How would the biblical writers have thought about what they were writing?
I'll tell you how they wouldn't have thought about it;
they wouldn't have thought about it the way it's presented on YouTube.
Okay, they wouldn't have thought about it the way it's presented on Facebook.
There's a context here; it is live, or be killed.
But there are verbs associated, not with killing in the commands to take the land.
It's not all killing. In other words, God would have been happy
for a number of people to just be driven out.
Or to be dispossessed, you don't have to kill them.
And you get the references there. You get some on Exodus, Deuteronomy,
Joshua, Numbers, Joshua 3, I mean, it is a fallacy. It's untrue
to say that the conquest was only about taking life. It is not,
and all you need to do is read the text.
Now, there are verbs of killing.
There are verbs of killing in specific episodes in the conquest accounts
that are used, not coincidentally, in places where Anakim
(the Amorite, Rephaim giant clans) are located. I'm gonna go through them,
there aren't that many, but we'll just go through them. Numbers 13.
Again, look at where we started back in Numbers 13, the hill country
and you have the Canaanites dwelt by the sea. Who are they?
well, they'd be the Philistines. Okay, you know,
what is the hill country? The report tells us about the inhabitants of the hill country:
Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, again, so on and so forth. What is it?
The hill country is basically when you can see in this map where it's hilly or mountainous,
all the way up through here from the south, the Negev, the hill country, all the way up
through the side through the land here, past Galilee, and up into upper Galilee.
This is the hill country. Alright, and then on the sea,
you're going to have some Philistine settlements, you're gonna have
the five cities of the Philistines and whatnot. But again, there's a logic to it,
and hill country is a consistent focus, including the hill country in the Negev.
If we look at the places where the terms "Anakim" and "sons of Anak" occur,
we get several more specific geographical references.
You get Hebron [Kiriath Arba], Debir, Anab, situated in the hill country,
okay, general descriptions "all the hill country of Judah",
the Anakim are not said to be found in other areas, just throughout the hill country,
again, including the hill country, the Negev, you get some of that.
Cities of Jericho, Jerusalem, Lachish, and Ai are in the hill country, as was Hazor.
And I'm mentioning these because these are the places
where the kherem commands are issued. It's not kherem everything.
It's when you're in the hill country, there's going to be kherem going on.
And it's going to be in the places where these people live: the Anakim, the sons of Anak,
not surprisingly, towns/cities that the king of Hazor sent aid to vs. the Israelites
are also in the hill country. So, that's a very poor decision on his part.
So he's going to loop himself into this, you know.
Though the precise locations of some of the sites are unknown,
the biblical narrative associates them all with the hill country.
And here we go, we have one kind of map over here, then you got the topographic over here,
and you can see, you know, you just look at the place names, they're all no country.
There's a reason for this, because of who lives in the hill country,
because of where the sons of Anak, the Anakim, and the Rephaim and all the...
this is where they're spotted; in the hill country.
Again, this is not a coincidence. It's not coincidental. It's not random.
If you look at the killing verbs; kherem, in the conquest accounts,
Numbers, Deuteronomy, you get it with Sihon and Og,
they are descendants through the Amorite kings. We know Og for sure is a giant,
Sihon is probably as well because of the association with Og.
They're under Kherem. Joshua 2, Jericho in the hill country, Ai in the hill country,
Joshua 10. All these places, Joshua left, none remaining.
They're all in the hill country.
They're all places where the Anakim were spotted.
Joshua 11, Hazor, hill Country. And this is my position:
This is why I think the whole point of the way Joshua wraps up the conquest,
how he defines victory, is "there are no more Anakim in the land."
He doesn't say; "there are no more humans in the land." He says "no,
there are no more Anakim in the land." He doesn't even say there's no more Canaanites.
He says,"there's no more Anakim in the land."
They become a consistent reference point.
Couple other verbs of killing: 'abad. Now in the Joshua references here,
it has the Israelites view that they're under threat, they could be destroyed by their enemies.
But the lemma is used in Numbers 21 of Sihon and Og,
Deuteronomy 7 and 9 of the warfare that's going to happen once they get into Canaan.
Shamad: to destroy. This lemma is used in Deuteronomy 9, Joshua 9:11, and 24.
All of the conquests, and every time they occur,
it's in association with the hill country. Every time.
It's also the lemma used in Amos 2:9 to describe the demise
of the very tall Amorites. And Amos is recounting the conquest.
What I'm trying to communicate here is;
this is a consistent picture and it is driven by a theological rationale.
Again, like I said with Joshua, when he winds up, he doesn't say,
"hey, there's no more humans in the land. We're supposed to just kill everybody."
No, he says, "there are no more Anakim in the land."
Except the ones that ran away to the Philistines.
You know, they're their buddies over there.
They're still business to be taken care of after the conquest.
We're going to run into Philistines later, when the new Joshua was in town,
his name is David. It's not a coincidence. We'll talk about next class period
about some of the similarities between Joshua and David and Moses and Jesus.
Again, there are some deliberate topology going on here,
that again, it's very easy for us to miss. So last slide, return to the fundamental questions,
how would the ancient readers of the conquest accounts have processed these accounts?
How would the biblical writers have thought about what they were writing?
I'll tell you how they wouldn't have thought about it.
They wouldn't have thought about it the way it's presented on YouTube.
Okay, they wouldn't have thought about it the way it's presented on Facebook.
There's a context here: it is live, or be killed.
Because it's not everybody that we have to worry about.
We can dispossessed people, we don't have to kill them, we can just drive them out.
God promised us this land, and they either have to join us as Israelites or they're gone.
But there are some, again, in the hill country, the descendants of Anak
that have a very long history, that goes back to the flood story and the Apkallu.
And associated stories, depending on what their ethnic tradition has, their texts,
the Hittite texts or whatever the Hurrian text. There are some people
who can trace their lineage and have done so all the way back to the second rebellion.
And they form a lethal threat. The agenda now is not only to increase depravity,
so that we never return to the true God and have life. Now the agenda is to kill us off.
So God says; we have to deal with that. We must deal with that.
This is why I'm bringing you here. It's why I took you up to Transjordan.
Got to take care of business in Bashan. It's why you're going to cross in
and you're going to confront the very people that made you chicken out in the first place
and caused your 40 years of wondering. It must be done.
And that is a completely different worldview context for thinking about the conquest.