Bible Difficulties (35 page)

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Joshua

Did God approve of Rahab's lie (Jos 2:4-5)?

Scripture unequivocally condemns lying as a sin. In Leviticus 19:11 the Lord says, "You shall not steal, nor deal falsely, nor lie to one another" (NASB). In Proverbs 12:22 we read, "Lying lips are an abomination to the LORD, but those who deal faithfully are His delight" (NASB). In the New Testament Paul exhorts the Ephesians in 4:25: "Therefore, laying aside falsehood, SPEAK TRUTH, EACH ONE OF YOU, WITH HIS

NEIGHBOR, for we are members of one another" (NASB). These and many other passages make it clear that God is never pleased when people fail to tell the truth.

On the other hand, falsehood like every other sin can be fully atoned for by the blood of Christ on Calvary, when the liar becomes convicted in his conscience concerning his guilt and heartily repents of it. A contrite believer may claim the atoning merit of Christ and be completely forgiven. What this adds up to is the following principle that covers God's dealings with sinners: (1) the Lord has always condemned sin, so much so that He laid the guilt of every sin on His sinless Son when He died for sinners on the cross; (2) the Lord does not accept sinners as partakers of His redemption because of their
sins
but rather because of their
faith
. Even Abraham sinned in Egypt when he lied about Sarah's status as his wife--though he felt compelled to do so in order to avoid being killed on her account (Gen. 12:12-19). David lied to the high priest Ahimelech when he told him that Saul had sent him to Nob on government business, even though he was actually fleeing from Saul to save his life (1 Sam. 21:2).

In Rahab's case there were special factors that operated in her favor, and they should not be overlooked, even if they do not altogether excuse her mendacity. In this particular case the lie meant for her a step of faith that put her very life in jeopardy. The safer thing for her to do was tell the truth and let the police officials of Jericho know that she had two Hebrew spies hidden under her piles of flax stalks drying under the sun on top of her roof. But she had given her solemn word, apparently, to the two fugitives that she would not betray them to the king's agents. At any rate, she professed a very firm conviction that the Israelite forces would capture and destroy Jericho, even though from the standpoint of military science it looked as if Jericho was virtually impregnable. "The LORD your God, He is God in heaven above and on earth beneath. Now therefore, please swear to me by the LORD" (Josh. 2:11-12, NASB). For a woman of ill fame and a completely pagan upbringing to attain such a conviction concerning the one true God was a far more striking display of faith than was the case of the patriarchs and the people of Moses who had been brought up in the truth of God. She had to turn her back on her own people and the cultural tradition in which she had been reared in order to take such a step as this and to throw in her lot with the covenant nation of Israel. She literally risked her life for the cause of the Lord, as she told that lie to the arresting officers. She might very easily have been discovered. A single sneeze or bodily movement on the part of the hidden spies would have sealed her doom--as well as theirs. Therefore we should recognize that there were very unusual extenuating factors involved in her deception.

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The commitment Rahab made to Yahweh and His lordship led her to join the ranks of Israel after they captured Jericho and leveled it to the ground (Josh. 6:17-25); and she later married Salmon of the tribe of Judah and by him became the mother of Boaz and the ancestress of King David (Matt. 1:5-6). Despite her sinful past her faith was reckoned to her for righteousness, not only by the Lord, but also by His people; and she assumed a position of honor as an ancestress of the Lord Jesus Himself. In Hebrews 11:31 we read this tribute to her courage and faith: "By faith Rahab the harlot did not perish along with those who were disobedient, after she had welcomed the spies in peace" (NASB). In James 2:25 the apostle commends her faith as genuine and effectual because she expressed that faith by "works, when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way" (NASB).

Joshua 3:17 suggests that the Israelite host had already crossed the Jordan, but
Joshua 4:4, 10-11 imply that they had not done so. How can these verses be
harmonized?

Joshua 3:17 tells us that the priests carrying the ark of the covenant remained standing in the middle of the crossing until all the rest of the congregation had passed over to the west bank. Joshua 4:4 then relates how twelve men, one from each tribe, were directed to go back from the west bank to the midway point where the priests were still standing with the ark. There they were to dig up twelve sizable stones out of the bed of the river and carry them over to the location of the first encampment of the host on the Canaan side of the Jordan (v.8). This cairn of twelve mid-river stones was to serve as a memorial to this epoch-making event in Israel's history (vv. 6-7).

Joshua 4:10-11 concludes the episode by recording how the ark-carrying priests finally left their post at the midway point of the riverbed and finished their crossing with the ark all the way to the west bank. There they continued on their way until they had come to the forefront of the entire congregation and preceded them to their new camping ground at Gilgal (cf. v.19). Not until all Israel was safely across--including the priests and the ark--were the waters of the Jordan, which had been dammed up at Adam (3:16), allowed to flow downstream once more into the Dead Sea. There is therefore no discrepancy here at all, and the account is perfectly clear.

Has not the Joshua 6 account of the capture of Jericho by the Israelites been
discredited by the modern archaeological investigations at Tell es-Sultan?

On the contrary, the testimony of the cemetery connected with City IV at Tell es-Sultan (which is generally agreed to be the site of Old Testament Jericho) is quite conclusive in favor of a date around 1400 B.C., which is in complete conformity with a 1446 date for the Exodus itself. After several years of thorough archaeological investigation, John Garstang discovered that of the many scarabs found in the graves of this cemetery, not a single one dates from a period later than Amenhotep III of Egypt (1412-1376 B.C.). It is impossible to explain why no scarabs bearing the cartouche of any later Pharaoh was ever found at that level if indeed the destruction of City IV took place in the mid-thirteenth 153

century (as modern scholarship generally maintains today). How could there have been no scarabs from the reign of any of the numerous Pharaohs between Amenhotep III and Ramses II?

Furthermore, of the 150,000 fragments of pottery discovered in this cemetery, only a single sherd has been found that is of the Mycenean type. Since Mycenean ware began to be imported into Palestine from 1400 and onward, it is difficult to explain why virtually none of it was found in the City IV cemetery unless that cemetery was abandoned around 1400 B.C.

Kathleen Kenyon's later investigations at Tell es-Sultan led her to question Garstang's identification of the collapsed walls with City IV, because the potsherds found in the earth-fill of those walls were from a period centuries earlier than 1400 B.C. The soundness of this deduction is open to question, however, because the same phenomenon would be observable if the walls of Avila in Spain or Carcasonne in France were to be leveled by an earthquake in our own generation. Since those walls were erected several centuries ago, the Kenyon criterion would compel us to believe that they must have fallen centuries ago, because they would, of course, contain no internal evidence of twentieth-century construction. But no discovery of Kenyon or Vincent--or any other excavator at that site who came there with a prior commitment to a 1250 date for the Israelite conquest of Canaan--has ever been able to shake the objective findings of Garstang and his team in regard to the scarabs and sherds found in the City IV cemetery. (See Garstang's remarks on this in the article on 1 Kings 6:1 and the date of the Exodus.) Readers desirous of an extended discussion of the soundness of the biblical date for the Exodus itself (i.e., 1446 B.C.) are referred to my
A Survey of Old Testament Introduction
, pp. 223-34. A more recent work by an able young British scholar is that of John J.

Bimson (
Redating the Exodus and the Conquest
[Sheffield: University of Sheffield, 1978]). Bimson shows how much of the archaeological evidence has been systematically manipulated by a process of circular reasoning on the part of the leading interpreters of archaeological data. He reviews the objective testimony of the stratigraphy and the artifacts and comes to a firm conclusion in favor of a fifteenth-century date of the Israelite Exodus and conquest of Canaan. This discussion is all the more impressive since Bimson himself does not hold to an Evangelical view of the inerrancy of Scripture but feels compelled to set the record straight so far as archaeology is concerned. (See also the article on 1 Kings 6:1 and the date of the Exodus.)

Was Joshua justified in exterminating the population of Jericho?

In Joshua 6:21 we read, "And they utterly destroyed everything in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and donkey, with the edge of the sword"

(NASB). Verses 22-23 go on to say that Rahab the harlot, who had risked her life in order to save the two Israelite spies who had come earlier in order to reconnoiter the city, was spared from death, along with her entire family--as the two spies had promised that she would be. But everything combustible in the city was put to the torch; and all articles of gold, silver, iron and bronze were devoted to the treasury of the tabernacle.

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Such complete destruction might appear to be needlessly harsh, since it included infants who were too young to have committed overt sin, even though the older children and the adults may all have fallen into utter depravity. Should we not understand this severity to be the result of a savage Bedouin mentality on the part of the wilderness warriors rather than a punitive measure ordained of God?

In answer to this humanitarian objection, we need to recognize first of all that the biblical record indicates that Joshua was simply carrying out God's orders in this matter.

In other words, the same account that tells of the massacre itself is the account that tells of God's commands to carry it out. Therefore we must recognize that our criticism cannot be leveled at Joshua or the Israelites but at the God whose bidding they obeyed.

(Otherwise we must demonstrate our own special competence to correct the biblical record on the basis of our own notions of probability as to what God might or might not decide to do.) If criticism there be, we should not stop there, for the destruction of Jericho was far smaller an affair than the annihilation of the populations of Sodom and Gomorrah and their allies in Genesis 19:24-25. And then again this volcanic catastrophe was far less significant in the loss of life than Noah's Flood, which, except for Noah's family, wiped out the entire human race.

Back in Genesis 15:16 God had forewarned Abraham: "Then in the fourth generation

[i.e., in four hundred years, after the migration to Egypt, since Abraham was one hundred before he became the father of Isaac] they [the Israelites] shall return here [to Canaan], for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete" (NASB). The implication of this last statement was that when the wickedness of the inhabitants of Canaan had reached a predetermined accumulation of guilt, then God would have them removed from the Land of Promise intended for Abraham and his seed.

The loss of innocent life in the demolition of Jericho was much to be regretted, but we must recognize that there are times when only radical surgery will save the life of a cancer-stricken body. The whole population of the antediluvian civilization had become hopelessly infected with the cancer of moral depravity (Gen. 6:5). Had any of them been permitted to live while still in rebellion against God, they might have infected Noah's family as well. The same was true of the detestable inhabitants of Sodom, wholly given over to the depravity of homosexuality and rape, in the days of Abraham and Lot. As with the Benjamites of Gibeah at a later period (Judg. 19:22-30; 20:43-48), the entire population had to be destroyed. So also it was with Jericho and Ai as well (Josh. 8:18-26); likewise with Makkedah (Josh. 10:28), Lachish (v.32), Eglon (v.35), Debir (v.39), and all the cities of the Negev and the Shephelah (v.40). In the northern campaign against Hazor, Madon, Shimron, and Achshaph, the same thorough destruction was meted out (Josh. 11:11-14).

In every case the baneful infection of degenerate idolatry and moral depravity had to be removed before Israel could safely settle down in these regions and set up a monotheistic, law-governed commonwealth as a testimony for the one true God. Much as we regret the terrible loss of life, we must remember that far greater mischief would have resulted if 155

they had been permitted to live on in the midst of the Hebrew nation. These incorrigible degenerates of the Canaanite civilization were a sinister threat to the spiritual survival of Abraham's race. The failure to carry through completely the policy of the extermination of the heathen in the Land of Promise later led to the moral and religious downfall of the Twelve Tribes in the days of the Judges (Judg. 2:1-3, 10-15, 19-23). Not until the time of David, some centuries later, did the Israelites succeed in completing their conquest of all the land that had been promised to the descendants of Abraham (cf. Gen. 15:18-21). This triumph was only possible in a time of unprecedented religious vigor and purity of faith and practice such as prevailed under the leadership of King David, "a man after God's own heart" (1 Sam. 13:14; Acts 13:22).

In our Christian dispensation true believers possess resources for resisting the corrupting influence of unconverted worldlings such as were hardly available to the people of the old covenant. As warriors of Christ who have yielded our members to Him as "weapons of righteousness" (Rom. 6:13) and whose bodies are indwelt and empowered by God the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19), we are well able to lead our lives in the midst of a corrupt and degenerate non-Christian culture (whether in the Roman Empire or in modern secularized Europe or America) and still keep true to God. We have the example of the Cross and the victory of the Resurrection of Christ our Lord, and he goes with us everywhere and at all times as we carry out the Great Commission.