Wednesday, December 29, 2021

Robert P. Gordon on Joshua 9 and the Gibeonite Ruse Fooling Joshua and the Israelites

Josh 9 is an example Latter-day Saint apologists cite as an example of prophetic errancy. As Jeff Lindsay writes:

 

The Bible gives examples of prophets and apostles who were mortal and fallible, with obvious mistakes having been made by Jonah (shirking his duty), Moses (not circumcising his son), and Peter (denying Christ three times). But can real prophets be fooled by deceivers? Certainly. Joshua was fooled by the men of Gibeon, who came in disguise as if from a distant country when they were locals who normally would have been treated as enemies. In that story, given in Joshua 9:3-27, Joshua was deceived. He was a prophet, but he fell for the trick of the Gibeonites. (Jeff Lindsay, LDSFAQ: The LDS Concept of Modern Prophets)

 

Commenting on the Gibeonites’ ruse, Robert P. Gordon wrote that:

 

When they arrive at the Israelite camp (v. 6), the Gibeonites announce with some emphasis, as reflected in the word-order, “From a far country we have come”, and they ask, bluntly and without further preamble, for a treaty with Israel, using the expression kãrat le, which occurs in Deut. 7:2 in the ban on the making of treaties with such as the Gibeonites (cf. also Exod. 23:32; 34:12). They are described by their tribal affiliation of “Hivite” in verse 7, doubtless to emphasize the fact of their ineligibility for such treatment (cf. v. 1). It may, or may not, be significant that there is no reference to language differences between the two parties. Josh. 9 would not, in any case, be exceptional among the narratives of the Old Testament in remaining silent about the language factor. We are simply not to know whether, on their own description of themselves, the Gibeonites should have spoken in a language unfamiliar to the Israelites.

 

The Israelites’ response in verse 7 and Joshua’s more direct questioning in verse 8 raise the possibility of detection. Joshua’s question noticeably never does get a straight answer. Thereafter the Gibenoites unravel their fictive skein (vv. 9-13). First they emphasize that they have come from a very distant land (c. 9; cf. v. 6). Like Rahab and the inhabitants of Jericho (2:9-11), they have heard of the discomfiture of the Egyptians and the defeat of the Amorite kingdoms of Heshbon and Bashan, and are alarmed. (In 2 Sam. 21:2 the Gibeonites themselves are described as belonging to “the remnant of the Amorites”.) Whether their failure to update the story to include Jericho and Ai is part of the act—in verse 3 it is when they hear what Joshua had done to Jericho and Ai that they take action (v. 4)—or simply reflects the importance of Sihon and Og in the conquest tradition [40] must be left an open question. The political set-up implied in their statement in verse 11 does not involve a monarchy (cf. 10:2 [“like one of the royal cities”])—contrast the references to Canaanite kings in 9:1 and in chapter 10—and, with its elders and popular representation of some sort (“all those living in our country”) might even fetch a parallel with premonarchical Israel as described in Joshua-Samuel. They may, according to Schäfer-Lichtenberger, be wanting to bring the comparison to the Israelites’ attention in order to win their sympathy. At the least, they succeed in making themselves sound different from the Canaanites. Presumably, by implying that their elders had remained at home (v. 11) they seek to reinforce the impression of distance travelled: elders would normally be expected to form at least part of such a delegation, but elders might not be expected to travel such a long distance as these people have come.

 

One of the most obvious features of the narrative is the amount of overkill attributed to the Gibeonites in their desperation to avoid the exterminatory “ban”. This applies specially to their appeal to their food supply which, surprisingly, they have not been able to replenish en route. They still have the bread baked for them at their home, before they set out (v. 12)! And then they quote their elders back home as having said that they should “take provisions for the journey” (v. 11), this is almost a give-away. If they were setting out on a journey of the length that they suggest, the advice is superfluous. The closest phraseological parallels are in the Joseph story in Genesis, but these occur in statements of fact (45:21, 23) or in a command from Joseph to his servants to provide his brothers with food for their journey home (42:24). Here in Josh. 9 the elders’ advice serves to draw attention to the food that will prove crucial to their deceiving of the Israelites (see v. 14).

 

Without much hesitancy the Israelites respond to this plea for a treaty; two or three features of a typical treaty may be represented in verses 14-45. The chief uncertainty in the text relates to the Israelites’ “taking (some) of” the Gibeonites’ food (v. 14). Is this the Israelites testing their claim to have come from a distance? Or is it a symbolic act of sharing food, amounting at its most formal to a conventual meal (cf. Gen. 26:30-1) (note that the meal precedes the oath-taking in Genesis 26, just as it would in this instance. Cf. also the treaty clause in the Esarhaddon vassal-treaty texts: “you will not make a treaty by serving food at table, by drinking from a cup . . .”)? Tasting bread that was obviously “dry and crumbling” would have added nothing to what the Israelites knew, or at least thought they knew. On the other hand, if this was a sharing of food as part of a treaty ratification ceremony, the Israelite participants are not being shown in their best light. Intertextual reading of verse 14 with Gen. 3 might even suggest comparison with the guilty eating of Eve who “took (some) of” the fruit of the tree in the middle of Eden (Gen. 3:6). At any rate, the use of the term “peace” and the ratification of the treaty by oath—as also the implied agreement on mutual assistance against enemies (cf. 10:6)—are conventional aspects of treaty—and covenant-making, and their significance in verse 15 is uncontroversial. The prior statement in verse 14 that the Israelites “did not ask instruction from the Lord” is obviously intended to carry a lot of weight in the narrative. From this oversight, it is implied, the Israelites dug a put for themselves by carelessly entering into a treaty arrangement contrary to their own law. (Robert P. Gordon, “Gibeonite Ruse and Israelite Curse in Joshua 9,” in Hebrew Bible and Ancient Versions: Selected Essays of Robert P. Gordon [Study for Old Testament Study Series; London: Routledge, 2016], 86-87)

 

Responding to a claim that the Israelites were simply “play-acting” and knew the true identity of the Gibeonites, and they simply did not wish to enact the “ban” (ḥerem) against them, Gordon notes that:

 

Occasionally it is suggested that in Josh. 9 the Israelites collude in their own deception, presumably to avoid having to apply the “ban”. However, the writer has not left us any clues that would support such an interpretation. In part, responses will depend on how the composition of the chapter is envisaged. The second half (vv. 16-27) clearly does not support the idea of collusion. When the truth is discovered, there is a strong inclination on the part of the mass of the Israelites (“the whole assembly”, v. 18) to take revenge for the deception, which still leaves the leadership, but only the leadership, as possibly having been tempted into collusion. Nor does the statement that Joshua made a treaty with the Gibeonites “to let them live” (v. 15) imply that this was consciously in breach of the law of Deut. 20:16, according to which nothing that breathed was to be left alive in the Canaanite cities. The decision is made to “keep alive” the Gibeonites before their ruse is discovered, and the term by itself does not suggest a policy the opposite of what was supposed to be followed. It occurs in the Rahab story, which has none of the complications of the Gibeonites account as regards the bona ides of the other covenant party (see 2:13; 6:25).

 

When the Gibeonites’ deceit is discovered it becomes clear that they occupy a tetrapolis (v. 17); the Israelites have been even more generous than they realized. The rank and file of Israel complain against their leaders, and a resolution of sorts is achieved by imposing on the offenders a menial function in relation to the Israelite community (v. 21). The fact that the leaders propose a role in relation to the community, whereas Joshua rules that they will be in service to the Israelite sanctuary (v. 23), is commonly taken as evidence of composite authorship. There is, nevertheless, a consistency about the leaders’ seeking to pacify the “community” with an offer of domestic service, and Joshua’s formalizing of the decision as a curse binding the Gibeonites to menial duties at the shrine of the God whose displeasure has been incurred (v. 23). That the curse relates directly to woodcutting and water-drawing is hardly in doubt. However, if the MT vocalization is followed in verse 21, a translation such as that of NRSV follows: “So they became hewers of wood and draws of water for all the congregation, as the leaders had decided concerning them,” and this could be taken to imply that the Gibeonites’ subservient role was decided at the time of the original treaty-making (cf. Deut. 20:11; Josh. 16:10; 17:13; 1 Kgs. 9:21). Even if this is the case, Joshua’s pronouncement in verse 23 still amounts to a formal curse in which the sentence consists of the subservient business of woodcutting and water-drawing. Verse 27, whatever its vintage, binds the decisions in verses 21 (“for all the congregation”) and 23 (“for the house of my God”) together in its summarizing comment on the episode of its after-effects. The significance of imposed sentence and the curse will be the subject of the next main section of this study.

 

Finally, the Gibeonites’ response to Joshua (vv. 24-5) does indeed differ from Rahab’s in putting stress on the “word” of God and not just the acts by which his dread has fallen on the population of Canaan. However, the truly significant point is that, whereas at their first encounter with the Israelites they could not confess their fears, ostensibly they had no reason for such, once their trick was uncovered they could own up to the real cause of the deception: the knowledge that the Israelites were set up on the eradication of the Canaanite tribes Once the confession was made, they could entrust their fate to Joshua (v. 25), comfortable in the knowledge that their ill-gotten treaty would save them alive. (Ibid., 88-89)

 

Josh 9, as Jeff Lindsay et al., note, is an explicit biblical example of a prophet of God (Joshua) being deceived.

Blog Archive