"Destruction
of Ai (Joshua 8:1-29)"
"Killing
at Jericho - "When the people heard the sound of the horns, they
shouted as loud as they could. Suddenly, the walls of Jericho collapsed, and
the Israelites charged straight into the city from every side and captured
it. They completely destroyed everything in it – men and women, young and
old, cattle, sheep, donkeys – everything." (Joshua 6:20-21 NLT)
These passages occur after Joshua
began to lead the Israelites into the promised land of Canaan, the land that
God had promised to give them. You can
read the full chapters here (to get a sense of the whole story, it would be
best to read Joshua chapters 1-8):
As mentioned in previous blog posts,
these events were the fulfillment of what God had been telling the Israelites
and the surrounding nations: the Israelites would take possession of the land
of Canaan, the land that God had promised them, and the people of Canaan were
to be killed if they did not repent and turn to God.
So why did God command the
destruction of Canaan, including the cities of Jericho and Ai? The Hebrew word used in Joshua 6:17 is charam, meaning "the complete
consecration of things or people to the Lord, either by destroying them or by
giving them as an offering" [1]. Only God could decide when this
type of devotion occurred, and it was always in response to a grievous sin that
the person or people had committed against the Lord. For example, when the Amalekites murdered all
of the sick, weak and elderly people who were straggling behind the Israelites
on their way out of Egypt, God commanded their destruction, and this same term
- charam - is used (Deuteronomy
25:17-19; 1 Samuel 15:2-3).
As mentioned in the previous blog
post "The Promise of the Conquest of Canaan", these nations would
have a very powerful and destructive influence on Israel if they were permitted
to live among them. As it happened, the
Israelites failed to fulfill God's command and remove all of the surrounding
nations - they intermarried with them and adopted their practices, which
ultimately led to their destruction and exile to Assyria and Babylon centuries
later (2 Kings 17; 2 Chronicles 36:14-21).
They broke their covenant with God and abandoned him, and so he withdrew
his protection from them, as he had sworn he would.
As for the destruction of Jericho
and Ai, these were situations in which the people involved were in direct opposition
to God. They practiced incest and child
sacrifice by fire - God gave them 400 years to repent, but they refused
(Genesis 15:13-16; Deuteronomy 12:31).
They had full knowledge of God and what he had done for the Israelites
(Joshua 2:8-11), but they neither repented nor offered a peace treaty with the
Israelites; instead they were determined to fight them. If they had repented and sought a peaceful
solution instead of war, they would have been spared (Jeremiah 18:7-8). The fact that God spared the Canaanite woman
Rahab and her family, who allied themselves with the Israelites, proved that no
one had to die (Joshua 6:25).
As in
previous passages, the command to kill the women and children is a difficult
issue. We must remember that the
children would have grown up following the same customs and practices as their
parents; they also would have been taught to hate Israel and seek their
destruction, and would have been lost for
eternity. God took their lives in
childhood to prevent this from occurring.
As in previous
passages, it should be noted that God does not want anyone to perish (2 Peter
3:9), and he takes no pleasure in the death of anyone (Ezekiel 18:32). However, there comes a time when his patience
runs out and he abandons those who have rejected him to their fate. The conquest of Jericho and Ai was such a
time.
