Week 11 Joshua 10-11
The section is filled with violence. It’s very unsettling to read.
I check a cross-ref in Genesis: after four generations your (Abraham’s) descendants will return here to this land, when the sin of the Amorites had run its course.
I draw two columns. The left column: Israel. Right column: Amorites.
Under Israel I write down what’s been happening all those hundreds-of-years. Abraham Isaac Jacob Twelve-sons Egyptian-slavery Exodus Mount-Sinai Wilderness Promised-Land. The Amorite column is pretty short and I write Accumulating Civilizational Evil. The one key thing that was happening was that Amorite criminality was running-its-course (another version: the sin of the Amorites has not reached its full measure. Another: the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete.)
In the Amorite column I add: ‘evil is getting stacked higher and higher’. I also add a bunch of undesignated plus-signs as place-holders.
I wish I knew what-all and how-all the pieces fitted together. But basically it looks like the Lord hung-around for centuries. Waiting… Waiting… Waiting while either a) evil kept piling up or b) the Amorites turned around. Waiting until an (unspecified) tipping-point was reached.
I’m glad to be past Joshua 10-11. About a dozen-and-a-half times (in 11:10-23 alone) the text says that everyone was destroyed. That’s hard reading to start out my day. I look at my two (useless) columns and try to reason things out clinically but I’m not too successful.
Mostly I’m just glad to get past it.
Note: quote from Genesis 15:16 (NLT NIV NASB)