The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest

Covenant, Retribution, and the Fate of the Canaanites

John H. Walton, J. Harvey Walton

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780830851843
• eBook ISBN: 9780830890071
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History

Biblical Foundations Award Winner

Holy warfare is the festering wound on the conscience of Bible-believing Christians. Of all the problems the Old Testament poses for our modern age, this is the one we want to avoid in mixed company.

But do the so-called holy war texts of the Old Testament portray a divinely inspired genocide? Did Israel slaughter Canaanites at God's command? Were they enforcing divine retribution on an unholy people? These texts shock. And we turn the page. But have we rightly understood them?

In The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest, John Walton and J. Harvey Walton take us on an archaeological dig, excavating the layers of translation and interpretation that over time have encrusted these texts and our perceptions. What happens when we take new approaches, frame new questions? When we weigh again their language and rhetoric? Were the Canaanites punished for sinning against the covenanting God? Does the Hebrew word herem mean "devote to destruction"? How are the Canaanites portrayed and why? And what happens when we backlight these texts with their ancient context?

The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest keenly recalibrates our perception and reframes our questions. While not attempting to provide all the answers, it offers surprising new insights and clears the ground for further understanding.

The books in the Lost World Series follow the pattern set by Bible scholar John H. Walton, bringing a fresh, close reading of the Hebrew text and knowledge of ancient Near Eastern literature to an accessible discussion of the biblical topic at hand using a series of logic-based propositions.

PART 1

INTERPRETATION

Proposition 1

Reading the Bible Consistently Means Reading It as an Ancient Document

The problem of the conquest is not about what a tribe of Semitic people did or did not do in the Levant in the Bronze Age. The issue is all about what the Bible says or does not say. If we really are interested in what the Bible says, we should take particular care that our interpretations do not simply result in us construing the text to say whatever we would prefer it to say or think that it should say. One of the ways we avoid doing this is to make sure that methods we use to derive our conclusions are applied consistently to any biblical text. In other words, we should adopt a method and accept whatever conclusions result from it; we should not adopt a conclusion and then apply whatever method will enable us to reach it in that particular instance. But how should we go about forming a method for interpreting the biblical text?

Central to our approach to how the conquest should be interpreted and understood is that the Bible, while it has relevance and significance for us, was not written to us. It was written in a language that most of us do not understand, to a culture very different from ours, and to people who thought very differently from how we do. If we want to understand what something in the Bible means, we have to first understand what it meant to the people to whom it was originally written.

THE CULTURAL RIVER

To illustrate the difference between the modern and ancient cognitive environments, we propose the metaphor of a cultural river. In our modern world there exists a cultural river that is widely known. Among its currents are various ideas and ways of thinking, such as natural rights, freedom, capitalism, democracy, individualism, globalism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, market economy, scientific naturalism, an expanding universe, empiricism, and natural laws, just to name a few. Though the culture of the United States may well be the primary source for the cultural river described above, the currents of this river flow around the globe (globalism is another current in the river) and affect many other cultures. Some may well wish to float in these currents, while others may struggle to swim upstream against them, but everyone draws from its waters. Though the extent to which each culture immerses itself varies, we are all in the cultural river. We are all aware of and affected by the ideas and ways of thinking listed here, whether or not we support any or all of them.

In the ancient world, the cultural river of the time flowed through all of the diverse cultures: Egyptians, Hittites, Phoenicians, Canaanites, Aramaeans, Assyrians, and Babylonians—and the Israelites. And despite the variations among cultures and across the centuries, certain elements remained static. But the point is that currents common to the ancient cultures are not the currents found in our modern cultural river. In the ancient cultural river we would find currents such as community identity, the comprehensive and ubiquitous control of the gods, the role of kingship, divination, the centrality of the temple, the mediatory role of images, the reality of the spirit world and magic, and the movement of the celestial bodies as the communication of the gods. The Israelites sometimes floated on the currents of that cultural river without resistance, while at other times the revelation of God encouraged them to wade into the shallows to get out of the currents or to swim persistently upstream. But whatever the extent and nature of the Israelites’ interactions with the cultural river, it is important to remember that they were situated in the ancient cultural river, not immersed in the modern ideas or mindsets of our cultural river.

The Bible is written for us (that is, we are supposed to benefit from its divine message and expect that it will help us to respond to the currents in our cultural river by transforming us), but it is not written to us (not in our language or in response to our culture). The message transcends culture, but it is given in a form that is fully ensconced in the ancient cultural river of Israel. The communicators that we encounter in the Old Testament are not aware of our cultural river; they neither anticipate it nor address its elements directly. We cannot therefore assume any of the constants or currents of our cultural river in Scripture. This means that if we are to interpret Scripture so as to receive the full impact of God’s authoritative message, we have to recognize our modern influences in order to do the best we can to realize when they are affecting our understanding of the text. The Bible was written to the people of ancient Israel in the language of ancient Israel, and therefore its message operates according to the logic of ancient Israel.

Since the Bible was not written in terms of our modern cultural river, its purpose is not to teach us how to be good Americans, where good is defined by the cognitive environment of America. But by the same token, it was not written to teach the ancient Israelites how to be good Americans either; that is, it does not necessarily affirm that the things Americans like are good, the things Americans value are valuable, and so on.

At the same time, it was not written to teach the ancient Israelites how to be good citizens of the ancient world; for the same reason, it does not teach us that we should be good citizens by the standards of the ancient world, either. The Bible was not written in order to transform ancient thought to resemble modern thought, and neither was it written in order to simply affirm the values and ideas of the ancient cognitive environment and stamp them with divine authority for all time. But its teaching is presented in the context of the ancient cognitive environment, just as it is presented through the medium of ancient language. That does not mean that God wants us to think like ancient Israelites any more than it means that God wants us to speak Hebrew. But it does mean that if we want to understand what the Bible is teaching we have to know what the ancient cognitive environment was, in the same way that if we want to know what the Bible is saying we have to be able to read Hebrew. This is what we mean when we say that the cultural river or cognitive environment must be translated. Since we don’t come to the text with the same mindset as the ancient people to whom it was written, we have to work to understand the currents that were flowing in the cultural river of the time and how they affected the message of the Bible for its original audience.

TRANSLATING THE CONQUEST

Because the Bible was written for us—that is, its teaching is not confined to the context of the ancient world—it means that we can apply its teaching within our own cognitive environment. However, because the logic and culture must be translated, we cannot apply that teaching by simply reading the logic of our own culture onto the words of the text. In order to translate properly, we have to understand the internal logic of the source, apply that logic to the text (as opposed to our own), and then rephrase the conclusion in terms that correspond to our logic. The conquest is a war, but if we want to understand the event, we cannot do so by using our modern understandings about war—what it is, what it is for, whether it is good or evil, how it should be waged, and so on. Instead, we have to look at the account in light of ancient understandings about war.

When we read phrases like “destroy them totally . . . and show them no mercy” (Deut 7:2), the meanings of those (English) words combine with the logic of our cognitive environment to produce a meaning of “do a thing that should never be done.” Consequently, when we translate the conquest event today, we are inclined to draw parallels to other things that our culture defines as things that should never be done: the Holocaust, jihad, colonial imperialism, the Crusades, and so on. But in the logic of the cognitive environment of ancient Israel, God was not commanding Joshua to do a thing that should never be done. Those parallels are therefore an example of bad cultural translation. Joshua is conducting a war in a generally similar manner to the way wars were conducted in the ancient world (for further discussion, see proposition 17). Whether or not we prefer to conduct wars that way is irrelevant; what matters is not what modern Westerners think about the methods, but what ancient Near Easterners would have thought.

The ancient world did not perceive of war as an irreconcilable evil in the way that some modern people do. When the narrator of Ecclesiastes laments the grievous evil that is done under the sun, he does not mention war, or plague, or tsunamis, or the deaths of innocent children, or any of the other things that modern Westerners are inclined to decry as the worst of all evils. On the other hand, he does mention things such as improper burial (Eccles 6:3) and being forgotten (Eccles 1:11), which were horrifying for the ancients but are matters of relative indifference for us. Thus we can understand that such threats as “Your carcasses will be food for all the birds and the wild animals” (Deut 28:26) should not be interpreted in light of modern (neutral or positive) ideas of returning to nature and providing for the needs of animals; in the ancient mindset, improper burial condemned the victim to an eternity of restlessness in the afterlife and thus was essentially the conceptual equivalent of modern hellfire. In the same way, we cannot understand the meaning of the conquest accounts by imposing our modern animosity toward war and human suffering onto the words.

The Israelites would not have understood Moses’ command to ḥerem the Canaanite communities as “do a thing that you are inclined to think should never be done,” even though that is what we feel when we hear the words. In contrast, the command to Ezekiel in Ezekiel 4:12 (“bake it . . . using human excrement for fuel”) is intended to be heard as “do a thing that should never be done,” but many of us would be relatively indifferent to doing this ourselves; if someone developed a process to turn human waste into an energy source, we would celebrate. We can understand that this prophetic sign-act is intended to be shocking, regardless of whether we are actually shocked by it. Likewise, we should understand that the conquest was not intended to be outrageous, even if we are outraged by it. The purpose of prophetic sign-acts is not to communicate ideal sentiments about human feces; neither is the command to Israel here intended to communicate ideal sentiments about ḥerem and war. We don’t have to share the sentiments portrayed in the language and logic of the text, but if we want to understand the text properly we have to know what those sentiments were and interpret accordingly. That is what this study is intended to examine.

Proposition 2

We Should Approach the Problem of the Conquest by Adjusting Our Expectations About What the Bible Is

The difficulties that the conquest account presents in the modern mind do not arise only as a result of the words of the biblical text. We are not simply experiencing the culture shock of unfamiliar ideas, or even reacting emotionally to a depiction of “man’s inhumanity to man.” We can read a book such as the Iliad, with its glorification of ancient cultural values that differ from ours and its graphic depictions of the sack of cities, without experiencing visceral horror. This is because the modern difficulties with the conquest account derive as much from what the Bible is as they do from what the Bible says. In other words, because Christians view the Bible as intended to be prescriptive for today, reading it is different from reading something we view as merely descriptive of ancient times.

THE BIBLE IS THE AUTHORITATIVE WORD OF GOD

The most common rationalization of the conquest by far is to construe the account as an act of divine judgment on the people of Canaan as punishment for spectacular crimes that together constituted a greater evil than the evils of the wars that destroyed their society. As we will discuss throughout this work, such an interpretation cannot be derived from the text itself. But the difficulties that arise for modern readers from the text as written are mostly derived from ideas about what the Bible is and how it is supposed to be used. Whatever else the Bible is, it is most importantly the authoritative Word of God. But if we want to regard the Bible’s teaching as an authority (as opposed to literature, records of an ancient culture, insightful fables, stories for children, a collection of inspirational and emotionally uplifting platitudes, an instrument of social control, and so on), and if we want to respect that authority, then the thing we must absolutely not do is to change what it says. By the same token, if we do not regard the Bible as an authority, then we have no compelling reason to rationalize what it says, for the same reasons that we have no compelling reason to rationalize what the Iliad says.

Our first premise, then, is that the Bible is a source of authoritative teaching. That is, we (the readers) are supposed to adjust our thinking and/or behavior in more or less specific ways based on what it says. This in turn means that we cannot adjust what it says to match the ways that we would prefer to behave; we have to work from the text as it is written. These premises are foundational and nonnegotiable, but they themselves do not produce the problem of the conquest. The problem of the conquest arises from a further series of assumptions about how to convert the text’s content into behavior, and consequently about what that behavior turns out to be. In light of the Bible’s authority, we assert that these assumptions, rather than the content of the Bible’s text, should be adjusted. But that adjustment in turn requires examining what the assumptions actually are.

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY “WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS”?

We should not think of what the Bible says as a list of sentences (or verses) read in isolation; we have to consider the significance of the ideas that the words and sentences contain in light of broader considerations such as theme and genre. So, if we want to understand what, for example, “the city and all that is in it are ḥerem for the LORD” (Josh 6:17) means, in terms of the thought and behavior that we are supposed to adopt as a result of reading it, we first have to understand what all the words mean in their context. We cannot draw conclusions based on the meaning of the English words “utterly destroy,” because those words mean different things for us from what the word ḥerem meant for the Israelites (see proposition 15). The question, “What does the Bible say?” cannot be effectively answered by asking, “What does this [word or verse] mean?” Rather, the question we shoul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Interpretation
• Part 2: The Canaanites Are Not Depicted as Guilty of Sin
• Part 3: The Canaanites Are Not Depicted as Guilty of Breaking God’s Law
• Part 4: The Language and Imagery of the Conquest Account Has Literary and Theological Significance
• Part 5: What God and the Israelites Are Doing Is Often Misunderstood Because the Hebrew Word Ḥerem Is Commonly Mistranslated
• Part 6: How to Apply This Understanding
• Conclusion
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest
• About the Authors
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright