Episode 311: Chauncey Diego Francisco Handy – The Afterlife of the Conquest of Canaan

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Pete: Hey folks, on today’s episode, we’re talking about the afterlife of the Conquest of Canaan with Chauncey Diego Francisco Handy. 

Jared: Chauncey is a professor of religion at Reed College, focusing on theories of ethnicity in the reception history of the Hebrew Bible. Let’s get into the episode. 

Chauncey: Anytime Joshua’s deployed by people with a lot of guns in power, or ships and swords and stuff in power, it’s quite bad.

There are very few ways that Joshua is used helpfully. Now, maybe these texts didn’t happen in time, but you know, maybe these stories weren’t quote-unquote “real,” but they’re real in the ways they played out for indigenous communities.

Jared: Well, welcome Chauncey to the podcast. It’s great to have you. 

Chauncey: Really glad to be here. Thanks for the opportunity. 

Pete: Yeah. So we wanna get into the topic of the Conquest narrative and how it was used, maybe appropriated or, or its reception history as many people put it. But before we do that, just for the benefit of our listeners, just can you get into and just explain like what, what are we talking about?

Conquest narrative, what do we find in the Bible and just what’s happening there generally? 

Chauncey: So we’re talking about, essentially the book of Joshua, right? This kind of moment of Israel entering into the quote unquote promised land. So those, those roots of that narrative kind of stretched throughout the Pentateuch, right?

And, and in various kinds of directions we could see references to it. But significantly, the biblical patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, are promised some kind of land for their descendants and the kind of, if you can talk about a meta narrative arc of the Pentateuch. So you zoom out, what’s the big story?

The big story is in some sense the choosing of a particular family that then expands into a particular community that then needs a place to live. Uh, and so, uh, through, uh, people know the story of the Book of Exodus, right? There’s a, you know, great film with a lot of songs, The Prince of Egypt.

But, um, for those of you who haven’t read the Biblical narrative, you’d be more familiar. 

Pete: I’m more of a 10 Commandments guy.

Jared: I was gonna say, you really just, you’re gonna, you did run into some fisticuffs here because Pete’s partial to the 10 Commandments. 

Chauncey: The four-hour Charlton Heston 10 Commandments.

Pete: Yes. Well, it’s two hours. Fair enough, on network TV, it’s four.

Chauncey: Yeah, that’s like the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice. A real commitment, right? In any case, so, uh. So you’ve got the story, kind of the, the Israelites leaving Egypt, uh, and with the end goal being the land of Canaan, where they are going to enter the land that was promised to, uh, you know, the Israelites via Moses, but also via the patriarchs, uh, in question.

So, so there is, essentially the conquest itself happens in Joshua, but the beginning of the conquest, I would argue, starts in Deuteronomy. You have the first sort of interaction between Israelites and um, people who need to be conquered in, uh, the second and third chapters of Deuteronomy. So basically right away.

And then the rest of Deuteronomy is in some sense, a kind of presumptive narrative, a kind of retelling of everything that happened to that point, plus some added legal material, et cetera. But what a really significant part of that is in Deuteronomy 7, where we get the command to, to, uh, ritually slaughter, the verb Hebrew is haram.

But in, in this case, uh, I mean, I, I don’t really see a distinction between this and human sacrifice, but we can get into that later. But the Israelites are commanded to go into the land and, uh, kill all the men, women, children that correspond to a given set of people groups, a list of some seven or so, depending on where you look, where you read.

Um, and so anyway, this is kind of all to say, that’s the backdrop. Um, once you get into the book of Joshua, Moses has died, his successor Joshua is then taking over and the people enter crossing the Jordan River into the promised land with the goal of conquering it. And this is kind of the plot, so to speak, uh, of the book of Joshua.

Jared: Okay. Well maybe let’s take one layer deeper and you talk about the conquest stories as, as an idealized golden age rather than straightforward history, which may be news to some, I mean, I don’t, that’s a new concept in general to probably most of our listeners, but specifically with Joshua. Can you talk about that distinction a little bit?

Chauncey: Yeah. I mean, on the, on the one hand, I think it’s, it behooves us as readers of biblical literature to be cautious about the correlation that we’re making between events and space and time and the text itself. So I, I like to say both the students and anyone who is, uh, fortunate or unfortunate enough to have to listen to me, that the Bible is a story about the past that’s not the same as the past. So there’s, there’s an effort for, uh, ancient Israelites, ancient Jews, to narrate a past that affects their present. Um, and that narration is not the same as events taking place in the base and time, but by which I mean the things that took place in Joshua did not happen in the way that they are written in the book of Joshua that you might find in your Bibles in various sorts.

Um, and we can get into, you know, there are- archeological evidence suggests that, for instance, the, the conquest of Jericho literally could not have happened in the timeframe. If one can go back and reconstruct a biblical timeline that kind of situates the conquest, first of all, it’s a very fraught procedure.

Um, given that we don’t have any archeological evidence prior to say the eighth century BCE, that can map on to biblical narratives. But if one were to do that anyway, the conquest of Jericho would not fit into that timeline. Uh, there, there, the, the burn layers as archeologists talk about, just simply don’t correspond to what the text describes.

Um, additionally, there’s some inconsistencies in the text, right? Rahab’s House, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the Canaanite, the sex worker, rah Rahab, her house is in the wall. And as we all know, perhaps from VeggieTales or from the narrative itself, the walls all fall down. But Rahab survives by staying in her house.

So some, some real like questions about just the narrative itself, its connection to the archeological data that we have. Um, and just overall principles of, uh, history as we conceive of it in some, in some kind of chronological sense that maps out more or less as, as we would like it to, um, events taking place in space and time.

This is not really what biblical texts are trying to do, or what ancient authors were wanting to do. It wasn’t about, ‘let me tell you exactly how it happened’ as much as, ‘let me tell you why it matters to us now.’ 

Pete: Chauncey, how, how is it though, an idealized golden age, you know? Right. I mean, I, I think I know where you’re going with that, but it’s just an interesting concept.

Chauncey: No, I mean, and in the sense that the, the faith, the kind of paradigmatic level of faithfulness of the Israelites, at least at points in the book of Joshua is, uh. 110%. I mean, if you, if you go to say, the fifth chapter of the book of Joshua, literally we read that the Israelites circumcised themselves a second time, and which is the, if you, I could read you the passage, but essentially the author is very, it’s, it’s clear to me anyway, there’s some editorial work going on here.

The author’s kind of uncomfortable with that and has to clarify what it means. But if you’re writing this for the first time in one go, you probably wouldn’t choose it that way. So, anyway, the Israelites are circumcised a second time. They eat the very last of the manna, they celebrate the Passover, and this is all before the Battle of Jericho, so, right.

They’re, like, at the pinnacle of ritual faithfulness. Um, the battles that go, well, go smashingly. Well, there is, you know, everyone’s routed. Things go entirely their way. I mean, back to the, to the, the book of the conquest of, of, of Jericho. They march around the city, uh, for seven days, and then on the seventh day they shout and blow their trumpets and the walls all fall down.

They don’t actually have to engage in stereotypical sorts of siege practices. So the, the, the conquest itself is in some ways I would argue divorced from. Battle practices that we can read about from ancient corollaries. Like how did, actually how did you conquer a walled city? The, the Israelites don’t have to engage in those practices.

So in this sense, idealize both in the level of their kinda expression of faithfulness. Um, the, I, you know, I’ll just say Yahweh. I mean, this is kind of scholarly practice, but you know, I know that it’s taboo for some, for just some Jewish folks, so you know, grain of salt, but, um, Yahweh’s engagement with the Israelites is very direct in ways that, say at the end of Genesis, we’ve kind of lost touch of..

So Jacob and Isaac are interacting at, at a pretty significant remove from, from Yahweh. Where through dreams and such, whereas all of a sudden. He always speaks directly to Joshua, often via like angelic beings or sometimes straight to, to Joshua as well. So this is kinda what I’m getting at, right?

That the, the, the account of the, the conquest is, um, I mean purely, I mean, quite significantly idealized in the sense of everything going according to plan. Uh, at least, again, at least in points. 

Pete: Okay. So, and one more just setup question here. Um, people talk about. Two voices in the book of Joshua, and I think that’s an important point to bring out.

So just in a nutshell, what’s that about? 

Chauncey: So this is, I’m borrowing this from Daniel Hawk’s work who I, I think Daniel Hawk’s a really impressive reader of the book of Joshua. Um, he structures this idea of the kind of triumphant militaristic voice and the kind of subtle voice of subversion.

I mean, this isn’t quite his language, but a paraphrase. So essentially Joshua 1, right? Joshua receives a parallel version to Moses’s call. 

Pete: Mm-hmm. 

Chauncey: Like I will, be strong and courageous, says the Lord. I will go with you. Everything will go according to plan. Only, keep the commandments and all the Israelites are, yes, Joshua, you’re the one. You will do it together. So you’ve got that. You’ve got Joshua 6 again, the conquest of Jericho just goes off without a hitch. So on, on the one hand, this God has supported our military campaign, and it’s going exactly as we want it to go. And with no commentary necessarily on, are there problems, maybe there’s, there’s some difficulty in this, but really just a, a voice of, uh, victory.

Um, on the other hand, then you have these complexities, uh, that the, the subtle voice. Um, so I would draw, draw folks’ attention to, um, to Joshua 2, the narrative of Rahab. This, this Canaanite sex worker in Joshua 2:1 sends the Israelites, uh, sends spies to go and scout out the promised land.

Pete: Yeah. 

Chauncey: Right. So now if we, if for readers who might remember, if we’re back in the book of Numbers, Joshua was part of the original delegation, the, the officially sanctioned spies to go and see the promised land. Now in Numbers, God, like Yahweh told Moses to pick spies to go and scout out the land.

Now, all of a sudden in Joshua two, Joshua picks two spies, not 12, not representative of all the tribes in the way that Moses did, but picks two. And sends them secretly. So all of a sudden we’re dealing with this huge contrast between Joshua and Moses. Joshua was one of the original spies, knew how it went, suddenly sending people secretly cutting the vast majority of the tribes out of the process. 

Then these spies go, the first thing they do is they go to a brothel. They go to a brothel inside of Jericho, and there was, it’s not like they looked around for another spot. I mean, the text is very clear.

They went straight there. And then almost immediately, they make a covenant with a Canaanite. The, the very thing that Deuteronomy 7 would say you are not able to do, and in fact if you do this, you are imperiling the entire project. The covenant with Yahweh is at risk because you made a covenant with a Canaanite.

Now this is practically the first thing they do inside of Jericho. And so, so, the narrator doesn’t tell us that this is breaking the covenant. There’s no quite, there’s no explicit condemnation of this. But for the attentive reader, and, you know, medieval rabbis were picked up on this quite, quite quickly.

The sense of like, oh, Joshua’s got some problems. Like he’s not Moses, he’s the Israelites are, are really like, I mean, we’re in chapter 2. They haven’t fought a battle yet and they’ve already made a covenant. They’ve already breached the, they’ve, they’ve already breached their own covenant with Yahweh to a degree that imperils their whole project.

So these are the kind of the, the voices I’m talking about. You’ve got this triumphalistic, we’re gonna do it, it’s gonna go great. See how great it went. And then you have, why are you making covenants with Canaanites? And then, you know, the gibeonites shortly thereafter. Why are you making more covenants with other people who you’re supposed to kill? 

You know, the, and these, these are the sorts of things that, or you know, the story of Achan, uh, in Joshua 7, where one of the Israelites steals things that are supposed to be ritually sacrificed to Yahweh. Uh, and this all, so all of these things, basically that there is a particular strand of, of ancient Jewish Israelite tradition that is, um, shall we say, skeptical of Israel’s capacity to carry out its divinely mandated-

Pete: And they’re, and they’re woven together, which is-  

Chauncey: Yes, right. These, these things take place side by side and in some places, again, of Joshua 5, literally in the same chapter. So Joshua 5, again, back to the second circumcision, you know, uh, blast of the manna, celebrating the Passover for the first time in the Promised Land.

And then at the end of Joshua 5, you get this passage where Joshua encounters the commander of the army of Yahweh and doesn’t know who he is, uh, meets a random swordsman next to Jericho and doesn’t know who he is, is not particularly, I mean, like the military problems there are significant. But then at the end when he figures out who he is, he gets this kind of half-version of what Moses got, which is this is, this is this land is whole, this, this ground is holy land.

Take off your shoes. And then in the text from Joshua, he does it, the text says, and then Joshua did so, and that’s the end of the, that’s the end of the story. The story for Moses is that Moses takes off his shoes and gets this I am the Lord your God. I will be with you as I was with your fathers, and I will lead you to this land.

There’s this whole affirmation, this whole sense of calling that Joshua got in chapter 1, but one would expect the parallels to Moses that he would get it here too, and he doesn’t. So, and again, this is so close together that in chapter five, this is functionally the same story.

Whereas in other places it kind of gets a little chunkier.

Jared: I feel torn. ’cause we could just keep talking about this. This is all fascinating for people who haven’t maybe read Joshua closely, but we wanted to talk some about how this text has been received. And, and before we get into that, I, I think for me, an entry point is, I remember, I, I guess it’s a paper from a more conservative, uh, institution that was going around when I was younger, and the name of it was “If Jericho was not Raised.”

Um, and the implication of this whole paper, it played off of a phrase in the New Testament. If Jesus is not raised, then our faith is in vain. And, and this author wrote this paper-

Chauncey: So raised, R-A-Z-E-D?

Jared: I remember it ’cause I, you know, I like a play on words. You know, it was clever. But the implication was, if Jericho was not raised, then our faith is in vain, directly tying kind of this historical, we have to read it as history because if Jesus isn’t raised, that’s important. But if every word in the text isn’t historically accurate, then our faith is also in vain. I mean, pretty bombastic. 

That does make me think of this question of kind of reception history and how people have received this text and how it’s been used over the years.

So can you, um, give us a definition of reception history? ‘Cause I think that’s gonna be a new concept for people, but it’s actually very, very important for how people read the Bible today. There’s a history and tradition that goes centuries and centuries back for these texts. And so can you talk about that in general, but then maybe mention why Joshua is particularly interesting or particularly dangerous in this reception history. 

Chauncey: Yeah, absolutely. I, I mean, so reception history in a certain sense is just what happens to a text when it’s complete. And I say complete in, in some quotes, right? ‘Cause you have questions of complete in what language? Complete for whom? Complete for what time, right? Like, is this King James?

Is this, uh, this to a Gentile Greek? Is this Aramaic? Is this Syriac? So on and so forth. But, you know, in quotes, when, when you have a finished version of Joshua, whenever that happens, what do people then do with it? And what we can see for, for quite some time, uh, obviously these texts are mostly read by Jews.

Now there are some Gentile Christian types who start to read them as well over time. But, uh, at the beginning we don’t really see, at least from what I’ve found, we don’t really see very much. What starts to change though is when these texts get received by say, Christian Empires. So in about the fourth century CE, um, we start to see Constantine, and Constantine becomes Christian.

And then from then on Christianity, and thus Christian canon, including Joshua, starts to become increasingly affiliated with Empire and with, with, with militaristic expansion such that by the time you’re in the, the, the, the 13th century King Louis IX is using Joshua. As a paradigmatic example for his crusade in the holy land, like Joshua is the paradigm by which he then goes and, uh, kills Muslims and I imagine Jews.

‘Cause there wasn’t really a whole lot of distinction for anyone at that particular parent. I mean, they also killed, you know, Byzantine Christians and everyone who is not Western. Um, so that’s like one example. I mean, Joshua is, is received in this kind of cascading array of imperial contexts that are actually, um, well, for lack of a better term, quite depressing. 

Uh, so, you know, the Spanish are using it to justify their conquest of indigenous folks in Mexico. In the 16th century, the British are using it, so Cotton Mather has this sermon called Soldiers Counseled and Comforted by which indigenous communities that these British colonists are fighting are characterized as Canaanites and, you know, these caste and all this kind of biblical, these people need to be destroyed sorts of language.

Uh, and then you have Manifest Destiny in, in the 19th century again, kind of charged with this, the, the kind of continental, the, the, the continent of the United States is the New Canaan that the United States, the New Israel has to conquer. And that, you know, that all [00:23:00] that runs all the way through American history, all the way through kind of European expansion.

Um, and then you find it again in the state in, in 1948 in the state of Israel. David Ben Gurion has this biblical study group about the book of Joshua with his cabinet. And this, uh, Rachel Havrelock, his whole book called The Joshua Generation about this. But essentially, anytime Joshua’s deployed by people with a lot of guns in power or ships and swords and stuff in power, it’s quite bad.

There’s not really a way, in my experience, looking into it. There are very few. Ways that Joshua is used helpfully. Now, St. Origen had some sermons on Joshua, but his pivot was, this is allegorical. 

This is, this is, this is the soul’s battle with sin. Who, who would actually want to worship a deity like this?

Do you want to, you wanna be, you wanna worship this kind of God? Of course you don’t. Now, so that, that’s a move that people made, but that didn’t end up holding all that much water for people with, um, imperial ambitions and plus 

Pete: Origen was a heretic, right? Yeah, right. 

Chauncey: Supposedly. I mean, 

Jared: That does, that was exactly a good segue into the, my next question, which was what, what would allow for this kind of re, like what are the moves you have to make when you say it was used?

Let’s use Constantine or maybe even in, you know, Spanish, uh, conquests later on, when it’s used. What exactly does that mean? How, how is it being used? 

Chauncey: Right. So I mean the, the key move for non-Jews, I think that’s, that’s probably the most to be, to be totally clear, that’s most of the reception history of Joshua that’s ugly is, is non-Jews.

So when Christians use the book of Joshua, they are associating themselves with Israel. So they are the New Israel. That’s like the, that’s the key movement. As soon as you are the New Israel, you have to do the things that the new Israel does. And immediately the New Israel entered the promised land.

Right? So you’re entering a new land. You can frame it in all these experiences, I mean the themes are practically one-to-one, right? Yeah. Here we left our home or these things that we knew, and now we’re in a new place where the new Israel, we’ve got this new land. What do we, what does Israel do in a new land?

Well, let’s look at the Bible. They kill a bunch of people. Take their stuff. 

Pete: Yeah. Great move. 

Chauncey: I mean, I mean it is, it is a disturbing sort of logic. And the thing thing that, I think it’s in the 

Pete: Bible. It’s in the Bible, Chauncey, I’m sorry, but it’s in the Bible. We live on the east coast. Right. So we’re on the east coast here.

Yeah. And you know, the East coast is littered with, I mean, there’s Bethlehem, Pennsylvania right up the road. So it’s this, this new, a New Canaan is in New Jersey. There, there are other, these biblical names around here and it’s, it’s-

Chauncey: I mean, I lived in North Carolina. There’s biblical names all over everything.

Pete: Exactly right. So it’s just, it, it just reinforces the memory is still there of seeing this land as the new Canaan. That’s, and, and the inhabitants are no better than Canaanites and they just need to be slaughtered. 

Chauncey: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there, there’s that, there’s this kind of like two double-edged sword to the con, the kind of the, the conquering mentalities, either they die or they convert. Right. And you’ve got that, there’s that in Rahab as well, right? In Joshua 6, the, the, the covenant that Rahab makes in, in Joshua 2 with the spies is like, look, I won’t rat you out to the King of Jericho who will kill you. Mm-hmm. Um, but you have to protect my family. Right. And so then the Israelites, well, yeah, we’ll do that.

That’s fine. Don’t, we don’t wanna die either. So then in Joshua 6, we have this whole scene where Joshua, you know, kind of finds out. Okay. Well, they survived. I mean, he knew about it before, but then he has to double down on this breach of the covenant, essentially, to keep Rahab alive. And he does.

And then the text says, and they, and they were, they lived outside the camp, right? With the unclean things and the sewage and all kinds of other stuff. Uh, that’s, that’s where they live. But they lived in Israel to this day, says the text. So there is this kind of paradigm that exists for what to do with the indigenous voice that is willing to sign on, so to speak. And, and, and in Joshua too, you get this very stereotypical Deuterenomic, which is to say channeling Deuteronomy and affiliated texts. Confession almost, now it’s, I don’t, I don’t like the term confession ’cause it’s very Protestant. 

He, and this is, Rahab is not that, and this is not what’s going on in the time, but it’s, but it is a sort of reiteration of things that Israelites generally might have been seen to believe. So the spies are breaking the covenant. Meanwhile, the Canaanite sex worker is able to say exactly what they should have said. 

Pete: Mm-hmm. 

Chauncey: So in any case, so there’s this, there’s this model by which indigenous folks, um, you know, also enslaved African folks, when those lands are conquered, they can, they can be enslaved, they can be killed, but they need to be quote unquote civilized, right? They need to be brought into this kind of Christian orbit by means of evangelization. 

Jared: So how do we navigate the, I mean, I think what I would guess that a lot of like Western Protestants who grew up kind of sola scriptura would say is, well, that’s just a wrong way to use it.

If you just went back to the text itself. Like that’s, yeah, of course that’s a weaponized way. They were wrong to do that. I feel like if you go to people who have been colonized, they’re not so quick to just brush that aside. It’s like, well, we have to, there’s, there’s an impact to this. And if we’re gonna figure out how to use Joshua in more helpful ways, we can’t just brush aside this history.

All that to say, this is kind of messy stuff. How do we navigate Joshua as scripture knowing that, it sounds to me like what you’re saying is it’s pretty, not universally, but quite. Prolifically used to harm people in Christian context. So how do we navigate from here on our way out without just saying, well, don’t do that anymore, let’s just move on. 

Chauncey: Right. I mean, I think several things. Um, on the one hand, I, I think actually listening to indigenous folks, uh, colonized voices, so like Robert Warrior has this piece, uh, Canines, Cowboys, and Indians is, are really great. It’s from, I mean, it’s from the eighties, but it’s still like incredible.

I mean, essentially his argument is, look, yeah, maybe these texts didn’t happen in time, but you know, maybe these stories weren’t quote-unquote real, but they’re real in the ways they played out for indigenous communities, right? So like, so you can say, oh, well you shouldn’t do that. But the fact is that people have been reading them like this.

I mean, for over a thousand years. 

Jared: Yeah. You can say it’s just a script, but if people have been play-acting the script, there’s real consequences. 

Chauncey: So, right. So I mean, so on the one hand you have to like, like you’re saying, acknowledge the difficulty there. It, it’s, it’s not simply solved by, oh, we shouldn’t do that.

I mean, it has to be a broad socialized effort inside of religious communities to say, A, we need the others who our society has told us we’re worthy of death and conquest. We need them. Not just, uh, we would like them to survive, but we personally need them around. We need to talk to them. We need to eat their food.

We need to like help, like help ourselves think about what it is they prioritize and see how those priorities challenge us. And then secondarily, I mean, I think, you know, a willingness to treat scripture as not just a book full, like full of mandates, things to do. I think we can all agree, or we, I would hope, I mean, we, three of us can, but I, I would hope that Christians could all agree that like there’s a lot of things in the Bible that you’re just not supposed to do, right?

I mean, whether literally don’t murder, like in the 10 Commandments or like, you know. I don’t think Judah’s behavior with his daughter-in-law in Genesis was a really good idea or  very ethical whatsoever. And that’s not a thing to be emulated. And I think those sorts of questions, so like in, uh, the way I like to frame it is, look, some, some Bible passages are like 60 miles an hour speed limit, right?

You just blow by like the, you know, you, you can like read it as is easily done, say like a sermon on the mount, like hard. But you can take it, you can take it as is. 

There are passages that are like 25 mile an hour reads, which like, you know, you really just need to slow down and then like, see what you’re gonna do with it.

Like, you know, biblical legal material, for instance. Like, I think for many Christians, you’re gonna need to, to nuance what you’re doing with this. And I think Jews have been doing this helpfully for thousands of years, right? So maybe follow their lead. Um, uh, point three, there are some texts that I think we need to read as like dead ends or like box-ear, or, you know, like, don’t go down this road.

And in a certain sense, I think the book of Joshua ought to be treated as a kind of dead end text now, not in the sense that there’s nothing to be done with it, but do not try to go this way. 

Pete: Do not do this at home. 

Chauncey: Right. Yeah. Don’t really, don’t do it at home. You can read it. Mm-hmm. But like, don’t do it.

Jared: Yeah. Maybe take the Origen path and, yeah. 

Chauncey: No, really, I mean, and I think these are, well, seriously. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. 

Pete: Why not? I mean, why not take, I, I, I mean, I should say why not? That’s, we don’t really analogize today, but-

Chauncey: I think this is, that allegorical read is something that Christian communities have lost, right.

That, that we, we’ve drank the Kool-Aid of modernity. And so all that’s left is history or nothing. Yes. And it’s like, what? 

Pete: And throughout the medieval period, I mean, they weren’t stupid. They could see that there was some highly problematic text and, you know, the, the, um, not, not to be totally reductionistic here, but I, I, I would be willing to say that the history of the Christian tradition has been about finding ways to make problematic texts relevant.

And, and by interpreting, I mean, Origen did his thing and the medieval interpreters did their thing as well. And, um, but we, we have lost that, right? We can’t, we can’t, we can’t recreate that in our modernist mindset to coin a phrase. 

Chauncey: Yeah. I mean, not, not without a sense of, you know, breaking that kind of core feature of modernity, which is like, there’s one story, right?

If, if we’re able to get inside of that and say that’s actually an irresponsible representation of the world, that there’s more than one narrative, there’s one more than one thing you can do with the text. If people are willing to go a couple steps down that path, they’ll be like, oh, look at the, well, there’s gardens over here.

And it’s not all like death and violence like this is pretty shocking. Like it could be like this for you too.

Jared: One of the things I wanted to ask you about was these, uh, diversity of voices and how that might help us as well. Because I think these texts, if we were to see, if we were to slow down and read them, we see the diversity that the argument is often within the text itself. Right. And so it is already disrespecting the text to have it be this, uh, monolithic mantle piece for what we want to do with it, because that’s not what’s happening there. 

And I think of, you know, conquest of, say the difference between, uh, the, the dialogue between Jonah and Nahum on the Assyrians. Are there places within Joshua, you talked about some of these, uh, subtle, subversive voices, but maybe are there other ways that the text itself is encouraging us not to, uh sort of forge ahead as though it’s this one proclamation? 

Chauncey: Yeah, I mean it’s, I mean, so you’ve got Joshua 2 with, with Rahab, as we’ve talked about. You’ve got Joshua 9 with the Gibeonites. The interesting thing as well is, is around Joshua 12, the conquest narrative resets. Yep. So Joshua 12, they finished and then shortly thereafter, they start again, the land, like it says the land was fully conquered in chapter 11, beginning of chapter 12. 

And then shortly thereafter, they’re fighting for it again. So that the text, it’s, it’s essentially got like two narratives included. And the second version is like, it’s not tidy. Like they, they, they win a couple battles, things don’t go well, then, then Yahweh’s like, actually we’re gonna stop the conquest.

‘Cause if you kill everyone too fast, then the wild animals will just overwhelm you. And I’m like, yeah. So, so just like, like hoards of bears, what’s going on here? Like, like how is, how is, what is it? What do you mean? And so, so in any case, then that conquest stops and at the very end, Joshua’s giving his farewell speech and he tells the Israelites, get the foreign gods out from amongst you.

Pete: Mm-hmm. 

Chauncey: Which again, you know, Joshua 2. They, they made this covenant with the Canaanite breaking their own covenant, end of the end of the book, the very end of this, like quote unquote, like magisterial con conquest, this ideal, the idealized conquest, Joshua is saying to the Israelites, you have foreign gods in your midst.

Get rid of them. Now, people could be like, oh, this is hyperbole, but that the burden is on the person saying this is a hyperbole. 

Pete: Mm-hmm. 

Chauncey: Rather than the text itself. Right. Which seems to indicate that Joshua suspects that the Israelites are not, uh, faithful to their commitments to Yahweh in this context.

Right. Which is to say the conquest has failed. Yeah. You know, like at the very end, it’s a failure. If you have, if you have other gods, you blew it. 

Pete: Right. Well, I wonder how much this is damage control perhaps because the ideal didn’t happen. In, in the book of Joshua itself, and then getting into Judges, right.

It’s like they’re making all these excuses. Well, we need to keep ’em around so that your young people can learn how to fight. That’s, that’s not Deuteronomy. No. That’s not the first 12 chapters of, of Joshua. And the thing is that you, you look at that, I think this is where Jared is, is going with this, that it’s not, that’s not a problem.

That’s not a bug. That’s the feature of the narrative. And to take that seriously is I think, one maybe in the modern sense, because, you know, if you look at the meaning of the text, you see their meanings in the text. Yeah. If you do that and you take it seriously in sort of a modernist mentality, you know, um, yeah.

If you just don’t overlay that with the Christian modernist move to say, well, this is the word of God, so it’s always gonna be perfect and, and no problems. Just read it. Take it for what it says. It’s, it’s, it can inspire people to, to think about not just this story, but many things in the Bible. Like, how can I interact with this?

And, and in a meaningful way. So, so lemme, on that, let me ask you something, Charles. Yeah. Um, post-Colonial decolonial. Is, is postmodernism an avenue for, uh, I guess deconstructing the text. I don’t know how else to put it. That’s different than Origen, that’s different than the medieval period, right?

Chauncey: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s something there. Um, I I, you know, I guess most postmodern theorists probably aren’t interested in the way a text is functioning in our religious community. So I, it would have to be a bit of like, um, a, a curious community, let’s just say that. Yeah. Like, not in like a weird, like, not curious in the weird, but curious is, and we’d like to think about stuff.

Um, I, I think there is something, so there’s a book that I, I enjoy assigning to my students via, um. Keith Jenkins called Rethinking History and Keith Jenkins, the, the main through line in this is that, uh, Jenkins is saying rather than thinking about history as what is history, he wants to ask the question, who is history for?

Pete: Hmm. 

Chauncey: And, and if we, and I, and I think in a certain sense, if we’re able to reorient who are these texts for and how? There’s a postmodern move that I think is helpful, right? Because then, then we’re having to ask questions about context. We’re having to ask questions about history. We’re having in the sense of things that took place, right?

Kind of what you were pointing to, Jared is this, this, this long history of reception of the book of Joshua that mostly points in horrific scary ways. We have to take all of that seriously, and then we have to ask, well, what do we want to do? Right. The idea, you know, in some sense that, that the, the text doesn’t tell you what you’re supposed to do with it.

And this is, I think, a problem, you know, with the kind of sola couture model, which is to say you can’t just do that. The Bible has no instruction manual. And so you’ve gotta kind of figure out what are, what are your community’s commitments along the way. And I think one of the things that postmodernity, decoloniality, what have you, would offer is a kind of view towards the wellbeing of people who are under the boot of empire. 

Rather than a view towards the people who benefit from the status quo of empire. And if, and if we’re willing to, you know, as Americans, I think to, to look ourselves in the mirror and be like, we live in an empire, you know?

Pete: Wait, wait. We wait a minute. We do what, what? I thought we were persecuted. Anyway, go ahead. 

Chauncey: But, uh, if we’re willing to do that work. I think and, and asking ourselves, well, well, what’s what’s required of us now, those of us who want to use these texts convincingly. For instance, like Palestinian Christians don’t like reading the, the, the Old Testament Hebrew Bible. Right. I mean, they, they, they’ll read a lot of it, but books like Joshua are inherently problematic for them. 

Pete: Mm-hmm. 

Chauncey: Because of the exact same things we’re talking about. Right. Right. Yeah. So, so, so I think insofar as we’re able to keep these voices in mind and keeping in mind the kind of world that we wanna live in, if we can orient our biblical narrative in that direction, then, and, and the way we, and the, the biblical narrative in terms of how the community receives it, then I think there’s some real, there’s some real, you know, gas in the tank in that direction. 

Now how much gas in the tank can you get outta Joshua particularly, I don’t know, but at least that, that kind of reframing of what are we doing with these problematic texts at least puts us on a different path.

Jared: Well, I would almost argue, I think, I think Joshua is actually a, um, not to disagree with you, but I might disagree with you. 

The more I’m thinking about, I’m mostly just processing out loud, but I think it. It’s a perfect text for this kind of thing because it, it’s, it problematizes itself and so we’re looking for these strategies and so we may not be able to do the Origen allegorizing strategy.

Because like you said, as, as in modern context, that’s harder to do, but I think there’s some sophisticated readings. Um, like what you talked on, I’m thinking of David Lambert work, uh, David Lambert’s work at, at North Carolina, where he’s talking about this idea of how the community receives it is actually part of the meaning that you can’t decouple that.

Which is like borrowing this language of assemblages. So when we say what does a text mean? We have to include in it the community who’s reading it. That is constitutive of meaning, or we could look at Joshua through like Foucault’s lens of the genealogy of power in the reception history.

Or, like, you’d mentioned deconstruction. That is the idea that within the text, the text deconstructs itself, like, of course, if you have this, uh, monolithic, uh, meta narrative of what it’s about, you just have to look at the text itself. 

And you’re gonna find some problems with it. So I actually think it’s a quite great book for this kind of stuff. 

Chauncey: No, I mean, I think it’s helpful to a degree. I think the only caveat that I would add to what you just said is that like, when we’re conceptualizing the “us” of who the people reading it are and how it affects us, we also have to include the people who’ve been brutalized by these texts. 

So the “us” includes indigenous Christians. The “us” includes, uh, it’s like descendants of enslaved African Christians, you know, uh, you know, I, I could. Latinx Christians from the American Southwest who have been treated like garbage by a lot of, you know, I mean the list goes on, but like, as, as long when we are limiting the “who” to a kind of, um, you know, status quo of Euro-American slash European Christian readers, I think we’re really doing ourselves a disservice by putting the cart before the horse in a certain sense, because then we’re not actually addressing the, the context effectively. If we’re starting with the community, not including the people who have been harmed by these texts.

And the other thing is like, we have to then move, in my opinion, towards not for people who aren’t Christian as well. 

I mean, we have to be willing to talk about Muslims and indigenous folks, et cetera. Um, because they’re also on the receiving end of these texts. I mean, there’s, there’s this great, um, uh, uh, Jacques Ellul. Have you read Jacques Ellul? Um, he, he makes this, this argument in Politics of Man, Politics of God that like, it’s incumbent upon the community of faith to listen to people who are not us, who are like, no, you’re doing it wrong. 

Like, we have to be willing to expose ourselves to external critique, because if we don’t, then we’re in an echo chamber and it’s terrifying.. 

Jared: I, yeah, I think that’s, I think that’s exactly right. So how do communities of faith, I’m thinking of like congregations and, are there practical ways to do some of these, these things that you’re talking about? 

Chauncey: Yeah. I mean, the first step is like, you’ve gotta read it, right?

I mean, I think there, there is, there is a desire with a lot of these texts that we perceive to be distasteful or violent or horrific to just not read them. The challenge there is that for every time we choose, we being responsible people who don’t wanna kill people with our bibles, let’s just start there.

Um, uh, every time we choose to not engage with a, with a hard text, uh, bad actors are engaging with that text. 

Jared: We’re sort of seeding the ground. 

Chauncey: Exactly. You’re, you’re we’re, we are, we are relinquishing our space, uh, to engage meaningfully in a, in a dialogue about what these texts can and should be doing.

Yeah. So you’ve gotta read it. And then you have to ask yourself, well, what do we do with it? Um, I think that, you know, that that second bit needs to be channeled through the mission of what the community is about. Right. Joshua is not the only text in our Bibles. And I’m not saying you kind of like paint it with Jesus and solve it.

However, an important note is that Jesus’ name in Greek is the same name as Joshua. Right? If you go and read the New Testament and you go and read the Septuagint, Jesus and Joshua have the same name. Which, if that’s not an internal Jewish commentary on the conquest narrative, I don’t know what is. And then, I mean, then you push it even further.

For instance, in, uh, I believe in Matthew, right? There’s the, the Syrophoenician woman in Jesus, in Mark, in Matthew. It’s a Canaanite woman, right? And Jesus is not. Jesus doesn’t brutally murder this woman, right? Jesus actually, like, helps her in some significant sense. 

Pete: Are there even Canaanites around? No.

Chauncey: No, and there weren’t in, in the context of the actual book of Joshua, there were no Canaanites then. Yeah, there certainly were no Canaanites in the first century. So, I mean, this is, I mean, there are these kind of, uh, intertextual references that we’re getting there.

There are New Testament spaces where people are saying, no, look, you wanna read Joshua, you gotta think about what, what is the project that God is doing? And if you wanna read Joshua, you have to, you have to like, I mean, again, the New Testament authors seem to be suggesting, again, Jewish interpreters.

We, you have to read this against the grain of empire. You have to read this against the grain of being bracketed off from other people who aren’t like you. Even if you find them incredibly distasteful, even if your people have said they should die for X, you have to not do that. 

Pete: Mm-hmm. 

Chauncey: So that, I mean, those are the directions I would start, but like, I think that the, the, the last piece that I would push people towards is you have to be around people who aren’t like you.

I mean, you just fundamentally, where is your body? Are you going to restaurants that serve you food that doesn’t correspond to your heritage? Right. I mean, that’s like the, a basic activity. You could go to the restaurant that you’ve never been to down the road. You drive by it every day. You could go there once a month.

For a year, order things you never had put yourself in that space, and all of a sudden you’re gonna start to feel your mind shifting because of where your body is. And I think as long as we are treating indigenous people as folks who are out there or, uh, you know, fill in the blank group folks who are out there, who aren’t us, um, I think we’re, we’re really setting ourselves up to, to repeat these imperial paradigms. Because we’re still sitting in the, the rooms, so to speak. That, uh, imperial expansion has made for us. 

Jared: Well, Chauncey, thank you so much for coming on and Yeah, and talking to us about this. It’s very fascinating. It’s clear you’re very passionate about this, very knowledgeable about it.

It’s, it’s contagious. So thank you so much. 

Chauncey: I really appreciate it. Glad to be here. 

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