Ethnic Cleansing

At camp this year an interesting subject came up for discussion: how is it that Scripture contains tales of merciless ethnic cleansing in the OT, which is never condemned anywhere else; and why did this stuff make it into the Canon of Scripture in the first place? After a brief conversation this weekend I thought I would offer my thoughts.

There are several points that I want to make:

1. The nature of the historical material in the OT is not the same as modern history. It was a dynamic entity, and did not amount to eyewitness accounts of actual events.

2. This encourages us to explore different ways of reading the material, and may have something constructive to say in answer to this question.

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An example.

In 2 Kings 22, the High Priest Hilkiah finds the book of Deuteronomy in the Temple. This comes right at the end of four books of history, centring on Israel’s ups and downs with kings and all the rest. The canonical order of the books (ie, Deuteronomy, then the Deuteronomistic history) encourages the reader to read the history in light of the road map. This, of course, is a fairly standard literary device.

What if, though, the history happened first? What if the road map was written after the events that it makes sense of?

Josiah’s reform in 2 Kgs 23 seeks to address many of the things that Israel has failed to do in the Deuteronomistic history, and which were outlawed in parts of Deuteronomy. A friend’s OT exam paper once asked whether the writers of Deuteronomy (known usually as ‘D’) and the Deuteronomistic history were ‘pawns of Josiah’. While this might be a little strong, the sense, I think, is about right – Israel’s history was not written by eyewitnesses, but by people seeking to make sense of the present with reference to the past.

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If this is the case, what then of the book of Joshua? What of the destruction of Jericho and Ai?

Tales of origins are a central component of our identity. People write creation stories (like Gen 1-3) and calling stories (like Gen 12 and Ex 3) to make sense of where they are now by referring to where they have come from. I wonder if Joshua might be a similar story? A story of people making sense of their current situation by writing stories about how the present came to be.

I am very comfortable with using the category of ‘myth’ in the interpretation of Scripture. Some are less so.

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At camp I talked about Deuteronomy 7, in which the notion of ‘herem’ is introduced. ‘Herem’ is the word most often used about this ethnic cleansing, and is an interesting word grammatically: firstly, it is usually used in the active causative (e.g., “you will cause them to be ’herem’”); and secondly, it means ‘to set aside for destruction’ – in modern Judaism, if someone is ritually put out of the community they are said to be ‘herem’.

When dispossessing the current inhabitants of the Promised Land, Israel are to not do several things:

• Make no covenant with the numerous –ites
• Show them no mercy
• Do not intermarry with them
• Smash their asher poles and other items of idolatrous regalia

These show several things:

• Making no covenant and intermarriage require these people to be alive – ie, not having been ethnically cleansed
• The only violence is to be committed against the objects of their religions

No violence against people is talked of in Deut 7, and the other elements of their commands expressly require the current inhabitants of the land to be alive.

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I wonder if, then, the book of Joshua is a myth. That is, a good story, expressing huge truths about the nature of Israel and its land; its commitment to the worship of the one God, YHWH; its stimulating a strong sense of national identity through great tales of military victory; and offering a symbolic manifesto for the way in which Israel is to act in the present: expressing Joshua-like unswervingness in following YHWH’s call.

The cogs are turning! The slippery slope has been engaged! Surely if this ethnic cleansing didn’t happen then the story is a load of rubbish? Doesn’t the ‘truthfulness’ of Scripture require the history it records to be ‘accurate’ (whatever that means)?

Not at all.

The Psalms are poetry; the Proverbs are based on sayings; Qoheleth/Ecclesiastes defies genre. Reading texts – any text – well requires us to, in the first instance, determine its genre, for only once this has been done can the development of good questions to ask the text be commenced. Different genres require different modes of analysis.

History in the modern sense (ie, eyewitness accounts of actual events) is a concept alien to the ancients. Instead, history and myth were rather more closely linked than many would care to believe: people made sense of their situations by telling stories, by embellishing them with meaningful additions, and by faithfully continuing the tradition of these stories’ influence on the present.

So what is the genre of Joshua, and what are its concerns? Well, the genre is not modern history, and is more like myth – meaningful stories told to make sense of particular things about the world. As a result, it is not remotely concerned with the ethical questions regarding the merciless destruction of cities and their inhabitants. This means one of two things:

- this makes it even worse. Not being concerned about such obviously immoral things shows an unforgivable hatred of the human race.
- the text is concerned with other things; its scope is beyond these factors, and to get hung up on these factors risks missing the real point of the narrative, which was written as a story, not as an account of actual events.

It won’t surprise you, I’m sure, to know that I veer much towards the second option, while acknowledging that there are substantial interpretation difficulties when dealing with the stories of Joshua. I hope that this attempt to voice and explore some of them might be helpful.