Semi-Random Musings (40)

“So now give me this hill country of which the Lord spoke on that day …”

Caleb son of Jephunneh is eighty-five when he speaks these words to his fellow senior citizen and current leader of Israel’s armies, Joshua son of Nun. Joshua and the high priest Eleazar are in the process of dividing the largely-conquered land of Canaan by lot to assign territory to the various tribes. In the middle of this, Caleb comes to ask a personal favor. In the process, he does some reminiscing.

He’s casting his mind back to a particular day forty-five years in the past.

Caleb and Joshua were tribal leaders assigned by Moses to spy out the land of Canaan, along with ten others. God charged them with a specific task, which he communicated to them through Moses, as was almost invariably the case in those days. Moses was God’s chosen intermediary, and his word like that of the Lord himself. God said, “Go up into the Negeb and go up into the hill country.” Where was that hill country? It was a place later called Hebron. Off went the spies to complete their task, and forty days later they came back to give their report. So “that day” was the day the Lord gave Caleb instructions through Moses to spy out Hebron, and the “hill country” for which Caleb asked Joshua forty-five years later was exactly the same place.

Most of us know the story. The ten spies were cowardly and recommended the people retreat. “We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we are,” they complained, and Israel listened, feared man and rebelled against the word of the Lord.

The first man to disagree with their evil report was Caleb. He appealed to the people to be courageous and obey God. “Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it.” Nobody listened, and God’s judgment righteously fell on that generation. They wandered in the wilderness until every last man who came out of Egypt from twenty years old and upward had died, and their children inherited Canaan.

It was this specific territory, the land full of giants that so terrified Israel, that eighty-five-year-old Caleb wanted the privilege of trying to conquer with his own sword. The next chapter notes specifically that giants were still there. Isn’t that remarkable faith and fidelity? Fidelity, because Caleb had encouraged the people to trust God and move forward. Having given his word in public, that faithful man considered it disgraceful not to be the first person going up the hill to do the job he was telling others needed to be done. Even as a senior citizen. He wanted to finish the job at eighty-five that other people’s failures of faith prevented him from doing at forty.

What a lesson for God’s people. We live in a day when critics are everywhere, especially in the evangelical community. If Israel knew how to grumble, so too do the people of God. Everyone has a “better idea” about how things ought to be done, how the leadership ought to proceed and who ought to be doing what.

Caleb too had ideas about what urgently needed doing, but he was willing to step out in faith and lead the charge himself. “It may be,” he said, “that the Lord will be with me, and I shall drive them out just as the Lord said.” It may be, it may not be, but if necessary, Caleb was going to die trying.

I’m not quite Caleb’s age yet, but may I have his spirit if I am privileged to get there.

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I note that President Trump launched his fusillade of executive orders with a couple of name changes: henceforth the Gulf of Mexico is to be referred to as the Gulf of America, and Alaska’s Mount Denali, the highest peak in North America, will revert to being called Mount McKinley after the 25th US president.

Say what you like, but names are important, and the president understands the message he is sending. The Gulf of Mexico has more American coastline than Mexican. Why not call it something more appropriate? In Alaska, the Koyukon people who inhabit the area have referred to the peak as Denali for centuries and will probably continue to do so, but history tells us the conquerors get to make the rules, and that there’s no need to be ashamed about it.

Hebron wasn’t always called Hebron. It’s called that in Genesis, Exodus, Numbers and Joshua only so the readers of those books understand which location the writers were referring to. Hebron was not Hebron when Abraham built an altar to the Lord there in Genesis 13 on pagan ground. It was either called Kiriath-arba (after Arba, the greatest of the Anakim giants), or perhaps something else in the years prior to Arba and his kindred occupying it. Hebron became Hebron when its Israelite conquerors drove out the last of the Anakim and renamed it with the Hebrew word for “friend”. Today, after more than three millennia, Hebron is still Hebron even though Palestinians govern it. It’s the third-largest city in the region.

Sure, the Arabs renamed it Al-Khalil in the 13th century, but even that is a precise Arabic translation of the Hebrew. It didn’t so much change the name as make it intelligible to people who spoke another language.

The conquerors make the rules, right?

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Trevor Bragdon at Pitch + Persuade has a fascinating post on how Albert Einstein’s fame in the US was actually the product of a media mistake. The Washington Times reporter assigned to cover the physicist’s first visit to New York in 1921 got his story on the front page because he reported that Einstein (then relatively unknown in the US) was greeted like a huge celebrity, paraded through the city in a motorcade to large crowds. Celebrity in the US quite naturally followed.

What the reporter failed to recognize was that the crowd he assumed was cheering Einstein was actually there to greet Chaim Weizmann, a prominent Zionist who would later become the first president of Israel. Einstein was one of many equally anonymous members in Weizmann’s delegation. Reporters at the Jewish newspaper Forward got the story right with their headline “Great Parade for Zionist Delegates in New York”, presumably because they knew why the (mainly Jewish) crowd had gathered.

Bragdon makes this a parable. What you see in any given situation, he says, depends on your initial frame. “Check your frame”, he advises.

This is excellent advice for Christians. Like everyone else, our default assumptions tend to govern our perceptions when we come to interpreting scripture. I have found it takes years of constant reading and re-reading of my Bible to get past the lessons I uncritically absorbed in church as a child, many of which were simply products of their time and culture rather than the eternal truths of the word of God. It’s a perpetual struggle to read what the text is actually saying and not hear what I think it’s saying.

Like that Washington Times reporter, I still regularly need to check my frame before I start opining.