Joshua and War

For our Project Timothy Q&A this month, we had to respond in one page to the following: “In Joshua, how would you explain the violent invasion of a settled population that resulted in total war.” Here’s my very imperfect effort:

1. Exegesis and Analysis

It is difficult to identify this text’s “original readers.” The traditional view is that Joshua himself wrote the text. Joshua would have written after the conquest when the tribes of Israel settled in the Promised Land. The original readers or hearers likely would have understood the text as a recitation of how God kept His promise to deliver the land to Israel. (See Josh 11:23).

The critical view generally attributes the text to several sources who wrote during or after the Babylonian captivity. This view seems more consistent in some respects with the archeological record, which does not appear to reveal either a “settled population” in Canaan or temporally consistent destruction layers in key cities such as Jericho and Ai. In this view, the original readers would have understood the narrative at least to some extent as a polemic against Babylon.

2. Hermeneutics and Application

Under the traditional view of Joshua’s authorship, there are three main options for contextualizing the violence depicted in the narrative: progressive revelation; accommodation to cultural norms; or just judgment / purification. Progressive revelation is the notion that God only gradually revealed the peace-making ethic reflected in the New Testament. This is tied to the concept of accommodation to cultural norms, by which God executes His perfect sovereign plans through the imperfect cultural norms of the day. Just judgment / purification is the view that God hardened the hearts of the Canaanites because of their continual wickedness and purified the land of influences that would corrupt Israel as God’s chosen people.

If one takes the critical view of authorship, the narrative does not depict actual genocide directed by God, but represents an idealized view of God’s faithfulness, which ultimately becomes tied to the messianic hope of final deliverance from oppression.

It is difficult to make a definitive choice from among these views. However, they all view the narrative through a Christological / ecclesiological / eschatological lens. Seen through this lens, a primary theme for today is that, while the gulf between sin and righteousness inevitably produces violence, God’s righteousness ultimately produces peace. The atoning death of Christ absorbed the violence of sin so that the community of the Church can now participate in the telos of creation, which is “rest from war” (cf. Josh. 11:23; Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross).

If this teleological view is correct, the text can be used to justify neither “holy war” nor so-called “just” war. The Church’s task today is not to wage war with human weapons or to provide spiritual justification for temporal political conflicts. Rather, the Church is called to transform culture sacrificially, in the love of the Father, participating in the sacrificial death of the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit.