Joshua, Conquest and Jesus (7)

As noted above, Ricoeur understands a text as a discourse without interlocutors, and the narrator is only present through the signs of narrativity. This would appear to ascribe agency to the text, that it has an intention of its own. Vanhoozer rightly criticises this aspect of Ricoeur's work: we do not 'praise or blame books; we rather direct our praise or blame at their authors.'⁷⁴ However, Vanhoozer is trying here to establish a basis for accessing authorial intention by seeing a text as meaningful action. For Ricoeur, however, the process of writing a text makes it a self-contained work and authorial intention becomes a dimension of the text.⁷⁵

Ricoeur's hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval have given us the tools to effect an appropriation of the conquest narratives of Joshua as Christian scripture. A semiotic and semantic analysis of Joshua has revealed the symbolic structure of the work: Joshua, the arch-symbol of salvation and victory, defines Israel's redemption and purity through violence and ethnic cleansing. Depth hermeneutics, combined with socio-critical and ideological observations, has enabled us to complete the suspicion of Joshua as a text that can be used for domination, conquest and betrayal and thereby at odds with the Christocentric heart of Christianity. But in hermeneutic reflection that appropriates and retrieves the text we are able to resist the world of Joshua and be transformed by first reflecting on the presence of redemptive violence in our own lives, and affirming a non-violent Christocentric faith that leaves us freer, and, if possible, a little happier.