Joshua 5:13-6:27 As War Narrative in Context by © Trevor Pomeroy A
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“As Commander of the Army of the LORD I Have Now Come”: Joshua 5:13-6:27 as War Narrative in Context by © Trevor Pomeroy A Thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Religious Studies Memorial University of Newfoundland August 2014 St. John’s Newfoundland and Labrador ABSTRACT War, and what constitutes the waging of successful warfare in the Ancient Near East, is the hermeneutical key by which to properly understand texts such as Joshua 5:13- 6:27. Traditionally, scholars have sought to understand biblical war narrative such as Joshua 5:13-6:27 from an ethical perspective, which fails because war generates a culture of its own, with its own set of norms, that are distinct from everyday reality. I describe features of Joshua 5:13-6:27 that persist throughout war narrative from the Ancient Near East and seek to understand those features within the sociology of warfare as described by the sociologist Siniša Malešević. Understanding these features within the context of other Ancient Near Eastern material illuminates the paradigmatic nature of Joshua 5:13-6:27 as war narrative and helps us to draw out its essential theme: the kingship of YHWH. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The writing and research required to produce this thesis would not have been possible without the encouragement and support of numerous people. First, I would like to thank the School of Graduate Studies, and the Department of Religious Studies for their generous financial support. I would also like to thank my parents, Michael and Valerie Pomeroy, who have patiently encouraged me in all that I have done and who have supported me in numerous ways throughout this entire process. Thank you to my fellow graduate student Emily Worsley for her friendship and support as well the rest of the Department of Religious Studies’ graduate cadre. I am grateful to Dr. Jennifer Selby and Dr. David Hawkin for their kind encouragement and advice; as well as Colleen Banfield and Mary Walsh for their helpful assistance whenever it was required. Finally, but most importantly, my sincerest thank-you must be extended to Dr. Kim Parker who has not only been an outstanding supervisor and mentor, offering direction at every step, but also a friend. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract …………………………………………………………………………….... ii Acknowledgments …………………………………………………………………… iii Introduction …………………………………………………………………………. 1 Chapter One 1.1 Approaches to the Question of Warfare in the Hebrew Bible ……………….. 5 Chapter Two 2.1 Why Are Human Beings Violent? ……………………………………………... 23 2.2 The Sociology of Warfare ……………………………………………………… 25 2.3 Akkad and the Cumulative Bureaucratization of Coercion ............................. 31 2.4 Akkad and Centrifugal Ideologization ............................................................... 35 2.5 The Sociology of Warfare and the Book of Joshua …………………………... 42 Chapter Three 3.1 The Presence of Divine Mandate ……………………………………………… 48 3.2 Divine Assistance in Battle …………………………………………………….. 56 iv 3.3 The Presence of Priests on the Battlefield ……………………………………. 61 3.4 Fear ……………………………………………………………………………... 66 73 ...………………………………………………………………… (חרם) The Ban 3.5 3.6 Physical Representations of the Presence of Divine Agency ………………... 83 3.7 The Destruction of the Walls ………………………………………………….. 89 3.8 Demonization of the Enemy …………………………………………………… 99 3.9 The Burning and Cursing of Conquered Cities …………………………...... 105 3.10 The Bodily Display of Defeated Kings ………………………………………112 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………….118 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………..128 v Introduction Throughout this thesis I will show that Joshua 5:13-6:27 is a paradigmatic war narrative from the Ancient Near East and it thus needs to be primarily understood within the context of warfare itself. My thesis is that war, and what constitutes the waging of successful warfare in the Ancient Near East, is the hermeneutical key by which to properly understand texts such as Joshua 5:13-6:27. This is not to say that this is the only way to understand texts such as Joshua but, rather, interpreting Joshua 5:13-6:27 through a war-narrative lens is a matter of first importance. In order to show what constitutes war narrative, we need to understand the underlying sociological elements of war. Attempts to understand (or even worse, to justify) war narrative ethically, or as part of a wider literary and theological context, will always fall short and/or meet some level of inadequacy precisely because, as we will see, war generates a culture all its own with its own set of norms that are plainly distinct from what might be considered everyday reality. In order to fully appreciate the common elements of what constitutes the waging of successful conquest campaigns in the Ancient Near East (that is, “successful” according to the victors, and thus the writing about such victories) it will be necessary to examine the sociological backdrop of warfare itself. Therefore, I will address the sociology of warfare because, in order to understand what we might expect from a war narrative in the first place, some understanding of warfare per se as well as the ways that human beings commemorate warfare is in order. Having established an understanding of war in and of itself, we will be in the position to understand why war narrative is both necessary to a given militaristic project and, furthermore, why it is distinct. This is because all the typical conventions of a culture or society are overturned during times of 2 war and, therefore, the heuristic key to understanding war narrative can only be war. The writer and former war correspondent Chris Hedges has written: I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by mythmakers - historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state – all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it.1 The fact that warfare generates a culture of its own means that we should expect warfare to be incongruent with the symbols, beliefs and praxis which typically govern daily life. Once warfare’s consistent propensity for overturning normative taboos is grasped, any effort to interpret warfare or, for our purposes, narrative concerning warfare in the Hebrew Bible, and in the Ancient Near East more generally, will at once be regarded as misguided if the attempt at interpretation involves couching the narratives within the symbols, beliefs and practices which govern daily living. This, of course, raises the question, “How have scholars sought to understand narratives concerning warfare in the Hebrew Bible?” In the first chapter of this thesis I will address the numerous ways in which the violent texts within the Hebrew Bible have been approached in the past. We will see that these approaches have been dominated by various means of attempting to ethically understand the texts in light of the Christian revelation of God as a God of love. I will also discuss efforts to contextualize the texts concerning warfare within a wider consideration of warfare in the Hebrew Bible as a whole, as well as within a wider corpus 1 Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (New York: Random House, 2002), 3. 3 of Ancient Near Eastern material. I will then address the sociology of warfare, which is necessary to appreciate precisely because warfare generates a culture of its own, and it is from the culture generated by warfare that the texts concerning warfare in the Ancient Near East, including those within the Hebrew Bible, emerge. In the second chapter I will delineate the sociological factors that underlie the emergence of organized violence (i.e. warfare). Following a description of the sociological underpinnings of warfare I will discuss the presence of those indispensible foundations of organized violence in the Ancient Near East through an examination of the Akkadian Empire. I will then illustrate that those underpinnings were intentionally incorporated into Israelite society, according to the biblical narrative, before the Israelites’ crossing of the Jordan. In Chapter Three I will describe features of Joshua 5:13-6:27 which constitute persistent normative elements of war narrative from the Ancient Near East. Describing these features within the context of other Ancient Near Eastern material will illuminate its paradigmatic nature as a war narrative and help us to draw out its essential theme, which is not so much about warfare, but the kingship of YHWH. Furthermore, I will illustrate the manner in which those normative elements of Ancient Near Eastern war narrative not only exhibit the presence of the underlying foundations of organized violence, but help to reinforce them, thereby contributing to Israel’s military success. Finally, in the concluding chapter of this thesis, I will describe how an appreciation of the sociology of warfare helps us to understand Joshua 5:13-6:27 in the context from which it emerged. That context was not merely “the Ancient Near East,” which is certainly invaluable to appreciate but, more importantly, that context was war. 4 Once that is grasped, our understanding of the text as one that helped the Israelites