Joshua

Joshua 1-7
Joshua is now the leader, very much the military man, which Moses was not. A prostitute called Rahab shelters Joshua's men when they go to case the city. The story doesn't seem to specify exactly what kind of prostitute she is, but she's got a house so she must be doing well (maybe a temple priestess?).. Incidentally, some people say she is an ancestor of Jesus. I cannot find where I read that now, which is quite frustrating. According to this book, she "lives among the Israelites to this day". She agrees to leave a length of red yarn hanging from her window so the soldiers will know which house to not touch, and she brings the people whose lives she wants to spare into the house with her.

Red string, like the number seven, is a recurring motif in the Bible. It's carried through to today in the Kabbalah (well, more precisely Jewish folk magic which is not technically the same thing). The mysterious prostitute is also a recurring theme but I'll touch on that when it comes up again later.

Joshua meets a man with a sword, and asks him "so, what side are you on?" And the man says "Neither, I am the commander of the Lord's Armies." According to most mythology, that'd make him the archangel Michael. Sort of, from this point of view, the celestial equivalent of Joshua.

He tells Joshua to march around the city once a day for six days, and on the seventh day to march around the city seven times. Then everyone should stop and shout all at once. If nothing else, this is extremely effective psychological warfare. When the city falls, Rahab's life is indeed spared. Joshua also tells the army to take the sacred items from the temple and put them in God's treasury.

Joshua God of War versus Prince of Peace

The only people who supposedly are spared besides Rahab's people are a tribe that comes to Joshua and offers to serve the Israelites forever if they're not killed.

The Reubenites and the Gaddites build an altar on their own side of the river, which upsets the other Israelites. The others gather an army against them at a place called Shiloh. It's an interesting coincidence that Shiloh in the US was the location of an important American Civil War battle. Anyway, the people building the altar manage to pacify the others by explaining that they only wanted a place near home to worship God.

But the war against all other people keeps raging. There are only a few places God insists that they cannot have, Egypt and Seir are two. It's interesting how protective God's been of Egypt, in spite of having to rescue his people from it. He won't let the Israelites war against Egypt, he tells them to be nice to the Egyptians… but the Caananites all have to go.

I've always felt sympathy for the people in these stories. I have never simply dismissed it all as irrelevant and bloodthirsty mythology of a cruel God. I have spent the last five books asking questions, having in-depth discussions on culture and translations, putting things in historical context. But I find that around the middle of Joshua, my patience runs out. There is kill, and there is overkill, and this is just too much. The blood and violence just keeps coming to the point where I actually felt sickened and I couldn't keep reading. So you'll have to forgive me but I won't be finishing Joshua.

It's at this point in the Bible that the issue of God's warlike side becomes a serious problem. There's no longer a visible excuse for the violence, it's just people going to town on their neighbors because they want to. They had a chance to stop and take some land no one else appeared to be using, but the people who suggested it were bullied into continuing on. People who don't want to fight are shouted down and called traitors. They're so into fighting that they actually almost start a war with themselves when they run out of other people to kill. This does not make the Israelites worse than any other group (the people they war with in the OT were not fluffy indigenous bunnies), or their god worse than other gods, nor does it change the concept of God as being good.
God is a war god. That's what Yahweh Saboath means, "Lord of Armies".

I guess one question is, what people is God the war god of? If he is the "king of the universe", then whatever he chooses to do in regards to moving the human chess pieces around is a result of how huge this universal God is as a concept. If he made everything, then he chooses when to destroy it as well. And if God is just a tribal god who got big, then he's simply putting the needs of his own people ahead of the needs of others, which is understandable for a tribal god. Especially since the definition of "his own people" has expanded so much in the last millenium. Wikipedia says there are 14 million Jews in the world currently. I think Christians and Muslims put together add up to about 2.8 billion of the world's population. There's also some groups that worship the same god but don’t, for whatever reason, fit into the above three categories. Now what happens if, say, Christians and Muslims decide to have a war, and the Jews get stuck in between? Or some other similar problem?

It could basically rip the world apart.

Many hyper conservative Christians have been encouraging parents for decades to have as many children as possible and to raise them to be little soldiers for God. They do tend to think of themselves as an army that must continuously recruit or it will die. Even if some people have to be drafted. The children are raised with the mindset that they are learning battle skills, and that the rest of the world is out there waiting to get them.

When I was little in Sunday School, we'd sing this song called I’m in the Lord's Army. The basic idea was, you might never get to be in the military and blow things up and shoot people but you can be a warrior for God. Our summer camp did a whole "Lord's Army" theme one year.

My whole childhood was filled with martial images like that. Songs about onward Christian soldiers, and blood and stories of people dying horrible deaths.
….And we weren't one of the scariest denominations. There were a lot of intellectual training games, such as "sword drills (verse finding competitions) and "quizzing". Membership drives, reading competitions- church was an endless competition. A sort of spiritual military school and I was from a West Point family. My sister, I think, has come close to being undefeated in sword drilling since she was about ten. No one was overtly pro war, but no one really talked about the concept of being anti violence either. We were taught that it's wrong to hit people (in spite of the fact that several of the parents believed in corporal punishment), but no one made the connection between that, and war.

And so how do we square this with the nonviolent message of Jesus? It's very difficult if you want to think of them as being the same guy, instead of Jesus simply representing the highest human potential. I think that's one of the reasons why Christianity has that weird personality disorder. There are nonviolent and pacifist Christian denominations- the Mennonites, the Quakers, the Amish…who are finding themselves increasingly at odds with the loudest voices in Christianity. And it's not new, it's always been a big problem, the usurping of the church back in the Roman era was done by a military commander. And ever since then, it's divided Christians into two groups, people who revel in the battle, and people who don't.

Can someone who isn't into war, isn't into conquering the world for God, still be a warrior? Clearly there's a sort of a war coming, the first advance troops were sent out against the rest of the world three decades ago. And when you discover, as I have, that you're not on the side you were brought up to be on, and there's a chance you will have to fight these troops, how do you do it? What do you do? Should the fact that your god is a warrior god be dismissed? It's all well and good to say "I won't stoop to their level, I won't give them the satisfaction of responding", but they're simply not getting the message, they're just going to keep pushing until you push back.

Right now, for privileged Westerners, it's only words and politics, and that seems bad enough. But less fortunate people all over the world are dealing with real consequences from our "words and politics".