In 2007, a few weeks after he announced his candidacy for President, Barak Obama spoke at the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, in Selma, Alabama, commemorating the voting-rights marches a generation ago.
In 2008 David Remnick, wrote about that speech in an article in the New Yorker, titled 'The Joshua Generation'':
“From the pulpit, Obama paid tribute to “the Moses generation”—to Martin Luther King and John Lewis, to Anna Cooper and the Reverend Joseph Lowery—the men and women of the movement, who marched and suffered but who, in many cases, “didn’t cross over the river to see the Promised Land.” He thanked them, praised their courage, honored their martyrdom. But he spent much of his speech on his own generation, “the Joshua generation,” and tried to answer the question “What’s called of us?” In Selma, Obama evoked a narrative for what lay ahead, and in that narrative Obama was not a patriarch and not a prophet but—the suggestion was distinct—the prophesied. “I’m here because somebody marched,” he said. “I’m here because you all sacrificed for me. I stand on the shoulders of giants.” He described the work that lay ahead for the Joshua generation and implicitly positioned himself at its head, as its standard-bearer.”
Perhaps it’s one of history’s ironies that Obama’s biblical reference echoes the legacy of a man who slaughtered indigenous giants. But with all the differences, both men took on a monumental task and are credited with leading a generation, leaving a significant legacy in the pages of the world’s list of leaders. Perhaps those legacies are still being updated.
In this final chapter of the book bearing his name, Joshua dies, alongside Elazer, Aaron’s son, the high priest, who, like Joshua, are among the last to still remember Moses and the desert. The book ends with their burial as well as with the ritual burial of Jospeh’s bones - those ancient relics that have been carried along since the Exodus.
Before he dies, Joshua completes his final speech, commands the people to obey their God lest they be exiled, and erects one final rock altar, a symbolic witness to the covenant between God and the people of Israel. The rock is placed under a sacred oak tree on a hilltop in Shechem, modern day Nablus in the Palestinian Territories. Careful readers may notice that Shechem is not a random choice for this final moment: It is the place where Jospeh, back in the Book of Genesis, is sold into slavery by his brothers. Coming full circle, the authors of Joshua bind together the loose ends of the long arc of the narrative, trying to present the end of an era, a new generation, a narrative of homecoming and completion. Almost a happy end:
וַיְהִ֗י אַֽחֲרֵי֙ הַדְּבָרִ֣ים הָאֵ֔לֶּה וַיָּ֛מׇת יְהוֹשֻׁ֥עַ בִּן־נ֖וּן עֶ֣בֶד יְהֹוָ֑ה בֶּן־מֵאָ֥ה וָעֶ֖שֶׂר שָׁנִֽים׃
After these events, Joshua son of Nun, the servant of Adonai, died at the age of one hundred and ten years.
But Joshua’s legacy remains anything but complete and simple, as it continues to fuel some people’s validation for occupation, while challenging other people’s beliefs, morals, and values.
In How to Read the Bible, Professor Harvey Cox takes the book’s legacy to task:
“What can contemporary students of the book of Joshua take away from the reading of it? We do not learn much ‘history’ in our current sense of the term.
In fact there are scholars who contend that not only did the conquest not take place in the manner in which it is described here, but quite possibly no conquest at all ever took place. In his book “The Tribes of Yahweh”, Norman Gottwald argues that the Israelites never invaded or conquered Canaan. They were the Canaanites who had been living there all along in dispersed extended family units and eventually formed a coalition that overthrew the ruling elites in the cities.”
Gottwald’s theories are among other scholarly speculations and leave us with the realization that although we we’ll never know exactly what happened, we are left with the responsibility to question its message and meaning. As Cox concludes:
“The conquest virus has found its way into the bloodstream. I am not suggesting that we tear its pages out of the Bible, but I think it is important to read it for what it is, a document composed centuries after the event it depicts and written for particular religious and political purposes, what we would now correctly term ‘propaganda’. Reading it now poses the blunt question of whether in a world armed with weapons of mass destruction we can continue to permit conquests of any sort, or ideologies and religions that validate them.”
And so we bid Joshua farewell, inviting Dr. Rachel Havrelock the final word from The Joshua Generation, as we transition on to the book of Judges and continue to ponder the complex coexistence of people and narratives, stories and truths:
“The book of Joshua, paradoxically enough, offers a precedent for emerging watershed politics and charts the course for moving beyond conquest and toward inhabitation. Its second half presents a mix of peoples, tribes, clans, and households present in shared regions. The picture is not utopian—skirmish and competition continue—but a decentralized system with loose alliances and variant sites of sovereignty is justified by Scripture as much as militarized Occupation. In conjunction with the second half of Joshua, the book of Judges attests to the variegated social order of ancient Israel.”
See you in Judges, tomorrow.
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