The Wonderment

Neighbors

How do you make peace with someone who has sworn to erase you from the face of the earth? How do you become accepted as a neighbor? This is the question the Gibeonites wrestle in the ninth chapter of the Book of Joshua. The Gibeonites end up relying on deception to be taken in as alien neighbors and servants, not so they will rise up and slaughter the Israelites, but truly to preserve their lives and those of the people they love.  For this deception, the Israelites make them a permanent class of slaves – contravening another law given to them in the desert, and among the issues later to be addressed by a variety of prophets when hard times befall the Israelites. For the first time since becoming people who have a place and possession of land, the Israelites have to figure out some way of living with their neighbors.

We have a hint at the end of the previous chapter that this is a growing reality, since there is a need to instruct the aliens residing amongst them in their culture and ways. 

“Who is my neighbor?” is an old religious question, and one, in 1400 BCE, when the historical events retold through the Book of Joshua are happening, is connected directly to where one lives. Deities are most often in 1400 BCE connected to particular places and peoples, which is part of the reason why the psalms, among many other parts of the Bible, refers to the God of gods and there’s a lot of contest among these deities lived out among men. Purging Canaan of other forms of worship was a well-established way to claim a land for a particular people and their understandings of divinity. But people who worshipped differently from you were not your neighbor, because they would live under different rules and in a very different culture.

Wars of religion are also wars about who will be my neighbor: whom can I live in peace with, learn from, teach, and live a good life? Interfaith dialogue is founded on the premise that we are neighbors and need to learn how to live with each other, while not forsaking the beliefs and practices that make us who we are.  Interfaith dialogue means sharing differences as well as finding commonalities. It is something that calls us into shared practices of compassion and justice in our communities, of developing friendships, and of being uncomfortable and stretching to accept our discomfort. More than a century of interfaith dialogue has taught us that people who worship differently from ourselves are very much our neighbors, even with different cultures, even in living with different values.

Yet in many American cities, suburbs and towns, people neither know nor cherish their neighbors. What would it mean to really know your neighbor? How would your life change? How might theirs?

Becoming a better neighbor today, as you meet and engage people today, how might your relationship with that person change if you treated them as a neighbor, a friend?

Truth and Conquest

While much of the conquest described in the Book of Joshua, which would have taken place about 1400 BCE (Before the Common/Christian Era), has been confirmed as consistent with the archeological evidence, discrepancy with that record occurs in chapter eight of the Book of Joshua, with the city of Ai. Khirbet el-Maqtir is the site that many claim as Ai, but there is no evidence of habitation during the period of the conquest. Even the loss of the walls around Jericho is something that is supported by the archeological record; archeology cannot always tell us whether the narrative of how things happened is how they happened, but it can tell us a lot about the historicity of particular stories and places. We then have to seek additional meanings for including the story that is separated into the eighth chapter, since it appears to have more than the recording function of the conquest of cities seen in chapters six, and nine through twelve, in the defeat of thirty-one kings.

Now, an astute leader of people may observe that continuing to require the Israelites to kill all of the livestock as they take cities and surrender all the other wealth to the Treasury of the Lord is only going to be carried out by a colonizing nation for so long. The story of Achan’s infidelity to that task in Jericho is a sign that our human desires to provide for ourselves and our families can only be denied when we’re already operating in a realm of rules separate from our regular operating rules. I tend to see the story of Ai answering some of the human desire-driven questions that the early listeners of the story might have raised: when are the Israelites allowed livestock? What kinds of military tactics are permissible in this kind of warfare? How do we keep the holy covenant to which we are committed at the forefront of our awareness?

So Joshua sends his army into two places – one to draw out and away from the protective walls of the city the army of Ai – and one to claim the open and defender-less city after the army has departed. This is a very successful tactic, although one might allow successful only once, for any survivors (although we are told there are none, you have to ask Really? Then how do the Hivites know about the Israelites deception? when we read the next chapter) will spread the word far and wide.  The livestock are taken and distributed among the people, after there is a sacrifice to the Holy made upon the newly built altar. Then Joshua places all the words of the law on the side of the altar and teaches them again to the Israelites.

After each period of destruction, the law must be reestablished, ritually and in fact. We also discover a curious fact: there are now aliens residing among the Israelites, who also need instruction in the law. This inclusion suggests strongly that the total destruction of the populace named in the fall of Jericho and of Ai is a bit of poetic license. Surely, many died. But there are now also, beyond Rahab and her household, others who need to be taught what this new people’s covenant is, whose they are, and how they are expected to behave.

When groups of people use deceptive tactics, folks become generally more suspicious. What we can imagine, so can others. We become wary that things may not be what they seem. Encountering a feint for the first time in basketball or fencing or boxing can be a difficult surprise; but after that first encounter, we learn to be more wary, even more so when we ourselves learn to feint. As part of that learning, we apprehend the degree to which such tactics are acceptable, and which step out of the rules of the game.  Joshua has to re-enforce what the rules of the game are with the whole people, because twice now he has legitimated in God’s name, the destruction of the everyday rules.

This raises for us some questions:

• When are the everyday rules to be suspended?
• How do you know what you believe is authorized and correct really is?
• What then are the consequences of that suspension of rules?
• How do we reestablish a sense of security, order, and normative meaning making?
• How do we hold onto a moral centre?

The Book of Joshua is probably not going to answer those questions for you. It can answer what the Israelites understood in 1400 BCE, but these raised questions shortly thereafter and continue to do so. Questioning, reflecting upon, and finding new meanings in these texts is part of our tradition and history, a process that developed so we would not lose our moral centre from generation to generation, and just start justifying all kinds of actions in the name of the Holy. If your encounter of the Holy is one of Wonderment and Love, how do you reassert that truth in a time of chaos, dispossession, and violence?

Theology, Punishment, & Justice

Being strong and very courageous is not easy, especially when that strength and courage is to try and live without coveting – wanting – some of what your neighbor holds dear. Human beings do tend to like things, and someone who is particularly prone to coveting and desiring yarn and books, those things don’t have to be bright and shiny for us to want to be like ravens and acquire them for our hoards. Despite being under strict instructions not to take for one’s own person the religious articles and the precious metals that are in Jericho, you know when chaos is unleashed, even temporarily and ritually very carefully, that something along this line is going to go wrong. Pilfering and thievery troubles most human communities, especially in times of war, when all kinds of awfulness can be stuffed into the justifications of war.

Joshua, chapter seven, sees the Israelites punished for the failure of a few to stick to the wretched business of wiping out the Canaanites in order to make their place in the world. Remember that the stories we tell are laden with meanings we make, and the historical books of the Bible aren’t any different. This chapter is also a commentary that tries to make meaning out of losing thirty-six people to the Amorites; if the Holy is on your side, then the only way you’re going to be beat is when the Holy wants you to be beaten, right? Frankly, that’s a theology I find hard to accept, as it goes against all my experiences of the Oneness. Were I to interpret that a little differently, it might be, hmmm, maybe we should find a different way of living in this land with all of us together? Here’s my liberal theological bias: I tend to believe that cooperation and inclusivity are more likely to create a solid community with more love and less fear than blaming, terrorizing, and killing people.

But what do you do when someone’s actions threaten your whole community? That’s really the issue at the heart of this chapter of Joshua. Whatever moral read you take about the actions of the Israelites and their understanding of what the Holy wants in this chapter, when the actions of one or a few threaten the viability of your whole community, what then is to be done?

They choose stoning and fire. I won’t. But not everyone is going to see the error of their ways, find a way of personal atonement, and then go on to live morally exemplary lives. Over time, communities develop procedures for punishment and justice, ones that need to be revisited from time to time. Because sometimes we lose our way.

That’s another reason why we need places where we can practice confession, forgiveness, and creating another way: so we know as a society how to do that, and so we have exercised these muscles of moral strength and these hearts of courage in loving justice and mercy.