“When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are about to enter and occupy, he will clear away many nations ahead of you: the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. These seven nations are greater and more numerous than you. When the Lord your God hands these nations over to you and you conquer them, you must completely destroy them. Make no treaties with them and show them no mercy.”
Deuteronomy 7:1-2 NLT
These are the people groups that were so evil and corrupt that, kinda like the flood of Noah, the LORD condemned every last one of them to be eradicated from the earth.
If you just read Joshua 10 without the context of the rest of the Bible (as people often do), it might sound like genocide on par with Hitler and Stalin. That would be comparing apples to oranges. Dictators who do genocide are…
- Finite humans
- Motivated by power, lies, lust – a whole lot of things except for love and truth and real justice.
That’s not what’s happening here. This is God ordering an execution for the safety of the rest of the world. It is also just punishment for their depravity.
Have you ever heard atheists and skeptics ask the question: “If God is so good and loving why does He allow evil to exist?”
Well, here He is, stopping evil from existing and the same atheists and skeptics will clutch their pearls and call God a genocidal maniac. You can’t have it both ways. Either you want God to intervene or you don’t. And if He does, He will do so on His terms, not ours.
Is it true that the winner typically writes history according to the version of events they prefered? Sure it is. Is it true that civilizations in power have spread lies and propaganda about the people they are destroying to make themselves look better? Yep. There were rumors flying around in the Roman Empire that Christians were blood-drinking perverts.
1st Century Roman Conspiracy Theorists:
🤨 And that’s why they meet in secret! So they can drink blood!
🤔 And that’s why the government arrested them and threw them to the lions! It must be true! 😧
There are conspiracies. And there are conspiracy theories.
Hitler’s propagandists spread all kinds of bizarre lies about Jews. And people believed them. And acted accordingly.
They weren’t the first. During the Black Death in Europe, Jewish communities fared far better than others because they practiced the hygiene laws of the Torah. Because they weren’t dying at the rates of Gentile communities, people began to believe that the Jews had somehow caused the plague – that’s why they were immune.
My point is – there is no evidence to support that the book of Joshua is a propaganda piece written by Israel to falsely villainize the tribes they have been ordered (by God) to destroy. If it was, why would you include the stories of failure with Ai and the Gibeonite deception? We know (from Bible history that we haven’t got to yet) that these tribes were practicing witchcraft and human (usually child) sacrifice. In public. Men kept harems of enslaved women. Idol worship often involved public sexual acts. No one had heard of “human rights.” Their cultures were a cancer killing humanity.
Recall that these tribes were larger than Israel and better prepared for war. Israel was a lightweight going up against the heavyweight- except that God was with them.
The tribes they are taking out were truly evil. And God had patiently given them 400 years to repent and change their ways. That’s 4 centuries of violence and oppression, rape and human sacrifice that the Almighty tolerated while waiting for these tribes to decide they’d had enough of partnering with the demonic realm. There comes a point when your time is up. I bet if you could put modern skeptics in a Time Machine and drop them into one of these tribes, they’d be screeching about how God needs to hurry up and do something! Women are being oppressed! Human rights are being violated! These people are barbaric!
Yeah. Duh. Hence the need to remove all traces of their existence from earth.
Israel did such a good job that scholars thought the Hittites were made up. There was no archeological evidence for them for a long time. Until finally someone dug something up that proved once again that the scriptures are accurate..
The federation of 5 Amorite kings led by Adoni-zedek of Jebus (Jerusalem) immediately makes me think of Genesis 14. Back then, the Amorites were attacked by Chedorlaomer and his 4-king confederacy. Then the 5 kings of the Sodom and Gomorrah greater metro area banded together to fight them. And lost. And Abram stops by Jebus and meets Melek-zedek, the priest.
These names are interesting.
Adoni = lord
Zedek = righteousness / justice
Melek = king
I don’t think it’s coincidence that both stories have a 5-king confederacy that loses and an appearance of someone from Jerusalem with a title of righteousness and justice. Sounds a bit like a confederacy of kings at the end of the book that go against the righteous and just king of Jerusalem. Funny how that works isn’t it?
The Amorites have been on God’s radar a long time. Israel has already battled them a couple times. Remember Sihon King of Heshbon and Og King of Bashan? They were GIANTS. And they were the kings of the Amorites. When Israel wiped out Heshbon and Bashan, they didn’t kill every last Amorite in the whole region – because here are 5 more groups of them. The Amorites were on the list of giant clans in Genesis 14. Right after that whole episode in Genesis 14, the Lord said to Abram:
“After four generations your descendants will return here to this land, for the sins of the Amorites do not yet warrant their destruction.” Genesis 15:16 NLT
The Lord knows exactly what’s going on. And He was gracious. Just because He didn’t rain down fire and brimstone before now doesn’t mean He didn’t know or didn’t care about the wickedness. That’s something we should remember for the world today but also on a personal level. It might seem that we or someone else has “gotten away with it” but the Lord knows. Nobody “gets away with” anything. Everybody’s gonna pay. There are 3 payment plan options:
- Pay now.
- Pay later.
- Repent and trust that Jesus paid it all.
After 400 years, the sins of the Amorites have piled up to the heavens and their end has come.
This chapter has some amazing stuff – a supernatural hailstorm that targets the enemy and Joshua’s famous “long day.”
I experienced the largest hail in my life this year. Thankfully it only left one big noticeable dent in my car hood and punched a hole in my garage door. (I wasn’t home when the hail hit or my car would’ve been IN the garage.) My neighbor – the one who’s always outside – his truck windshield was smashed. Some of the stones were nearly the size of tennis balls.
If you were out in that, it would basically be like being stoned. To death. Which was how Israel carried out the death penalty. God is basically stoning the wicked from the heavens.
Scientists and skeptics argue about how it would be possible or impossible for the long day to happen but I don’t find it a stretch to believe that the Creator who made the sun and moon and put them in their orbits, can do whatever He likes with them.
The biggest thing is that God does this in response to the request of a man. That’s what’s mind-blowing. But I suspect it has something to do with the fact that Joshua is foreshadowing Jesus and His future conquest of the kings of the earth and their armies.
Who has the authority to command the storehouses of hail (Job 38:22)? Yashua. Who has authority to command the very lights of heaven? Yashua.
We know that the final judgments on earth include hail.
“There was a terrible hailstorm, and hailstones weighing as much as seventy-five pounds fell from the sky onto the people below. They cursed God because of the terrible plague of the hailstorm.”
Revelation 16:21 NLT
The final conquest also includes strange goings-on with the sun and moon.
“Then the fourth angel blew his trumpet, and one-third of the sun was struck, and one-third of the moon, and one-third of the stars, and they became dark. And one-third of the day was dark, and also one-third of the night.”
Revelation 8:12 NLT
I’m tellin’ ya. All this stuff in Joshua is prophetic. It’s one bookend. The other is in Revelation when the second Joshua and His armies drive the evil inhabitants out of His world.
Here is a map of Joshua’s “southern campaign” as the Bible scholars call it.
You can see how close Gibeon is to Ai. I suspect that when Ai went up in flames, the thread of smoke could be seen on the horizon from Gibeon.
In 2013 I got to stand on an overlook of the Valley of Aijalon where the moon hung in the same spot for a whole day. In the distance we could see a pass that led to Beth Horon where the hailstones fell.
These places are real. The people were real. The events were real. Let’s not be selectively supernatural. It’s kinda silly to say you believe in the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection of Christ but you don’t believe in targeted hailstorms. If you believe God can suspend the laws of physics and time to turn water into wine or multiply loaves and fish why can’t He suspend the laws of physics and time to make the sun and moon stand still for a day?
Joshua and the army are on a roll now. Tomorrow they head north.
To The Reader 