in other countries.

But the blood that ran through the veins of the Levites who dwelled in Ephraim was Ephraimite blood, just as the blood of those priests who lived in Judahite territory was Judahite, and so on. Some were perhaps of mixed descent.

As for their occupational heritage, it was not one they owed to YWH. These seers, temple caretakers, ritual butchers, and outright magicians had plied their trade as Canaan's intermediaries with the spirit world long before He monopolized their business. The name by which they're still known even references their previous service to a powerful snake deity (consider that their name shares its root word with "leviathan"), a service which dramatically ended when King Hezekiah smashed their main idol.*

Sea changes in the ritualism and theology of the Levites were not only brought about by a dynasty that schizophrenically vacillated between state-mandated henotheism and traditional Canaanite polytheism. The various clans of Levites constantly waged wars of religious propaganda against each other. A sect would attempt to undercut the authority of a rival faction by promoting unflattering stories about that group's founding members.

The Levites who speak to Joshua in this chapter represent a fusion of those two brotherhoods, who were painfully united out of necessity when the Assyrians devastated Israel. Refugees from the ruined kingdom fled into Judah and brought their beliefs with them. The compromise these Moses-touting immigrants eventually struck with the Aaronite priests of Jerusalem resulted in the stories so familiar to Bible readers today.

* Cultural shifts are never so neat, of course. Illegal worship undoubtedly continued despite Hezekiah's suppression and began to revive under his polytheistic son Manasseh, but the "YWH-Only" crowd likely dealt it a serious blow every time they came to power, from which the religion self-evidently never completely recovered.

NEXT: The weekend. Come back on Monday.

Bible Translation: Judaica Press's Tanach with Rashi commentary, courtesy of Chabad.org.

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES:

Joshua 20

Joshua 12-19

Joshua 11

Joshua 10

Joshua 9

Joshua 7-8

Joshua 5-6

Joshua 2-4

Joshua 1

TIME's running a feature-length article on their website about how archaeologists are informing our understanding of the Bible. I note that they quote Israel Finkelstein, the book of whom is one of my primary resources for my commentary on the Book of Joshua.

I wish the reporter had added a little more detail to this sentence:

In 1986, archaeologists found the earliest known text of the Bible, dated to about 600 B.C. It suggests that at least part of the Old Testament was written soon after some of the events it describes.

What text, Dude? Which part? Inquiring minds want to know and now will have to look it up themselves - and they're lazy, so they hate doing that!

But the piece is a pretty good summary of the history and current state of Biblical archaeology, at least as I understand the subject. Check 'er out.

And welcome back to the Internet’s greatest Bible commentary, in which Yours Truly reads through the Bible and explains its many mysteries as best my limited education allows. I encourage you to read the Good Book along with me, because my time’s too valuable to write summaries. Here we go!

Wow. That last post really pulled us ahead, didn't it? Only four more chapters to go now. You hardcore bloggers out there will think I'm a wimp for saying it, but I'm glad; publishing a daily series has been fun but tiring. I want to continue on to the Book of Judges, but I think I'll be taking a break before I do.

Onto Chapter 20.

20:2. "Speak to the children of Israel, saying, 'Prepare for you cities of refuge, of which I spoke to you through Moses.

This order was given by the LORD way, way back in Numbers/Bamidbar 35.

20:6. And he shall dwell in that city until he stand before the tribunal for judgment, until the death of the High Priest that shall be in those days. Then shall the slayer return, and come to his own city, and to his own house, to the city from which he fled."

I was confused when I first read this verse and had to seek clarification, so I'll now offer the same. A man who accidentally kills another may legally take refuge in one of six designated cities, after which he is marched back to his own town under guard in order to stand trial. If he is found guilty of intentional murder, he is executed; if not, he is returned to the city of refuge, wherein he must remain until the death of the high priest living there, an event which atones for an exile's sin.

Three cities are selected for the purpose on the western side of the Jordan River and three are selected to the east of it. Each of the three to the west - Shechem, Hebron, and Kadesh - were major centers of religion and naturally belonged to the Levites, so we can safely assume that the other three - Bezer, Ramoth, and Golan - were as well.

Their ability to protect people comes from the ancient and especially Hebrew idea of "holy ground", derived from a god's ownership of it and presence on it. Such land is naturally not beholden to any temporal authority, so its caretakers are in theory free to defy any secular parties' demands of it, such as extradition of a fugitive. This idea is basically still a part of the Catholic Church's doctrine and until the seventeenth century, it still had the clout to make its churches sanctuaries from local law.

(I should note in fairness that the Catholic Church itself argues its concept of sanctuary has nothing to do with ancient cities of refuge. Quoth the Catholic Encyclopedia: "The right of sanctuary was based on the inviolability attached to things sacred, and not, as some have held, on the example set by the Hebrew cities of refuge." Since the power of the cities rested on the inviolability of sacred things, however, I think the two concepts are justly identified with each other.)

Historically, the Hebrew cities of refuge may have not actually worked out so well in practice as they were supposed to in theory. Apparently they didn't in other civilizations of the time. Wikipedia's entry on the subject says:

Over time, these general rights of asylum were gradually curtailed, as some sanctuaries had become notorious hotbeds of crime; in Athens, for example, the regulations were changed so that slaves were only permitted to escape to the sanctuary of the temple of Theseus.

Some historians suggest this is why only six cities are listed when in theory any Levite city should work. By the time the Book of Joshua was written, other cities had eliminated the policy.

Later there was also the problem of what to do when not all six of the cities in question were under Jewish authority. Rabbis pragmatically concluded that alternative cities could be designated as necessary. Other Hebrew traditions and bylaws concerning issues with the cities of refuge are just as entertainingly practical. The Mishnah tells us that the mothers of the high priests were understandably concerned that the refugees would wish a quick death upon her son and that their thoughts would cause exactly that (an "evil eye" -type superstition), so they traditionally offered gifts of food and clothing to the new arrivals.

It was my intention to cover two chapters in today's post, but after reading Chapter 21 I've realized that doing it justice is going to require its own day's work.

NEXT: The secret identity of the Levites!

Bible Translation: Judaica Press's Tanach with Rashi commentary, courtesy of Chabad.org.

Picture: Cities of refuge, as in Joshua 20:1-9, illustration from a Bible card published 1901 by the Providence Lithograph Company.

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES:

Judah 12-19

Joshua 11

Joshua 10

Joshua 9

Joshua 7-8

Joshua 5-6

Joshua 2-4

Joshua 1

So: please find below my summary of Joshua 12-19.

Which I lifted from a page on Wikipedia, that famous fount of information. That page also says that

... by the Bible's account, and archaeologically as well, the Israelites did not conquer the plains at that time; thus, those borders that run through the plains are nominal; they partition land that Israel did not possess.

Thanks, Wikipedia!

The above map begs an important question that I haven't yet addressed in this series: if Joshua's campaign never took place - and make no mistake, the verdict on that question is in - then how did these tribes actually come to Canaan?

Well, they didn't come from anywhere. The people who eventually identified themselves as Israel, a chosen people that had destroyed and replaced the vile Canaanite population formerly living in the Levant, were actually the latest generation of Canaanites themselves. At the risk of losing all credibility with you as a scholar (oh, wait - I have none! Well then, let's carry on!), I'm going to quote Wikipedia's summary of the question:

Since archaeological remains show a smooth cultural continuity in [Canaan in the Late Bronze Age], rather than the destruction of one culture (Canaanite) and replacement by another (Israelite), a large body of archaeologists believe that the Israelites were simply an emergent subculture within Canaanite society — i.e. that an Israelite conquest would be... logical nonsense — it would have involved the Canaanites invading themselves, from Canaan.

There is evidence that many Canaanite cities were suddenly destroyed in the Late Bronze Age, but believers in the Abrahamic religions err in taking it all as proof of an Israelite invasion. If they widened their perspective of the archaeological finds to include what was happening at the time in the Eastern Mediterranean as a whole, they'd understand that the finds are part of a greater mystery: the unsolved question of why every civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean abruptly collapsed in a very short period, with the exception (barely) of Egypt.

One tribe of desert-wanderers, who principally worshiped a god named YWH and who never ate pigs, did indeed "invade" and settle in Canaan during the Late Bronze Age. They didn't see it as an opportunity so much as a necessity; the collapse of civilization meant that the Canaanites were once again living at a subsistence level and didn't have extra grain and vegetables to trade for the wanderers' sheep. The desert-wanderers would now have to farm for themselves. This they did by settling in small villages throughout the central highlands of the Levant, laying down roots that would eventually turn them into a small, unwealthy nation named Judah. Because the highlands were so difficult to reach and held too few resources to make conquering their inhabitants worth it, it survived the new and powerful kingdoms that emerged around it.

This tribe of Judah was never part of a greater monarchy that included the far more wealthy kingdom of Israel to the north. They were clearly of the same ethnicity, as well as of the same breed as the other desert-wanderers who settled Edom, Moab, and Ammon. They once had a leader named David, famed for how brilliantly he led his army of habiru against the Israelites and Ammonites. Eventually they would come under the power of a theocratic regime led by the high priest Hilkiah and the king Hezekiah, who were determined to obliterate the traditional polytheism of their people.

They had big dreams, those men. They imagined a unified Canaan with its capital in Jerusalem, where the throne would always be occupied by a descendant of the House of David. To facilitate this expansion of Judah's power, a history was written, either over time or all at once, in which the many differing traditions of the Israelite and Judahite tribes were threaded together to form one narrative. This history showed that all of their revered ancestors - Abram/Abraham, Isaac, Jacob - were of one family, and thus so were they, and damn it, it was time to start acting like it by integrating into one political unit and reestablishing their independence from foreigners.

That didn't happen, of course. Judah's rebellion against its Assyrian master resulted in ruin, with only Jerusalem being spared thanks to a last-minute bribe. Later attempts by "YWHist" kings to throw off the yoke of foreign agents resulted in the exile to Babylon.

All of which you might say is a digression from Joshua 12-19, but I think it's related; both the chapters and this post are about how the mythic kingdom of Israel was originally organized. The chapters deal with the content of the myth itself and I've dealt here with the writing of it.

We'll return to the story of Joshua tomorrow. 'Til then.

NEXT TIME: I'll be honest with you. I'd have to read ahead to know.

SOURCES: Wikipedia, The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES:

Joshua 11

Joshua 10

Joshua 9

Joshua 7-8

Joshua 5-6

Joshua 2-4

Joshua 1

And welcome back to the Internet’s greatest Bible commentary, in which Yours Truly reads through the Bible and explains its many mysteries as best my limited education allows. I encourage you to read the Good Book along with me, because my time’s too valuable to write summaries. Here we go!

11:1. And it was, when Jabin king of Hazor heard, he sent to Jobab king of Madon, and to the king of Shimron, to the king of Achshaph.

11:2. And to the kings that were on the north of the mountains, and of the plains south of Chinnaroth, and in the valley, and in the regions of Dor on the west.

By the end of Chapter 10, Joshua has successfully conquered and obliterated all the cities in the southern half of Israel. Now Israel has to reckon with the major cities to the north, which it does.

5:18. Joshua made war a long time with all these kings.

This verse is the subject of one of Rashi's many entertainingly preposterous notes. According to the venerated sage, this verse is actually a rebuke to Joshua, because the Israelite leader, aware of his divinely ordination to parcel out the Promised Land to the tribes of Israel, took his sweet time killing the Canaanites in order to extend his lifespan.

5:21. And at that time, Joshua came and cut off the 'Anakim from the mountains, from Hebron, from Debir, from 'Anab, and from all the mountains of Judah, and from all the mountains of Israel; Joshua destroyed them completely with their cities.

Here we have mention of the Anakim, or "the descendants of Anak", a small ethnic minority that are physically intimidating to their neighbors because of their great height. Oddly enough, traditional Jewish sources tend to prefer a down-to-earth interpretation of passages involving these people, while some Christians still link them with the nephilim of Genesis and conclude they were demon-human hybrids of astonishing size.

The Anakim could well have been nephilim - giants - but remember how relative that word is. People in the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age were far shorter than the average man or woman is today. Goliath's height of six feet and seven inches (200cm) was considered awe-inspiring at the time it was recorded, but today I have a cousin that tall.

In his book The Greek Myths, Robert Graves suggests that the Anakites' mighty ancestor Anak is the same mythic figure whom the ancient Greeks knew as Anax. There are undeniable parallels - like Anak, Anax was said to be the giant leader of a tall people named after him, the Anactorians - and both legends existed in the same time period, in two lands known to have been in contact. It's a neat thought, so I hope it's true.

OK, then. Since Chapter 12 is a major gear change from the type of stuff we've been reading so far, I'm going to end today's entry here.

NEXT TIME: As any policeman or military officer can tell you, behind every successful mission lies a mountain of paperwork. Join Joshua as he gets down to the less sexy, bureaucratic side of leading an invasion.

Bible Translation: Judaica Press's Tanach with Rashi's commentary, courtesy of Chabad.org.

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES:

Joshua 10

Joshua 9

Joshua 7-8

Joshua 5-6

Joshua 2-4

Joshua 1

And welcome back to the Internet’s greatest Bible commentary, in which Yours Truly reads through the Bible and explains its many mysteries as best my limited education allows. I encourage you to read the Good Book along with me, because my time’s too valuable to write summaries. Here we go!

10:1. [The Amorite kings learned that]...the inhabitants of Gibeon had made peace with Israel, and were among them;

10:2. That they feared greatly, because Gibeon was a great city, as one of the royal cities, and because it was greater than Ai, and all her men were mighty.

In these setup verses lies another hint that the various episodes of Joshua's campaign were originally standalone stories. We have here five Amorite kings going ape over Gibeon joining Israel, "because it was greater than Ai" - a comparison which should mystify any reader who recalls how Ai is described only two chapters ago: "they are but few" (7:3). Ai is understood by the writer of Joshua 8 to be a pathetic distraction that unfortunately develops into something bigger due to Achan's sin, but here the writer - be he the same man or another - is clearly imagining a city of somewhat more repute.

10:3. And Adonizedek, king of Jerusalem...

Adonizedek is the second king of Jerusalem mentioned in the Bible, after Melchizedek, and his name merits some attention. Most believe it translates into English as "My Lord is Righteousness" just as Melchizedek's does "Righteousness is my king", but both meanings may be the result of reinterpretation by later Hebrew and Christian thinkers. "Tzedek" could also be the name of a deity, possibly a second name for the Canaanite god El _before he became the _Elohim we all know and love, and if so that would fit very well with the naming practices of Canaanite kings, including the Israelites themselves. They often incorporated their patron deities' names into their own.

10:5. And the five kings of the Amorites, the king of Jerusalem, the king of Hebron, the king of Jarmuth, the king of Lachish, the king of Eglon, gathered together and went up, they and all their camps, and encamped on Gibeon, and made war against it.

The Amorites were a powerful people who are nevertheless well past their heyday here, at least if we're assuming that this war is really happening when the Bible says it is. From 2000-1600 B.C.E. they were so dominant in Mesopotamia that scholars sometimes refer to that cultural and political phase of the Levant as the Amorite Period. Hammurabi, the famous king of Babylon, was an Amorite. Their hegemony was eventually broken by the Hittites, who themselves imploded before the time of Joshua's invasion.

5:10. And the Lord confused them before Israel, and slew them with a great slaughter at Gibeon, and they chased them by the way that goes up to Beth-horon, and smote them to Azekah, and to Makkedah.

"Confusion" might better be read "chaos". I've heard on more than one occasion a historian say that casualties in ancient warfare were usually light until for whatever reason one side broke formation and ceased to function as a unit. At that point people really started dying in large numbers - mostly on the side which had caved. The Lord is simply being credited here with the breaking of the Amorite ranks.

5:11. And it was as they fled from before Israel, and were in the descent of Beth-horon, that the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them to Azekah, and they died. There were more who died with the hailstones than whom the children of Israel slew with the sword.

What do we make of this record of a miracle?

Christian apologists bristle when skeptics dismiss accounts like this one out of hand, but I don't think they're fairly acknowledging the propensity for absolutely bizarre embellishments to which ancient scribes apparently leaned. An Egyptian pharoah had it written down (prior to winning the actual fight) that the gods had drowned his opponents in a giant tidal wave. Jewish writers claimed that an angel saved Jerusalem by striking down 185,000 Assyrian soldiers... after which Hezekiah apparently bribed Sennacherib to leave out of pity. Other examples abound. It wouldn't be unfair to suggest the stones raining down from Heaven in this story are a complete fabrication. It certainly wouldn't be unfair to suggest that they're just embellished hailstones, taken as a sign.

5:13. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is this not written in the book of Jashar?

Creation.com has done its homework on other cultures' versions of this famous miracle, while of course remaining predictably certain that the Book of Joshua's version is the true account. I'll quote it here:

"[Many] cultures have legends that seem to be based on this event. For example, there is a Greek myth of Apollo’s son, Phaethon, who disrupted the sun’s course for a day... In fact, the New Zealand Maori people have a myth about how their hero Maui slowed the sun before it rose, while the Mexican Annals of Cuauhtitlan (the history of the empire of Culhuacan and Mexico) records a night that continued for an extended time... It should also be noted that the Amorites were sun and moon worshippers."

I'd append to the last sentence of the above paragraph: "Like everyone else." Sun worship is so prevalent a feature of ancient religion that it's almost not worth noting the Amorites practiced it.

It's even found in the religion of the Hebrews, in this very story. Joshua's demand of the celestial bodies to freeze takes the form of a poetic couplet in the midst of a story otherwise composed of prose, which is about as big a hint as there can be that Joshua's words pre-date the story around them. Divorced of its context the quotation suggests itself to be a pagan incantation, famous saying, or both; the exact words of miracle workers, including Jesus, were often repeated verbatim by magicians in an attempt to achieve the same results. The couplet can also be taken as Exhibit B in the case that Joshua as a character pre-dates his Biblical incarnation (see Joshua 1 in this series).

Concerning the "book of Jashar" (also spelled "Jasher") mentioned in 5:13: while many think the book is the source for this story and simply no longer exists, Orthodox Judaism identifies it as another name for the Torah.

5:14. And there was no day like that before it or after it, that the Lord hearkened to the voice of a man, for the Lord fought for Israel.

The writer of the Book of Judah now has to cover for the fact that he just quoted a man's successful ordering around of the sun and moon: really, of course, God did it.

Whew. I knew this was going to be a long entry. I got to get to bed.

NEXT TIME: We continue our daringly sequential exegetical escapade with Chapter 11.

Bible Translation: Judaica Press's Tanach with Rashi commentary, courtesy of Chabad.org.

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES:

Joshua 9

Joshua 7-8

Joshua 5-6

Joshua 2-4

Joshua 1

And welcome back to this week's final installment of the Internet's greatest Bible commentary, in which Yours Truly reads through the Bible and explains its many mysteries as best his limited education allows. He encourages you to read the Good Book with him, because his time's too valuable to write summaries. Here we go!

9:6 And [the Gibeonites] went to Joshua to the camp at Gilgal, and said to him and to the men of Israel: "We have come from a distant land, and now make a covenant with us."

Notice that the Israelites consider a promise made to someone to be binding, even if that person lied to obtain it. Oaths, blessings, and curses were powerful and irrevocable things in antiquity. Their importance is why one of the Ten Commandments is to "not take the LORD's name in vain", as the King James Version famously puts it. The commandment is warning you that it's a sin to say something like "I swear by God in Heaven that I will repay you next Tuesday" and then break your word.

"Wait! Wait! Back up! Who were the Gibeonites?" you ask. Well, they were, quite simply, the people who lived in the city of Gibeon, much as New Yorkers are people who live in New York. Ethnically-speaking, they were apparently Hivites.

"And who are the Hivites?" you implacably inquire.

I hate it when you ask questions I can't answer. But at least in this case nobody can. Out of the seven different nations living in Canaan at the time of Joshua's invasion, the Hivites are the most obscure. The only detail known about them is that they were uncircumcised, which seems to me like a highly personal thing to know about folks who are otherwise completely mysterious to you.

At least why they're mentioned in the Book of Joshua is easier to figure out. Whoever the Gibeonites were and whatever happened to them, they clearly still lived in Canaan at the time the Book of Joshua was written. The writers of the Book of Joshua needed to explain their presence.

Remember the writers' goal and you'll understand the problem: the story of Joshua was written to help unite all the people of Israel and Judah against their conquerors, the Assyrians. First, it tells the inspiring story of an Israelite general taking over the Promised Land. Joshua and his army are meant to serve as an example for everyone to follow. Second, the Book of Joshua shows Joshua dividing the Promised Land among the twelve tribes of Israel. It reminded the Jews, as it still does today, that they were one people, not many, and that the whole land belonged to them, so they had a right and even a God-given duty to kick out foreigners.

But if that was true, who were these Gibeonite people? Everyone knew this un-assimilated minority had been living in Canaan for practically forever. They weren't children of Abraham, that was for sure; just look at their yoohoos.

Chapter 9 of the Book of Joshua answers this question with a story so convenient and racist that it's practically impossible to accept at face-value: they were so scared of us when we arrived that they tricked us into letting them live, then promised to be our gofers. Especially considering the importance that the ancient Israelites placed on one's heritage, the writers' message is equally transparent: the Gibeonites of today are also cowards and should still be our gofers.

Still, if I were a Gibeonite I would count myself lucky. After all, the writers of Genesis explained Moab and Ammon to be what happens when girls sleep with their fathers.

By the way, there is a modern city of Gibeon - "New Gibeon" now - but it's full of Jews, not Hivites. It's small because it was only resettled in 1977 and because you have to be brave/crazy to live there; it lies in the Arab territory now known as the West Bank / Judea and Samaria Area. Here's a picture:

Have a good weekend!

NEXT TIME: Chapter 10! Duh!

Bible Translation: Judaica Press's Tanach with Rashi commentary, courtesy of Chabad.org.

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES: Joshua 7-8 Joshua 5-6 Joshua 2-4 Joshua 1

Uh oh, there's a lot to cover here. We'd better jump right into it.

When last we left our hero (as my old O.T. professor always likes to say), Joshua has successfully destroyed the city of Jericho and now has his eye set on its neighbor, Ai.

7:2. And Joshua sent men from Jericho, to Ai, which is beside Beth-aven, on the east side of Beth-el, and spoke to them saying, Go up and spy out the land. And the men went up and spied out Ai.

7:3. And they returned to Joshua, and said to him, Do not let all the people go up; but let about two or three thousand men go up and smite Ai; do not trouble all the people there; for they are but few.

We're starting to get a sense of Joshua's M.O. here: always start by sending spies to check out the enemy's defenses.

In this case, the spies' report is meant to make the Israelites' upcoming defeat even more humiliating. The town of Ai is not a tough target. Joshua shouldn't need to send more than a sliver of his army to take it.

1. And the men of Ai smote of them about thirty-six men; and they chased them from before the gate to Shebarim, and smote them in the descent; and the hearts of the people melted, and became as water.

The men of Ai whup the ever-loving bejeezus out of Joshua's men, chasing them all the way back down the hill (most cities were built on top of hills back then so that they could be more easily defended). Notice that despite suffering total defeat, the Israelite force of three thousand men only suffers thirty-six casualties.

There are several ways to explain that strangely low figure. First, you could just accept that war is a strange art and sometimes you get these results. For instance, in the famous Battle of Trenton, George Washington attacked 1,500 Hessian soldiers with 2,400 men, but only two American soldiers and twenty-two Hessians died in the fighting. Second, you could take this as evidence that the number of Israelites listed in the Bible is heavily inflated (which is true, as I've previously discussed), since thirty-six is only a realistic number of deaths if there were far fewer participants.

7.1. And the children of Israel committed a trespass in the consecrated thing, for Achan the son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took of the consecrated thing; and the anger of the Lord was kindled against the children of Israel. (Joshua 7.1)

Notice the collectivist mindset of the ancients here: one soldier angers the LORD by taking home some of the nice things the Israelites find in Jericho, but this verse accuses all of "the children of Israel" - and an apparently like-minded God punishes the entire army. The sin of the individual is the sin of the community. You are indeed your brother's keeper.

7.14. [God says:] In the morning, therefore, you shall be brought near according to your tribes; and it shall be, that the tribe which the Lord takes shall come near by families; and the family which the Lord takes shall come near by households; and the household which the Lord takes shall come near man by man.

This is a very unclear verse, perhaps purposefully so; a later redactor of the text might have been embarrassed by the method which the Israelites use here and purposefully obscured it. What happens is that the priests cast lots - basically, roll dice - in order to figure out who is guilty. Probably they are specifically using Urimm and Thummim a holy pair of divination stones in the possession of the high priest. These particular stones are the Israelites' primary means of communicating with God after Moses dies: Joshua asks what he should do next and the high priest pulls out the stones to find out.

So: first the high priest rolls to see which tribe is at fault (Judah), then he rolls to see which family of that tribe is at fault (the Zarhites), then he rolls to see which household in that family is at fault (Zabdi), and finally he rolls to see which of Zabdi's people is at fault (Achan, Zabdi's grandson), after which Achan (whose name basically means "trouble-maker") confesses.

If this doesn't sound very different from seeking the advice of someone who gazes into crystal balls or reads tea leaves, well, let's face it: it's not.

7:25. And Joshua said, Why have you troubled us? The Lord shall trouble you this day. And all Israel stoned him with stones, and burned them with fire, [after] they [had] stoned them with stones.

A friend (actually he's more of an enemy, but we keep in touch) who has visited Israel and who majored in Religion tells me that the Hebrews usually didn't throw rocks at somebody until they died; that might take too long. Instead they brought the criminal to a cliff and then stoned him until he fell. Since the tribesmen of Judah (which wrote most of the Tanakh) mainly lived in the mountains, they had plenty of cliffs available.

I'm going to skip most of chapter 8 because while it's fun stuff, it's also pretty self-explanatory. God is happy with Israel again, so Joshua conquers Ai, and this time everyone keeps their hands in their pockets.

8:30. Then Joshua built an altar to the Lord God of Israel on Mount Ebal.

8:31. As Moses, the servant of the Lord, commanded the children of Israel, as it is written in the book of the law of Moses, an altar of whole stones, upon which no (man) has lifted up any iron. And they offered upon it burnt-offerings to the Lord and sacrificed peace-offerings.

8:32. And he wrote there upon the stones a copy of the law of Moses, which he wrote in the presence of the children of Israel.

8:33. And all Israel, and their elders and officers and their judges, stood on this side of the Ark and on that side, before the priests the Levites, the bearers of the Ark of the covenant of the Lord, the stranger as well as the native born, half of them over against Mount Gerizim and half of them over against Mount Ebal, as Moses the servant of the Lord had commanded, to bless the people of Israel first.

8:34. And afterward he read all the words of the law, the blessing and the curse, according to all that is written in the book of the Torah.

This scene may seem familiar to you. In the Book of Deuteronomy, a still-living Moses orders the people of Israel to perform this ritual after they enter the Promised Land. The Book of Joshua's record of the people doing so is actually considered the older account by scholars, however; that is, the story of the Israelities performing the ritual is older than the story of Moses telling them to do it.

Both stories may actually be incorrect, though. The Samaritan version of the Torah says that Mount Gerizim - the other mountain that the tribes stand on - is the original site of the altar, as well as the place God has truly designed for His worship. This disagreement may be why both mountains are used, but blessings are pronounced from Ebal and curses from Gerizim: the writers of Dueteronomy and Jonah, southerners who would have disagreed with the Samarians, are trying to bring northern and southern Hebrews together while still subtly asserting their chosen mountain's superiority.

Here's a picture of both Ebal and Gerizim:

On the archaeology side of things, a structure which may well be an altar has been discovered on Mount Ebal. The only problem is it's facing the wrong direction - away from Mount Gerizim, north instead of south. Wikipedia says that "the excavating archaeologist proposed that this could be resolved by identifying a mountain to the north as Gerizim rather than the usual location, [but] the suggestion was ridiculed by both the Samaritans, who found it offensive to move the centre of their religion, and by other scholars and archaeologists."

So take from all that what you will.

Fin.

As usual, all Biblical quotations are from the Tanach published by Judaica Press, courtesy of Chabad.org.

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES: Joshua 5-6 Joshua 2-4 Joshua 1

Above: Family photo! Brooklyn, NY. 2007.

The version of the Hebrew Bible we will use today is once again brought to you by Chabad.org, the website of our favorite Hasids, the Chabadniks (pictured above). They should all live and be well.

Let's see what their ancestors are doing in the Book of Joshua, chapter 5.

5.13. And it was when Joshua was in Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and saw, and, behold, a man was standing opposite him with his sword drawn in his hand; and Joshua went to him, and said to him, Are you for us, or for our adversaries?

5.14. And he said, No, but I am the the captain of the host of the Lord; I have now come. And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and prostrated himself, and said to him, What does my lord say to his servant?

5.15. And the captain of the Lord's host said to Joshua, Remove your shoe from your foot; for the place upon which you stand is holy. And Joshua did so.

When reading this passage, I always assumed "the Lord's host" is a reference to God's army of angels. Rashi, however, is convinced that "the Lord's host" is a reference to Israel, and on reflection he's more likely to be right. I think he and other religious Jews are almost certainly wrong, however, in identifying the captain as the archangel Michael; Michael's name doesn't pop up in the Tanakh until the Book of Daniel, which means he probably didn't have a place in Jewish mythology until the Exile.

This should go without saying, but the captain's not Jesus, either.

And naturally, that means the Mormon idea that the captain is both Jesus and Michael is right out.

No - the captain is God Himself. Notice that Joshua is told by the captain to remove his shoes, just as Moses was once told. Notice also that Joshua prostrates himself before the captain; the Jews who edited the Book of Joshua were fierce monotheists and never would have allowed this scene to remain if they thought Joshua was bowing to anyone but the LORD.

The Walls of Jericho

Above: The ruins of Jericho's walls. Cool, huh?

6.2. And the Lord said to Joshua, See, I have given into your hand Jericho and its king, the mighty warriors.

6.3. And you shall circle the city, all the men of war, go round about the city once. Thus shall you do six days.

6.4. And seven priests shall bear seven trumpets of rams' horns before the Ark; and on the seventh day you shall encircle the city seven times, and the priests shall blow with the trumpets.

6.5. And it shall be that when they make a long blast with the ram's horn, when you hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout a great shout; and the wall of the city shall fall down in its place and the people shall go up, every man opposite him.

Jericho's walls really did fall and the city was indeed destroyed, but not by Joshua; the city was burnt down roughly 150 years before the Bible's dating of the Israelite invasion. Joshua would have arrived to find the city abandoned. Jericho's sudden, violent ruin was more likely a famous story which the writers of the Book of Joshua attached to Joshua's conquest.

But wait! Don't get too depressed! There is indeed evidence of attacks from across the Jordan River in the fifteenth century by "shashu (Egyptian for wanderers) of YHW", whom the Egyptians list in their records as one of their many enemies. Anson Rainey of the Biblical Archaeology Review writes in an online article:

"A text in the hypostyle hall at Karnak that can be dated quite precisely to 1291 B.C.E. (to the reign of Seti I) tells of shasu pastoralists on the mountain ridges of Canaan. They have no regard for the laws of the Egyptian palace. A similar text locates a clash with shasu in northern Sinai or the western Negev."

"These shasu were the main source of early hill-country settlements in Canaan that represent the Israelites’ settling down."

These nomadic shashu attacked cities in Canaan during the Late Bronze Age and eventually settled in the highlands where the nation of Judah arose, all in the right time period. That's pretty exciting, isn't it? Even more exciting, writes Israel Finkelstein in The Bible Unearthed, is the fact that when archaeologists dig through these settlements, there's one usually common discovery which they just can't seem to find: pig bones.

OK, enough historical fact-checking. Back to the story.

6:17. And the city shall be devoted; it, and all that is in it, to the Lord; only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all that is with her in the house, because she hid the messengers that we sent.

Notice the verb "devoted" basically means "kill/burn". We're talking about violent blood sacrifices here to the LORD, not only of animals and treasure but of people. The real difference between sacrifices to Yahweh and other gods isn't that Yahweh doesn't demand human flesh, but that the Israelites only have to kill enemies and not their own people. This is because of the Israelite system of redemption. Instead of having your firstborn son sacrificed on the altar of the Tabernacle, you're allowed by Yahweh to redeem (that is, buy back from Him) the child with a dove or bull. The Bible's first example of this substitution system is when Abraham receives a ram with which to replace Isaac.

Aaaaaand I think that'll do for today.

PREVIOUS ENTRIES IN THIS SERIES: Joshua 1, Joshua 2-4.

Above: The River Jordan in all her glory.

Hm. I left my JPS Tanakh at home today and the only JPS version of the Jewish Bible I can find online is the 1917 release. Well, let's try using Judaica Press's version today, helpfully available on Chabad.org. It could be fun, since it comes with Rashi's commentary, one of those rabbis who never met a question about the Bible for which he couldn't bend over and pull out an answer.

2:1. And Joshua the son of Nun sent two men out of Shittim to spy secretly, saying, Go see the land and Jericho. And they went, and came to the house of an innkeeper named Rahab, and they lay there.

According to Jewish tradition, the two spies are Phinehas and Caleb. In theory that can't be true, since only Caleb and Joshua survived the Israelites' forty years in the desert. Phinehas should have died with the last generation. However, he actually does appear later in the Book of Joshua and gets rewarded with his own mountain, so apparently he's not.

This first verse is a good example of what I mean about Rashi's commentary: while you might only take from the above verse that Joshua sent two spies, Rashi informs us that he specifically told the two spies that they should pretend to be either deaf-mutes or potters.

And ah, yes - Rahab. I once heard someone refer to her as "the original hooker with the heart of gold." What a thought: the storytelling tradition that climaxed in 1990 with Pretty Woman begins here.

What I only noticed while studying for this post was that her reputation as a prostitute may be undeserved. Let's read that verse again.

2:1. And Joshua the son of Nun sent two men out of Shittim to spy secretly, saying, Go see the land and Jericho. And they went, and came to the house of an innkeeper named Rahab, and they lay there.

Who knew? The word for "prostitute" in Hebrew is apparently similar to - or even the same as - the word for "innkeeper". I'll bet that's gotten a lot of Hebrew men in trouble over the years.

JOSEPH: Finally! We've made it to Bethlehem. You stay here, Mary. I'll go find a prostitute.

MARY: At least you've finally admitted you see them. I knew you couldn't deal with this.

It's nice to see that the translators at Judaica Press give Rahab the benefit of the doubt.

Jewish tradition also says that Rahab not only gets to live as a reward for helping the Hebrew spies, but also gets to marry Joshua.

3:17. And the priests that bore the Ark of the covenant of the Lord stood firm arranged on the dry land in the midst of the Jordan, and all Israel passed over on dry ground, until the whole nation had completely passed over the Jordan.

In chapter 3, God repeats the miracle He did for the last generation, parting the waters of the Jordan River for Joshua's forces. The miracles in which God parts the waters are probably His most important ones in the Bible because of their symbolism. They represent God's greatest power and recall the story of Creation.

...the earth was astonishingly empty, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the water. (Genesis/Bereshit 1:2)

To understand why there is water in the world before God has created anything, you need to know about other stories of how the world was created, specifically the Sumerian and Babylonian myths (remember, Abram's father Terah is from the city of Ur, which lies in that part of the world). In many mythologies but specifically these Middle-Eastern ones, water represents chaos and disorder; it has existed forever, like we think of outer space existing now. The gods make the world by creating order out of that chaotic, immortal substance. For instance, in Babylonian mythology the god Marduk creates the world by killing the ocean goddess Tiamat and splitting her in half.

In Genesis, God creates the world in a similar way (after He finishes turning on the lights so He can see what He's doing), creating space in which to work by parting the waters. His parting of a sea (or lake, or whatever) in Exodus and a river in Joshua are reminders to that.

OK, that's Joshua 2-4. Here, by the way, is a map showing where all of this is happening:

You can see Jericho, but Abel-Shittim's too small to be on this map. The Jordan River is the blue river feeding the Dead Sea from the north. The Israelites cross more or less directly east of Jericho.

While today's archaeologists dismiss a lot of the Biblical account, almost all of the ones I've read do agree that the Israelites came to settle Canaan through its eastern border, so I think the Book of Joshua does get its geography right here.

PREVIOUS ENTRIES IN THIS SERIES: Joshua 1.

Like many other books of the "Old Testament", Joshua is grouped differently in the Hebrew canon; it's considered the first book of the Prophets. The best bet is that the earliest recognizable version of this book was prepared by the scribes of either King Hezekiah of Judah or his descendant King Josiah. They wrote it because their king wanted to reunite all of Israel under Jerusalem's rule. The story of Joshua conquering Canaan was the perfect story with which to inspire the people, to convince them that the LORD would bless Judah's liberating Canaan from the Assyrians if only they would believe and be faithful.

I should just go ahead and say it now: from what archaeologists have discovered, Joshua's invasion of Canaan can't possibly have really occurred - any of it, at all. Egypt actually ruled Canaan during the traditional time period (the Late Bronze Age) in which the Israelites are supposed to have invaded. None of the less traditional ideas about when the Israelites might have attacked work either, for various reasons.

More than that, details like the number of Israelites with Joshua (Numbers 1:26) are transparently untrue. The tribe of Judah, for instance, is listed as contributing almost 75,000 soldiers to the Israelite army, but archaeologists can't find evidence in the land it settled for a larger population than 12,000. For another comparison, consider this: Rome is known to be the first city to ever reach a population of one million people, which it did over a thousand years after Joshua's day - but a conservative estimate of the Israelite "camp" under Joshua would have to at least exceed 3 million. For the Late Bronze Age, that's just crazy talk.

But not necessarily for scribes living five hundred years later, who might at least have imagined such fantastic numbers. And the reason why we can finger those later priests of Judah as the writers of Joshua is because the Canaan which Joshua is depicted conquering corresponds nicely with Canaan as the priests would have known it in the time.

Summary:

• The Book of Joshua was written in the 700-600s B.C.

• It was written to serve as an example to the people, so they would support the king of Judah's plans to overthrow the Assyrians and unite Israel. The people who read the book were supposed to see their current king as a new Joshua and themselves as God's new army.

It's quite possible a lot of events written about in the Book of Joshua really happened, but probably not in the context in which they're presented.

Alright, that's it for preliminary discussion. Let's move onto the content.

1:1 Now it came to pass after the death of Moses the servant of the LORD, that the LORD spoke unto Joshua the son of Nun, Moses' minister...

The most interesting thing about Joshua, from a biologist's perspective, is how he could have a fish for a father.

Because apparently he did: "Nun" means "fish" in Aramaic (it's not a Hebrew word). And while the Israelites often gave their children strange names, "fish" is still too odd to be one of them.

Most scholars don't find that interesting, but at least one of them does: Dr. Robert M. Price wonders if Joshua, clearly a famous figure in ancient Canaan, originally had no place in the Israelite genealogies at all, but was once instead a legendary half-god, half-human warrior like Hercules or Achilles. His father would have been one of the elohim of the waters, someone like (but not) the Philistine sea god Dagon (pictured above).

According to this theory, the Israelites retooled Joshua's legend after they switched from polytheism to henotheism (and from henotheism to monotheism): Joshua became simply a hero and nobody paid any attention to his father, who was presumed to just be some poor jerk who spent most of his life as a slave in Egypt.

This theory also explains the miracles that God performs for Joshua: originally, Joshua performs the miracles himself.

The rest of Joshua 1 isn't very interesting, just Joshua giving Team Israel a pep talk before the big game, so we'll stop here. Hope you had fun.

NEXT: Joshua, Chapter 2. Maybe.

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES: Joshua 9 Joshua 7-8 Joshua 5-6 Joshua 2-4

Common Sense Atheism has compiled a list of links to over 500 debates about the existence of God. Gorge yourself.

Another large hint that many of the Bible's stories are fictional can be found in the names of their characters.

The example I run across most often are Mahlon and Chilion, the doomed husbands of Ruth and her sister-in-law in the widely-misunderstood Book of Ruth; the reader is tipped off in advance to their coming fates by the fact that their names respectively mean "sick" and "wasting away".

But other suspiciously clever monikers abound, in the New Testament as well as the old:

Zacchaeus, the tax collector who offers so much money to the poor, has a name which at its root means "to give alms".

Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews, is appropriately-named "ruler of the people" (talk about a case of your parents having your life planned out for you, huh?).

One would only have to be introduced to Martha to know that she is the "lady of the house".

And Judas Iscariot has three equally-possible (to some) translations. One is that he was an Edomite, the same red-haired, good-for-nothing race as Herod. The second and third translations are "assassin" (a particular sort, too, but I won't get into it here) and "traitor".

The most fascinating and tantalizing sobriquet, however, which I've stumbled on in my recent studies (comprised mainly of Dr. Price's The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man and Jack Miles's God and Christ), is that of Thomas.

Like Moses, Thomas is a name that has clearly undergone some surgery. It was the Greek name for the sign of Gemini, which is to say that it means "twin", but that of course isn't a real name. "He would have been called So-And-So the Twin" (Price). But withal the So-And-So? And isn't it strange that a man would simply be referred to as "the Twin"? One imagines he must have had a pretty famous brother or sister.

You see this coming, don't you?

Multiple traditions (and possibly some manuscripts of the canon, though I don't have a source for that to reference at the moment, so just disbelieve me there) have it that Thomas's full name was Judas Thomas - and Judas is one of the brothers of Jesus listed in the canonical gospels. While by no means proven, it certainly isn't a stretch to imagine the Catholic Church deciding to start snipping away at the connection once its emerging orthodoxy began to demand a sole, virgin birth by an eternally virginal Mary - and a time-honored way to lie without, y'know, actually saying anything factually untrue is just to withhold certain information. The issue could be buried well enough simply by ceasing to identify Thomas's twin.

To me, a mind-blowing thought, even if unsubstantiated.

And I hope you're grateful for it, 'cause I don't have internet access in my apartment right now and this post has cost me nearly 3000 won to type at the local internet cafe.

I'll be updating my 2010 Reading List (primarily composed of books I uploaded to my Kindle in February) as I read through it, in no particular order.

And since I've gone ahead and created a post to make that announcement, I'll go ahead and list what I've finished thus far, as well as brief reviews:

The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett – I paid a visit to the former chair of the Shorter College Humanities Department recently and we naturally flung books to read at each other before parting. This was his contribution to my stack - a generations-spanning chronicle of the Englishmen and women involved in the building of a cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge. The writer was previously known for his work in the thriller genre, but this radical departure quickly became his bestselling work and has even spawned three board games and a television series, as well as a sequel novel. For good reason, too: I recommend the book to any fan of historical fiction. If Follett does say so himself: "It recreates, quite vividly, the entire life of the village and the people who live there. You feel you know the place and the people as intimately as if you yourself were living there in the Middle Ages."

Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan – The movie looked like a great deal of fun, but in general I’m a firm believer of reading the book first. This was the first real disappointing read of my batch, though in all fairness that's largely because I turned out not to be the target audience; the reading level on this one's far below, say, the Harry Potter series, on which by the way it is far too shamelessly based (the gods' children all attend an annual summer camp where they train, for cryin' out loud). What I did enjoy enough to finish the story was how well Rick Riordan handles the central theme of parental abandonment. Naturally, it's that very redeeming feature at the core which the movie mishandles as badly as possible. Instead of keeping Percy Jackson in the dark about his completely mysterious god of a father, alternately longing to meet Poseidon and hating him for leaving, the film adaptation (1) shows Poseidon in the first minute of the film, so that we don't have any of that pesky curiousity bugging us as we take in the special effects, (2) has everyone Percy knows assuring him that Daddy loves him and is kept from his side by forces outside of his control, and (3) even has Poseidon's voice repeatedly guiding Percy through danger. Oy.

The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway - This actually wasn't on my reading list. A copy was included gratis by the curriculum publisher from which my school purchases all its materials and I stole it for a night. Coincidentally, two of Ernest Hemingway's other famous novels actually are on my list.

The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton - I uploaded all 30+ of her novels onto my Kindle for .99. That never ceases to tickle me. That aside, I can't really recommend this one. It's not unenjoyable, but the book is written in a Victorian tradition that most modern readers will find silly and unsatisfying: the morality tale about the girl who foolishly engages in one or more Ill-Advised Activities, like putting off marriage too long or flirting with men so they buy you things. The consequences of these crimes is almost unfailingly homelessness and death in her twenties. The contrived nature of these dire ends can be hysterical, but they're never engaging. Fortunately, Edith Wharton moved on from such stuff to write The Age of Innocence, which is a mature and engrossing study of both an unconsummated extramarital affair and New York's high society at the beginning of the 20th century, fabulously written. Go check it out.

Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick – The true accounts of six North Korean refugees, who describe life beyond the DMZ and how they escaped it. Any account of the horrific and inexcusable conditions in which people in North Korea are trying to live out their lives is bound to be moving, but living as I currently do in the Koreans' southern republic - surrounded by this proud race and witnessing the society they're capable of achieving when not trod into the mud by a dictator - each story in this book feels barbed with greater poignancy. To see an ajumma happily teasing her toddler as she shops for dinner at an overstocked supermarket, then to read about a practically interchangeable woman watching her own baby die of starvation and incapable of even acknowledging the fact, truly impresses on one just how monstrous the crimes of Kim Jung-il and his cronies are.

The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, by Dr. Robert “The Bible Geek” Price – A biblical scholar’s assessment of the four gospels’ authenticity by one of the infamous (in Christian circles, anyway) Jesus Seminar's founders. Dr. Price is the very opposite of a fundamentalist Christian; ometimes there seems to be no passage in the Bible which he considers believable. I don't agree with all of his opinions (I find it likely that a historical Jesus has at least walked this Earth at some time), but he always provides a very dense, informative, and witty read. Plus, he's a fellow comic book geek. What other Biblical scholar can you find who quotes recent issues of the Justice League of America?