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 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.]