November 17, 1999
FAMILY BIBLE SERIES:
Jericho demonstates God's
high priority on justice
___Joshua 6:1-27
___By Susan Pigott
___Logsdon School of Theology, Abilene
___When you hear the word "Jericho" what do you think? I begin singing the old spiritual, "and the walls came a tumblin' down." I recall the pastel pictures from a children's Bible of the walls crumbling before Israel and the warriors with their spears (no blood, of course). I think of a glorious battle interspersed with God's miraculous intervention, but I don't tend to consider the realities of war.
___But then I read the words, "They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it--men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys"(Joshua 6:21), and the harsh brutality of the text confronts me.
___The battle of Jericho was under the rules of cherem, the Hebrew word for "utter destruction." Deuteronomy 7:1-26 and Deuteronomy 20:16-18 outline the instructions for such battles, including the rules that no spoils of battle were to be taken unless otherwise specified by God, and there were to be no survivors. Cherem was instituted because the Canaanite religion posed an enormous threat to Israel (see Deuteronomy 7:3, 16, 25; 20:18). Elimination of that threat entailed the utter destruction of the people who practiced the religion.
___Israel was commanded to enter the land and destroy the Canaanites because of their religion. But doesn't this amount to genocide--ethnic cleansing? Suddenly Jericho becomes less like the watercolor pictures from a children's Bible and much more like the horrifying surrealism of Bosnia or East Timor. And I must ask myself, "Why?" Why would the God of Israel command such violence and pitiless destruction (Deuteronomy 7:2)?
___To be honest, there are no easy answers to this question. Some may feel we shouldn't even ask the question since God's ways are inscrutable. But I'm convinced God invites us to ask questions about difficult issues since we have numerous biblical examples of people doing exactly that (Moses, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, to name a few). Some assert God would not have made such a command--perhaps Israel just misunderstood or misinterpreted God's desires. But this view does not accord well with the biblical text, which clearly places the rules of cherem in the mouth of God. Others conclude cherem was instituted to establish God's justice over a perverse religion--an extreme threat required radical retribution. And while this justice was violently employed, it was tempered somewhat by grace. At least a few Canaanites were spared due to a prostitute's confession of faith and aid to the Israelite spies (Joshua 2:11; 6:17).
___The questions raised by Jericho and the practice of cherem should trouble us and cause us to think. We need to consider seriously the extent to which God will go in order to establish justice, whether it's through the practice of cherem or the concept of hell. When we consider that the Canaanites at Jericho were real people with faces and families and histories (and real blood), then perhaps we will better appreciate the price of God's justice, even if we fail to understand the why.
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