Apropos of Nothing Biblical

You may or may not be aware of the fact that there are three novels out there for which I must claim responsibility. The two Ted and Jerry Adventures featuring a couple of perpetually down on their luck jazzers and their unintended involvement in matters usually handled by characters played by Tom Cruise, Daniel Craig, or even John Krasinski are titled "Boomerang" and "devil Went Down to Phoenix." Laughs, intrigue, a bit of political poke-in-the-eye action, even a wee tad of romance. "Boomerang" is my first, and so far my most popular title, racking up tens of thousands of sales worldwide. "devil Went Down to Phoenix" has many of the same characters, but with a much more current sort of satirical bent, inspired as it was by the question, "How in the world did we get here, anyway?" The third novel is a stand alone* and is a coming home tale of a forty-two year old son, his recently widowed father, the dachshund who becomes part of their household, and, mostly, the son's stumbling efforts to finally get a grip on life. It is called "The Baer Boys." Right now, "Boomerang" and "The Baer Boys" are free for Kindle. The Giveaway is good through July 5, 2025. The links will take you to the Amazon US site, but the free offer is good worldwide. I hope your summer is going well. Or at least as well as can be expected with the Dastardly Bastards in Washington DC doing their darndest to live up to that description. *A follow-up is quite possible if it looks like a readership is out there for it.

That Does It

 The world is too full of actual fuckery for me to find any sort of enlightenment, much less solace or strength, from reading this book. I know I said it before, but let me say it again, this time with meaning.

I'm outta here.

Read good books.

This one sucks.

Joshua Installment Three

 

The Beat Goes On

As we move on from the infrequently interrupted parade of genocide that entertained and inspired us in Chapters Six through Ten, we seque quite handily into...let's see...You're familiar with the phrase "Divide and Conquer" are you not? well, in Chapters Eleven through Nineteen Joshua switches that around to "Conquer and Divide."

    All will become clear.

    It seems the Land of Milk and Honey is lousy with kings, all of them seemingly reluctant to hand over their little kingdoms to the new arrivals. In Chapter Eleven Joshua and his mighty warriors settle the hash of a bunch of these minor monarchs from the northern reaches of Canaan. Here's the cast list:

• King Jabin of Hazor
• King Jobab of Madon
• King No Name Given of Shimron
• King Also No Name Given of Achshaph
• A whole bunch of kings we will call The Ensemble since they don't get individual billing of any sort.

    But of course no matter how many kings, with however many big strong men and iron chariots and noble horses come out to challenge Joshua on the field of battle, if God says you're gonna whup 'em, you can put good money of the fact that whupped they're gonna be. 

8) ...They struck them down, until they had left no one remaining. 9) And Joshua did to them as the Lord commanded him; he hamstrung their horses, and burned their chariots with fire.

     What in the world did those horse do to deserve that? Just asking. I mean, they're horses, it's not like they signed up for that duty and understood what they were getting themselves into. And in case you're wondering, all the opposing players of a Homo Sapiens persuasion were "stuck down with the edge of the sword" just to give their steeds a bit of company on the field of battle. 

    In Chapter Twelve we get an inventory of the kings that have found themselves voted out of office as a result of the surge of undocumented immigrants led first by Moses and then Joshua. The Moses list is presented in paragraph form and is, I think, a bit of a slog to plow through, whereas the Joshua list is done very neatly in a sort of bullet point presentation beginning with "the king of Jericho" and ending with "the king of Tirzah": we are even provided with a total at the end. That total being a big thirty-one.

    And even though it meant a whole five minutes of dealing with small print, I counted the kings voted off the island by Moses. It starts with King Sihon of the Amorites and ends with King Og of Bashan with nobody in between, just a whole lot of surveying talk.  So once you take the trouble to wade through all the verbiage the total for Moses as presented here is all of two.

    Advantage: Joshua.

    Not that we're keeping score.

    Chapter Thirteen opens with one of my favorite bits, just because.

Now Joshua was old and advanced in years; and the Lord said to him, "You are old and advanced in years"

    God goes on to tell Joshua that there is still a lot to do, more kings to skewer and territory to claim under the Middle Eastern edition of Manifest Destiny. God lists all the little kingdoms that have yet to be liberated from their current residents and then assures Joshua that he doesn't need to bother with the actual fighting at his advanced age, because God his own darned self "will drive them out from before the Israelites" and all Joshua needs to worry about is distributing the land once all the blood has been soaked up by the thirsty earth. And it's all of the fascinating real estate details we get in the next five thousand or so verses, a sort of surveying catalogue of which tribe gets what, and in some cases what they think of their share. Every once in a while we are reminded--because the author here is big advocate of learning through repetition--that the Levites aren't getting any territory to call their own, because "the Lord God of Israel is their inheritance." I bet they appreciate that.

    And just in case you think I exaggerate regarding the amount of ink given over to how the Land of Milk and Honey and dead horses is to be divided amongst the tribes, I'll just say that that's pretty much all you're going to find in Chapters Thirteen through Nineteen and we're not going to do a play by play here, thank you very much.

    If you're curious about how the Tribe of Zebulun made out I invite you to turn to Chapter Nineteen, verses 13-16 and you will be satisfied. Any fans of the Tribe of Dan should skip along in that chapter to verses 40-48. 

    Next time we meet up we'll learn all about the Cities of Refuge, a bit of real estate that actually does get set aside for the Levites, and, Spoiler Alert! Joshua exits this mortal coil. Whether or not there is a succession plan in place we hope to find out.

    

 

Joshua Installment Two

 

  *

Battlin' Joshua

"Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho.

Joshua fought the battle of Jericho,

And the walls came tumbling down."

Hold on, because the next five chapters in this book make the opening scenes in 

"Saving Private Ryan" look like a meet cute in a rom-com. It's battle after 

battle, after battle. Actually, more like a bunch of slaughtering interrupted 

by an early Bay of Pigs episode.

    The big one, the famous one, of course, comes in Chapter Six where  Jericho meets its doom. Where Joshua employs a unique choreographed 

and musical strategy.

    We start out with God telling Joshua not worry, that the city has been 

handed to him provided he follows these simple instructions.

3) "You shall march around the city, all the warriors circling the city once. 

Thus you shall do for six days, 4) with seven priests bearing seven 

trumpets of rams' horns before the ark. On the seventh day you shall 

march around the the city seven times, the priests blowing the trumpets 

(another word for rams' horns I suppose). 5) When they make a long blast 

with the rams' horn, as soon as you hear the sound of the trumpet, then

all the people will shout with a great shout."

    You've got to admit, it's a great plan, one that the king of Jericho 

couldn't have seen coming. He must have spent those first six days looking over the parapets at the parade going on outside his walls and shaking his head in wonder at the loopiness of it all. Chuckling and rolling his eyes at the silly Israelites tooting their horns and high stepping around the wall. Little did he know what day seven had in store for him and his people. Seven laps around the wall, some heavy tooting on the rams' horns, and a mighty shout and those walls came tumbling down.

    And once those walls tumbled down, the Israelites came surging in, and, following God's instructions, they kill everyone, man, woman and child that hadn't already been dispatched by the collapsing structures. They also kill all the livestock, once again, at God's instructions. And then all the brave Israelites gather anything of value they can find and bring it to the priests so God could have the shiny stuff. That was also part of the instructions. All looting was to be for the glory of God, not for personal enrichment.

    Oh, I almost forgot, Rahab the prostitute and her loved ones are spared, just like the two spies had promised. I'm not sure how the invading army knew which home was hers since from the earlier spy story we're told her home had an outside facing wall and any crimson rope she would have tied to the window would have been buried in the rubble, along with anyone inside the house, but the Bible says Rahab and her kinfolk were fine, so there you go. Just another detail over which we should not quibble. We will also be glad to know that not only was Rahab spared, but she went on to became a pillar of the community and in fact was voted first chairperson of the Milk and Honey Benevolent Society Auxiliary and Bookclub**.

    But the rest of the town was destroyed and everyone was killed, let's not lose sight of the important stuff.

27) So the Lord was with Joshua, and his fame was in all the land.

    Joshua is now officially not only good with God, but a also a celebrity. Destroying an entire city will do that.

    Remember the bit about bringing all of the good stuff (silver, gold, bronze, iron, Franklin Mint collectibles**) back to the priests? Well, in Chapter Seven we find out that one of the brave soldiers decided to keep a bit of the booty for himself. His name is Achan, and Achan soon finds out that one does not skim off the top when dealing with The Lord.

    But first.

    After the easy-peasy conquering of Jericho, Joshua sends some soldiers to add the city of Ai to his Win Column, but somehow things don't turn out so well, and not only do they lose thirty-six men, but the inhabitants of Ai chase them out of the town and taunt them whilst doing so. When Joshua asks God why he hadn't been with the Israelites, God tells him that someone had been naughty in regard to the shiny stuff from Jericho. God then tells Joshua to sift through the population until he ID's the culprit. You'll have to read verses 14-20 if you want to know just how he narrows down the field to our friend Achan, because it doesn't make much sense to me. But Achan fesses up, a public stoning and incineration follows, and...

26)...Then the Lord turned from his burning anger.

    Which meant God would start helping out with the conquering again.

    So it's back to Ai for another try in Chapter Eight. This time with a nifty plan provided by God, who now is back on the side of Joshua and the Israelites. He tells Joshua the best way to handle this one is to sneak a bunch of the army around back of the city, then camp everyone else out in front, where the Ailites (Aians? Aiarians?) can see them. The Ai army, over confident after swatting away the previous attempt to invade their city, will then rush out to chase away the enemy camped conveniently outside their front door. When they do that, the Israelites in front of Ai are to run away, drawing the Aitans away from the gate so the Israelites who have been lurking behind the town can rush around the corner, into the undefended city, set it aflame, then rush back out the gate and trap the Ai soldiers from behind. It's devious and effective and, you guessed it, everyone with an Ai zip code dies. Some special attention is given to the King of Ai that we won't dwell on here. Suffice to say it's a nasty way to go.

    We take a little detour in Chapter Nine with a story about how some folks from Gibeon, upon hearing just how ruthless the Israelites have been behaving, decide that while all the other towns in the vicinity are getting ready to defend their territory against the powerful and devious Israelites, the best way to avoid becoming next on the Conquer and Slaughter Tour, is trick Joshua into thinking they have just arrived from a distant country, specifically to devote themselves to the Israelites' cause.  Joshua buys this unlikely story and promises they can become a part of the community, albeit as low wage workers. When he finds out they were fibbing he can't do anything about it because he is a Man of Honor who will not go back on a promise. Besides, it will be good to have a readymade lower class of "hewers of wood and drawers of water" when they finish up with their slaughtering and settle down to a peaceful, agrarian existence.

    Chapter Ten is titled "The Sun Stands Still", which kinda makes a person want to keep reading, doesn't it? Conjures up the pivotal scene in Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" where the hero Hank Morgan takes advantage of a convenient solar eclipse to make the sun go away at his command and secure his place as a man to be reckoned with. 

    Back to the book at hand.

    The chapter opens up with the King of Jerusalem, a city which at this time has yet to come under new, Israelite management. He's heard about the Gibeon/Joshua contract and it rankles. So he gets a bunch of other area kings together and they go make war on Gibeon, just to show they don't appreciate the fact that their neighbors have thrown in with the invaders. The Gibeonites (this is what they are called in verse 6) send to Joshua for some help so he gathers up a bunch of mighty warriors and heads their way. He is confident things will go well because God has told him in verse 8 "Do not fear them, for I have handed them over to you; not one of them shall stand before you." Which is God's way of saying, "The fix is in. You can make it look like a real battle if you want to, but in any case make sure you kill everyone."

    So Joshua and his warriors chase the gathered armies of Jerusalem, Jarmuth, Hebron, Lachish, and Eglon away from the gates of Gibeon, and God helps out by pelting the retreating armies with "huge stones from heaven." 

    And now for the Sun Standing Still part. Joshua made up a nice poem, calling on the sun to, well, I'll just give you the song itself...

12) On the day when the Lord gave the Amorites over to the Israelites, Joshua spoke to the Lord; and he said in the sight of Israel,

"Sun stand still at Gibeon,

and Moon, in the valley of

Aijalon."

13) And the sun stood still, and the

moon stopped,

until the nation took vengeance on their enemies.

    So, if I'm reading this correctly, Joshua wanted good light to last for a longer seasonally reasonable, so his mighty warriors would have an easier time wiping out the opposing army.

    The chapter gets even jollier.

    

    The five kings whose armies had been defeated outside of Gibeon go and hide inside a cave. Joshua has his men roll a big rock in front of the cave to trap the kings, then goes about the territory killing their armies. Then they extract the kings, Joshua "struck them down" and "hung them on five trees" until sunset, at which time down come the royal corpses, to be tossed back in the cave and sealed in with some more big rocks "which remain to this day."

    Just in case you think that's quite enough regicide and general slaughter for one chapter, you would be mistaken. Joshua and his Invincible Army proceeds to dispatch...

• Makkedah and its king
• Libnah and its king
• Lachish (king already dispatched)
• Gezer and its king
• Eglon (see note re Lachish)
• Hebron (for some reason that king gets a mention here, so perhaps that municipality had two kings, one that stayed at home while the other went to meet his fate at Gibeon?)
• Debir and its king

   Chapter Ten concludes with this celebratory paragraph.

40) So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the low-land and the slopes,

and all their kings; he left no one remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded.  41) And Joshua defeated them from Kadesh-barnea to Gaza, and all the country of Goshen, as far as Gibeon. Joshua took all these kings and their land at one time, because the Lord God of Israel fought for Israel. 43) Then Joshua returned, and all Israel with him, to the camp at Gilgal.***

*A Cliff Chipmunk. I thought it might be a nice antidote to the goings on in this installment.

**I shouldn't have to say this, but bits like this should not be taken as anything other than an exercise of Authorial Voice.

***For some well deserved R&R

Joshua, Installment One

 

  ***

It's Joshua's Turn

Looks like we're back to installments, at least for a while. Deuteronomy gave me false hope that I could polish off a book in one post, but that only worked because so much of Deuteronomy was a rehash of old material. Now we've turned things over to Moses' apprentice Joshua, who we really didn't hear much about in the earlier books, maybe because Moses wasn't interested in having any attention drawn away from himself, I don't know, but in any case it looks like there is going to be a fair amount of new goings-on so we're back to installments.

    I'm still going to try to keep things concise. Good luck to me on that one.

Speaking of keeping things concise, in Chapter One God gets right down to business as he hands Joshua the keys to the caravan.

2) "My servant Moses is dead. Now proceed to cross the Jordan."

6) "...for you shall put this people in possession of the land that I swore to their ancestors to give them."

    Something I think we should all keep in mind if God ever promises us anything is to find out just how many generations will need to come and go before he sees fit to make good on the promise. He doesn't seem to be one for immediate gratification, at least where other folks are concerned.

    Joshua goes to the officers' club tent and tells the captains and majors and whatnot to get ready for some real action. He also makes it clear as well water that what he says goes. Backtalk, or even hesitation will not be tolerated. The officers assure him,

18) "Whoever rebels against your orders and disobeys your words whatever you command, shall be put to death."

    So nothing has changed on the whole progression of disciplinary actions front.

Chapter Two has Joshua doing the old "send spies into the place you're about to attack" thing he learned from Moses. I'm not a military scholar, but I guess it's a solid strategy, used all the time even now. He sends two trusty fellows to go get a lay of the land in Jericho.

    The first place his two spies stop in order to get the lay of the land is at a prostitute's house. That's what it says. The prostitute's name is Rahab. She does the spies a solid by hiding them from soldiers the King of Jericho has sent around after he being warned that there might be spies in town. It seems the King and all the Jerichoians (Jerichoites?) are scared silly about the fearsome Israelites lurking across the border. Word of a Great Replacement Conspiracy designed to make the native born Jerichoinos, including the King, lose their place at the top of the Rights And Privileges Pyramid has the electorate all worked up.

    After successfully avoiding detection by hiding on the roof under stacks of flax, the spies decide that they've learned all they need to learn about the place and so they're happy to take Rahab's offer to lower them to the ground outside the city walls from one of her windows. They promise her that when they come back with the rest of the battalion everyone in her home will be spared from the scheduled slaughter. She just needs to tie a crimson rope outside the window to mark her home as a slaughter-free zone. 

Back at camp in Chapter Three. Joshua tells everyone they will know it is time to cross the River Jordan when they see the priests heading that way with the Ark of the Covenant. They should follow the ark, but stay two thousands cubits back. That's about three thousand feet, if we're talking the long arm cubit*.

    

    So we've got, what did we say, something like 2.4 million people who are to follow the priests across the river, but they must stay a minimum of ten football fields length distant from the priests and the ark. Cool.

    At this point, nobody seems to have given a thought to just how they're all going to get from one side of the river to the other. No mention has been made of any bridge building activities or commissions for local ferry businesses. We find out here that God is going to use this challenge to help Joshua establish himself as a leader worthy of the name. Reaching back into God's old Red Sea bag of miracles, Joshua and his ark bearing Levites stride up to the near bank of the river and the waters draw back.

    It must have been a pretty good sized chunk of dry riverbed, because the priests went halfway across and just hung around while the other 2.4 million hoofed it to the other side, all the while maintaining that two thousand cubit respectful distance. Seems to me at that distance the priests could hardly see the rest of the crowd, maybe just the dust their sandals kicked up. almost five million sandals are bound to kick up quite a cloud. I'm thinking the priests must have settled in and played gin rummy or something because getting all 2.4 million from one side to the other must have taken the better part of the afternoon.

Then, in Chapter Four, God gives out instructions about what he wants done with a dozen stones to mark the location of this miraculous crossing. I'm still just a bit confused as to whether the stones were stacked up in the middle of the riverbed where the priests loitered while they watched everyone else cross way over there, or if the stones were stacked on the river bank to mark where they emerged on the other side, or, more likely, that there were two stacks of a dozen stones, one in the river and one not. A third or fourth reading may clear things up, but that's not happening. If any of my Dear Readers here find yourselves vacationing near the River Jordan close by the town of Shittim and you happen to have your scuba gear with you, take a look and see if you can be the first to spot the stack of stones in the actual river that marks where the priests opened their camping chairs. (See Verse 9.)

    If you don't have your tanks and regulators handy maybe you can still look around in Gilgal for the stack that was put up on dry land. (See Verses 19-22.)

9) [Joshua set up twelve stones in the middle of the Jordan, in the place where the feet of the priests bearing the ark of the covenant had stood; and they are there to this day.]

19) and they camped in Gilgal on the east border of Jericho. 20) Those twelve stones, which they had taken out of the Jordan, Joshua set up in Gilgal, 21) saying to the Israelites, "When your children ask their parents in time to come, 'What do these stones mean?' 22) then you shall let your children know, 'Israel crossed over the Jordan here on dry ground.'

We now come to Chapter Five. Let's bullet point this one.

• God tells Joshua that it's time for the next generation to get the flint knife treatment. So I guess it's been a decade or three since anyone thought to get the boy kiddos circumcised and now we've got a backlog of hundreds of thousands of foreskins to deal with.
• Camp stays in one place while the cosmetic surgery is done and the necessary recuperation time has elapsed.
• They celebrate their first Passover in the Promised Land.
• They have their first meal made from something other than manna.
• I know, this isn't consistent with all the talk about sacrifices and what you can and cannot eat after you kill a goat or ox or bunny rabbit, and there have been all sorts of references to the bounty of the fields in the previous two or three books, but we're told here that this is actually when the manna from heaven supply was cut off and they were able to add some variety to their diet.
• Joshua has a vision in which he meets a fellow with a sword. The fellow identifies himself as the commander of the army of the Lord. The commander tells Joshua to take off his shoes.
• He does.

Next time we'll see how Jericho's walls fell down and why it's important to give the good stuff to the church.

*There is also a short arm cubit, which is about twelve inches, give or take.

***A photo of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado. Just because.