Joshua 9-15 - Take my Worf... please!

The readings - days 72 and 73 - Joshua 9-15

Allow me to begin, as many good things do, with Worf talking.

Now, I'm not wanting to sound too over-the-top or anything, but in this clip, Worf reminds me a lot of God.



There's something about, for lack of a better term, testicular fortitude that God seems to admire in people. Whether it's the samaritan woman giving Jesus a smart-ass answer, for which He is very appreciative, or the Gibeonites using an elaborate ruse to trick the Israelites into making peace with them, people who are willing to put gall to work in order to endear themselves to Him and His people tend to do alright much of the time.

These guys dressed up in costume, worked out a convincing story, played their respective roles to a tee, all to convince Joshua and Israel in general that they were from far away, but just wanted to be friends - and it worked.

Even after Joshua realizes that he's been tricked, he doesn't renege on his peace treaty. This appears, on the surface, to be two bad things compounding on one another. After all, God's explicit instructions were that nobody was to be spared and that the entire land was to be emptied of its inhabitants. Surely He's going to be upset that the Israelites A) were tricked into making peace with one of the native nations and B) made peace and decided to keep it.

But far from this happening, God goes a long way towards proving that He's actually pretty okay with what the Gibeonites did. Not only does He not punish Joshua for the treaty, or try to undo it in any way, but he actively smites those kings that were trying to attack Gibeon. Chapter 10, verse 11 says that more men were actually killed during the hailstorm that followed the five invading armies than the Israelites killed in battle.

I'm not particularly interested in this hailstorm and whether it was a real hailstorm or God throwing rocks at soldiers or whatever. To me, the message is pretty clear: these gall-full Gibeonites were off-limits to invaders. By the time the land is ready to divide up by chapter 13, every single city and feifdom in the land had been conquered by Joshua's armies - except for the Gibeonites.

Now, granted, they were to live as servants among the Israelites, but taking a look a the laws governing how servants were to be treated compared to the way they would normally have been, and comparing life as a servant to life as a dead person, it seems like a pretty sweet deal for the Gibeonites.

Thanks, gall!