Joshua, Conquest and Jesus (2)

Discuss, using Ricoeur's hermeneutic of suspicion and retrieval, ways in which the conquest narratives of Joshua can be appropriated as Christian scripture

The inclusion of the conquest narratives of Joshua in the Christian Scriptures raises one the most profound challenges to Christian belief. A prima facie reading of Joshua presents a God who is not only invoked in support of violence, but who indeed supports violence, and, in fact, sanctions retributive murder, demands ethnic cleansing and even genocide.¹ This is a far cry from the God that Jesus evokes in the Gospels.² This presents the faithful Christian with the conundrum of the title: if the God of Jesus is to be normative for a Christocentric faith, and if both Testaments are to be regarded as sacred Canon, how can Joshua be appropriated as Christian Scripture? Pragmatic responses may range from an embarrassed shrug to a dismissive dispensationalism, but ultimately fail to address the hermeneutic challenge of engaging with the Joshua narrative by not progressing beyond the level of ‘plain sense’ reading. Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval allow the interpreter to move beyond the ‘primitive naïveté,’ as Ricoeur calls it, and attempt to appropriate the Joshua narrative within the paradigm of Christian faith.³ In this essay I shall first exercise Ricoeur’s hermeneutic of suspicion to critique the conquest narratives of Joshua through a depth analysis of the semiotic and semantic construction of the narrative, the langue and the parole.⁴ I shall also make both socio-critical and ideological critical observations of the narrative. As this suspicion gives way to a hermeneutic of retrieval, I shall reflect on the impact of the ciphered myth and symbolism of the narrative from which arise some alternative meanings that may enable Joshua to be appropriated as Christian scripture. Finally I shall highlight some criticisms of Ricoeur’s methodology.

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