Book of Joshua 16-24, Judges 1-15

The Book of Joshua picks back up with the splitting of territories.  Riveting stuff.

I meant to make this reference before, but there's a strong feeling that Book of Joshua inspired a lot of Revelation's imagery, with its emphasis on the number seven and the appearance of Megiddo, which is the source of the word "Armageddon."  Megiddo was a real place, where the apocalyptic battle was supposed to take place.  And as I've stated before, there is plenty of fighting in the chronicles of Moses and Joshua..

Shiloh appears.  I found this remarkable mostly as an extremely amateur American Civil War buff.

"Thus the Lord gave to Israel all the land he swore to give their fathers."  This line kind of makes the original Abrahamic covenant sound complete, but of course the whole relationship between God and the Hebrews became very much ongoing, as long as those Hebrews quit being so rebellious...Which doesn't happen very soon.  Just as I was making a note that they were behaving themselves, they stopped that right away.  God gets pretty hot under the collar when they build an altar intended for a purpose other than worshiping him, although Phinehas appears again to explain that it is a communal phenomenon that will help unite them in their common devotion to their Lord.  This appeases him.  No smiting.  Phinehas is the go-to guy when you don't need to know too much about the guy saving the Hebrews' butt.

Joshua in his farewell address summarizes the line of Abraham, skipping just like Exodus to Moses at that point in the history.  Apparently there was just no one worth talking about, or their names were completely forgotten.  Balaam is described as intending to curse rather than bless Israel, and I still hate reading this kind of stuff.  He seems to have come from a separate tradition that was folded into the Moses narrative without anyone realizing it, and only the orthodox view based on his final fate survived full tradition.  In the address Joshua utters the phrase, "as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord," which you will surely find familiar.

I know I've tried to guess how many generations passed from the time of Joshua to when his story was codified in this chronicle, possibly the first record completed, and I conclude by suggesting that perhaps it was as few as two, as the concluding passages in the book might be interpreted to say.

Judges is very similar to Joshua and may stem from an equally early recording tradition.  More summary can be found here, of the conquests the Hebrews were so fond of performing.  Caleb is mentioned here.  Everything sounds perfectly fine, and then they start making concessions, and that seems to be where things fall apart.  As living memory of the founding fathers fades away, the people stray from God.  So he gives them a series of periodic champions, or judges, to try and put them back in order.

The first judge is named Othniel, and he is the son of Caleb's brother.  The second is Ehud, who has the first of the extended episodes, in which he personally slays the king of an enemy nation.  The king is extremely fat, and Ehud has to plunge his sword deep into the king's belly.  Shamgar operates against the Philistines, who are quickly approaching their most famous biblical hours.  Then there's Deborah, who is described as a prophetess but is clearly a judge.  The highlight of her episode is a a pretty good poem.

The first truly big name among the judges appears next, and it's Gideon.  He frequently has God, or the angel representing him, prove they are who they say they are, which makes him far more brazen than past figures (any of them).  He has to contend with worship of that nasty pagan god Baal, whose followers fully expect him to act in their defense as Gideon threatens smiting.  In opposite of Abraham, who had to talk God into accepting smaller numbers of worthy individuals to save, Gideon argues that he needs fewer men to lead in battle.  Prophetic dreams return to scripture, but not in the guise of Gideon.  He engages in spectacular trumpet warfare, probably something you may remember.

The enemy leaders flee from him much as Darius does from Alexander the Great.  Unlike Darius, however, these guys are eventually slain by Gideon himself.  As soon as Gideon himself dies, the people return to their wicked ways.

One bit of cultural connections is camels wearing the crescent, which remains an Arabic emblem to this day.

Remember the name Abimelech from earlier?  Someone else gives it as spin, as king.  He is the son of Gideon. He faces the same kind of turmoil as the successors of Alexander, everyone spoiling for control and no one capable of filling Great shoes.  Abimelech is no slouch, but he's no Gideon, either.  Even with two of them now, I doubt you remember the name at all.  But he does leave an echo behind.  Like Samson who is to appear shortly, the most famous of the judges, Abimelech finds himself in the position to wipe out a whole mess of his enemies in the midst of one major structural collapse.  He ends up dying in battle, although since he's fatally struck by a woman, the chauvinist asks a male colleague to do him in first, because he doesn't want to go out that way.

Maybe that's why no one knows his (or his predecessor's) name...

Then there was Tola who judged for 23 years, then Jair who judged for 22.  Syria is mentioned.  Philistines come round again.  Another interesting lost figure is Jephthah, who was initially rejected as meaningless in the grand scheme, and so he gathers around him other "worthless fellows," only for the lot of them to be recuited, via begging, to help the Hebrews catch a break.  He consents.  He later goes so far as to massage their ego by explaining in extremely favorable terms the history of their conquests.  Jephthah has a tragic ending, however, when he strikes a bargain with God and the payment he comes to regret is sacrificing the first person he sees when he returns home.  That person ends up being his own daughter, which begins a tradition when she's allowed to bemoan never having made a life for herself, and then becomes a burnt offering.  Which kind of beggars the question of why earlier God had to make such a point of saying this was an abomination pagans practiced.

Anyway, Jephthah in all judged for 6 years.  Elom followed for 10, Abdon for 8.  The Philistines come round again!  And then a man named Manoah receives a visit from the angel of the Lord, who like Abraham before him and later for two lucky ladies in the New Testament, learns that his barren wife will give birth after all.  The resulting child's name is Samson.  Samson grows up and is a clever guy, wanting a Philistine bride so he can have something to complain about later.  His whole career as a judge is recorded at 20 years.  David Maine has one of his several exceptions works of fiction based on biblical episodes I've now reached in my readings centered around Samson, called appropriately enough The Book of Samson.  Maine also has The Preservationist (concerning Noah) and Fallen (the best of them; featuring Adam, Eve, Abel, and Cain, told in reverse).  He doesn't paint Samson in the best of lights, you should know...

Numbers 21-36, Deuteronomy 1-5

It strikes me as I'm reading, the deep and perhaps hidden significance of the serpent in Old Testament lore.  In Genesis the serpent was always interpreted to be the Devil in disguise, tempting Eve into enacting original sin, cursed by God ever after to wriggle on its belly, and there are other passages about this sorry fate.  And yet in Exodus God also has Moses and Aaron turn the staff trick of transforming it into a serpent, and the image returns in Numbers in an equally famous episode that the medical establishment later adopted, of serpents that God had sent against his continually mischievous people and then the one he asks Moses to place upon a staff to cure them.

So which is it?  Are serpents representations of evil, or are they perhaps after all agents of God?  The Old Testament is littered with God testing his people, who are constantly failing (except Abraham with his near-sacrifice of Isaac, which seems to be the defining point for the foundation of Judaism).  Maybe this whole time we've been misinterpreting the serpent in the garden.  Maybe God always intended man to become aware of his regular duties, which he'd already been given anyway, to be lord and master of the earth much as God is Lord of everything else (and man).  God has a terrible time accounting for all the ways mankind disappoints him, including his own chosen people, and spends a lot of time smiting them in the early books.  He could have just as easily done the job the first time, but didn't.  Sometimes failure is permanent, but the larger point is that God is constantly testing mankind.

And his agent that first time was a serpent.  Put aside the curse he levels against it.  He continues using serpents in the books that follow.  I'm not trying to upend theology here, but these things keep coming to me.  (Don't smite me!)

Anyway, Numbers gets a ton more interesting with the introduction of and narrative that follows Balaam for a while.  There's this whole story of this prophet who exists entirely outside of the Hebrew lineage, an independent phenomenon in direct communication with God.  His whole story is how he gets out of having to condemn the Hebrews as they continue their journey toward the promised land.  It's like the Bible suddenly splits off into an entirely new story filled with its own mythology, right in the middle of the Moses arc.  His own lord and master is displeased each time Balaam reports what God has told him, that he keeps evading the prospect of taking out the Hebrews.

Unfortunately, his narrative ends abruptly, we switch back to Moses, and the next and last time he's brought up Balaam is summarily executed as a collaborator with the enemy, even listed as a villainous presence who actively conspired against the Hebrews.  There's apparently even something about it in Revelation.  The guy's whole reputation is entirely slandered, even though he clearly was working the opposite of how he ends up being perceived, and to make it all the worse, probably no one outside of devoted scholars are even aware today that he ever existed.  Not cool.  So that's another way my ruminations on the Bible will deviate from the record.  Balaam represents an important development in the history of God's interaction with mankind.  He's confirmation that God didn't just pal up with Abraham and his descendants.  And another way in which Moses kind of ended up doing his own smiting along the way, when God failed to do it himself.

There's an interesting phrase to be found here, "son of man," that is associated with repentance, which is another thing later Christians could probably call their own from the earliest books even though they mostly seem concerned with the prophetic later ones.

The classic pagan god Baal is referenced for the first time, as are Hebrew judges, which becomes important later, notably in the books of Judges.

A man named Phinehas manages to talk God out of another round of smiting, which puts him on a certain kind of level with Moses, who managed the fete earlier (and himself then proceeded to smite in the same righteous manner).  This seems significant.  His name, however, has since been forgotten.  Making a note of it here all the same.

Jericho is referenced for the first time.

A second census is carried out, now that a considerable amount of smiting has occurred..  God is also asked to consider women as capable of inheriting property, which he grants.  So that's another positive indication for women in the face of a number of other examples that don't paint them in such favorable light.

Joshua is officially deemed Moses' successor.  God outlines the holy days.  The Judaic tradition of holy war continues, presaging the Crusades and much of what Islam has become.  The exiles start to settle down, which initially causes God discomfit, but he decides to play along.  Canaan, the promised land, is identified as such.  High priests are referenced for the first time, another thing Christians will definitely recognize.

Deuteronomy, the fourth book of Moses and fifth of the Old Testament, begins with something Numbers had done in a different way, recapping the journey to this point.  The Deuteronomy version highly favors the most favorable Judaic interpretation of events.  It also comes in the form of a great speech on the part of Moses, who had initially beggared God to ask for someone else (i.e. Aaron) to do the talking because he was a poor public speaker.  Here he has no problem at all, and seems to relish the role.

The descendants of Esau and Lot are encountered, who are not part of the Hebrew exiles from Egypt.  They are part of separate traditions.  Imagine a Bible that includes their stories as well, or even Balaam's.

The most striking element now seems how easily war-like and conquer-happy the Hebrews are at God's behest.  They sound like Alexander the Great, or Attila the Hun, that sort of phenomenon.  They fight and beat everyone, and assume their territory for their own, a small (relatively speaking) scrappy band of warriors always good for a fight.  You could easily make a movie about Moses and do almost nothing but warfare.

The ten commandments are referenced again, specifically as a covenant.  My interpretation of them will continue to be in the air.  The familiar ones end up being reiterated, in case you'd forgotten, although at that point are not spoken of in relation to a covenant.  God, as I will argue for now, seems far more interested in emphasizing the way to worship him than the moral codes that dominate the latter of the traditional ten commandments, some of which he goes to great lengths to interpret given specific circumstances again and again, such as murder.

That is all for now.