Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [70]
Recent archaeology has tempered the biblical account of the Conquest. In the thirteenth century BCE, the likely date of the entry of the Israelites into Canaan, Jericho was an unfortified village. In other words, the familiar account was most likely embroidered upon in later tellings. The Jordan River valley in which Jericho lies sits on a major rift, or geological fault zone. One explanation for the river stopping and the walls tumbling is that both events were earthquake-induced. However, there is no archaeological evidence of those tumbled walls at Jericho.
For evidence of how old war stories get embellished and overlaid with notions of “divine intervention,” one needn’t look too far in the ancient Mediterranean neighborhood. At about the same general historical time period that Joshua may have been leading the loose confederation of Israelite tribes into Canaan, there was a long-running battle between a loose confederation of Greek tribes and the inhabitants of another fortified town on the coast of what is now Turkey. This extended but otherwise historically insignificant battle fought over “Ilium” around 1193 BCE was transformed into a much bigger story. Transmitted orally, like the Bible stories, it was finally written down more than three hundred years later in 850 BCE by a poet we call “Homer” and is titled The Iliad (its sequel is The Odyssey).
Following Jericho’s capture, the town was destroyed, pillaged, and cursed, but there was some unpleasant fallout from the destruction of Jericho. One of the Israelites illicitly kept some of the booty of Jericho that had been promised to God. For this crime, God punished all of Israel with a military defeat when Joshua and his armies moved on to Ai (which means “ruin”). After the guilty party was discovered, he and his family were stoned to death, and Joshua captured Ai, which is near Bethel, through a clever military ruse, instead of divine intervention.
The casualty reports after the battle for Ai are grim: “When Israel had finished slaughtering all the inhabitants of Ai in the open wilderness where they had pursued them, and when all of them to the very last had fallen by the edge of the sword, all Israel returned to Ai, and attacked it with the edge of the sword. The total of those who fell that day, both men and women, was twelve thousand—all the people of Ai…. So Joshua burned Ai, and made of it forever a heap of ruins, as it is to this day.” (Josh. 8:24-28)
If God sanctions “ethnic cleansing,” does that make it okay?
Bosnia. Lebanon. Nanking. The “removal” of Native Americans. The “Peculiar Institution.” You don’t have to look very hard to find evidence of people justifying the rape, enslavement, murder, and genocide of “godless heathens.” These are just a few examples from fairly recent history, and there are plenty more. Of course, in history’s worst episode of “ethnic cleansing,” the descendants of Joshua were nearly wiped out in the Nazi Holocaust.
The vivid biblical description of the cruel treatment of the Canaanites in Ai and other cities comes wrapped in the cloak of divine approval, pointing up one of the great ethical contradictions of the Bible. When a supposedly “evil” people is eradicated at God’s direction, does that justify it? Remember, God’s own commandment said not to “murder,” leaving some “wiggle room” for cases of killing that could be justified.
Ironically, recent research into this period seems to be chipping away at the biblical version of the Conquest, so the worst of the killing done by the Israelites seems to have been embellished with retelling. More likely, in current scholarly opinions, the Israelites gradually took over Canaan in a much longer process of “Settlement,” combining emigration and negotiations, while scattered conflicts between localized groups went on for a much longer time. But saying “It didn’t really happen that way” is the easy way out of this moral