Joshua and Judges

1. The God of Joshua: An Ambivalent Field of Negotiation

1 The God of Joshua An Ambivalent Field of Negotiation Walter Brueggemann The contours of critical issues in the book of Joshua are relatively clear, even though these issues have not been settled in any consensus. For that reason, I do not need to engage further those critical questions, but can move to a postcritical probe of theological-interpretive matters concerning the text of Joshua. What follows is a theological probe in the manner of a “second naïveté” that may strike one as rather fanciful. Or it may be regarded as a theological fantasy informed by what I have been reading lately. At any rate, let me consider what must be an important interpretive question in the book of Joshua, namely, the matter of legitimated violence and, beyond that, the indispensible commitment of YHWH to that violence on behalf of Israel at the expense of the prior inhabitants of the land. I The interface of YHWH and violence is, in the end, an acute theological embarrassment. Commentators have been remarkably agile in overcoming that embarrassment by a variety of interpretive strategies: • An evolutionary hypothesis that does not need to take early “primitive” texts seriously, as they have been better superseded and displaced by better, subsequent texts. • A distinction between ancient text and reutilization in the Persian (“canonical”) period, when ancient memory has been purged of its literal toxic quality and now functions in a more credible way as a conviction of faith, but without any literal intention. 13 • A variety of approaches, as with Douglas Earl, to read mythologically or symbolically, past the unmistakable substance of the text, this way in particular in the service of Christian interpretation (Earl 2010). Each of these approaches no doubt has merit, and I have no wish to denigrate them or the interpreters who practice them. Nonetheless, they all smack, in one way or another, of a Marcionite temptation to select and cherry-pick the text for what is most palatable, and to dismiss or deny what is most objectionable in it. These are, in the end, various strategies to explain away the text. I have no doubt that the harshness of the text, including its violence, requires some such reading agility. Given that, however, it remains to admit that the statement of the text persists and continues to wound and to authorize systemic wounding. The land is still described as violently seized; and the God of Israel is still narrated as the legitimator of that violent seizure. As a result, for all of our hermeneutical imagination, we still have before us texts that wound. These texts offer a God willing to enact, and capable of enacting, summary violence against the enemies of the chosen people and in the service of the divine promise. II In what follows, I will articulate three probes in an attempt to understand more fully, and in an effort to consider the responsibility of ongoing theological interpretation in the light of the witness of the text. I do so in the context of our own acutely violent society in a violent world, in an awareness that theological ideologies, interpretations, and institutions regularly collude in supporting violence as a proper and moral undertaking, sometimes in local authoritarian and patriarchal ways and sometimes in colonizing military actions. It is of course an enormous stretch from ancient text to contemporary legitimation, but the texts remain available precisely for such legitimation, a stretch often undertaken with an untroubled conscience. PROBE 1 The violent seizure of the land is the function of the chosenness of Israel by YHWH to be YHWH’s “treasured possession” (Exod. 19:5; Deut. 7:6; 14:2; 26:18). It is impossible to follow the narrative account of the book of Joshua except with an assumption of chosenness that binds Israel to radical Torah obedience (1:7-8; 8:30-35; 23:6) and to covenant fidelity of an exclusionary kind (23:7, 12-13). Conversely, the chosenness of Israel binds YHWH to a 14 | Joshua and Judges singular commitment to and passion for the well-being of Israel that comes to mean safe settlement in the land (see Deut. 26:16-19). I have learned the most in recent times about chosenness from the critical reflections of Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz in their book, The Chosen Peoples (2010). They accent that the chosenness of Israel, in the tradition of Israel, is integrally and intrinsically...