Gibeon's Deception - Joshua 9

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 join with Israel or leave to avoid being destroyed, I think there might have even been an option for these Canaanite, non-destroyed, communities to be vasal states to Israel, so making peace with this far away place was reasonable to Joshua and in keeping with the command of God, as far as I’m aware. However, verse 14 makes it clear what the problem was, that Joshua “asked not counsel at the mouth of the Lord.” Joshua didn’t ask God about this situation and made peace with these people, believing them to be from a far away kingdom.

These ambassadors leave and Israel shows up at the city of Gibeon 3 days later, and to Joshua’s astonishment, there are these same ambassadors. It’s interesting to point out that it says the people of Gibeon were spared, despite making this pact under false pretenses because the “princes of the congregation” had made the pact and not just Joshua. So it seems like perhaps the princes wanted to make a pact with the travelers because they brought gifts and the princes wanted the gifts so they might have pressured Joshua to make that pact and under pressure maybe that’s why Joshua didn’t ask God. Maybe Joshua just thought that he was acting within the rules of the command of who to destroy and who to let live. So the princes say that they made a pact with these people “therefore we may not touch them,” but they made them slaves instead. So really this was working out for the princes quite a bit, they got gifts, they got slaves, and they didn’t have to risk any soldiers going into war to defeat the Gibeonites. The people complain about this arrangement, perhaps the people want to obey God and the princes don’t. So Joshua goes to the Gibeonites and says basically, “hey you lied to us but we will honor the promise we made you not to destroy you, but you will be our slaves forever.” Again, it seems like God was not consulted on this matter.