Flood and Fury

Eldredge loses sight of the context in Exodus 15. The point of Exodus 15 is that God is a warrior and Israel is to stand and await rescue. Men included. God’s warrior status nullified Israel’s. Israelite men didn’t need their swords. That’s the whole point of the story. God isn’t telling Israelite men to stand their ground and fight the pursuing Egyptians to protect their Israelite women. Moses instructs all the people to stand and watch, “The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still” (Ex 14:14).

The most obvious sense of subdue is thus agricultural development that preserves and unlocks the earth’s goodness. Subduing also involved sharing. Genesis 1:29-30 reminds us that humans share food sources with animals who were created on the same day. Subduing the land was not to be done at the expense of animal multiplication or food sources. All actions in Genesis 1 are toward life: life-enabling rule, multiplication, earth-filling, and ultimately, goodness.

Genesis 1–2 begins with a compelling vision of male-female equality.4 Women and men are made in God’s image, called to rule in creation (Gen 1), and they share in the sacred task of keeping the Garden (Gen 2). But once humanity rebels, male dominance enters the picture. As an awful consequence of sin, men would now “rule over” women (Gen 3:16). Male dominance and rule represented a distortion of God’s intention for men and women.

This is what happens in the Great Flood of Genesis 6–8. God takes an already ruined creation and turns it back into useful formlessness so that he can begin to form it again. This point is crucial, and I don’t want us to miss it. Creation was already ruined before the Great Flood.

When Cain killed his brother Abel, for instance, the ground refused to yield crops for him (Gen 4:11-12). Why should the ground get involved? Because humanity (Heb. ’adam) is from the ground (Heb. ’adamah). Violence ruined what was very tov!

Genesis 1 portrays a world where violence isn’t necessary for the world’s flourishing. In fact, violence is anti-creation. Violence is Enemy No. 1, which becomes clear as the story of Genesis 1–11 unfolds. That story tells of a violent struggle to come (Gen 3:15), of sibling violence (Gen 4:1-16), of gratuitous violence (Gen 4:23-24), of violence against women (Gen 6:1-4), and of creation-consuming violence (Gen 6:11). Genesis wants us to understand that violence is diametrically opposed to God’s good purposes in creation.

Circumcision in Joshua becomes a kind of anti-military-strategy. When Joshua calls the people to prepare to cross the Jordan (Josh 1:11) he never mentions preparing weapons. The preparations he mentions were more about worship than war. They ready the ark for crossing the Jordan by consecrating themselves. They ready food for Passover, not for a campaign. They ready themselves by clinging to Torah.

The Torah stipulates death-by-stoning for idolaters within Israel (Deut 12:29–13:11). But here Joshua just says, put them away. In his wisdom, Joshua discerned the gracious heart of the law that emanated from a God who rarely exacted what the law permitted. Israel’s success in the land depended on rooting out their own idolatry as much as it did on eliminating risks from “out there.”

The storyteller wants to unsettle and dislodge the binary us-them categories implied by a surface reading of the book’s earlier chapters. The conquest story, left unexamined, can foster nationalistic confidence, religious certainty, and a simple story of success. But Joshua needed to uncouple his perceptions of God from the narrow confines of nationalistic thinking. He needed to learn the significance of Yahweh’s name, revealed earlier to Moses in the form of a mystery: “I AM WHO I AM.” (Ex 3:14). God was far less aligned and far freer than Joshua imagined.

Let’s step back and take stock of this story about Rahab and how it helps us think about the issue of violence. First, it’s safe to say that Joshua is not a straightforward tale of genocide. The book complicates that sort of reading from the outset. In fact, the book is designed to critique the ethnocentric and nationalistic assumptions on which a genocidal ideology depends.

This fits with how biblical scholars think law worked in the Bible. Laws were not inflexible systems meant to be rigidly applied. Instead, a law collection provided a set of wise rulings and admonitions designed to form a just and wise people. Each situation would require wisdom for that specific circumstance.

Time and again a careful reading of Joshua suggests that there was even a place at the table for Canaanite people. They too could choose to serve Yahweh (Josh 24).

Some argue that the Canaanites were so evil that they deserved to be entirely wiped off the map. The Bible makes a point of detailing some of these evils (Deut 18:9-22). Yet the call to wipe out the Canaanites included the death of children and animals, the elderly, men and women. It is impossible to maintain an argument based on moral culpability that includes all such groups. And the idea that collective punishment was necessary to clear the land for a holy people undermines itself through an act of injustice. Further, the claim that none of us deserves life anyhow flies in the face of the many biblical texts that maintain belief in a God who judges justly to preserve the innocent (Gen 18:25).

Israel was to practice herem against anyone in their community who led them into idolatry. If someone led a town into idolatry, Israel was to destroy it completely (herem)—including all human and animal inhabitants—as a “ruin forever, never to be rebuilt” (Deut 13:16). By that standard, Jerusalem and virtually every city in Israel should’ve been destroyed at some point in Israel’s history!

Deuteronomy 7:3-5 qualify verse 2, telling us that the way for Israel to rid themselves of Canaanites is to tear down their places of worship. This is religious vandalism, not the extermination of whole people groups! Or, if you prefer scholarly parlance, this is a “reform movement,” not a genocidal campaign.

The initial command to destroy totally Canaanites was interpreted correctly by later biblical writers to be a command about separating from other gods and their influences. Walter Moberly suggests why this might be: Although it appears that there was once an actual practice of herem on the battlefield, both in ancient Israel and among its near neighbors, Deuteronomy uses and indeed privileges the notion of herem only because it was seen to lend itself to a particular metaphorical usage for practices appropriate to enabling Israel’s everyday allegiance to YHWH within a world of conflicting allegiances.29

Deuteronomy, Joshua, Kings, and Ezra refocus the call to genocidal war (Deut 7:1-2) in terms of a call for radical separation from external and internal idolatry.

As the book of Acts reports, Gentile followers came to be welcomed into the fellowship (Acts 11:1-18) and were required to observe a limited range of laws (Acts 15:19-20). Of particular interest to the Rahab story (and later to that of Achan in Josh 7) is the encouragement “to abstain only from things polluted by idols” (Acts 15:20, NRSV; cf. Col 3:5).43 The early church took up the ethic of Joshua. It took the story seriously but didn’t apply it literally.

Recognizing the artfulness of history-telling can help us navigate (but not solve!) some of the historical and moral complexities in the book. It can help us wrestle through the historicity of some of the book’s most graphically violent episodes, like the story of Jericho.

Joshua also reports that few Canaanite cities made peace with Israel “for it was the LORD himself who hardened their hearts” (Josh 11:20). While this may sound unduly harsh, it is worth bearing in mind that hardening hearts is always a form of judgment in the Old Testament. God wasn’t in the business of taking otherwise nice people and hardening them into objects of his wrath. As with Pharaoh (Ex 4:21), God hardens as an act of judgment for injustice. In Pharaoh’s case, he’s hardened because he failed to recognize Yahweh and killed the Hebrew boys. The reasons for that hardening judgment aren’t explicit in Joshua, but visible in other texts (e.g., Gen 15:13-14; Deut 12:29-31).

Israel’s presence in Canaan presents Egypt’s nominal representatives—the Canaanite kings—with the action of Yahweh, and likewise demands a response. . . . The conquest narratives are therefore structured so as to depict the Canaanites not as morally decadent, but as increasingly resistant to the action of Yahweh. The Israelites are depicted not as a savage, unstoppable war machine blazing over Canaan, but as reacting to the Canaanite kings’ [violent] opposition to Yahweh.

Rethinking the conquest in these terms doesn’t erase its violent qualities. But our picture of what happened in Canaan, and how it parallels the exodus, changes the moral calculus. The violence in which Israel participated as it gained a foothold in Canaan was aimed at weakening an ages-old colonial power that held the land in a vice grip. Recognizing Israel’s relative weakness before Egyptian-backed militarily superior forces casts the stories of Joshua in terms of a David versus Goliath contest.

terms, breaking Israel’s bonds with other national powers. Second, Joshua portrays Israel’s conquest as a clash of powers. The book’s battles were between Israel, whose God is king, and the Canaanite city-states, for whom kings were like gods.

While Joshua could be read in such a way that warfare is seen as a form of worship, I’m suggesting that the momentum of the book was in the other direction, toward the idea that worship was a form of warfare. The book permits both readings, but only one leads toward the one who later took up the name Joshua, that is, Jesus.

In the psalmist’s view, God isn’t even as punish-y as he claims!

In the end, God’s hesed, not herem (comprehensive destruction), preoccupies the worshiping community of Israel. Whereas herem never gets a psalmic mention, we hear of Yahweh’s hesed no less than 128 times. And while other terms for judgment appear in Psalms, none become the character metronome like God’s hesed.

The recent failed war in Afghanistan cost the lives of over 241,000 Afghans and Pakistanis, a number that exceeds best estimates for the total population of Canaan during the time of Joshua by as much as four times!

As Abraham Heschel notes, “No word is God’s final word. Judgment, far from being absolute, is conditional. A change in [a hu]man’s conduct brings about a change in God’s judgment.”15

Building up our “core strength” will enable us to extend ourselves to engage troubling topics without fear that we’ll end up injured. Practicing what’s core to the Christian faith can sometimes enable us to look back at the problem of violence with renewed strength for a hard task.