Hey hey, welcome back to The Book That God Wrote, the second and final part of Joshua. Where we learn what happens with Joshua and his ragtag crew of Israelites. Does Joshua find the answers he's looking for? Is he able to fill the gigantic shoes left by that badass Moses? And what is it with Joshua and his apparent rock obsession? Read on to find out, did I mention that we also have an octogenarian battling giants, and the Israelites attacked by biblical transformers? Man for serious, read on, read on, read on.
Aaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiii!:
As I'm sure you remember, we left Joshua in a huddled, torn clothed, mass on the ground, muttering about how God had forsaken him. Come early morning, God appears to Joshua, I guess he was taking care of another promised land campaign or something. Anyway, God is straight with Joshua, "Someone sinned asshole, you need to root out the transgressor and you know ... take care of him." The Bible doesn't say that God crosses his throat with his index finger, but it's certainly implied. See here's what happened, before the Israelites bombed into Jericho, God told them some very specific things, basically that they could only take the gold, silver, steel and other metals and those were only taken for the priests, to make various God helmets I guess. Everything else, and I mean everything: clothes, furniture, musical instruments, food, wagons, sex toys, people, and even horses were burned in a sacrificial fire. Well it turns out one of the soldiers did a little bit of pillaging when he was only supposed to be burning, and that one dude doing one thing is what caused God to make the Israelites lose to Ai. Remember in school when one jackass would make a snarky comment and everyone would get extra homework because of it? Yeah, that shit is apparently biblical, instead of God just smiting the asshole who crossed him, he causes the Israelites to lose to a tiny bitch city. In fact, it doesn't even seem like God knows who this person is. For being a supposedly omniscient badass, God doesn't seem to know anything. "Yeah hey, I know someone went against what I said, but I'm not sure who, you better find out Joshua if you plan on winning up in this promised land." It's almost like God has astigmatism and everyone looks blurry from upstairs, and he's God, so he'll be damned if he'll get glasses for that shit, imagine how much those gigantic lenses would cost? Anyway, you can probably guess what happens next, Joshua starts investigating each tribe and each family down to every tent. Finally, in the tribe of Judah, when a kid named Achan is brought before him he breaks down in front of Joshua, "Oh Joshua, it was me I'm so sorry, I just saw this robe and silvery shit that would match my purple hat that I just had to have it, I didn't think this all would happen, please have mercy."
Ha, Achan should know better than to ask for mercy from God or Joshua. Joshua and his crew take Achan, his stolen possessions, his sons, daughters, his entire tent, and pretty much everything he's ever even fucking touched down into a valley away from camp. There they stone him in front of his family and then stone everybody else one by one. After all that they torch all Achan's shit, including the corpses, and then cover the entire scene in rocks. Seriously, if you haven't figured it out by now, do not fucking cross God, he will eff you up, and if he doesn't, then his people will. And what is it with Joshua and rocks? He went out of his way to collect some in the Jordan, and now he's throwing them all over his massacre, was he the original owner of the pet rock? Or the first rock collector? Haha, Joshua, the Warrior of God, the nerd of the Israelites, I like it.
So now that that's been taken care of, Joshua sets his sights back on Ai. This time he's not playing around, he's going to send his entire fucking crew, but he's not going to march them all out to Ai. He decides to deceive the city, he plans to march part of his army to the main gate and lure their army away from the city, much like before when Ai trounced the Israelites. Now while the Ai-ian army is out and about, the remainder of God's army will be free to attack Ai from behind and burn that shit to the ground. And pretty much this plan comes off without a hitch, the Israelites lead the Ai-ite (God that is such a fucking terrible city name) army away and suddenly they look back and see that their precious city is on fire and a remainder of the Israelites are coming from behind them. So the army of Ai is surrounded by mean ass Israelites, which basically means they're fucked. Oh, and to be extra badass, after the Ai-ite army realizes that their precious home is on fire, Joshua stops fighting all together and just points his spear at Ai. For the rest of the battle all those gentiles see is mean Israelites surrounding them, their precious home in flames, and the general of the opposing army calling the fucking shot. "That city right there, it's ours now bitches." So, yeah Joshua is badass, rock collector or not, he pulled a fucking Babe Ruth against Ai.
Then on top of all that, the Israelites go back and kill anyone left in the city and completely burn everything to the ground, much like they did with Jericho. And I guess to show that they mean business, Joshua hung the king of Ai from a tree. Then at sunset they threw his body at the entrance of the now ruined city, "and they raised a large pile of rocks over it, which remains to this day (8:28)." Seriously, what is it with Joshua and rocks?
The Decepticites:
So there's this group of dudes (who I've decided to call the Decepticites) living in Canaan that see this complete steamroll fuckover the Israelites are laying down in the surrounding cities and they come up with a plan to avoid their inevitable fate. They all dress up in tattered dirty clothes and beat the shit out of their sandals, they collect all the moldy bread they can, along with all the spoiled meat they have, and then they set out for Israelite central. "Who the hell are you?" Joshua asks when these guys roll into camp.
"We're your servants from a very distant land. We've heard of your badass God and we'd like to join you."
"Yeah? How do I know you're not Canaanites trying to avoid your inevitable fate."
"Well just looks at our tattered clothes and beat up sandals, when we left all our shit was new. Look at all this moldy ass bread we have, and spoiled meat, this stuff was all fresh when we left home. We've obviously been traveling for a long time."
"Hmm, well sounds convincing to me, welcome aboard fellas," and so the two parties sign a treaty saying that the Israelites will protect these new journeymen.
Apparently Joshua isn't all that clever, or he's too trusting, or, well, according to the Bible his biggest mistake here isn't consulting with God first, which he probably should have done because a few days later they find out who all these Decepticites really are and the Israelites are not pleased. And what's more, their hands are a little tied, because they made a treaty with these guys, basically promising not to kill them and burn all their shit to the ground. But they're also living in Canaan, where it's their prerogative to fuck them up and burn their shit to the ground. So, do the Israelites honor their treaty or honor God's commands? Well, you gotta hand it to ole Joshua, he's got some serious class, he actually honors this treaty with the Decepticites. So the Israelites do not kill these tricky bastards, but they do kind of curse them down to the shit work. Basically they can stay with the Israelites, but they're forced to be woodcutters and water carriers, which actually doesn't seem that bad considering about one third of the Israelites are actually shepherds.
So after all this goes down the Israelites ask the Decepticites, "Yo, why did you come here and deceive us, and curse yourselves to lives of manual labor?" Apparently the Israelites don't have a grasp on the kind of mindless destruction they're unleashing on the promised land. To which the Decepticites say, "Umm hello? Being servants under you guys is better than being pillaged, burned, raped, and being wiped from existence, what the fuck is wrong with you guys?" Which seriously, the Israelites are powerful motherfuckers to be sure, but they're starting to prove just how clueless they really are. God really chose winners with this group huh? Not that God's much better really, I guess they all deserve each other huh?
The Sun Stands Still:
In any case a bunch of other dudes around the area begin to realize what just happened, basically that the Decepticites had a badass idea that can never be reproduced, and they're pretty much pissed about it. But at this point no one's going to march out against the Israelites, so instead a bunch of kings join together and march on the city of the Decepticites, um probably called Cybertron, which they've also heard how empty it is now. It doesn't take long for the tribes of Canaan to start warring on each other does it? Seriously, you'd think that all of Canaan would try to join together to defeat Israel, I mean sure they couldn't actually win, but it'd be the best shot they'd have, and it would accomplish more than turning on each other right as Israel is steamrolling the place.Anyway, it doesn't matter, because with Israel's new treaty they just charge out to Cybertron to fuck up these Godless backstabbers, and fuck them up they do. This battle's pretty epic, it's five armies against God's one and in no time the Israelites send the foreskinned gentiles packing, and "as they fled before Israel ... the Lord hurled large hailstones down on them from the sky, and more of them died from the hailstones than were killed by the swords of the Israelites (10:11)." Bam, seems God wanted in on all this massacring fun, and so Joshua jumps up on a big rock (sigh, seriously) and screams, "God, may the sun stand still." And kazaam, the sun stands still in the sky for about a day. Why does Joshua do this? I'm not really sure, and it doesn't really say, he just asks God to stop the sun, and God stops the sun, so they have about a full day straight of sunlight. Maybe they want to invade northern Alaska and they wanna know what it'll be like. In any case it's pretty awesome, Moses might've parted the Red Sea, but Joshua stopped the fucking sun.
The Promised Land ... As Promised:
So what else happens in Joshua? Not a whole lot really, I mean the Israelites take everything else over but the Bible doesn't go into much detail really. No, let me rephrase that, the Bible lists every battle, every king conquered and how every minute portion of land is partitioned among the tribes. It's much like Numbers with all the lists, and instead of just drawing a fucking map and drawing borders for each tribe, the author of Joshua tries to explain what portions of land each tribe gets. For example, "Their southern boundary started from the bay at the southern end of the Salt Sea, crossed south of Scorpion Pass, continued on to Zin and went over to the south of Kadesh Barnea. Then it ran past Hezron up ..." blah blah blah, "It then passed along to Azmon and joined the ..." yadda yadda yadda (15:1-4). Oh and that was just the southern border of Judah, in verse 5 they start describing the eastern border and so on. Maps are a good thing Bible writers, surely they used maps for this kindof thing back then right? Although I do like the sound of that Scorpion Pass. See, check this out:
Bam, and just say, "Hey the Tribes of Israel were allotted this land according to this awesome map I just found on google image search." See, was that so hard? That's a good third of Joshua compressed into a sentence and a map. I'm starting to think that I should've been the editor for the Bible, I could've saved a lot of trees from a horrible death.
So at some point near the end of Joshua, Caleb, remember Caleb? He was one of Joshua's buds, check out Numbers to read more about him. Anyway, Caleb comes up and is like, "Hey Josh, I want that hill country up north, lemme go take that over real quick."
"Ok, but aren't you like eighty years old?"
"Yeah, I don't give a fuck, with God on my side I'll tear their shit up."
And so Caleb goes, at eighty effing years old, and takes on the northern hill country. Not only does some old coot take over the place, but the hill country is known for having Anakites in it, which are fucking giants. That's right, an eighty year old man just went off to wage war against giants. Remember in Numbers when Caleb is like "Hey who care's if they have giants, we have God on our side, we'll fuck their world up," well gentle readers, he's about to put his money where his mouth is. And, "From Hebron Caleb drove out the three Anakites -- Sheshai, Ahiman and Talmai -- descendents of Anak. From there he marched against the people living in Debir (15:14-15)," so Caleb just bombs up north and defeats 3 giants and takes on some other dudes just 'cause. Man that old man has some serious chutzpah, Caleb, I think, could give Moses a run, not to mention Joshua, yikes, why isn't this effing book called Caleb?
Anywho, at the very end of Joshua, after all of the promised land has been taken and the Israelites have settled in this new land of theirs, Joshua's an old ass man and he knows his time has come, so he calls all of the Israelites together at Shechem to renew their covenant with God. Wait a minute, Shechem, Shechem, why does that sound familiar? ... Oh right, what the fuck? That's the city where the prince raped Dinah (Jacob's daughter) and Levi and Simeon bombed through the place, killing everyone in sight, after they tricked everyone there to cut their foreskins off. Why in the hell would you renew God's covenant there? Why wasn't that place with such an awful history burned to the ground? Anyway, Joshua pulls a Deuteronomy on the Israelites, summarizing everything that's happened, along with a couple of new things, which thank God it's only a few paragraphs this time and not twenty fucking pages.
Now to finish everything off Joshua "took a large stone and set it up under the oak near the holy place of the Lord. '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.' (24:26-27)." Goddamnit, what is it with this dude and rocks? Yo Joshua, it's just a rock man, rocks can't hear. And so Joshua dies at the ripe age of 110, and he was buried in the promised land. Then the bones of Joseph were buried near Shechem in "the tract of land that Jacob bought for a hundred pieces of silver from the sons of Hamor, the father of Shechem (24:32)." Umm no, I remember that story, and I'm pretty sure Jacob didn't buy anything after Levi and Simeon fucked up the place, in fact I'm pretty sure Jacob took all their shit, silver included, so I don't know what the hell they're talking about here. But hey, these guys just steamrolled everything from Edom to Canaan, are you going to argue with them? Yeah, I didn't think so because neither am I.
That'll about do it for Joshua, the Bible's starting to warm back up again. So it's not back up to the fun of Genesis or Exodus just yet, but any improvement at this point is good. And hey, I have high hopes for the next book Judges, it's the one I've been aching to get to since I hit that boring ass Numbers. So what happens in Judges that's so awesome? Well there's this Judge named Deborah, and you know shit gets raw in the Bible when named women show up. Also there's this dumb ass brute you might have heard of: goes by the name of Samson, fought an army with a bone, had magic hair, looked like this:
Ringing any bells? No? Then you're in for a real treat in the next entry or so. Until next time guys.
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