I recently labored through the first volume of C.W. Previté-Orton’s Cambridge Medieval History, which covers the period from the late Roman Empire through to the twelfth century in a little under 700 pages. I say “labored”, but some parts (the earlier ones) were actually fairly exciting. However, as the venerable historian’s focus shifted from Italy and Greece to Germany, then Western Europe, I bogged down in a morass of what appeared (from my limited and relatively disinterested perspective) to be mediocre personages doing mediocre things.
I’m sure it wasn’t really that way.
Equal Measures
Historians are inclined to be evenhanded in their treatment of the world’s kings and kingdoms. At least this one was, and I believe from my school texts that it’s a general tendency. Eras of similar duration get comparable levels of attention and detail, and this despite the strong likelihood that the available data for some eras is considerably greater than for others. The net effect is that if nothing terribly interesting happened between AD800 and 900, you’re in for a tedious hundred pages of slogging as the top specialist in his field contemplates the marvelous invention of Goth underwear.
Perhaps the evolutionary mindset has permeated the recording and analysis of history. If, in fact, historians only document assorted collections of random molecules doing nasty things to each other, we have no compelling reason to prioritize stories of heroism, conquest and the machinations of ingenious generals over stories about men shearing sheep, plowing fields, cutting their hair, making dinner and dying of the occasional plague. It’s all one in the end.
What’s Left In and What’s Left Out
Scripture is not like that, because the Bible is not simply documenting events of a certain type in the order they happened. If it were, we’d all drive our Bibles to church in eighteen wheelers. Sunday Schools that staged sword drills would need a resident masseur to deal with the pulled muscles of ten-year-olds trying in vain to locate the story of David and Goliath in a veritable ocean of fine print.
Thankfully, the writers of Bible history have spiritual points to make instead, so they omit vast quantities of material that doesn’t serve their purpose. The Holy Spirit knows how to cut to the chase.
The book of Joshua is fascinating for what it includes … and far more fascinating for what it doesn’t. It takes six chapters for the walls of Jericho to bite the dust, two more to deal with Achan and Ai, and a single chapter to cover the Gibeonite treaty, perhaps because it’s critical to what happens next. Then, suddenly, in two brief chapters (10 and 11), Israel blows through twenty-nine more kings and their armies, conquering Canaan (with a few local exceptions) and setting the stage for the various tribes to receive their territorial allotments.
Kings and Kingdoms
I’m calling them kings, as the scripture does. The word meleḵ is the Hebrew form of a Semitic term usually translated “king” and used throughout Babylon, Assyria, Chaldea and Mesopotamia in those days. But these were not all kings in the modern sense, ruling over nations and even empires. Canaan comprised territories and city-states of various ethnic backgrounds, and each major city had its “king”. Some of these fortified cities were on the small side by modern standards. Israel thought to take Ai with a few thousand men, suggesting Ai’s army was roughly that size and its total population perhaps no more than ten thousand.
Given the limited numbers over which these kings ruled and the small size of some of their territories, the majority were more like warlords or tribal chieftains than Charles III. Still, each king in Canaan was the most important individual among his people. He made the rules, accumulated riches, fame, wives, children and concubines, and lived more opulently than anyone else in those troubled and chaotic times.
The Events vs the Records of the Events
Joshua conquered thirty-one of these local monarchs in total, decimating their armies and displaying the bodies of their dead rulers by hanging them from convenient trees until sundown. To be fair, many of those kings met their demise in two major battles between Israel and five or more of its enemies in alliance, both conflicts instigated by the losers. Nevertheless, even after defeating one or more kings in the battlefield on any given day of fighting, each city represented by the fallen monarchs still had to be besieged and conquered, a process that took longer than may appear from the rather succinct narrative. Concerning the taking of the northern territories, it says, “Joshua made war a long time with all those kings.” Five years went by, but the job got done.
Given their druthers, secular historians would probably have included all manner of detail over which the Holy Spirit blithely skips in telling the tale of Canaan’s conquest. But Jericho and Ai are sufficient to illustrate the extremes of Israelite warfare and the nature of God’s involvement in it. After that, we need little further description to get the picture and absorb the much more important instruction between the lines. To tell the tale of their undoing, the twenty-nine other Canaanite cities get something less than two verses apiece, if that.
That’s amazing. The first nine chapters of Joshua cover a period of about a month, and the next three chapters encapsulate five years. No secular historian would ever omit all the thrilling details involved in besieging and conquering twenty-nine cities, but including it would have added nothing to the spiritual lessons of the book of Joshua. If Joshua read like a Grade 9 textbook, it would surely have distracted us from its intended purpose.
Checklist of the Kings
My favorite part of this is the “executive summary” in Joshua 12, which reads like an accounting text, a book of recipes or maybe the back of a hockey card checklist. “The king of Tappuah, one; the king of Hepher, one; the king of Aphek, one; the king of Lasharon, one”, and so on for all thirty-one kings. Check, check, check, done. Men whose servants groveled and fawned in their presence and from the lips of whom a harsh word struck terror into their subjects. If other nations and other times are any indication, gorgeous women considered themselves lucky to be conscripted into the harems of these Canaanite kings.
Not so once Israel came to town.
In Joshua, these royal persons are merely a commodity; line items on a divine “to-do” list forever marked “done and dusted”. They fought against God, they lost, and most of them today go entirely unremembered. In the case of twenty-three of the thirty-one kings, the Holy Spirit of God cannot even trouble himself to recall their names for us, let alone describe the campaigns in which they and all their wicked people met their richly deserved fate. The story of the Israelite Achan, which has a significant moral point, takes longer to tell than the details of all these conquests combined.
A Theological History
Such are the priorities of the Bible’s historians: a theological history is a very different beast than a secular history.
One day, when the terrible “kings” with which you and I battle today are all dead and buried, I hope to find somewhere in the Lord’s heavenly records The Book of Tom, in which the recording angel notes all Christ’s victories over sin in my life with similarly dismissive brevity. “Jealousy, one; lust, one; envy, one; addiction, one; cowardice, one”, and so on down the line. All dead and gone, perhaps none worth recollecting amid the splendor of eternity except for the ways in which they display for us Christ at work in his people, the hope of glory. The process of conforming us to the character of our Savior may mean we, like Israel, “make war a long time with all those kings”, but our victory is just as inevitable because we do not fight this battle alone, no matter what it sometimes feels like.
One greater than Joshua has arrived to command the army of the Lord, and his Holy Spirit knows how to cut to the chase.
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