Blogging Through the Book of Mormon

Joshua knows that he’s about to die, so after talking to “all the people of Israel” he calls just the elders of the tribes to him and tells them what God told him to say. He reminds them that their ancestors worshipped “other gods” on the other side of the Euphrates. TB makes an interesting note on the term “other gods” which is sometimes translated as “false gods,” he says that the literal translation is “non-gods” meaning, “non-entities.” This means that they don’t exist, so for a world where everyone believes in a bunch of gods and they have their main “boss” god, for Him to say “none of those other gods are real,” would have been a big blow to the understanding of the people. TB says that the main problem with ancient Israel accepting the almighty God at that time was because the prevailing belief among all people was that there were tons of gods that had very specific natural elements and that were contained to one specific geographic region. That’s why Jacob and Joseph died, they...

The weirdest thing just happened. I’ve been using the Institute Manual as a reference for the last 13 years and suddenly when I was reading the entry for Joshua 23, the screen refreshed and I was rerouted to the home page and now the IM is gone and replaced by some very vague “Scripture Helps.” This is unfortunate and I hope is just a glitch because I really want that content back. Here’s to hoping. Anyway. Joshua is now very old and he knows he’s about to die so he calls “all Israel” together to give him his final departing address. Joshua reminds the people that they have seen God do many great things for them and that He promises to continue to drive out their enemies from the land. He tells them to keep the law of Moses and to not fall into idolatry by associating with the people around them by marriage, breeding, or to worship any of their pagan gods. If Israel does choose to associate with them, instead of becoming friends, “they shall be snares and traps unto you, and scourges ...

The large army that has been conquering Canaan is disbanded and the 2 ½ tribes that wanted land to settle on the east of the Jordan river were discharged from the army, probably in a ceremony of some sort. Joshua tells them that they have fulfilled their obligations to be a part of the conquering army of Israel and that they are free to return to the east side of the Jordan river to the land that they wanted. Joshua reminds them “take diligent heed to do the commandment and the law… to. Love the Lord your God, and to walk in all his ways, and to keep his commandment, and to cleave unto him, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul.” It’s also important to note that Joshua had to give these departing tribes their share of the spoils of war to take back with them. When the departing tribes got to the Jordan river, they stopped and built an altar on the west side of the river before they crossed over to their side on the east. The question of the day is, why would th...

I listened to TB’s lecture on chapter 17 and got some insight into some of the questions that I had from yesterday. The first insight was about the timeline of conquering Canaan vs settling the land. TB suggests that at this point all 12 tribes had been given their land but 7 of the tribes had refused what was offered. He says that the reason they rejected the land was “the element of responsibility and obligation of the inheritors to the divine giver… what they didn’t realize was that connected with the inheritance of the land was an obligation to finish conquering it. Up to now the 12 tribes worked together as a large and formidable army to battle the Canaanites in order to take their land from them, The Holy Was against Canaan had largely been successful; but much remained to be done… Acceptance of their land inheritance meant that each tribe now assumed full responsibility to finish conquering and to govern their allotted territory. Inheritance neither meant peace nor stability for...

The IM only has a short paragraph to cover chapters 12-21 and TB has some lectures, but I started listening to one and I think I’m going to skip those because they mostly go over borders and land disputes and I’m not interested in listening to him go on his Pro-current state of Israel rants, so I’m just going to skip those and cover these chapters in chunks and go over what I think it important. Israel and Joshua have conquered the south and north parts of the land of Canaan and have taken that land to settle, and now they move on to the east and west parts. Chapter 12 is basically summed up by the header which says, “two kings on the east of the Jordan and thirty-one on the west are conquered by Israel.” The whole chapter is just a list of those conquered cities, which just listed out like that makes it seem insignificant, but that’s a lot of warfare and a lot of time and a lot of killing, especially when we’re talking about not only killing combatants but also women and children, i...

Chapter 11 is basically just a continuation of chapter 10, where chapter 10 talks about the Israelites conquering the southern part of the promised land and chapter 11 talking about them taking the northern part of the land. The kingdoms of the north did similar to what the southern kingdoms did, which was to try to band together to defeat the Israelites so that they wouldn’t be killed. So all these northern kingdoms banded together and came out to battle against Israel. An interesting point that TB made is that all these cities had very large, impenetrable walls so the safest place for these people would have been inside their heavily fortified cities but they left the safety of their cities and came out against the Israelites to battle. TB asked why they would do that, and answered, “the reason these various Canaanite kings will do this foolhardy act of leaving positions of strength to come out into the open to fight Israel (and thus losing the military advantage of defending nearly ...

After that incredible day of miracles and victory where Israel fought and beat much of the 5 armies that came to fight against Gibeon, Joshua and “all Israel” went back to their base camp at Gilgal. But the kings of the beaten 5 armies fled and “hid themselves in a cave.” When Joshua found out that the kings were hiding in a cave, he said to block them in the cave with stones and he’ll deal with them later. Joshua and the army pursued the fleeing 5 armies and kill most of them but some still make it back to their walled cities and are going to be a bit harder to get out. Now it’s time to deal with these walled in kings. Joshua has them pulled out of the cave, laid them on the ground and had his new officers come and put their feet on the necks of the kings. This isn’t like they stomped on them or anything but it was a symbolic humiliation demonstrating Israel’s complete victory over these kings. Joshua puts an added message to these young officers saying, “for thus shall the Lord do t...

By making that pact with Gibeon, Israel is finding itself in a bit of a pickle. First, I think it’s important to note that verse 2 describes Gibeon as “a great city, as one of the royal cities, and because it was greater than Ai, and all the men thereof were mighty.” This wasn’t some Podunk town that was certainly going to be slaughtered by Israel, but it was a large city with a strong, formidable army so the fact that it had made a peace treaty with Israel, even though done deceptively, was very off putting to the surrounding kingdoms, specifically to the king od Jerusalem “Adoni-zedek.” TB gives a lengthy explanation of how Jerusalem came to be and the name of this Adoni-zedek being a mix of Melchizedek and some pagan thing, but the IM doesn’t say anything about it, so I’m not going to recount it here. This Adoni-zedek sends word to 4 other kings who surround him and they decide to go to war against Gibeon because they are angry that Gibeon is now in cahoots with Israel. I don’t know...

Israel has defeated a couple of the Canaanite settlements, and the rest of the towns are getting pretty nervous. One town, Gibeon, makes a plan to try to save themselves, and honestly I can’t blame them for that, I will never fault someone for working in their own best interest, even if it is contrary to mine. Gibeon makes a plan to go to Joshua and pretend to be from a far away place and ask for a truce. They go all in on it too, they get their oldest, rattiest clothes, moldy bread “old sacks,” spent wine bottles. They go to Joshua and say “We be come from a far country: how therefore make ye a league with us.” They say they are coming “because of the name of the Lord thy God,” because they heard what God did for them in Egypt and the other Canaanite kingdoms. They say that they are obviously from somewhere far away because their provisions are so old. Ad far as I’m aware, Joshua was commanded to only destroy those specific seven kingdoms and the rest were to be given the option to j...

The evil that Achan had done in taking the loot consecrated for God had been eradicated, so it was time for Israel to go back and try again to take the city of Ai. The planning of this campaign is different this time because instead of sending out scouts and strategizing, God just tells Joshua what to do. The scouts last time said that Israel only needed to take 3,000 soldiers to take the city, I misread that as 300 yesterday, 3,000 makes more sense. This time God says “take all the people of war with thee,” so they weren’t taking minimalist stuff here. Instead of Joshua coming up with a plan like the last time, God tells him to “lay thee an ambush for the city behind it.” Interesting that God gave the battle plans for Jericho, marching around for a week, and gave the plan for this battle but didn’t give the plan for the first time Israel tried to take Ai and that time failed, for other reasons but I wonder if the lack of God giving Joshua a plan was the indication that God wasn’t goin...

For the study of chapter 7, I listened to the lecture for the last half without realizing that the first half had been covered in a previous lecture, so my first assumption was that God went to Joshua and told him that someone had sinned against Him and taken some of the sacred treasure and had to be dealt with. Imagine my surprise when I read it and realized that I had missed the critical first part of that event. Only knowing the last half, I thought that the punishment for the thief was extreme but once I learned the whole story, I was like “oh yeah that makes sense.” Let’s remember the miraculous defeat against Jericho and that the soldiers were told to go take all the precious metals (gold, silver, brass, etc) and give it to the priests because it was to consecrated to God. This was the extreme opposite end of the spectrum of what was normal for victors at this time, and really since the dawn of human history. The victors get to loot and abuse the defeated enemy and keep any good...

The people of Jericho knew that the soldiers of Israel were headed right for them, and like we discussed yesterday, the people were terrified, so they shut their gates so that “none went out, and none came in.” It was really all they could do because they knew that Israel was protected by God and even more than that, knew that God fought their battles for them, and they knew their city wasn’t a match for God. Presumably in the same conversation that Joshua was having with God at the end of chapter 5 when He appeared to him, He tells Joshua to have all the soldiers march around the city once a day for six days and while marching have “seven priests shall bear before the ark seven trumpets of rams horns, and the seventh day ye shall compass the city seven times, and the priests shall blow with the trumpets. And it shall come to pass, that when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, and when ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout, and the wall...

Chapter 5 is very short, only 15 verses, but there is a lot that happens and when reading it, it seems like it occurs over several months, but I think the chronology is not what imagine that it is. The IM reminds us that the land of Canaan that the Israelites were now in after crossing the Jordan, was not uninhabited land that no one had ever been to before. The land had been peopled for thousands of years at that point, so several civilizations had been established. Now just how established that land was, I’m not sure. Where they able to just walk to up plants and pluck the food right off? Was it flowing with milk and honey that could just be taken and used to feed all the millions of people? I’m not sure, but it plays into it later. When the scouts went to Jericho previously, Rahab had already told them that all the people were terrified of the Israelites because they knew that they had been blessed by God, both by the miracles used to free the from Egypt and also the parting of t...