Joshua: The Story

I believe stories are our greatest teachers, and I especially love the biblical stories. I can think of only one relevant text to my earlier post: the books of Joshua and Judges. In the biblical story up to the point of the Joshua and Judges books, the land God promised that Israel would enter was only that, a promised land, it wasn’t real land. Their actual entry into the land, which is told in the great stories of Joshua and Judges, turns out not to be as clean and neat as Israel thought it would be. Other people are already living on the land, people with their own ideas who don’t just yield to Israel’s claim. So to do what they feel they have to do the Israelites need to choose between dealing with conflict or accommodating/compromising. Either choice is far from simple. Thus Joshua and Judges can be read as the entry that faith must always make into the complexities of life.

Read the books. They’re worth the time. If you don’t like Bible language, read it from The Message translation.

An outstanding commentary on this is in Brueggemann et.al’s Theological Introduction to the Old Testament.

Comments

[R.L.]

Cool perspective - thanks Lynn and Jayme.