Victory at Ai - Joshua 8

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 going to go with them. I wondered yesterday if the whole first loss at Ai could have been avoided if Joshua had asked God beforehand if there was any reason why He wouldn’t grant them victory. Maybe, maybe not, but perhaps God not giving Joshua a battle plan beforehand was the sign that something was amiss in the war effort. I’m curious to see how the rest of the battles play out to see if that’s a consistent factor for the rest of them. When comparing this to Book of Mormon battle strategy, there are a couple of times when the military leadership goes to the prophets to ask for God’s guidance in where to go and what to do, but for the most part, in Alma especially, it seems like the leadership are constructing the strategy themselves.

I wonder what this would look like in today’s modern warfare, what would God’s input on strategy look like. We don’t have a ton of walled cities, so the Jericho method wouldn’t work, we’re about to see and in the Book of Mormon, DO see trickery and recon and scouts and siege, etc. I just wonder what it would look like if a military entity found itself in a situation similar to Israel’s and the Book of Mormon’s. There’s the whole debacle of God commanded war vs. war to just defend yourself vs. preemptive war vs. wars of conquest, like those are completely separate issues that would have to be accounted for. It’s just some of the stuff that I’ve read about obscure prophecies about the last days that make me wonder about what that would look like in modern day, especially having been to combat myself, watching GWOT from a front row seat, like I just wonder about the comparison of strategy, the contrast of tactics, and what it would actually look like if it played out today. Maybe I’m making stuff up or reading too much into it, but it’s interesting to me. But my main question for today is, was God’s lack of involvement when formulating the initial battle plan against Ai, Joshua’s indication that it wasn’t the right time and something else had to be taken care of first? What Joshua moving forward without God’s input fault in his leadership?

God dictated the battle plan for Jericho, and even though He also dictates the battle plan for Ai now, there is a significant difference between the instructions for Jericho and Ai, and that is concerning the spoils of war. In Jericho, God commanded that living thing must be killed and all the metal spoils were to be taken and consecrated to God. He was very specific that NOTHING could be taken back by the soldiers for their personal gain, everything was to be consecrated to God. This is why Achan’s taking the loot for himself was such a big deal because technically he stole from God. The difference for Ai is that “only the spoil thereof, and the cattle there of, shall ye take for a prey unto yourselves.” When I saw that God changed the rules concerning loot for this city, I was very surprised, I thought that that was going to be a hard and fast rule going forward forever, but I guess not. I could not for the life of me understand why there had been a change here, especially because it almost seemed in my mind that Achan’s thievery had changed God’s mind and that it was now ok, which definitely wasn’t the case. It kind of seemed to me that God was recognizing that people were going to violate His commandments concerning this matter anyway so He may as well change the rule so it’s not a sin anymore.

TB gave some much needed perspective on why the change came and it made a lot more sense afterward. He said that the consecrating of the spoils to God was in keeping with the concept of offering the first fruits for sacrifice. Even with the animals being killed in Jericho, that was similar to an animal sacrifice done in the tabernacle because the animals had to be first borns and pure. The animals in Jericho obviously all weren’t first borns, nor were they all ritually pure, but because this was Israel’s first victory, they were to take nothing for themselves and give everything else to God either through sacrifice (death) or consecration (spoils). This is similar to all the other sacrifices, animal have to be the first borns, agrucultures have to be the first harvests that are suitable for consumption, etc. It’s such an interesting concept because especially in a society that does not have easy access to the means of survival, like most of human history, people wait months for the harvest to start coming in, they wait months for the animals to start being born. The people who were waiting for months and sometimes years for their food sources to build up to the point where they could start eating them, were probably very hungry that whole time while they were waiting.

To tell people who are hungry, “give the first to me and wait longer trusting that I will provide enough” is very difficult. Like I grew up poor, like so poor we didn’t have food to eat a lot of the time and even now that I’m in my 40’s I still, to this day, have food insecurity ingrained in the way I think. Logically I know that if I get hungry I can just go to the store and buy some food with my grown up money, but emotionally I can never waste food, I am very aware of where my next meal is coming from, I always have to have food easily accessible to me. So if someone were to tell child, hungry me, “burn the first food up and trust I’ll give you enough later,” that’s going to be a hard sell for me. And that brings up the point that I was a very hungry child, where was my deliverance then? Where did God provide then? But then again, I’m still here so clearly He did provide enough. But clawing by for survival, is that “providing enough,” if mere survival “enough,” like where is all the “I’ll open the windows of heaven with so much abundance that you won’t have room to receive it?” Where was that when I was a hungry kid? Again, I’m still here, so it was enough, but what about the hundreds of millions of people who starve to death throughout human history? Where was their abundance? Where was their deliverance? I’m not asking this antagonistically, these are just some of the questions I’ve been thinking about recently.

Anyway, TB said that the soldiers that attacked Jericho couldn’t keep any of the spoils because they were the first fruits to be given to God, which makes sense, the first victory, first fruits. Now that Israel was on to their second conquest, they were allowed to take some of the spoils for themselves. TB noted that the law of first fruit sacrifices was that the whole first portion went to God and then after that a portion, usually 10%, went to God for the subsequent harvests, animal births, spoils of war, etc. In the case of Ai, God wanted the buildings and the people as His consecrated portion but the soldiers could have the spoils and the animals for themselves, for their own personal use. That makes so much more sense after it was explained that way. Interesting too though that Joshua also didn’t have this information when he went to attack Ai the first time. Maybe another indication that it wasn’t time, but Joshua probably didn’t know that that was the pattern. The first attack on Jericho was brand new so it’s possible that Joshua looked at the next city and thought that God was expecting him to step up and act in faith, that’s not a wrong thinking. It’s hard to know when we are supposed to wait to act for God’s guidance or when we are supposed to just move forward in faith. Something to think about.

This ambush attach that God tells Joshua to use is where a portion of the troops go hide behind the city at night and a bigger portion of the troops go to the front of the city gates. When the soldiers of Ai see a smallish amount of Israelite soldiers outside their front gate, then they send their troops out to defeat this small army, then while the troops are out of the city, the portion that was hidden behind the city rushes around to the front gate, go in, kill everyone and burn the city down. An important note to make here is that maneuvering troops at night was highly unusual according to TB, and this is also something that I was told when I was in the army using night vision goggles, that the ability to accurately and safely move at night is a new technology and unique to a small number of armies. So the fact that Joshua is moving an element of troops at night to hide behind the city, this is an unusual strategy. But what else is interesting is that this same specific strategy is used several times throughout the Book of Mormon, but lead to start thinking about my earlier question, did the Book of Mormon military leaders consult God and/or the prophets when coming up with their strategies? What’s the difference? I’m also fairly certain that the Nephite military and spiritual leadership had the brass plates which contained this account of Joshua which would make sense as to why they used some of the same battle strategies.

So that’s what Joshua does, squirrels about 5,000 troops behind the city in the middle of the night, then the other 25,000 comes around to the front. The king of Ai sees these 25,00 troops and assumes “hey I beat them before I can do it again,” and comes out to fight them. Joshua pretends to be scared and starts to retreat, the soldiers of Ai follow them, and then when it’s clear the hidden troops come in and take the city. The problem was, then as in the case when this strategy was used in the Book of Mormon, the king was overconfident, and took every single man of fighting age out of the city to pursue Israel “and they left the city open.” God told Joshua to “stretch out the spear that is in they hand toward Ai; for I will give it into thine hand.” This is in contrast to the battle where Israel prevailed only when Moses raised up his staff. TB notes that the difference between the two was that Moses used a staff that denoted leadership and wisdom because he was both the spiritual and military leader of Israel, whereas Joshua just had a spear, which was a weapon, because he was only the military commander.

The hidden ambush troops rush into the open city, kill everyone and burn everything. The fire from the city is Joshua’s signal that the plan worked, and this is where the soldiers of Ai realize that they’ve made a fatal error. They look back and see their city burning and realize they are screwed and Israel comes in a destroys them, no one escaped, everyone was killed. The king specifically was hanged on a tree, left up there for a day then cut down and impaled on a pole in front of the city which TB says was an incredible humiliation at the time. The city was burned down, 12,000 people were killed that day, and a pile of rocks was put up to commemorate Israel’s victory here.

The rest of chapter 8 has to do with Joshua building an alter in Mount Ebal, which was commanded by Moses before crossing the Jordan, the one where the stones were not to be cut with human hands and the laws were to be written on the stones and all the laws and curses were to be read to the people again. Joshua did all this on Mount Ebal, but TB speculates that this is not the correct chronological order of events here just because Ebal is far from Ai and it seems unlikely that he transported all the people there to do this at that time.