Joshua, Conquest and Jesus (6)

This is the most challenging aspect of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics to apply to the conquest narratives of Joshua. As we observed above, the text is saturated with the symbolism of salvation through victory, of purity through redemptive violence. By asking what we make of the symbolic meanings of Joshua we are drawn into the world proposed by the conquest narratives, becoming implicated in the life of these symbols. But the very process of resisting the proposed world of Joshua and using our socio-critical and ideological observations to demythologise the symbolism of the conquest narratives does indeed give rise to thought.

Ricoeur exhorts the Christian reader of Joshua to assess the world of Joshua in the light of the world of Christian faith. This absolutely does not mean assimilating Joshua’s world into a Christian world, since this would be pre-critical or even sub-critical. And it does not necessarily mean trying to find motifs of Christian faith within the narrative and symbolism of Joshua, since that would mean both that Joshua is being used to talk about something that it does not talk about, and that the peril of allegory would potentially be realised. Instead, as a reader I must answer this question: how does the world proposed by Joshua challenge the world of Christian faith? What is the impact of the world evoked in the conquest narratives?

By resisting the world proposed by Joshua in the history-as-narrated I, the reader, am able to reflect on my own character, morality and praxis as a Christian. The conquest narratives propose a world in which salvation is achieved through victory, in which violence is redemptive. The story of Jesus for a Christian is one in which victory is strange and salvation is realised within apparent defeat.⁶⁹ Consequently, I am called to resist any attempt to achieve salvation that intends victory, especially one that demands violence, since that amplifies the risk that Warrior states of belief in the God of deliverance manifesting itself as obedience to a God of conquest. Warrior’s exhortation to keep the experience of the Canaanites at the centre of hermeneutic reflection on Joshua urges me to critically assess my capacity to dominate, subjugate and ultimately betray the weak, vulnerable and marginalised among us. The result for my ethics and praxis as a Christian demands that I identify with the weak, vulnerable and marginalised in the same way that, for Moltmann, Jesus’ death is a crucified God identifying with suffering humanity.⁷⁰ It might become possible to attain what Yahweh’s chosen people in the past were not: ‘a society of people delivered from oppression who are not so afraid of becoming victims again that they become oppressors themselves.’⁷¹

It is also possible to begin a creative engagement with the text where further patterns can be recognised and alternatives postulated.⁷² I can make a wager that embracing a non-violent entrance into this already-inhabited land would have resulted in a better existence for Israel in the long run, and therefore I can wager that a personal embrace of non-violence would also lead to a better life for me. I can also observe that a nation established in divinely-ordained violence and retributive murder will result in a nation that requires cities of refuge, and that a nation inclined to a covenantal view that is birthed in divinely-sanctioned genocide will have to deal with the ethics and practical implications of deception and oaths founded on trickery.⁷³

It must be noted that, by following the movement of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval, Joshua has not ceased to be scriptural canon. The conquest narratives remain. But the text itself has prompted us to demythologise the narrative and engage with its symbolic meanings, which has led us to appropriate the text and become transformed in the process.