Joshua 11

If the battle at Ai was like the Battle of the Five Armies from The Hobbit, the battle that opens Joshua 11 is like the Battle of the Pelennor Fields from The Return of the King. OK, that's actually not that great of an analogy, because the Battle of Pelennor Fields basically involved the bad guys laying siege to the good guys' city, while in this chapter, the Israelites army takes "a huge army, as numerous as the sand on the seashore" (verse 4) by surprise, completely decimating it. And while most of the battles in The Lord of the Rings were struggles (as all good fictional battles should be), the Israelites here are basically continuing their inexorable steamrolling of the Canaanite city-states.

While the author doesn't really describe the nitty-gritty of the battles--probably because they were all so one-sided--he or she does include an interesting detail: Joshua hamstrings the horses of the opposing armies. Basically, if you cut the tendon near a horse's ankle in just the right place, you can make that horse lame in that leg. In fact, one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Silver Blaze, features a rogue whose nefarious plot hinges on that very technique. Apparently, if one uses just the right kind of knife and makes just the right kind of cut, one can disable the horse with nary a perceptible trace. But of course, it's a Sherlock Holmes story, so the venerable detective sniffs out the villainy. (However, even though Sherlock Holmes nearly always figures out the mystery, there are a handful of stories where he finds out too late or fails to actually catch the criminal once identifying him--or her.)

Another intriguing quirk about these battles is that while the Israelites burn most of the cities, they do "not burn any of the cities built on the mounds--except Hazor" (verse 13). The author explains in an aside in verse 10 that Hazor is essentially the chief city in the area, but such is the relentless dominance of the Israelite army that this otherwise important factoid becomes little more than a footnote. But why did the Israelites not burn any of the other cities built on mounds? Did they think it was too dangerous to climb the mounds with torches in their hands?

All these battles take up a paltry 23 verses, but the author asserts that "Joshua waged war against all these kings for a very long time" (verse 18)--about five years, as we'll learn in a few chapters. Yes, the Israelites enjoyed victory after victory, but war is war, a tautology sometimes pushed to the wayside in impersonal accounts of battle. After it's all over, the author even uses personification to accentuate the toll of battle: "Then the land had rest from war" (verse 23).

Finally, I want to make return to the question I posited in the last post about whether God was OK with the Gibeonites using deceit to become subservient to the Israelites. Verse 20 says that God "hardened the hearts" of the Canaanites who rose up against the Israelites, which of course led to this succession of battles. Does this mean that He did not harden the hearts of the Gibeonites, who respected and feared God enough to surrender to His chosen people?