Judges: Chapter 7

 

Rise, to go down

Hold dread in check--

a dammed river

and know it can all

flip in a moment

[for full chapter, click here

This chapter continues smoothly from the previous (indeed, with no break in the Masoretic text). It shares the keywords of yad -arm, and the focus on the spatial tensions between downward and upward motion. Like the previous chapter, it is in dialogue with the exodus, with the locus-like enemy camp and a "night" of redemption; as in the previous chapter, Israel's primordial blessings (I will make you like the sand of the sea that cannot be counted) has been appropriated by their enemies. Gideon's fear is still an underlying force: the people camp in Ein Harod, עין חרוד, a verbal play on the later reference to "all that fear" (כל החרד), so that it can be read as camping on the "spring of anxiety." Yet Gideon keeps his promise and does not question God\, keeping his anxiety in check--even as God slaughs away his men.

In reward, God of His own volition offers a new sign to assuage Gideon's fear--and opens a new intertext. Gideon, we are reminded, is not just a lesser iteration of Moses for a fallen age. As a Mannasite, he is also a descendant of Joseph, the master of dreams. Like Joseph, he is offered someone else's dream, in virtually the same language: "Behold, I have dreamed a dream." As in the case of Joseph, who interprets a dream of bread loaves, Gideon hears of a loaf of bread, swirling like a dervish. This flipping source of nourishment opens the possibility of sudden reversal, where Israel's fallen, starved state can suddenly flip, just like Joseph's in the pit. 

Inspired and renewed. Gideon prepares for battle, while returning to the opening, miraculous battle that started the conquest of the land: like the settled Jericho, the nomad Midianites will be brought low by the sound of surrounding shofars, and God's will rather than by brute physical force.]

A Belated Goodbye to Joshua

 It feels strange to say “Goodbye to Joshua” when I have just said a new “hello.”

After several years (!), I can't even begin to understand or explain what made me stop the Joshua section one chapter before completion.

I do remember after the end of Deuteronomy, I felt like I had reached closure, a natural stop point. Joshua always felt like a tag-along, an added experiment. I experienced the Book of Joshua as a comedown after the high poetry and complex narratology of Deuteronomy—the language mundane, the violence off-putting. And as a first-time new mother, I also had other concerns that felt more urgent. Yet why I stopped right before the end, I can’t say. No doubt there were some deep, unacknowledged currents there. I do know that the longer I waited, the more distant I felt from the project, and the harder it became to go back. Finally I blocked it out. A niggling untied end that I refused to consider.

Then came this year’s terrible Simchat Torah and its aftermath. As October turned to November, November to December, month after month, the war raging on with no exit point, I found myself completely blocked. Words disappeared.  When I tried to draw, I had to push against the intractable weight of futility. It was as bad—worse—as the block that started me on the Bibliodraw project so many years ago. This time I didn’t have whiplash or amnesia. My arm was working. It was my heart that wasn’t. I found myself desperate for a daily project. And the only project that seemed real enough and urgent enough to matter was Bibliodraw—a project in which I had already invested so much, a project embodying so many layers and history.  It is also a project that gives me a framework of feeling my way through this desperate time. Feeling my way, as I always have, with the “tikvat hut ha-shani”,  Rahab’s guiding bright thread of central archetypal narratives. Returning to Bibliodraw is returning to the questions: what are we doing here? How do we earn this home? How do we lose it? A project that could engage my heart and intellect and hand as one.

Finding a quiet moment does not happen often with four little kids in war time. But I suddenly had a day when I woke up, and all my children were in childcare, and I had no urgent projects that I needed to complete. For the first time in what seemed like months, I drew a deep breath. And I said: I'm going to finish this. I will at least complete Joshua, and close this one circle. Tie up this one dangling thread.

Because, despite all my denials, it was still bothering me. The notebook there, sitting in my closet, incomplete. And so I spent my quiet day reading through Joshua again. This is a much more condensed process that my other “goodbyes”, which were the slow accumulation of weeks' worth of ruminations and thoughts. This rather is the result of months of studying, years of silence, then a quick one-day review

So, the those thoughts after this review.

The Book of Joshua opens with a promise and a charge: I will be with you like I was with Moses, but you must take courage and be strong. The book indeed continues directly from the story of Moses, providing a bridge from Deuteronomy, . Yet it also actively redoes Moses’ legacy in a complex balancing act.   Jooshua’sleadership begins with crossing the Jordan, in a conscious recreation  of the parting of the Red Sea. This places him in the position of Moses, even as it rebirths Israel yet again as a nation. This is a new generation, with a new destiny.

Israel then camps in Gilgal, where they recreate the Exodus, celebrating Passover. It is a place of renewed literal brit, reactivating circumcision after the years of wandering: “Make thee knives of flint, and circumcise again the children of Israel the second time. … them [the children born in the desert] did Joshua circumcise; for they were uncircumcised, because they had not been circumcised by the way.” The desert era is seen as a hiatus, a kind of suspended animation between the beginning of the journey and its end. It is only now, when the children of Israel camp in Gilgal that they start national life anew

The ideas originally presented by Moses in the desert, which existed until this point only in words and concept, are now put into action, finding embodiment in the concrete space of the Land: cities of refuge, covenants in specific places, words literally etched in stone. Yet embodiment is a dynamic  and gradual process. Ideas become real, but not at once. Repetition and variation are key elements as this book. We keep going back to revisit history, even as we move forward. There is aonstant tension between potential and actual, becoming and being. The virtual desert journey does not truly end.

Again and again the verses declare that the conquest is complete, that the land is “subdued”, that Israel is settled and secure. Again and again, we find that it is not so. The same cities are conquered and unconquered, again and again: Hebron, Debir. This tension is perfectly encapsulated at the end of the era, when Joshua sends out representatives of eeach of the tribes to scout out and demarcatethe boundaries of their estate (18: 4). The land is then “distributed…each to his inheritance” (19:49), and they make “and end of dividing the land’ (19: 51), even though, as we find out, the land is as yet mostly unconquered, and not yet theirs to divide. The inheritance “ends” in abstracted visualization, even as in concrete terms it remains undone.   

Throughout this intense period of process, Gilgal is the home base, from which Israel sets out in short sorties, returning back to this space of covenant, as they try to work out the relationship between themselves and God.

The conquest begins with thedivine battle at with Jericho, which is essentially a version of the Jubilee (yovel): seven cycles on the seventh day, which ends with the blowing of the shofar (yovel), in a recreation of the Jubilee opening which undoes human ownership. With the blowing of the Jubilee horn, all the land returns to the owners originally allotted by God, all debts are cancelled, human possession and transactions are undone.  We return to origin. Just so, Israel’s inheritance of the land begins with God announcing a Jubilee, undoing the ownership of the Canaanites. The yovel is blown, the land returns to God. The victory is not the people’s ,but completely herem—forbidden, within the realm of the divine.

The second battle with Ai opens the door for human involvement in battle, as God steps back, acting mostly as tactician. And throughout the book, Joshua pushing for greater and greater human involvement. “You are a great people, who have great power…you shall drive out the Canaanites” (17:17), he tells the children of Joseph, urging them to take charge of their inheritance.

Yet at the very closing, the book returns to its opening point of yovel: the land is not truly theirs. It remains always God’s, a gift that precludes true possession, always given, never had. It is the process itself that is true belonging, the various points where God showed his faithfulness. What remains is to make a choice, and witness your own commitment.

Joshua: Chapter 9

Open your mouth

bind yourself with your ongue

in a world of tattered objects

[For full  chapter, click here

This chapter begins to unpack  some of the implications of the movement from miracles to tactics that took place in the previous chapter.  If in the aftermath of Jericho, the children of Israel venerated Joshua, here there is an underlying tension between the "man of Israel" and the leadership. The local inhabitants also no longer tremble before Joshua. Rather than "melting" in fear as they hear of the supernatural victories, they unite in a federation to fight tactics with tactics. 

The Gibonites take a differnt approach, and rather than battleing Israel head-on, use the same subterfuge and cunning that Joshua used against Ai--this time against him. "Why did you beguile us?" Joshua cries. not undertsanding that deception and play has become an essential part of the world in which he plays, the battles that he fights. 

In a world defined by human action rather than the all-encompaing reality of God's presence--"for the Land is Mine"--there are many objects, and shadows, but few clear cut realities. The leaders of Israel do not "ask the mouth of God", but rather look to the witness of objects as they "take of their provisions" (9: 14). We move from the previous chapter's focus on the "hand" of human action, to the "mouth" that defines the human reality--regardless of the facts. 

If in the battle of Jericho, Israel was told to remain silent, here, after the battle of Ai, human speech becomes definitive. Joshua and the tribal leaders are bound by their word, despite the fact that their oath was given on the basis of a lie.  "We cannot do anything to them"--the human hand bound by the human oath.

There is a subtle counterpoint here to the story of Jericho, which also ends with the commitment to keep an oath: the scouts search out Rahab, and save her and her family as promised. Here, the battle of Ai ends with the commitment to spare the Gibonitesis as promised. Yet in Jericho, the promise to Rahab was bound by faithfulness: she had to complete her part of the bargain, and not give the spies away. Here, the promise was given under deception. At the closing of the story of Jericho, Rahab is accepted within the encampment, and she comes to dwell "within Israel."; the Gibonites, by contrast, remain in a strange liminal state, intimate outsiders who remain forever apart, yet serve within God's sanctuary, The bonds created arbitrarily by human language are not the full equivallent of bonds rooted in reality.]

Joshua: Chapter 8

Learn to lie.

Learn to trap.

Learn to circle round from the back,

weapon clenched in upraised hand.

[For full chapter, click here

With the exorcism of Ahan, the worse seems to have passed. The Children of Israel are no longer infected with the contigion of herem; God once more speaks as comforter rather than in "fierce anger," telling Joshua "do not fear, and do not be lowered." Yet even though God speaks as he did "at the first" (one of the key phrases of this chapter), something fundamental has changed.

From a world of miracles and open revelation, we move to a world of tactics. There is a huge chasm between the capture of Jericho, and the destruction of the Ai. The fall of Jericho does not require warfate in the usual sense of the word. The warriors circle silently, doing nothing. On the seventh day, after seven circles, the walls of the city fall away--just as on the Jubilee year of seven-seven, all human ownership falls away. God's presence is palpable, and His central command is to restrict human action: "do not open your mouth." And after the victory, the command not to try to approparite this victory: all spoils are to be herem to God. 

In Ai, by contrast, God acts as a tachtician. He does not provide victory--only the information that can allow Israel to win by their own means. Yehoshua, under the direction of God, plans a sophisticated ambush that takes advantage of the Ai's own over-confidence (an echo of Israel's over-confidence in the previous chapter). The mistakes and failures "of the first" are used to Israel's own advantage here, as the backup (two?) ambush parties attack the undefended city, leaving the main force to turn around and wipe out the war party. The leitwort  of this chapter is "hand", emphasizing the role of human action: if in Jericho, the inhabitants "hearts" melted, here, the warriors of Ai don't have a "hand." Emphasing the change is Joshua's hands, which remain upraised trhoughout the battle--an echo of Moses' upraised hands in the battle against Amalek.  Yet in contrast to Moses' empty hands, upraised to heaven, Joshua's hands hold up a spear, emphasizing the importance of tachtics and weapons. 

The violation of the Herem moves us out of the world of divine Precense and into the human realm . The spoils now belong to the people rather than God.

 The chapter ends with an enactment of the covenanat at mount Gerizim and Eival that Moses commanded before his death--a covenant that emphasizes the human role in recording the Torah. It is unclea if the stones here are the same stones taken from the Jordan. The ambigity of whether this is a new covenant or a reitification emphasies the transformation: having changed the framework of the relationship between God and Israel, the covenant must be changed as well. ]

Joshua: Chapter 7

How do you rise

after the fall?

What chases behind as you flee?

[For full chapter, click here

From perfect victory we move to abject failure. If before, Jericho's heart melted before the approach of Israel, now the heart of Israel melts before the people of Ai. Joshua's rising fame comes tumbling down, as he "falls on his face" before God.

The opening of the chapter sets into place the reversal that is to come, contrasting Joshua's rising fame with the Children of Israel's desecrations of the herem. All is not well in the aftermath of the miraculous victory of Jericho. What stands out in this context is the conflation of the nation with the individual:

And the children of Israel committed a trespass against the Herem.  

Achan, the son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took of the herem; 

and the anger of the LORD was kindled against the children of Israel. 

The secret sin of Achan is bracketed between two declarations of Israel’s collective guilt. The growth into nationhood is dangerous. Having crossed the transformative passage of the Jordan, Israel has become a single entity, and a problem in a single part can destroy the whole. No more are there incidental details. All is incorporated and impacts the nation.

The herem that closes the previous chapter establishes that the victory over Jericho did not come by human means. The city fell to the yovel call of the Shofar, while the nation was ordered to be silent. Like the Jubilee year, the disintegration of Jericho establishes that "the Land is Mine," and the city is "set aside" (herem) completly to God. Yet how is the nation to move on from this overwhelming revelation,  Joshua's diluted version of Moses' encounter at the Burning Bush?

Joshua attempts to recreate  Jericho by once again sending to spies to "scout out the land." Yet unlike the first scouts, who are careful to look at both "city and land," these second set of scouts immediately zoom in on the city of Ai. And unlike the careful reconnaissance that characterized the approach to Jericho, these  spies arrogantly proceed by approximation: “About two thousand or three thousand..." Not for nothing is Achan conflated with the nation as a whole. There overconfidence reveals that the lesson of Jericho has not been learned. Like Achan, who steals from the physical wealth of Jericho, the nation as a whole steals the aura of the victory over Jericho:  believing their own invincibility, they assume that the city is theirs to win. 

This appropriate of God's action becomes a betrayal as deep, in some ways, as the worship of the Golden Calf in the aftermath of Sinai-- God's exchange with Joshua echoes His words to Moses as he is sent down the mountain.  Desecrating the herem is undoing the covenant. Israel "has stolen and also lied and also taken into his possessions." The attempt to appropriate the herem for oneself makes the herem spread like a contagion. Achan becomes an extension of Jericho, burned with all the possessions that drove him, as well as his family. Israel, which has also become herem, must physically exorcise their connection to Ahan, actively and ruthlessly cutting him out of the body politic.

The meagre objects, and their oversized consequence, become a physical embodyment of the danger of the God of Small Things, who makes no approxumates, and demands a confession of the very specific "this and this." ]

Joshua 6: In Writing

Circle, circle, round and round

what is the pivot

how far the radii

that mark the boundaries of the silent core

closed and enclosed against you.

Set with the sun

to bunk in silence

those who go before

those who gather after

all that is scattered within the storm.

Hear your breath rise within a horn

tremble on the circle of bone

to break out

a piercing cry

 that says: I have nothing..

Watch the walls crumble.

Rush in like a river

lapping the stones

like the tongue of all-devouring God

Joshua: Chapter 6

Count to seven

seven times

Jubilee of connection

when man made ties dissolve

except for the bonds of the mouth

[For full chapter, click here

"Go view the Land and Jericho" (2:2) Joshua commanded the  scouts, setting up Jericho as the key to the Land, and seperate from it. Now we learn that even as the inhabitants tremble before the incoming Israel, Jericho is "closed and enclosed before the children of Israel" (6:1). The walls, so important for the scouts encounter with Rahab, seperate the city from the countryside--just as in Leviticus 25, the city is seen as a human construct, seperating people from the direct, indelible bond to the "field." 

The conquest of Jericho involves circling this wall, a repetitive cyclic movement that is somehow related to the repetitive cycles of time: the weekly cycle of 6 days plus Shabbat; the seven year cycle of shemita [sabbatical year] ; and the seven times seven cycle of the Yovel / Jubilee--a connection that is emphasized by refering to the shofars carried by the priests as yovel. The nation is to circle the city for six days, one circle a day, with seven priests carrying seven shofarot-yovlot, On the seveneth day. there are seven circles, creating the seven times seven pattern of Yovel. 

The laws of the Jubilee (Leviticus 25)  establish that the Land is God's, with humanity only granted the right of usage. Cities finction as small, humanity-centered bubbles, which allow people to cling to their ownership, even as the Jubillee dissolves it. Here, the sounding of the Yovel literally disolves the walls, merging the city with the land outside--and ending the protection of its inhabitants.

The land returns to God's ownership, becoming herem (forbidden, set aside) for human usage. The city is given to Israel to destroy, but not to possess.

Yet even as the human bonds of ownership are disolved, the bonds  of language stands. The people are commanded to be silent throughout the week of circling Jericho, the only sound the impersonal call of the Shofar. Yet at the moment the walls dissolve, the people are permitted to speak. And human speech is binding. The oath sworn to Rahab must be kept "as you swore to her" (6: 22); Joshua "swears" (6:26) not to rebuild the city. The saving of Rahab "she and all who are with her" is set up as a counter to the destruction of the city "she and all within her." The human bonds of language parallel God's unbreakable possesion of the land.]

Joshua: Chapter 2

What keeps watch at the doorway, between? 

Are you penetrable,  knowable? 

Shut the door,  yet open the window

Give me a sign.

[For full chapter, click here
This chapter continues the focus on theme of transition, which here is given a tangible embodiment.
 We begin with the transition between Moses to Joshua. Joshua acts as Moses,  sending out spies. Yet this time, in a successful reiteration, Joshua sends only  two--a recreation of the successful spies, Caleb and himself. The other ten spies are forgotten.
We move on to the transition between the Encampment and the Land.  The spies are to scout out "Jericho, and the land", looking both at the countryside and the city. They stop at the liminal space between the two--the house of Rahab, who lives within the city wall itself, straddling the separation. Rahab becomes the key to the spies success in Jericho, straddling metaphorically between Israel and the inhabitants of the land. It is she who gives the spies their information. And saving  their lives, she demands to be saved in turn. Her literal liminality indeed becomes the key to salvation: she saves the spies by lowering them by rope out her window, and is saved in turn by hanging a "red thread" in her window. This thread, tikvat (lit. 'extension' 'hope') hut ha-shani, signals a way forward, and opening for hope.
Rahab not only lives in a liminal space--she herself is a liminal space, an entrance waiting to be penetrated. The language of the chapter is unremittingly sexual.  Rahab is described as a zonah (which means both innkeeper and whore). The spies "come to her" (repeatedly) and "lie there" in her home; she is told the spies have come to "plow" the land; and she repeatedly speaks of "knowing" (the carnal daat) and "not-knowing."  Indeed, there are many echoes of the Sodom story, with its threat of sexual violence. Rahab's advice to the spies to flee "to the mountain" echoes the angels' advice to Lot to "flee to the mountain" (hahara nasu).
Yet it is Rahab and her family who actually play the part of Lot, saved from the destroyed city. In  saving the spies--"sending them forth", as Joshua had "sent" them --Rahab metaphorically opens herself and the city up as conquest. In exchange, she is granted a protection that echoes Israel's protection in Egypt during the plague  of the firstborn. By marking the limen, she is set aside].