The Joshua Generation

Israeli Occupation and the Bible

Rachel Havrelock

• Éditeur: Princeton University Press
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691201498
• Sujet: Histoire
• Sous-sujet: Histoire du Moyen-Orient

How a controversial biblical tale of conquest and genocide became a founding story of modern Israel No biblical text has been more central to the politics of modern Israel than the book of Joshua. Named after a military leader who became the successor to Moses, it depicts the march of the ancient Israelites into Canaan, describing how they subjugated and massacred the indigenous peoples. The Joshua Generation examines the book's centrality to the Israeli occupation today, revealing why nationalist longing and social reality are tragically out of sync in the Promised Land.Though the book of Joshua was largely ignored and reviled by diaspora Jews, the leaders of modern Israel have invoked it to promote national cohesion. Critics of occupation, meanwhile, have denounced it as a book that celebrates genocide. Rachel Havrelock looks at the composition of Joshua, showing how it reflected the fractious nature of ancient Israelite society and a desire to unify the populace under a strong monarchy. She describes how David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, convened a study group at his home in the late 1950s, where generals, politicians, and professors reformulated the story of Israel's founding in the language of Joshua. Havrelock traces how Ben-Gurion used a brutal tale of conquest to unite an immigrant population of Jews of different ethnicities and backgrounds, casting modern Israelis and Palestinians as latter-day Israelites and Canaanites.Providing an alternative reading of Joshua, The Joshua Generation finds evidence of a decentralized society composed of tribes, clans, and woman-run households, one with relevance to today when diverse peoples share the dwindling resources of a scarred land.

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The Conquest of Land and Language

Joshua is, I venture, the least attractive text in the canon. It records tribal arrogance and cruelty with undoubted relish. It is brimful of malediction and triumphalism.

GEORGE STEINER, “A PREFACE TO THE HEBREW BIBLE,” 68–69

MOST MODERN READERS would agree with George Steiner’s position on the book of Joshua, even associate the narrated massacre of the Canaanites with later acts of genocide, expulsion, and colonization. Why, then, am I asking you to consider the book of Joshua? To begin, because the theme of glorious conquest has played such an instrumental role in the territorial dominance of empires and the nation-states that succeeded them. Where once I considered writing a book about the many such usages of Joshua, I ultimately decided to focus on its reception in the modern State of Israel, which proved to be the most prominent of the twentieth century and to have lasting implications for twenty-first-century Judaism and Christianity.¹ My focus on Israel is not meant to single out the country or to excuse other egregious occasions of military conquest.

Beyond its political applications, we should also read the book of Joshua as a premier example of how a war story tries to forge unity when no such accord exists on the ground. As an ancient prototype, this most violent of biblical books exhibits the nationalist impulse to conceal social heterogeneity beneath the rousing story of an army marching in lockstep to definitive victory. After the battles are declared won, the text pivots to reveal political fissures and component parts. In the hope that these reasons for reading Joshua persuade, let us turn to the ancient tale of conquest and explore how it preserves what it wants to deny—the plurality of constituent groups and presence of neighbors resistant to the national formation.

What Is the Book of Joshua?

The compact book of Joshua is a composite text in many regards. Significantly, it is a book that scholars easily separate into two parts: an initial twelve chapters that narrate an action-packed, miraculous campaign by twelve tribes of Israel to reclaim their homeland and another twelve chapters that mostly enumerate a monotonous roster of the towns and borders claimed by specific tribes following victory on the battlefield. Put differently, the first half of Joshua narrates a scorched earth conquest while the second half provides descriptions of regions wherein the tribes of Israel blend with the very peoples they were just said to have exterminated. Concentrated attention on the boundary lists quickly undoes the image of an integrated army settling on emptied land. Why would a founding story about the indelible link between a people and a territory so quickly betray itself?

Joshua’s conquest is first and foremost a story intended to produce national cohesion through the representation of a collective war effort. Military representations, we can observe, endeavor to impose collectivity on a complex social reality in the name of producing the nation. Because social life never quite exhibits nationalist traits, military rituals and acts of war serve as essential evidence that a unified collective exists.² The representation of a “whole nation” that does battle against apparent enemies polemicizes against local and regional governance systems, what Stephen Russell refers to as “structures of distributed power.”³ Tribal leaders, regional practices, and local land claims all pose problems for nationalist writers and therefore assume an ambivalent position in their texts. Yet the writers face a problem of their own. They must make a nation out of something, and geography requires that this something be the people already present in the desired territory. Some degree of imposition and projection of identity is possible, but motivating people to join a political entity requires persuasion along with reciprocity, at least at the onset. I propose that the book of Joshua reveals the negotiations among smaller social units necessary for a state in the making and that attention to its seams and overlaps offers insight into the components of the successful confederation of discrete groups.

The book of Joshua, albeit reluctantly, also records the agency of autonomous groups and localized forms of sovereignty. Certainly, the dominant narrative voice advocates for a centralized state represented by a unified military and a capital city. However, because the state in question emerges through the absorption of smaller constitutive groups, the narrative reflects negotiation with representatives of kingdoms, tribes, clans, households, and sacred centers. In the name of confederating, such groups must lend adherence to some level of statist ideology and, more importantly, pledge their militias and monies to the cause. To my eyes, the book of Joshua, as well as its larger context of the Deuteronomistic History, reflects these tradeoffs. Its authors advance ideas about the monarchy, collective accountability to the law, and the homeland as they adapt local traditions to their historical chronology. Their dream of authoritative centralization is checked by the demands for autonomy and recognition by diverse parties. Whereas the book of Joshua has been implemented and analyzed as a charter for both imperial control and settler-colonialism, our approach allows us to see other forms of political configuration unwittingly depicted in the text.

These processes become particularly legible in the book of Joshua in two ways. First, by the fact that the very conquest fought by “all of Israel” for “all of the land” contains battles that reflect local traditions, and, second, by the book’s central paradox that allegedly national territory gains description through nonnational frames. The second half of the book points to smaller-scale politics involving households, towns, and tribes, supporting Carl Schmitt’s sense that “the sovereign State is actually an expression of heteronomous society.”⁴ The sovereign state as depicted in Joshua appears largely as the stitching that would bind together component groups. The alleged bond already starts to fray in the battle stories, composed as they are through the adaptation of tales pertaining to particular places. With an agenda of suppressing local jurisdiction working in tandem with a project of incorporating and placating provincial leaders, the book of Joshua anxiously pushes military unity before conceding to decentralized sites and networks of power. In sum, the bifurcated structure of Joshua provides an exemplary case of a nation figured as an army at the same time that it admits to a social scenario diffuse enough to require a bloody and protracted war story intended to rouse a sense of unifying sacrifice.

The composite text of Joshua further reflects the emergence of a composite polity. Several levels of social organization become evident in the text, suggesting the fluid and overlapping affiliations of a segmented society. As much as I depend on the language of nation and state to account for the motivations of Joshua’s editors, the terms help us to identify political aspiration as much as reality in the ancient Near East. The first half of Joshua expresses the will for unity among distributed groups along with administrative centralization approximating the forms of nation and state.⁵ At the same time, smaller scales of social organization, including kingdoms, tribes, clans, cities, and households, can be glimpsed in the text. My analysis dispenses with the social evolutionary sense that localized forms of governance gave way to monarchy and state, instead relying on Daniel Fleming’s conclusion that “the collaborative political structure of Israel probably remained active under kings.”⁶ The authors of the Deuteronomistic History promoted the vision that early unity under the banner of Joshua’s army gave way to tribal fragmentation until a stable dynasty arose in Jerusalem and centuries of biblical exegetes extended it as a vision of progress. More contemporary scholarship, in which this book plays a part, advocates for the simultaneity of different, sometimes competing, political configurations.

A clear political division into two distinct kingdoms parallels the bifurcated nature of the book of Joshua, although the two splits do not neatly map onto one another. The kingdoms are the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. Daniel Fleming, a scholar of the ancient Near East who has authored the most sustained study of how Israelite and Judahite traditions mix and meld in the Hebrew Bible, rejects the popular designation of Northern and Southern Kingdoms because it suggests equivalence when, in fact, the two were significantly different. For one, the wealthier, cosmopolitan Kingdom of Israel had access to more copious sources of water, a fact that is perhaps reflected in its capital city of Samaria once decked in ivory.⁷ Along with an understanding that political boundaries are porous, there is evidence that the Kingdom of Israel had an open, rather than restrictive, sense of identity as its royalty forged alliances with neighboring peoples.⁸ The Kingdom of Israel developed and seems to have reached its apex earlier than the Kingdom of Judah.⁹ Judah’s outsized influence results from its weathering the storm of Assyrian invasion, which scattered the subjects of Israel as the famous ten lost tribes, as well as its restoration of a temple city in Jerusalem during the Persian Period and ultimately the Kingdom of Judea in Hellenistic times. It is possible that the more restricted view of ethno-political identity familiar from the Bible developed in Judah in response to Israel’s wealth and capaciousness or that it is a product of exilic and postexilic editors who refashioned the stories to reflect the kind of clannishness necessary to maintain group identity in the absence of state sovereignty. In hindsight, it appears that Judah’s political power depended upon the talents of its scribes. Their kingdom may have paled in comparison to the larger, more fertile Israel and met its end at the hands of the Babylonians, but the narrative form that they pioneered outlasted the poetic epics of their neighbors.

If the scribes of Judah were such good writers, then why did they bother absorbing the stories of other groups? This question, which is key to my argument, relates to the larger politics of self-representation. I submit that the process in which scribes in Judah forged their grand historical narrative mirrors political movements of alliance and confederation. In short, the scribes collated traditions because it was necessary to bring the bearers of the traditions into the fold. As Fleming shows, central traditions—including the Jacob and Joseph stories, memories of Moses and Exodus, and the bulk of the book of Judges—all derived from Israel.¹⁰ Such traditions curve the narrative arc of the Hebrew Bible because emergent Judah’s affiliation with the Kingdom of Israel was vital for economic and military reasons. We will attend to places where Israelite traditions come into view in a book that skews toward Judah while accounting for the other evident scales of social organization.

Considering Israel and Judah as emergent polities, rather than administrative states, brings their composite nature into view. Although weighted with the heavy baggage of a misused analytic category, the tribe indicates a key social unit whose power is both recorded and contested in biblical narrative. It appears that the tribe, compr...