Joshua (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible)

By Paul R. Hinlicky

Paul Hinlicky, a leading systematic theologian widely respected for his contributions in contemporary dogmatics, offers a theological reading of Joshua in this addition to the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series. Hinlicky compares and contrasts the politics of purity and the politics of redemption in an innovative and illuminating way and locates the book of Joshua in the postexilic genesis of apocalyptic theology. As with other series volumes, this commentary is designed to serve the church, providing a rich resource for preachers, teachers, students, and study groups.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781493431137

Paul R. Hinlicky

Paul R. Hinlicky is Tise Professor of Lutheran Studies at Roanoke College, Salem, Virginia. His previous books include Divine Complexity: The Rise of Creedal Christianity.

Book preview

Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible

Series Editors

R. R. Reno, General Editor

First Things

New York, New York

Robert W. Jenson (1930–2017)

Center of Theological Inquiry

Princeton, New Jersey

Robert Louis Wilken

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, Virginia

Ephraim Radner

Wycliffe College

Toronto, Ontario

Michael Root

Catholic University of America

Washington, DC

George Sumner

Episcopal Diocese of Dallas

Dallas, Texas

© 2021 by Paul R. Hinlicky

Published by Brazos Press

a division of Baker Publishing Group

PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.brazospress.com

Ebook edition created 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Control Number: 2020053958

ISBN 978-1-4934-3113-7

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled AT are the author’s own translation.

Quotations from L. Daniel Hawk, Joshua, Berit Olam (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), appear courtesy of the publisher. Copyright 2000 by Order of Saint Benedict. Published by Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota. Used with permission.

To all my former students,

both in Slovakia and at Roanoke College,

who answered the call to minister

the word and sacraments of Christ

Contents

Cover    i

Half Title Page    ib

Series Page    ii

Title Page    iii

Copyright Page    iv

Dedication    v

Acknowledgments    ix

Series Preface    xi

Abbreviations    xix

Introduction    1

Preliminary Considerations    5

Part 1:  YHWH Usurps the Usurpers of the Earth (Joshua 1–12)    51

YHWH Commissions Joshua to Succeed Moses (1:1–9)    53

Preparations for the Battle of the Kingdom of YHWH (1:10–18)    60

Rahab, Confessing YHWH, Tricks Her King, Saving Joshua’s Spies and Her Own Family (2:1–24)    64

Israel Passes Over the Jordan and Memorializes the Event (3:1–4:24)    76

Joshua Prepares the New Generation and Is Prepared by the Prince of the Army of YHWH (5:1–15)    91

The War Procession of the Throne of YHWH (6:1–27)    102

Achan Covets (7:1–26)    120

Ḥerem Consumes Ai and Its King (8:1–29)    134

Covenant Renewal in the Promised Land (8:30–35)    144

The Paradox of the Gibeonites (9:1–27)    149

The Messianic Paradox (10:1–15)    158

The Campaign against the Southern Kings (10:16–43)    166

The Alliance of the Northern Kings against Israel and Their Defeat (11:1–15)    172

The Hardening of the Hearts of the Canaanite Kings (11:16–20)    179

Defeat of the Anakim and the End of Battle (11:21–23)    182

The End of Canaanite Sovereignty (12:1–24)    183

Part 2:  To Inherit the Earth (Joshua 13–21)    189

Unconquered Canaan (13:1–7)    191

The Transjordan (13:8–33)    196

The Cisjordan (14:1–5)    199

The Kenite’s Inheritance (14:6–15)    202

The Territory of Judah and Its Satellites (15:1–17:18)    204

Casting Lots at Shiloh for the Seven Remaining Tribes (18:1–19:51)    215

Sanctuary (20:1–9)    223

Cities Assigned to the Levites (21:1–42)    229

Conclusion to Israel’s Initial Land Reform (21:43–45)    232

Part 3:  An Inconclusive Conclusion (Joshua 22–24)    235

The True Unity of the Israel of God (22:1–34)    237

The Aged Joshua Bids Israel Farewell, Not Once but Twice (23:1–24:33)    250

Epilogue    273

Scripture Index    286

Author Index    290

Subject Index    293

Cover Flaps    299

Back Cover    300

Acknowledgments

This book has been more than five years in the making. I was excited when I received the assignment because I had long wanted to test my life’s work in systematic theology (which I prefer to call critical dogmatics) with a sustained exercise in biblical exegesis and theological commentary. Moreover, I have had an abiding theological interest in reaping a harvest from the postwar Jewish-Christian dialogue and the reassessment in Christian theology of traditional anti-Judaism. This interest began under the sponsorship of the late Richard John Neuhaus, who invited me to consultations he organized with Jewish theologians including David Novak, Peter Ochs, Leon Klenicki, and, on one memorable occasion, Michael Wyschogrod. Thus, I undertook the book of Joshua as a fitting challenge—this particularly problematic book of the Bible. In historical fact, the problem of Joshua was already felt in the Greek translation of the Hebrew known as the Septuagint, and the problem became acute in face of the objections to its violence in gnostic circles, both Jewish and Christian. But the problem of the book of Joshua has become inescapable for us today after the twentieth century’s barbaric descent into total war—a paradigm of utter destruction, divinely sanctioned no less, on display in the book of Joshua.

Full of enthusiasm, I plunged in. After a year or more of intensive research in the literature on Joshua, however, I was unexpectedly felled by a stroke. A steady but slow recovery further delayed the work until this past year when I was finally able to concentrate fully on the composition of the commentary. In hindsight, I am glad about the delay because the long simmering of the multiple ingredients composing Joshua has made for a more savory stew—at least to the taste of the chef. Taste for yourselves and see!

I am grateful to Ellen, my wife of forty-six years, who has cheerfully and faithfully supported me in this challenging time, and also to our son, Will, who has likewise taken up many tasks on our St. Gall Farm in the mountains of Virginia—farmer tasks, which my stroke-injured left hand can no longer perform. To any others suffering with such a disability, I would like to mention here that this entire book has been composed through voice recognition technology. When I lost the ability to type, I feared for the future of my work as an author. But this technology has wonderfully provided the means to continue, and I heartily recommend it to others who need this kind of help.

I am also indebted to a number of theological friends and colleagues who have read all or part of this work in its various stages and provided feedback. Initially, biblical scholars Dr. Wesley Hill and Dr. Kathryn Schifferdecker commented on the chapter below called Preliminary Considerations, which works out the interpretive framework for the commentary that follows. When the full commentary was drafted, I greatly benefited from the scholarly feedback provided by literary critic Dr. Fritz Oehlschlaeger and from the Rev. Dr. Dave Delaney, Hebraist, colleague, pastor, and adjunct faculty at Roanoke College. For this project I also sought out readers who are working pastors. I am thus most happily indebted for reactions and reflections to the Rev. Gregory Fryer, who scrupulously proofread; the Rev. David C. Drebes, my pastor, who read the text as a journalist demanding clarity; and the Rev. Canon Natalie L. G. Hall, who deeply engaged the draft. Hall brought to bear her own multiple identities as child of a Jewish mother and a Lutheran father, and an ordained Lutheran serving an Episcopal diocese, offering numerous comments and suggestions and in the process saving the author from many a cultural faux pas. Both Drebes and Hall are Roanoke College alums, thus former students who have matured to become contemporary colleagues in ordained ministry. Finally, thanks are owed to my partner in podcast adventures (see our tongue-in-cheek-titled Queen of the Sciences), the Rev. Dr. Sarah Hinlicky Wilson. Sarah, who is a pastor of Tokyo Lutheran Church in Japan (and this author’s daughter), also provided rich reflection on the draft of the commentary, for which among many other things I am deeply grateful. The book everywhere reflects the criticism and appreciation provided by these readers, and the faults that remain are solely the author’s. Soli Deo gloria!

Paul R. Hinlicky

Easter 2020

Series Preface

Near the beginning of his treatise against gnostic interpretations of the Bible, Against Heresies, Irenaeus observes that scripture is like a great mosaic depicting a handsome king. It is as if we were owners of a villa in Gaul who had ordered a mosaic from Rome. It arrives, and the beautifully colored tiles need to be taken out of their packaging and put into proper order according to the plan of the artist. The difficulty, of course, is that scripture provides us with the individual pieces, but the order and sequence of various elements are not obvious. The Bible does not come with instructions that would allow interpreters to simply place verses, episodes, images, and parables in order as a worker might follow a schematic drawing in assembling the pieces to depict the handsome king. The mosaic must be puzzled out. This is precisely the work of scriptural interpretation.

Origen has his own image to express the difficulty of working out the proper approach to reading the Bible. When preparing to offer a commentary on the Psalms he tells of a tradition handed down to him by his Hebrew teacher:

The Hebrew said that the whole divinely inspired scripture may be likened, because of its obscurity, to many locked rooms in our house. By each room is placed a key, but not the one that corresponds to it, so that the keys are scattered about beside the rooms, none of them matching the room by which it is placed. It is a difficult task to find the keys and match them to the rooms that they can open. We therefore know the scriptures that are obscure only by taking the points of departure for understanding them from another place because they have their interpretive principle scattered among them.1

As is the case for Irenaeus, scriptural interpretation is not purely local. The key in Genesis may best fit the door of Isaiah, which in turn opens up the meaning of Matthew. The mosaic must be put together with an eye toward the overall plan.

Irenaeus, Origen, and the great cloud of premodern biblical interpreters assumed that puzzling out the mosaic of scripture must be a communal project. The Bible is vast, heterogeneous, full of confusing passages and obscure words, and difficult to understand. Only a fool would imagine that he or she could work out solutions alone. The way forward must rely upon a tradition of reading that Irenaeus reports has been passed on as the rule or canon of truth that functions as a confession of faith. Anyone, he says, who keeps unchangeable in himself the rule of truth received through baptism will recognize the names and sayings and parables of the scriptures.2 Modern scholars debate the content of the rule on which Irenaeus relies and commends, not the least because the terms and formulations Irenaeus himself uses shift and slide. Nonetheless, Irenaeus assumes that there is a body of apostolic doctrine sustained by a tradition of teaching in the church. This doctrine provides the clarifying principles that guide exegetical judgment toward a coherent overall reading of scripture as a unified witness. Doctrine, then, is the schematic drawing that will allow the reader to organize the vast heterogeneity of the words, images, and stories of the Bible into a readable, coherent whole. It is the rule that guides us toward the proper matching of keys to doors.

If self-consciousness about the role of history in shaping human consciousness makes modern historical-critical study actually critical, then what makes modern study of the Bible actually modern is the consensus that classical Christian doctrine distorts interpretive understanding. Benjamin Jowett, the influential nineteenth-century English classical scholar, is representative. In his programmatic essay On the Interpretation of Scripture, he exhorts the biblical reader to disengage from doctrine and break its hold over the interpretive imagination. The simple words of that book, writes Jowett of the modern reader, he tries to preserve absolutely pure from the refinements or distinctions of later times. The modern interpreter wishes to clear away the remains of dogmas, systems, controversies, which are encrusted upon the words of scripture. The disciplines of close philological analysis would enable us to separate the elements of doctrine and tradition with which the meaning of scripture is encumbered in our own day.3 The lens of understanding must be wiped clear of the hazy and distorting film of doctrine.

Postmodernity, in turn, has encouraged us to criticize the critics. Jowett imagined that when he wiped away doctrine he would encounter the biblical text in its purity and uncover what he called the original spirit and intention of the authors.4 We are not now so sanguine, and the postmodern mind thinks interpretive frameworks inevitable. Nonetheless, we tend to remain modern in at least one sense. We read Athanasius and think of him stage-managing the diversity of scripture to support his positions against the Arians. We read Bernard of Clairvaux and assume that his monastic ideals structure his reading of the Song of Songs. In the wake of the Reformation, we can see how the doctrinal divisions of the time shaped biblical interpretation. Luther famously described the Epistle of James as an epistle of straw, for, as he said, it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it.5 In these and many other instances, often written in the heat of ecclesiastical controversy or out of the passion of ascetic commitment, we tend to think Jowett correct: doctrine is a distorting film on the lens of understanding.

However, is what we commonly think actually the case? Are readers naturally perceptive? Do we have an unblemished, reliable aptitude for the divine? Have we no need for disciplines of vision? Do our attention and judgment need to be trained, especially as we seek to read scripture as the living word of God? According to Augustine, we all struggle to journey toward God, who is our rest and peace. Yet our vision is darkened and the fetters of worldly habit corrupt our judgment. We need training and instruction in order to cleanse our minds so that we might find our way toward God.6 To this end, the whole temporal dispensation was made by divine Providence for our salvation.7 The covenant with Israel, the coming of Christ, the gathering of the nations into the church—all these things are gathered up into the rule of faith, and they guide the vision and form of the soul toward the end of fellowship with God. In Augustine’s view, the reading of scripture both contributes to and benefits from this divine pedagogy. With countless variations in both exegetical conclusions and theological frameworks, the same pedagogy of a doctrinally ruled reading of scripture characterizes the broad sweep of the Christian tradition from Gregory the Great through Bernard and Bonaventure, continuing across Reformation differences in both John Calvin and Cornelius à Lapide, Patrick Henry and Bishop Bossuet, and on to more recent figures such as Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Is doctrine, then, not a moldering scrim of antique prejudice obscuring the Bible, but instead a clarifying agent, an enduring tradition of theological judgments that amplifies the living voice of scripture? And what of the scholarly dispassion advocated by Jowett? Is a noncommitted reading—an interpretation unprejudiced—the way toward objectivity, or does it simply invite the languid intellectual apathy that stands aside to make room for the false truism and easy answers of the age?

This series of biblical commentaries was born out of the conviction that dogma clarifies rather than obscures. The Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible advances upon the assumption that the Nicene tradition, in all its diversity and controversy, provides the proper basis for the interpretation of the Bible as Christian scripture. God the Father Almighty, who sends his only begotten Son to die for us and for our salvation and who raises the crucified Son in the power of the Holy Spirit so that the baptized may be joined in one body—faith in this God with this vocation of love for the world is the lens through which to view the heterogeneity and particularity of the biblical texts. Doctrine, then, is not a moldering scrim of antique prejudice obscuring the meaning of the Bible. It is a crucial aspect of the divine pedagogy, a clarifying agent for our minds fogged by self-deceptions, a challenge to our languid intellectual apathy that will too often rest in false truisms and the easy spiritual nostrums of the present age rather than search more deeply and widely for the dispersed keys to the many doors of scripture.

For this reason, the commentators in this series have not been chosen because of their historical or philological expertise. In the main, they are not biblical scholars in the conventional, modern sense of the term. Instead, the commentators were chosen because of their knowledge of and expertise in using the Christian doctrinal tradition. They are qualified by virtue of the doctrinal formation of their mental habits, for it is the conceit of this series of biblical commentaries that theological training in the Nicene tradition prepares one for biblical interpretation, and thus it is to theologians and not biblical scholars that we have turned. War is too important, it has been said, to leave to the generals.

We do hope, however, that readers do not draw the wrong impression. The Nicene tradition does not provide a set formula for the solution of exegetical problems. The great tradition of Christian doctrine was not transcribed, bound in folio, and issued in an official, critical edition. We have the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, used for centuries in many traditions of Christian worship. We have ancient baptismal affirmations of faith. The Chalcedonian Definition and the creeds and canons of other church councils have their places in official church documents. Yet the rule of faith cannot be limited to a specific set of words, sentences, and creeds. It is instead a pervasive habit of thought, the animating culture of the church in its intellectual aspect. As Augustine observed, commenting on Jeremiah 31:33, The creed is learned by listening; it is written, not on stone tablets nor on any material, but on the heart.8 This is why Irenaeus is able to appeal to the rule of faith more than a century before the first ecumenical council, and this is why we need not itemize the contents of the Nicene tradition in order to appeal to its potency and role in the work of interpretation.

Because doctrine is intrinsically fluid on the margins and most powerful as a habit of mind rather than a list of propositions, this commentary series cannot settle difficult questions of method and content at the outset. The editors of the series impose no particular method of doctrinal interpretation. We cannot say in advance how doctrine helps the Christian reader assemble the mosaic of scripture. We have no clear answer to the question of whether exegesis guided by doctrine is antithetical to or compatible with the now-old modern methods of historical-critical inquiry. Truth—historical, mathematical, or doctrinal—knows no contradiction. But method is a discipline of vision and judgment, and we cannot know in advance what aspects of historical-critical inquiry are functions of modernism that shape the soul to be at odds with Christian discipline. Still further, the editors do not hold the commentators to any particular hermeneutical theory that specifies how to define the plain sense of scripture—or the role this plain sense should play in interpretation. Here the commentary series is tentative and exploratory.

Can we proceed in any other way? European and North American intellectual culture has been de-Christianized. The effect has not been a cessation of Christian activity. Theological work continues. Sermons are preached. Biblical scholars produce monographs. Church leaders have meetings. But each dimension of a formerly unified Christian practice now tends to function independently. It is as if a weakened army has been fragmented, and various corps have retreated to isolated fortresses in order to survive. Theology has lost its competence in exegesis. Scripture scholars function with minimal theological training. Each decade finds new theories of preaching to cover the nakedness of seminary training that provides theology without exegesis and exegesis without theology.

Not the least of the causes of the fragmentation of Christian intellectual practice has been the divisions of the church. Since the Reformation, the role of the rule of faith in interpretation has been obscured by polemics and counterpolemics about sola scriptura and the necessity of a magisterial teaching authority. The Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series is deliberately ecumenical in scope because the editors are convinced that early church fathers were correct: church doctrine does not compete with scripture in a limited economy of epistemic authority. We wish to encourage unashamedly dogmatic interpretation of scripture, confident that the concrete consequences of such a reading will cast far more light on the great divisive questions of the Reformation than either reengaging in old theological polemics or chasing the fantasy of a pure exegesis that will somehow adjudicate between competing theological positions. You shall know the truth of doctrine by its interpretive fruits, and therefore in hopes of contributing to the unity of the church, we have deliberately chosen a wide range of theologians whose commitment to doctrine will allow readers to see real interpretive consequences rather than the shadowboxing of theological concepts.

The Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible endorses a textual ecumenism that parallels our diversity of ecclesial backgrounds. We do not impose the thankfully modest inclusive-language agenda of the New Revised Standard Version, nor do we insist upon the glories of the Authorized Version, nor do we require our commentators to create a new translation. In our communal worship, in our private devotions, and in our theological scholarship, we use a range of scriptural translations. Precisely as scripture—a living, functioning text in the present life of faith—the Bible is not semantically fixed. Only a modernist, literalist hermeneutic could imagine that this modest fluidity is a liability. Philological precision and stability is a consequence of, not a basis for, exegesis. Judgments about the meaning of a text fix its literal sense, not the other way around. As a result, readers should expect an eclectic use of biblical translations, both across the different volumes of the series and within individual commentaries.

We cannot speak for contemporary biblical scholars, but as theologians we know that we have long been trained to defend our fortresses of theological concepts and formulations. And we have forgotten the skills of interpretation. Like stroke victims, we must rehabilitate our exegetical imaginations, and there are likely to be different strategies of recovery. Readers should expect this reconstructive—not reactionary—series to provide them with experiments in postcritical doctrinal interpretation, not commentaries written according to the settled principles of a well-functioning tradition. Some commentators will follow classical typological and allegorical readings from the premodern tradition; others will draw on contemporary historical study. Some will comment verse by verse; others will highlight passages, even single words that trigger theological analysis of scripture. No reading strategies are proscribed, no interpretive methods foresworn. The central premise in this commentary series is that doctrine provides structure and cogency to scriptural interpretation. We trust in this premise with the hope that the Nicene tradition can guide us, however imperfectly, diversely, and haltingly, toward a reading of scripture in which the right keys open the right doors.

R. R. Reno

1. Fragment from the preface to Commentary on Psalms 1–25, preserved in the Philokalia, in Origen, trans. Joseph W. Trigg (London: Routledge, 1998), 70–71.

2. Against Heresies 9.4.

3. Benjamin Jowett, On the Interpretation of Scripture, in Essays and Reviews (London: Parker, 1860), 338–39.

4. Jowett, On the Interpretation of Scripture, 340.

5. Luther’s Works, vol. 35, ed. E. Theodore Bachmann (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1959), 362.

6. On Christian Doctrine 1.10.

7. On Christian Doctrine 1.35.

8. Sermon 212.2.

Abbreviations

General

Old Testament

New Testament

Introduction

Theological exposition takes the Bible as the book of the church and interprets it as such.1 Bonhoeffer wrote these words about the first three chapters of the Bible in the Christian Old Testament in a commentary titled Creation and Fall. The commentary was actually an intervention at the time of Hitler’s rise to power, when Protestant Christians in Germany had developed an acute allergy to all things Hebrew. The sources of this allergy were manifold. The combination of the higher criticism of the Bible (accused by some of being the higher anti-Semitism) and the rise of evolutionary biology in the nineteenth century had discredited hitherto predominantly literal readings of Genesis. The meteoric cultural ascent of Nietzsche’s philosophy of life, with its jugular attack on Judaic morality as resentment against life and on its theology as the cunning ploy of the weak to tyrannize the strong by conjuring the picture of a vengeful deity, seemed to correlate with modern Protestant Christianity’s supersession of the burdensome religion of law by a liberating religion of grace. Long-standing tropes about the church as the new Israel superseding the old Israel enabled leading intellectuals like Adolf von Harnack to defend the second-century heretic Marcion as a misunderstood genius ahead of his time, and thus to take up his cause that contemporary Christians jettison Old Testament Scripture.

In some respects, and for similar reasons, the situation today is uncomfortably similar. The Old Testament is dying.2 Hence this commentary takes up the interpretive task that Bonhoeffer then announced with the intention of making an intervention in a fraught situation. In what follows, commentary will take the form of a learned paraphrase, based on this author’s own review of the Hebrew text of the book of Joshua. The paraphrase follows the canonical narrative’s causal sequence3—effecting a literary reading that seeks to understand the meaning of the textual narrative on its own terms, which, as we shall see, are intrinsically theological. The procedure is similar but not identical to that of literary criticism in today’s academy in that it takes the horizon of the canonical book’s first readers and the intention of the final author/editor within canonical scripture as an essential key to determining what the letters say. This determination locates the canonical book of Joshua as a part within the whole, which is the panorama of the Genesis-to-Revelation story of God’s history with humanity through the particular history of Israel and a particular son of Israel, the second Joshua who is Jesus Christ.

It is important, accordingly, to see from the outset that Joshua is a promissory narrative, a history that portends a promised future. Indeed, its knowledge of God consists in the identification of the God who promises the coming of his reign. What that could mean for us today who read the book of Joshua long after its original horizon of meaning has passed away is a question that must be engaged step-by-step along the way. This engagement is possible because the creation of landed Israel once upon a time, like the biblical account of the creation of the world once upon a time, is a promise projected backward.4 It is this promissory character of the historical narrative, moreover, that sharply distinguishes the knowledge of God rendered in Joshua from any kind of so-called dominion theology. Triumphalist readings of Joshua misunderstand the book categorically, as the commentary will show.

This commentary by paraphrase will thus be interlaced with observations, questions, and connections relevant for rendering its knowledge of God. Readers are advised section by section to review in advance the text of canonical Joshua in any standard and scholarly responsible English translation. As this commentary is engaged in harvesting from the biblical book its knowledge of God for us today, it will not provide its own technical contribution to numerous exegetical difficulties but only report on, and synthesize to the extent that it is useful for its theological purpose, the excellent work of experts in this connection. Sufficient reference to this specialist work of biblical scholars is provided in the notes for those readers who wish to descend into labyrinthine rabbit holes. For the literary-theological purpose of this commentary, however, overly technical discussion of such problems would be little more than a distraction. Indeed, the book of Joshua as it came to rest in the scriptural canon is problem enough to tackle, especially for a theologically focused commentary. The narrative thrust of Joshua is sufficiently clear, and it becomes abundantly clear when read literarily to draw out its (disruptive!) knowledge of God.

Readers, especially pastors and other teachers looking for help in sermon or Bible study or to answer a thorny question or even a wholesale objection raised by a parishioner, often jump to the passage in question in a commentary. It is important, however, for readers to work through the rather lengthy first chapter, Preliminary Considerations, in order to use this commentary intelligently. To warrant the proposed literary-theological approach to Joshua executed in the commentary, this chapter must clear in advance a path through a field chock-full of difficulties.

It must first hermeneutically justify the distinction between literary and literal readings, which are ambiguously confused in the precritical ecclesiastical tradition, and then provide validity tests for the literary yield of knowledge of God. It must then identify literarily the gospel promise in Joshua as its constantly reiterated proclamation of YHWH5 who fights for Israel, and interpret this kerygma in light of the dreadful divine command for the utter destruction of the Canaanites. Accomplishing this theological interpretation of the celebrated—or notorious—violence of the Divine Warrior, moreover, requires the registration of a protest that will run throughout the commentary against the widespread tendency in modern theology to reduce knowledge of God to religious ideology: YHWH’s warfare according to the book of Joshua is not the holy war common in the ancient Near East nor in the literalistic and thus inept appropriations of it by Christian Crusade or Islamic Jihad or European colonialism/imperialism or today’s nationalistic dominion theology. Rather it belongs in the genre of apocalyptic theology’s deliberate resort to what I will term the fabulous, a classification for tales of the gods, which Augustine borrowed from the philosopher Varro.

I use this term instead of the ambiguous myth, a word of Greek origin that simply means story. Consequently, confused attempts to demythologize biblical narrative to render its message intelligible and existentially compelling for modern people actually end up denarrativizing the text with disastrous implications for the knowledge of God. Deliteralization, by which we decode the fabulous theologically, is to be preferred. In the words of Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod, when the prophet speaks of the messianic future in which the lion will lie down with the lamb (and in which both and not only one will rise) he is indeed foreseeing the transformation of nature, but this transformation is not an evolutionary but an apocalyptic one. It is a transformation that is discontinuous with nature as it has been. It envisages a break with the autonomy of nature brought about by God’s intervention and not by the working itself out of the telos of nature.6 In tandem with this apocalyptic turn in contemporary theology, a preliminary clarification of the nature of the gift of the land—inheritance as opposed to a privately traded commodity—is needed, which in turn opens up the messianic resonances attending the figure of Joshua.

With these preliminary clarifications behind us, we will be prepared to follow the narrative step-by-step to its disruptive conclusion disclosing Israel’s incapacity. Following the commentary, an epilogue is provided, speaking to what the knowledge of God from the book of Joshua means for us, specifically for Jews and Christians together, today.

1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 3 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004), 22.

2. Brent A. Strawn, The Old Testament Is Dying: A Diagnosis and Recommended Treatment (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017).

3. Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2:282.

4. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 1 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004), 61.

5. For the use of this transliteration of the Hebrew for the divine name, the Tetragrammaton or Hashem, see the epilogue. When citing others, I will give their English rendering of the word, usually Yahweh.

6. Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 227.

Preliminary Considerations

Joshua does little to mute the triumphalism and brutality of Israel’s memories of conquest or to complete piecemeal remembrances of lands and boundaries. Yet something quite profound is accomplished in the way these memories are connected and presented. The whole of Joshua conveys a very different message than the pieces within it.

—L. Daniel Hawk, Joshua, xxxii

Literary, Not Literal, Reading

The whole, it is said, is greater than the sum of its parts. Reading Joshua piecemeal, picking out passages as theo-political prooftexts—whether with hostile intent to demonstrate a gruesome brutality at the core of ancient Israel’s exclusive faith in YHWH, a holy and jealous God,1 or with political intent to support contemporary Zionist claims on the land of Canaan2 once given to the twelve tribes of Israel—is a fundamental literary mistake. In other words, both or either of these contemporary claims may be congruent with the book of Joshua—or not. But we cannot tell until we establish the literary meaning of the Joshua narrative on its own terms.

Literary meaning is a widely proposed revision today of the classical literal sense, which in any case has always been regarded as primary and foundational to any further senses. This revision is necessary because literary meaning differs in several important ways from the now common understanding of the literal sense as if replicating by a verbal picture some state of past affairs and thus presenting a critically discerned fact. In contrast, a literary reading of a scriptural text receives the text as scriptural. That entails theologically an act of faith in the biblical story’s final—that is, eschatological—coherence; in the interim, it tests this presumption by exploring how the plot integrates parts and whole and conversely how the integration of parts and whole manifests plot that, in a feedback loop, confirms at least provisionally the literary reading as referring to the coming of the reign of God and identifying it in specific ways. Scriptural narrative is not a replication by a verbal picture of the status quo ante but is promissory narrative,3 anticipating a promised future of God in creative tension with the way things are. Tension, even conflict, between the parts is what makes the achievement of theological coherence dramatic, and dramatic coherence4 is in turn characteristic of biblical narrative read theologically. Literary meaning is thus the gateway to what had been classically called the spiritual meaning, which is discovered as the close literary reading, following the causal sequence of the words of the text (literally, what the letters say, the traditional literal sense), yields knowledge of God. The spiritual sense is the theological meaning of the literary sense.

As Robert Jenson explains, drawing on the work of Henri de Lubac,

Contrary to what has often been thought, therefore, spiritual exegesis does not intend to spiritualize its texts; the mystery supposed to be hidden in an Old Testament event or testimony is not . . . a timeless truth. It is . . . an action, the realization of a great plan, and is therefore . . . itself a historical reality. The letter is the succession of events narrated by the text and the best masters of spiritual exegesis, when reading ad litteram, labored like any modern exegete to trace the events in their causal sequence. The spirit is the meaning of those events, within the gospel’s whole teleological narrative.5

To be explicit, then, such literary-spiritual reading of the book of Joshua in the Christian canon is undertaken by faith in its eschatological coherence according to the gospel that tells of another Joshua, crucified and risen from the dead to triumph for us all—when and if this reading proves to be no arbitrary imposition on the book of Joshua, even though it obviously exceeds what was the historical horizon of canonical Joshua and its first audience. Yet this excess is permitted with committing the Joshua narrative to writing and receiving it among those writings of Israel that Israel and then the church following deemed sacred. In any event, as we shall see, the canonical book tells its own gospel of YHWH who fights for Israel such that the gospel of Jesus Christ can and did find itself anticipated in this message. Thus there is an integral relationship between the gospel of Jesus, the Christus victor, and the gospel told beforehand in the book of Joshua.

In order to prevent supposedly peaceful-and-universal