Back in Genesis, God had promised Abraham that He would give his descendants a land and a nation and that they would be a blessing to all people. But the promised land, modern-day Palestine, was inhabited by other people who worshipped other gods. Naturally, they had to be slaughtered so that the first part of the promise, concerning a land, could be kept. The book of Joshua tells the story of the bloody, one-sided territorial conquest. The third part of the promise, about being a blessing to all people, was no concern of the author.
And who was the author? The preponderance of scholarly opinion holds that Joshua is continuous with the five books of the Pentateuch, which is why one sometimes hears the term "Hexateuch" applied to the first six books of the Old Testament (Pentateuch plus Joshua equals Hexateuch). In that case, we have in Joshua a composite of the four sources of the so-called documentary hypothesis. This would explain the familiar problem of contradictory details (caused by the coexistence of unedited material from different sources within the same narrative) and long, boring stretches (our old friend, P). An example of the former occurs when the Israeli fighting force is crossing the Jordan. In one detail, the presence of the Ark in the river acts like a dam, the water is stopped up, and the Israelites cross on dry land, whereupon the Ark follows them out of the river bed and the water flows again. In another detail, we are told that the Ark and the priests led the procession across the river. These details appear contradictory.
Most of the second half of Joshua, about the partition of the conquered territory, with its numbing geographical lists and confusing tribal names, is an instance of another longueur courtesy of the Priestly source.
Unless you are determined to give it a pass since it's been canonized as Holy Writ, it's hard to find anything to like in Joshua. The title character is plainly meant to be Moses's successor, but he is not a vivid figure. There is nothing analogous to the attractive scene in which Moses protests his lack of eloquence to God. The battle of Jericho, which the Negro spiritual may have persuaded us to anticipate, disappoints. The city's fortifications fell flat when the Israelites, having encircled it, let out a shout? Sure. I've alluded to an obvious moral problem. The only excuse I can think of for the bloodthirstiness of the Israelites is that it's actually the bloodthirstiness of their God. And it is the reader who has to supply the excuses, because the text seems unaware of any problem at all. The headnote to Joshua in The Oxford Annotated Bible allows that "many have felt--no doubt rightly--that the God of Joshua is infinitely remote from the God of Jesus." A smart aleck might call this an instance of damning with faint praise the God of Jesus. The editor's conclusion is that "[i]n this book Israel's God appears as a purely nationalistic deity, a God of Battles whose power is chiefly manifested in the prosecution of Holy War." And all this pertains to the part of the book that is relatively lively. Having survived the killing fields, the reader comes to the attention deadening second half of the book.
But suppose you had to find merit in something. I'd choose the story line about the Israelite spies who put up in the house of Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute. Her shielding of the Israelites is the source of a popular tradition in which she is exalted as a faithful hero. Christians, for example, see in her a forerunner of the Good Samaritan, an outsider who apprehends the true God and His teaching. But I wonder whether it's not possible to detect in her actions some enlightened self interest. She might have understood better than the spies whether the loose confederation of peoples inhabiting the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean stood a chance to turn back Israel's incursion. In any event, it seems she chose wisely, for her life is spared by invaders who killed practically everyone else they came upon. I am pleased by the prospect of a prostitue making judicious geopolitical calculations that succeed in the very personal matter of saving her life. Rahab signed up to be on the winning team. A world in which "true God" means nothing more than "most powerful national deity" invites such an arguably cynical interpretation.
The question of the book's historical accuracy has been the subject of much inquiry. Modern archeology has uncovered evidence of ruined Palestinian cities from the latter part of the thirteenth century B.C., which coincides with Joshua's time. But the details of time and place do always line up, and one is, moreover, suspicious of a Jewish document that reports a series of overwhelming Jewish victories that decisively established the chosen people in the promised land. It all seems too neat, and indeed other biblical texts at least suggest that Israel's hegemony in the promised land was achieved much more gradually. The book of Joshua is followed by the book of Judges, which begins with the question of who, after the death of Joshua, "shall go up first for us against the Canaanites, to fight against them?" This suggests that Joshua's victories were not as decisive as depicted in the book of Joshua. Later, but still in the first chapter of Judges, we're told:
And Yahweh was with Judah, and he took possession of the hill country, but he could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain, because they had chariots of iron.
Note the impossibility of avoiding the conclusion that, according to this text, Israel attempted but failed to "drive out" a technologically more advanced foe. That Israel might by stymied by chariots of iron is completely foreign to the account of the conquest found in the first half of the book of Joshua, where God, who presumably could overcome the military hardware of the thirteenth century B.C., fought on the side of His people.
The tentative conclusion of much mainline scholarship holds that the military campaigns as described in Joshua didn't actually occur. Instead, the "conquest" of the promised land occurred over a few generations, and the military part of it mattered less than the gradual infiltration of the Jewish people into Palestine. But to the Deuteronomic writer responsible for much of the book of Joshua, such a story lacked drama and glory. The source material at hand was therefore embellished to create a work more flattering to national and religious enthusiasms.
