The Murderous God - Part 3: The Battle for Jericho
The Fall of the Walls of Jericho by Henry Hugh Armstead as part of Dalziels' Bible Gallery (1881)
Welcome back to this series examining the violent God of the Bible as often taught to young Children by their religious parents and in the congregations they attend. If you haven’t done so already, I recommend going back and reading Part 1 and Part 2 before diving into this piece.
“and the walls came a-tumbling down”
As with the stories of Noah’s Ark and Abraham’s near murder of Isaac, the battle for Jericho (Joshua chapters 3 and 6) has inspired a great number of coloring sheets, cartoons, and peppy songs.
I remember singing as a kid…
Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho
Joshua fought the battle of Jericho
And the walls came a-tumbling down
…
Up to the walls of Jericho
They marched with spears in hand
"Come blow them ram horns," Joshua said
"'Cause the battle is in our hands."
If you are not familiar with the tune, you can join over 180,000 others and listen to ‘Old Holy’ and friends musically regale the moment.
This and other videos are meant to, “teach your children…Christian Bible stories through animations, songs, (and) nursery rhymes in a fun (and) joyful learning process. As a parent, you can trust our animated characters to keep your kids entertained and educated about Christianity.” Personally as a parent and a combat veteran, I’m struggling with the words “fun” and “joyful” and “entertaining” when describing, in this case, an act of war. But we will come back to that later.
Of course, the popularity of this video and YouTube channel pales in comparison to the colossal success of VeggieTales. The evidence for this was humbly on display in an April 2019 press release celebrating a new partnership between the entertainment property’s parent company, Big Idea Content Group, and the juggernaut of conservative Pentecostal media, Trinity Broadcasting Network. Bob, Larry and Co. are, “the most successful faith-based children’s franchise of all time…having sold over 75 million videos, 16 million books, 7 million CDs, and 80 million music streams.”
VeggieTales presentded their take on Israel’s famous military conquest of Jericho in Josh and the Big Wall. One of the most telling lines of this short film is when Larry, here playing our hero Joshua, tells a couple of guards on the wall that, “God has given us this land for our new home. So well, you are going to have to leave.” This may be the most charming and innocent depiction of genocide I have ever encountered.
From Big Idea Entertainment (1997)
As we have looked at in previous installments, this story is also featured in the Bible App for Kids. Below are a few of the slides from their version.
I can’t help but notice how pleased and happy they appear once God had busted down the wall. Perhaps they were excited that the ensuing blood bath could now begin!
And now for the rest of the story
I take it that it is fairly obvious that these G-rated depictions don’t exactly square with the hard-R reality of the Bible.
On a lighter note, I love it when children’s renditions leave out the more sexual components of Scripture. VeggieTales probably cut for time the part about the two spies being sent to get a read on Jericho’s defensive posture and how they were hosted by a woman named Rahab. The Bible App for Kids mentions her but conveniently leaves out her profession. In the words of the great philosopher Deadpool, Rahab would “bump fuzzies for money”. She also was apparently willing to sell out her whole town in order to make good with the invaders. That certainly makes her a worthy addition to the genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1:5).
Far more serious is the omission or outright lie these retellings pass on to little ones when it came to the fate of the people of Jericho. Here is what the text said would and did happen once the city’s barrier of protection had been breached:
The seventh time around, when the priests sounded the trumpet blast, Joshua commanded the army, “Shout! For the Lord has given you the city! The city and all that is in it are to be devoted [elsewhere translated ‘destroyed] to the Lord. Only Rahab the prostitute and all who are with her in her house shall be spared, because she hid the spies we sent. When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city. They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys. (Joshua 6:16-17, 20-21 New International Version)
What genocide really looks like
I’m going to set aside the fact that this story is mostly if not entirely fictional (see also this article). Again, the point of this series is not to address the historicity of biblical events. Rather, it is to raise serious questions about the moral character of the God of the Bible. That challenge stands whether you are a literalist who is convinced this and other stories of the Bible are factual records or if you are a progressive that still wants to uphold the idea that Jericho symbolically contributes to the overall narrative of a loving and redemptive God.
If indeed God’s chosen leader, whose name ironically means “YAHWEH is salvation”, ordered the annihilation of “every living thing” in Jericho, then God, through his people, committed genocide. And even if we accept the argument that the author of Joshua, in keeping with the literature of that period, engaged in “hagiographic hyperbole”, is that supposed to somehow relieve our conscience since not “every” child, for example, was run through with a sword that day?
Let’s focus a little closer on just the children of Jericho who were executed as well as those who survived if the Bible is indeed prone to literary exaggeration. They probably numbered in the hundreds and a series of questions come to my mind that should push us beyond data to the raw, human experience of genocide.
For those who died…
Did some of them see their mommies and daddies’ throats slit or bellies split open or pierced by the blade of ‘the children of Israel’ as Larry the Cucumber called them?
What dread befell them as they ran and tried to hide from their attackers?
What physiological and psychological trauma occurred as some felt and heard their own final blood-gurgling gasps?
For those who survived…
How did their minds process what they witnessed that day, chiefly the death of one or more of their parents, siblings, extended family, and friends?
What PTSD symptoms did they manifest in the days and months if not years after the horrific event? For example, could an ordinary fire immediately recall the smell of burning flesh as Israel’s fighters torched the town (Joshua 6:24)?
worse than physical genocide?
But since the focus of this series is on the early childhood education of biblical barbarism, let us return to consider the impact of such stories on young human beings who are not the victims of such physical atrocities but who rather are simply listening to their parents or Sunday school teachers or pastors teach them from the Bible. The question to that point is simple: What kind of psychological trauma will this cause to our children as we teach them stories such as this one?
I will return and share more detailed thoughts in the final piece of the series. But generally speaking, we all should be able to recognize as reasonably rational adults that any proposed answers pertaining to the existence and more importantly the character of God can have a massive impact on a child’s foundational sense of reality. I would argue that closing the door of curiosity in a child’s mind is a form of cognitive murder, or if done on a broader scale, genocide. And I would further contend that nothing would more effectively achieve this than subjecting children to a system of belief that demands their unquestioned love and obedience to a God who has often been found killing kids just like them.
bringing it home
So we have witnessed the carnage of the God of the Bible again, this time in the ancient city of Jericho through a divinely directed act of ethnic cleansing (see also Numbers 31:7-16; Deuteronomy 2:34, 3:4-6, and 20:16-17; Joshua 8:24-25; 1st Samuel 15:3). We’ve tried to empathize in particular with the trauma the children of the town experienced. Then we reflected on how teaching such stories to our children in the present day might scare and shackle their developing intellects. There really is only one more question that should matter for you at this point…
Does all of this make you sick to your stomach and overwhelmed with sorrow and rage?
If it doesn’t and you instead try to emotionally detach and rationalize through some theological or pseudo-logical gymnastics both the injustice of a violent God and a mandate to call young children to worship him, then you are in need of help. Indoctrination aside, there is no sane defense of genocide. Even war-mongering humanity has decided that civilians, obviously including children, are 'off limits’ when it comes to military action in a conventional war. Yet when I and others have challenged the goodness of a ‘God’ who would do exactly that, we are often charged with hubris. “How dare you, mere mortals, cast judgement on the Almighty and His Word!” To which I would say, if there has ever been a case where the chief sin of pride is more than vindicated, this is it.
postscript
One of the most well known acts of genocide in recent human history is that of the Rwanda genocide of 1994. The Associated Press did a pictorial retrospective as this year marked twenty-five years since the tragedy. The images are troubling, but I would encourage you to view them. If we are disturbed and oppose any such violence in our time, we should, if we are being consistent, reject any similar viciousness in ancient religious texts.