Scattered Notes on the Book of Joshua

• What does it mean to “give glory to God”?
• Why stone Achan’s family?
• What was the cost of Canaanite cheap labor?

Joshua 7:19 is a puzzle to me.

And Joshua said unto Achan, My son, give, I pray thee, glory to the Lord God of Israel, and make confession unto him; and tell me now what thou hast done; hide it not from me.

What sense of glory is meant here? It is similar to the expression you see a few places elsewhere in the scriptures.

So how is this sinner man giving glory to the Father? In what sense is the Father’s glory increased?

We have some different definitions of glory that we’ve discovered over the years. One is merited love or conditional love.  Another is the praise, the merited praise and acclamation you get for your good deeds. Scriptures also seem to talk about glory as if it were actually some kind of substance like a luminous fluid full of light that can literally be gathered into a person.

None of those definitions seem to quite work here.

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The big story in Joshua 7 is this fella who steals a wedge of gold and silver money and a fine garment and hides it.  Steal is not exactly the right word, but he was in on the sack of a city and they had strict rules about what they were supposed to do with the loot and what to keep.  The wealth of gold and the clothing, the luxuries, and the things that allowed them to buy luxuries, were off limits, which is actually pretty healthy rule when you think about it. But this guy broke the rule. And then the Israelites lost a gimme battle.  The Israelites who had been unstoppable before then.  Their leaders, Joshua and his his other fellows, were devastated. They prayed to God and God told them, well,  you got a problem. You have someone who’s in it for himself.

(It’s easy to understand this story on a smaller level as basic political science. The united people is strong but when they’re distracted by luxuries or when people start going off on their own, they become weak and lose.  It’s a tragedy of the commons thing or a prisoner’s dilemma.  United they’re all strong. When someone decides to take advantage of their united strength for individual purposes, eventually the united strength goes away. All right, but I’m a real believer that this story actually happened, its not just an illustration of a point. The story has the detailed ring of truth about it.)

So they have this ceremony this to detect the evil one.  They parade past the various tribes and they find it’s the tribe of Judah and then they parade past the various clans within Judah and they find its this  one clan and they parade past households of that clan and they find the household and then the man who is the head of the household. I guess the head of the family confesses what he’s done. So then they take him and all his offspring and they stone them to death and then burn them.  Lock stock and barrel sons and daughters and young’uns and all.

Now here’s the point that I’m wanting to make. This is very hard story for me to understand. I think this would be true of most modern people, Americans or Westerners or even just moderns in general.

There’s no evidence, there’s really no reason to think, that any of these people were involved in the original crime other than the head of household. It’s possible most of the family were complicit in the cover up. I suppose that is even likely. But in the scripture passage that we have that’s never mentioned, because apparently it’s not important. The family wasn’t included in the execution because of their guilt. They were included just because they were part of the same family.

And anyway, our instinct is to think that if not quite innocent, it’s somewhat excusable when people are involved in a crime that was ordered by their superior, which in this case would be the father of the family.

So it’s hard for me to make sense of this. In fact, I don’t have a good explanation from a gospel standpoint.

The two ways of understanding this to make sense to me are first a symbolic and metaphorical one. And second, oddly enough, a Darwinian perspective. Symbolically or metaphorically we can understand this as being about the taint, the taint of sin. So, when one man has become a rebel  and is gone black in his heart, everything involved with him on a close level is tainted. More specifically, we could think about the damage an unrighteous patriarch can do to his generations after him.  Awesome. All right, fair enough.

Then the Darwinian level.  You are probably thinking I mean something like genes pass on bad heredity or I guess we could do a more environmental version of the same idea and say the father passed on bad culture.  Bad culture, bad genes, either way the point would be that if the progenitors are bad, the children are likely also.  But that’s not what I mean. I’m thinking more of incentive structures from a secular Darwinian perspective.  In that perspective, people might still violate laws whose punishment would result in the person’s death only if the crime still benefited their children. Their offspring. And so, although harsh, a principle that says certain kinds of offenses will lead to the offender and the offender’s offspring being killed removes that incentive.

I don’t think that Darwinian perspective is the gospel perspective. And I don’t think this story is only symbolic or metaphorical, but those are the only two ways I found that makes sense of it.

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One of the themes of the Old Testament is that the Israelites came into Canaan and didn’t sufficiently keep themselves isolated from the corrupting influence of Canaanites. There’s plenty of scriptures talking about how they were supposed to kill them all or drive them out but because of the Canaanites’ iniquity, but they didn’t

Now on the face of it, the Israelite action seems hard to explain, especially since there is plenty of evidence that the Israelites weren’t tenderhearted.  It seems like gross iniquity.  There are reasons that I think it’s a little more complicated than that. For example, the Israelites properly ended up with Rahab and all her family. So if somebody was tempted to keep some Canaanites around to hobnob with, they weren’t doing anything completely unusual. They have precedents, they have models for that happening already. But then even worse, we have the incident in Joshua 9 where there’s several cities that trick the Israelites into offering them protection and becoming allies. Joshua would deals with it by essentially making them a slave class or servant class or a serf class, something like that. We don’t know the details, but they’re called hewers of wood and drawers of water. They’re supposed to be laborers on behalf of the Israelites.

We all know what happened from that. These Canaanite influences come in and the Israelites fall apart, never achieve the greatness they really should have, and ultimately end up being a prey to foreign enemies because they’re condemned by their God for their wickedness.

There is a saying I have heard from time to time that cheap labor is one of the most expensive things in the world and the desire for cheap labor is always and everywhere a curse.

Certainly to the Israelites it did no good.