Friday, December 1, 2017

Yehoshua: Chapter 13


What is left undone
The negative spaces before the quiet 
What lies between the name

[For full chapter, click here
From the uplifting soaring of poetry, we land back into the nitty gritty of prose. And discover that the triumphant listing tells only a small part of the story. The land has not "rested from war" (11: 23). What is left is an uneasy truce, and an incomplete possession. In this chapter, we are presented with an alternative map to the victorious presentation of Joshua's victories: the anti-matter map of what has not been possessed; the negative to define the positive. Almost every name mentioned in the course of the description of the battles of 11-12, are here mentioned again, demarcating lines between conquered and unconquered territory. 
As Joshua grows "Old, coming into days" what he sees are the things undone, a landscape of incompleteness.  
All that is left is to assert the virtual possession declared in the last two chapters, and alott the land as though it is already possessed. The assigning rather than possession will be Joshua's final achievement.] 

No comments:

Post a Comment