LORD said to Joshua, “See, I have handed Jericho over to you, along with its king and soldiers. 3 You shall march around the city, all the warriors circling the city once. Thus you shall do for six days, 4 with seven priests bearing seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark. On the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, the priests blowing the trumpets. 5 When they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, as soon as you hear the sound of the trumpet, then all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city will fall down flat, and all the people shall charge straight ahead.”
15 On the seventh day they rose early, at dawn, and marched around the city in the same manner seven times. It was only on that day that they marched around the city seven times. 16 And at the seventh time, when the priests had blown the trumpets, Joshua said to the people, “Shout! For the LORD has given you the city. 17 The city and all that is in it shall be devoted to the LORD for destruction. Only Rahab the prostitute and all who are with her in her house shall live because she hid the messengers we sent. 18 As for you, keep away from the things devoted to destruction, so as not to covet and take any of the devoted things and make the camp of Israel an object for destruction, bringing trouble upon it. 19 But all silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and iron, are sacred to the LORD; they shall go into the treasury of the LORD.” 20 So the people shouted, and the trumpets were blown. As soon as the people heard the sound of the trumpets, they raised a great shout, and the wall fell down flat; so the people charged straight ahead into the city and captured it. 21 Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.
The story of how the Lord instructed Joshua to conquer the city of Jericho serves as an example of the Israelites’ copying the mythology of the culture around them. In the ancient Canaanite culture, between 1792 and 1750 BCE, there is a similar story written in their Ugaritic language. It is called the Story of Keret. In the Story of Keret, the Canaanite god El instructs Keret to lay siege to the city of Udum. Like Joshua, Keret is instructed by El not to attack the walls, but instead cut the city off for seven days.18 In Joshua 6, Rehab the prostitute is spared. In the Story of Keret, a maiden is spared for Keret.19 One of the names for God used in the Hebrew Scriptures—Elohim—is constructed off of the Canaanite god’s name, El.
In his book titled Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses, Philip Jenkins reports that “no actual city of Jericho stood at the time of the conquest . . . Putting the archeological evidence together, Joshua’s conquest is close to invisible.”20 So what we have in Joshua 6 is indeed the Israelites’ copying of their neighbors’ mythology in order to be like them. This presents us with the problem of relegating all the writing of the bible to mythology, which authors such as James Frazer in his work The Golden Bough, have done. And works such as Frazer’s have led atheists such as Richard Dawkins to buy into this view.21 I argue that copying is taking place by the Israelites, and yet this copying that tries to conceal and hide real human violence is uncovered in the ongoing story of salvation, and ultimately rejected.
The Story of Joshua, like the Story of Keret, can be likened to our own violent movies and battle games being marketed today during each NFL football game. X-box One games like Assassins and Game of War are not literal events, yet they provide a narrative, in a story that leads us to believe human violence is justifiable and acceptable. In the meantime, real killing and violence is part of our culture. We pass laws for people to conceal and carry guns. Military drones are killing real people in the Middle East. Terrorists are killing real people. Politicians want to take us to war again. And it appears we are living in an endless cycle of human violence.
We need to see the accounts of violence in the Hebrew Bible as evidence of the copying of the Israelites of their neighbor’s gods (and goddesses). This copying reveals that they do not understand who their god is at these times. Often the Israelites recreate their own version of what Bernard F. Batto has named “The Combat Myth.”22 And rather than allow texts such as Joshua 6 to be read as approval of violence by God, we need to read them as illustrations that show how the Israelites were mistaken about who God is through the copying of combat myths. Our reading them as literal stories of prescribed living rather than descriptions of mimesis perpetuates our own human violence.
Walter Wink says that we must reject what he calls “the myth of redemptive violence,” namely that by using violence we can bring an end to violence.23 Wink is correct; no amount of violence is going to change the underlying human condition of mimesis, copying, and the rivalry and conflict that are by-products of it. At the same time, we need to learn what is going on with the copying of these myths in the bible. Richard Dawkins thinks that religion is a kind of “misfiring” in evolution and calls it a “meme”—an idea we carry, like genes, but a meme that is more harmful to us like a “virus.”24 By arguing his case with fundamentalists who read these stories literally, Dawkins is pulled off the mark of his real expertise on evolution, and these myths function as they do, to blind us, and hide the human condition that is rooted in all life in evolution—mimesis, the process of copying, not memes. By following Girard’s lens of mimesis and human rivalry we can view violence in the bible as part of the evolving understanding of God who in the culmination of the salvation story rejects all our combat myths.
18. Matthews and Benjamin, Old Testament Parallels, 201–5.
19. Ibid., 204.
20. Jenkins, Laying Down the Sword, 54–57.
21. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 188.
22. Batto, Slaying the Dragon, 168–9.
23. Wink, The Powers That Be, 42–48.
24. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 186–90.
Exodus 1
15 The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, 16 “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.” 17 But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. 18 So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this, and allowed the boys to live?” 19 The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” 20 So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong. 21 And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. 22 Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live.”
Walter Brueggemann observes that the genocide of Egypt by its ruler Pharaoh is rooted in the power of monopoly that at the same time lives in constant fear and anxiety that the many people whom they deprive through their hording will rise up and destroy them. And thus paradoxically their power starts to destroy the very source of their empire, namely the slaves!25
