Joshua 1.7-8.
| 1.7 רק חזק ואמץ מאד | “But be hard and very strongα— |
|---|---|
| לשמר לעשות ככל התורה | so you can follow all the Wayβ |
| אשר צוך משה עבדי | which My slave Mosheγ sorted out for you. |
| אל תסור ממנו ימין ושמאול | Don’t turn right or left from it. |
| למען תשכיל בכל אשר תלך׃ | All who walk in it will have success. |
| 1.8 לא ימוש ספר התורה הזה מפיך | This book of the Way must not leave your mouth. |
| והגית בו יומם ולילה | Meditate on it day and night. |
| למען תשמר לעשות ככל הכתוב בו | In this way, guard the practice of all its writings, |
| כי אז תצליח את דרכך | for then prosperity is your journey |
| ואז תשכיל׃ | and success follows. |
Joshua is a very difficult book for many to read. In it, God orders the Hebrews to wipe out the Amorite tribes, one by one, that occupied Palestine at the time. Then, genocide was simply what you did when you won a war; today, genocide is seen as a deplorable tactic where innocent people are slaughtered for no good reason.
The assumption most Christians make is that God did have a good reason for ordering genocide—the Amorites were horrible sinners and got what they had coming to them. But most people today can’t possibly think of any justification for genocide, and have concluded that either Joshua completely misrepresents God, or that there’s no God at all and the Hebrews were using Him as an excuse for their own bloodthirsty tendencies.
Oddly, very few of them come to the logical conclusion that there is a God… but that we really don’t understand Him as much as we think we do. He’s a lot more willing to kill that we expect Him to be. Maybe this is because death is not as final for Him as it is for us; maybe it’s because, technically, He kills everyone on the planet. He cut our lifespans off at 120 years. He decides when people live or die; what deaths He’ll allow and what deaths He won’t. He can—and will—bring everyone back if He so chooses. And because we don’t have anything close to this degree of control over life and death, we can’t relate to the ways God chooses to exercise this control. We just know it’s been forbidden to us, and foolishly apply that same standard to God.
So much for my defense of God. If you’re already predisposed to follow God or take His side, you’ll likely come up with your own excuses for the book of Joshua. If you’re already anti-God, you’ll see it as strong evidence for your position. It’s a book that doesn’t force people to take sides so much as make plain which side they’re already on.
While it’s God’s prerogative to kill, I worry about the idea of delegating that power to humans. We obviously can’t handle it. Yet God had the Hebrews kill for Him. This bothers me. So obviously I still struggle with this book. It’s inhuman not to.
Anyway. Joshua’s book begins with Joshua in charge, and God telling him over and over, “Be hard and very strong.” Whatever else genocide may be, it’s an ugly, nasty job; and it’s not at all going to be easy for Joshua and the Hebrews to carry out the commands to destroy the Amorites. God has to toughen them up before they can carry it out. Even so, they don’t carry it out—they let many tribes live, and are as a result enticed into worshipping the Palestinian sex gods, and become too fractured to defend themselves against local marauders. When we see what the local pagans have turned the Hebrews into in the book of Judges, we start to see some of the reason God wanted the Amorites destroyed. They really had nothing of value—nothing but corruption and vice—to contribute to the Hebrews.
However, wiping out the Amorites will lead to the same sort of corruption and vice the Amorites spread. People frequently treat condemned criminals inhumanely; it’s a mindset that plagues every nation’s prison system. It would only be natural for the Hebrews to harm the Amorites with extreme prejudice, killing them with torture and torment. All the more reason why the Hebrews needed to be guided by the laws God had given them through Moses. If you have to function as the instrument of God’s justice (as George W. Bush certainly liked to think of himself), you cannot lower yourself to the same unworthy standards as your adversaries (something he didn’t keep in mind when he pursued the ability to torture his captives).
Thus, three times in chapter 1, God tells Joshua, “Be hard and very strong,” and gives him this instruction for applying the laws. I render it as the Way in order to retain the sense of the law being our guide and path in life, rather than just some arbitrary commands that some detached Supreme Being has set up as obstacles. We follow the Way in order to have better lives. We ignore it at our peril—particularly when we’re forced to make the hard choices that a war inevitably produces.
The book of the Way must not leave our mouths. We must make ourselves familiar with its precepts by reciting them. We must (if this is meant to be a parallel idea) meditate upon them, turning them over in our heads as the Spirit illuminates us, so that they can become part of our lives, and not just a collection of sayings in a section of the bible we never read.
Towards that end, I intend to go through each of the 613 commandments and “turn them over,” as it were. (But this’ll take time. Plus there are a few other posts I’m going to put up here first, and mixed among them are going to be other things that I’ll add to them as God points them out to me.)
α. Meaning “toughen up” or “brace yourself.”
β. Lit. “Torah,” or commands, or Tao.
γ. Moses.
