Reading Joshua: A Preview

During recent decades, the Book of Joshua came to trouble people. More recently, it seems that hardly a month goes by without the publication of another volume on violence in the Scriptures or another conference or research project on the subject. In reading Joshua, one of my convictions is that we won’t get to understand the book unless we set its accounts of war-making in the context of the book as a whole. In addition, thinking more broadly about the nature of migration and settlement provides some illumination on the story Joshua tells. And if we can stand aside from our preoccupation with violence for a moment, we can discover a lot about what the Book of Joshua meant for Israel and how it works as a story and how thoughtfully it discusses tricky issues and what it emphasizes about God . . . .

The paper on “Reading Joshua” is posted under “Prophets.”