fatvegan

Tom and I were chatting about Job last night. So I decided I wanted to read it. I borrowed Tom's bible and opened it up. I landed on Joshua and decided to read that instead. I'd only ever had Sunday school Joshua before - the story with mostly trumpets and laughing and celebrating the winning of Jericho. But it's not quite the same in the bible. I read through 45 minutes of very bloody war. Joshua goes about killing everything that moves for decades. The only tribe where even the poor kiddies were spared by Joshua was the Gibeonites and that was only because the sneaky devils tricked him into making a peace treaty with them. Lousy, lying heathens.

I think one of my favourite bits was where Joshua sends off some troops to go and kill and raze everyone in the city of Ai. He didn't send many troops and they were all slaughtered. It turned out that the reason they lost the battle was because Achan had stolen some silver and gold from Jericho that was precious to God (I suppose God is storing up his riches in heaven just like the rest of us). So all of Israel through stones at Achan and his children until they were dead, and God was appeased. So Joshua went back to Ai with 30,000 men and convincingly killed and burnt everything. I'm sure God worked some of his military magic (like recommending that cheeky ambush), but you have to wonder if the extra 27,000 soldiers also made a difference.

The funny thing about that is that these days we say that the problem with violence is that it just brings more violence. In Joshua's case he needed to do violence, and Achan was standing in his way. So violence does bring more violence, but sometimes that's exactly what we want.

I suppose I can understand how killing a whole sub-continent might be part of God's plan. But it strikes me as a little arbitrary. To be fair, God and I have always had disagreements with this. Life also seemed a lot cheaper in the Old Testament than the New Testament, and feels like it might have more to do with the space humans were in at the time than the space God was in.

It brings up the age old question. Is God mainly on about maximising his glory, or about loving humanity?