In the competition for worst book of the Bible, I give it to Joshua. The book is an unbeatable combination of abysmal literary quality and revolting content. Here Yahweh boasts of his atrocities. No, he doesn't seem nice. Skeptics Annotated Bible lists about 13 contradictions in this chapter but I won't bother, suffice it to say that many of the details of the narrative don't match up with previous accounts.
Next time we move on to Judges, which is equally repulsive but a bit more interesting.
24 Then Joshua assembled all the tribes of Israel at Shechem. He summoned the elders, leaders, judges and officials of Israel, and they presented themselves before God.
2 Joshua said to all the people, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Long ago your ancestors, including Terah the father of Abraham and Nahor, lived beyond the Euphrates River and worshiped other gods. 3 But I took your father Abraham from the land beyond the Euphrates and led him throughout Canaan and gave him many descendants. I gave him Isaac, 4 and to Isaac I gave Jacob and Esau. I assigned the hill country of Seir to Esau, but Jacob and his family went down to Egypt.
5 “‘Then I sent Moses and Aaron, and I afflicted the Egyptians by what I did there, and I brought you out. 6 When I brought your people out of Egypt, you came to the sea, and the Egyptians pursued them with chariots and horsemen[a] as far as the Red Sea.[b] 7 But they cried to the Lord for help, and he put darkness between you and the Egyptians; he brought the sea over them and covered them. You saw with your own eyes what I did to the Egyptians. Then you lived in the wilderness for a long time.
8 “‘I brought you to the land of the Amorites who lived east of the Jordan. They fought against you, but I gave them into your hands. I destroyed them from before you, and you took possession of their land. 9 When Balak son of Zippor, the king of Moab, prepared to fight against Israel, he sent for Balaam son of Beor to put a curse on you. 10 But I would not listen to Balaam, so he blessed you again and again, and I delivered you out of his hand.
11 “‘Then you crossed the Jordan and came to Jericho. The citizens of Jericho fought against you, as did also the Amorites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hittites, Girgashites, Hivites and Jebusites, but I gave them into your hands. 12 I sent the hornet ahead of you, which drove them out before you—also the two Amorite kings. You did not do it with your own sword and bow. 13 So I gave you a land on which you did not toil and cities you did not build; and you live in them and eat from vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant.’
14 “Now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your ancestors worshiped beyond the Euphrates River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. 15 But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
16 Then the people answered, “Far be it from us to forsake the Lord to serve other gods! 17 It was the Lord our God himself who brought us and our parents up out of Egypt, from that land of slavery, and performed those great signs before our eyes. He protected us on our entire journey and among all the nations through which we traveled. 18 And the Lord drove out before us all the nations, including the Amorites, who lived in the land. We too will serve the Lord, because he is our God.”
19 Joshua said to the people, “You are not able to serve the Lord. He is a holy God; he is a jealous God. He will not forgive your rebellion and your sins. 20 If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, he will turn and bring disaster on you and make an end of you, after he has been good to you.”
21 But the people said to Joshua, “No! We will serve the Lord.”
22 Then Joshua said, “You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen to serve the Lord.”
“Yes, we are witnesses,” they replied.
23 “Now then,” said Joshua, “throw away the foreign gods that are among you and yield your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel.”
24 And the people said to Joshua, “We will serve the Lord our God and obey him.”
25 On that day Joshua made a covenant for the people, and there at Shechem he reaffirmed for them decrees and laws. 26 And Joshua recorded these things in the Book of the Law of God. Then he took a large stone and set it up there under the oak near the holy place of the Lord.
27 “See!” he said to all the people. “This stone will be a witness against us. It has heard all the words the Lord has said to us. It will be a witness against you if you are untrue to your God.”
28 Then Joshua dismissed the people, each to their own inheritance.
Buried in the Promised Land
29 After these things, Joshua son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of a hundred and ten. 30 And they buried him in the land of his inheritance, at Timnath Serah[c] in the hill country of Ephraim, north of Mount Gaash.
31 Israel served the Lord throughout the lifetime of Joshua and of the elders who outlived him and who had experienced everything the Lord had done for Israel.
32 And Joseph’s bones, which the Israelites had brought up from Egypt, were buried at Shechem in the tract of land that Jacob bought for a hundred pieces of silver[d] from the sons of Hamor, the father of Shechem. This became the inheritance of Joseph’s descendants.
33 And Eleazar son of Aaron died and was buried at Gibeah, which had been allotted to his son Phinehas in the hill country of Ephraim.
Footnotes
- Joshua 24:6 Or charioteers
- Joshua 24:6 Or the Sea of Reeds
- Joshua 24:30 Also known as Timnath Heres (see Judges 2:9)
- Joshua 24:32 Hebrew hundred kesitahs; a kesitah was a unit of money of unknown weight and value.
12 comments:
I want to quote an excerpt from Mojrim's comment from June 4th's post ("Nucking Futz") and point out its relevance to the sociopathy, warmongering and irrationality of the book of Joshua. In discussing why people in the USA believe and propagate wild-ass conspiracy theories, Mojrim wrote,
"Why do people fall into wild-ass conspiracy theories such as this? I submit it to you that this is the inevitable result of inhabiting a political economy which makes zero sense and over which you have zero control. It's likely that some degree of narcissism and psychopathy are prerequisites for success in this society, but that's a deeply unsatisfying answer for many. Liturgically, most of our ruling class (political and corporate) are clearly demons, and that's clearly a much easier pill to swallow."
It is my belief that most people in the world have no idea why they even do the things they do. Hearkening back to Cervantes' comparison of the biblical Israelites' to that of Germany in WW II, Joshua "vuss chust followink orderss." And most people are--the subconscious messages they take from their parents, clergy, coaches, teachers and others who abuse them. There are not enough great people from those groups in most people's past.
In order to be a "success" at the time the book of Joshua was written, or in our own time, it's easiest to act like a narcissistic psychopath, as Mojrim points out. The credo of the USA is "The one who dies with the most toys wins"--and, I'd add, abuses the most people and lies the most. Like Donald J. PieceOfShitMotherFucker. Imagine, 330 million Americans and we like to sometimes pick the most disgusting one of all to "lead" us ... and then we turn around and elect a relative mensch like Joe Biden!
We don't seem to be able to make up our minds once and for all, choosing instead to zig-zag between crazy motherfuckers and more evolved people. Jimmy Carter was seen for many years as a "failure" as a president. I submit that's because he was a decent man, not a lying, thieving, murdering psychopath or a pathologically ignorant popinjay. Carter wanted us to wean ourselves from foreign oil, and created a successful plan to create a Palestinian state.
How crazy is that?
I'd say he was actually the greatest success as a man and a president behind Washington, Lincoln and FDR. But he was too good for us.
I've written with all sincerity that I'll be glad if we make it to the point where Christianity dies once and for all. But I think John Lennon had it write when he asked us to appeal to our better angels in imagining a world with "no religion, too."
A PS here:
Every time a super enlightened human (Jesus, Guatama Buddha, Socrates, Gandhi) tries to tell the rest of humanity what being alive is really about, he/she gets killed because, as Mojrim explains, so many people "can't handle the truth." If Jesus could come back (he's dead, though), you can bet that many Caucasian Christians in the USA would be the very folks wanting to "rip that little brown fucker to shreds" which is precisely what they do to the protagonist in Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land," who lets them do it, for he realizes that they know not what they do."
Another masterful Sci-Fi writer, Robert Silverberg, wrote a novella about this very tragic dynamic in his trilogy, "Born With the Dead." In "Thomas the Proclaimer," the populace literally tears apart god's messenger for having the courage (which they see as temerity) to share god's message, intended to let people know that "god is there."
As Marianne Williamson wrote, "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that [most] frightens us."
Buddha died peacefully as an old man. But people perverted his message and started venerating him as a God.
Right … Thank you for that. The original point I wanted to make was that Gautama would never have called himself “the Buddha,” any more than Jesus would have called himself “the Christ.” These titles are among the perversions you refer to, as people like Saul (who rebranded himself as Paul), people who never knew the original enlightened humans themselves, came along and distorted or outright corrupted their messages of peace and awareness.
That's the crux of the matter, gentlefolk: humanity wants neither an existential materialist philosophy (buddhism) nor a gospel of universal love christianity). The former because it leaves one in fear of inevitable death and the latter because it's an impossible standard for someone just trying to feed their family. Christianity (minus the cherry picked bits of torah and acid-trip prophecy) is a radical egalitarian message. I suspect that Mohammed and said "okay, gotta give them some ironclad rules" thus 2/3 of the quran is dictated sharia.
NB: Biden is nothing resembling a mensch, unless you're a credit card company. He's slightly better than Trump (or any current republican) on a narrow range of issues. In the end, my liturgy goggles show him as ~70% demonic.
I want to address the last part of Mo's comment, above, which is tragically inaccurate but nonetheless understandable.
After 260 years of American slavery and another 160 years of terrorism, I'd look at Joe Biden the same way Mo does. When you are treated as subhuman by the dominant group, in this case Caucasians, with random acts of shittiness on a daily basis and the danger of harassment and murder by law enforcement officers on a daily basis, the degradation is beyond infuriating. How would I know any of this as a mere cracker? Because my closest friend in college was African American, and because my own ancestors in Russia were beaten and murdered first by their supposed countrymen and then by the Nazis. A cousin of mine just passed away at 92, 80 years after having witnessed the murder of almost his entire family by SS Einsatzgruppen. My ancestors weren't slaves, of course, but they couldn't own land, couldn't vote, were subject to violence and degradation on a daily basis, and got the hell out of that country when they could--if they could. They weren't thought of as "the n-word" plural, they were thought of as "the j-word" plural.
When I asked my grandmother what it was like when the Bolsheviks came into power in Kiev, I was expecting a great moment in living history. Instead, she dismissively shared that they were treated like shit under the czar and the same under the Bolsheviks. Nothing changed.
That is the view of many of even the most educated African Americans. I have a friend who's traveled the world and won a Pulitzer Prize. But he still equates Hillary and Donald and Joe.
Nothing could be further from the truth. You wanna see bad? Elect a complete shithead like Donald Shitler. Presto! BAD.
Comparing Shitler to Biden is like comparing a toxic plate of ammonia and bat feces to a T-bone stead with sauteéd greens.
But many (though not all, e.g., Stacey Abrams) extremely intelligent and educated African Americans are coming from the perspective that an ofay is an ofay, and no change in the resident in the White House will change anything for them because they've been treated like subhuman garbage for their whole lives by the dominant ethnic group.
Caucasians have a different perspective because we've experience the privilege of not being constantly targeted, watched, suspected, harassed, rejected, deprived and dehumanized by the dominant ethnic group. We are the dominant ethnic group. But as I learned early in my adult life, if there's one thing Caucasians are good at, it's fucking EACH OTHER over. A lot of African Americans don't realize that that's the case.
I said Joe Biden was a relative mensch. Relatively speaking, he is.
Typos are such a problem. I should know ... I'm a proofreader/editor.
Anyway, in the above comment I of course meant "steak," not "stead."
The point of the comment is basically this: If you're Caucasian in Amerikkka, the choice of president has monumental ramifications. Electing a Republican means poisoned air and water, accelerated climate change, children in cages separated from their parents, gerrymandering, restricted voting rights, pardoning of criminals by their president buddy, crooks in office, etc.
If you're African American in Amerikkka, and not in the know about the perspective in the above paragraph, then a different president--whether Democrat or Republican--means the same ton of shit dumped on you under a different administration. I can't say how Mo felt about Obama, either before he began his administration, during, or after. I personally voted for the man because I saw his wife speak in Tucson before he was elected, and she was so amazing that I thought, "If this guy married her, I'm voting for him." I'm actually disappointed in his failure to be more assertive concerning health care and his military adventurism. I'm also disappointed that, constitutional scholar that he was, he played by the rules and let Moscow Motherfucker Mitch run the country and judiciary. But that's who he was.
I would submit it to you, my dearest Don, that you are walking into a minefield of race and class politics in which you should tread very fucking lightly. Your reference to Stacy Abrams as "getting it" while the rest of us, no matter how educated and well travelled, sounds a whole lot like "one of the good ones." Your presumption that we don't realize how whites treat each other is... ignorant, to put it kindly. There's a hundred cubic yards of research and discussion on how skin plays into the class game in america, you just haven't availed yourself of it.
Moreover, your disgust with Trump is that of all Good White Liberals: he's crude, he's crass, he's fat and orange. He openly supported police violence. He made a spectacle of putting kids in cages and murdering people with hellfire missiles. He tweeted it a dozen times a day. Are you unaware that most of this was the continuation of Obama and Bush policy, or are you merely uncomfortable with his showmanship? Biden won't descend to such theatrics, but he won't suspend the 1033 program, either. Nor will he stop "detaining" children, but he has called for volunteers to help them deal with it, so...mensch? Meanwhile, the Iran sanctions are still on, Cuba is still under crushing embargo, the Trump and Bush tax cuts are still in place, and cetera... And that's before we get into his utterly monstrous record in the senate...
I'm not Jewish, and my understanding of Yiddish is limited, but I don't think mensch is 100% relative.
In short: Do not presume to tell me, or any other POC, what we do or do not understand about race and class in america. Surviving at the bottom requires a clarity of perception that becomes more of a hindrance the higher you climb. What you have done here is show plainly why many of us (including Fred Hampton) see better allies among the rednecks than among Good White Liberals.
Okay Mo, I know you feel strongly, I hope we can have this discussion less confrontationally. I don't think we'll make any progress on structural racism and class struggle in this country if we can't make alliances. It's racism that divides the working class and divides them from the intelligentsia and that accounts in substantial part from the greater inequality in the U.S. than elsewhere in the wealthy countries. Fred Hampton was murdered by the FBI, not well-meaning white liberals. Historically there was an important alliance between Southern African Americans and Jews in the Freedom movement. Sadly that has not endured by it was a good thing in my view, not something to reject.
I knew I'd get a reaction, Mo, but that's not why I wrote the comments. On the whole your response was quite reasonable and, as always, well thought out. I appreciate it, and I don't take it at all personally.
Although you make some good points, you fail to observe how I qualify my statements with phrases such as "many" or "for example," or "some" or "some of" ... I do NOT group all people of any ethnicity, religion, skin color or other persuasion into one giant group. People are individuals, and it gets my goat when ignorant people say "The Arabs this" or "The Jews that" or "The Blacks that" or "Those people" ... You still feel the way you feel about Biden, which is fine, but he seems to have evolved from the Anita Hill-baiting sonofabitch that he was.
You know, when it comes to comparing Biden and Shitler, well, some people change ... but others mutate. As a matter of fact, I think that the aging population in the US demands a bill that not only vets people who run for president based on their taxes, but on their pre-campaign psychological responses to verify that they don't suffer from incipient senility.
Thank you for pointing out that the policies at the border are in SOME respects continuations of pre-Shitler programs, but the crass violence practiced by US border agents escalated under Shitler (as it did under Cheney and Booosh). I'm also aware of the continuing deportation of law-observing legal immigrants that has continued or escalated under Obama and Biden as a result of the "Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act" of 1996 signed under Clinton, another shit.
And when it comes to Shitler, well, I don't think he's worse than Dick Cheney! There are plenty of Caucasoid bastards in our country's government's history and present. But give me some credit (if you can) for NOT blanket labeling. And good luck on those alliances with folks like the ones who attacked the Capitol on January 6. I'm sure they're just as amenable to social change and justice as Abbie Hoffman would have been. I ain't no liberal. I'm a radical in many respects. If you don't want to be labeled and grouped into a cohort with others, don't do it (as in "Good White Liberals").
I feel strongly indeed, estemado Cervantes, and I appreciate you publishing my response though it skirted the edge of civility. I welcome the renewal of such alliances but they cannot be founded on paternalism. The proximate agent of Hampton's death was the FBI, the ultimate was white presumption that they are qualified to judge who among us "gets it" and who does not.
Sherman was right and Lincoln should have let him kill another 100k. That failure has led, ultimately, to the plantation system taking over the entire country. Unions are satanist commies; class is a marxist fraud; and no matter how poor you are, at least you're not a neeeegro. Race as we know it was literally invented for this. Yes, we do indeed need such alliances, but they were founded on class, a thing which modern america rejects.
You must forgive me when I grow tired of explaining that we aren't confused.
I agree wholeheartedly with everything you wrote in the above comment, Mo.
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