The Pulpit Commentary — Joshua — Section 56

an authentic account, by one every way qualified to write it, of the conquest and occupation by the Israelites of the Promised Land. II. ON DIFFICULTIES IN THE BooK oF JosHUA. The principal objections which have been made against the Divine inspiration of the Book of Joshua are of two kinds, moral and scientific. The first class of objections is raised against the slaughter of the Canaanites as inconsistent with the goodness and mercy we know to be attributes of the Di,ine Being. The second class take their stand on the inconsistency of miraculous parts of the history with the known laws of nature as revealed by science. I. The moral objection admits of a very simple answer. How, 1t is asked, could the revolting and -cruel command have been given by the God of love and mercy to Moses and Joshua, to massacre an unoffending population under circumstances of the grossest barbarity; involving aged men, weak women, and harmless children in the same slaughter with the warriors and leaders of the people ? (1) We reply, in the same spirit as Bishop Butler, that, whatever objec- tion applies to the God of Revelation on this ground applies equally to the God of Nature. If it be of any force at all, it proves that the Supreme Being is a cruel being.* For it is one of the most palpable facts of history that He has permitted such massacres to take place throughout the whole course of the world, from the beginning until our own time. And not only so, but massacres with wicked refinements of cruelty which cannot be charged against the Jews. We may go further still. The God of Nature has not merely permitted such atrocities, He may be said, in a sense, to have enjoined them. For it has been an invariable law of His providenee that when civilised peoples steeped in luxury, vice, and immorality have become the prey of peoples simpler and purer than themselves, these cruelties, and far more than these, have always taken place. Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian conquerors were not more, but far less merciful than Joshua. The Greeks and Romans alone can be said to have been milder; but even the progress of their arms has not been unstained by crimes from which Joshua was wholly free. The violation of women and children, and even crimes of a fouler kind, have not been unknown. The dedication of captives to the impure worship of Mylitta or Aphrodite (see 'Records of the Past,' iii. 86 1 89-50) t • The force of this argument ha.a been felt by so keen a reasoner a.s John Stuart Mill. ln his Essay on Nature he a.ccepts the position. He regards nature a.s immoral and imper- fect, asserts that "blind partiality, reckless injustice, atrocious cruelty, a.bound to excess in the commonest phenomena. of nature," a.nd regards nature a.nd life as "the product of a. struggle between contriving goodness a.nd a.n intractable ma.teria.l," the ~;l.71, in fa.et, of the Gnostics and Ma.nichea.ns. t The Moabite stone, too, tells us how Mesha devoted the pure virgins of Israel to the foul orgies of Chemosh.  TO T:S:E BOOK OF JOSHUA, xiii ~------------- ------- ----------- was almost universal. And it is quite possible that death itself may ha.ve been preferable-and by many it was regarded as preferable-to a life-long bondage. The miserable condition to which such slaves were often reduced is touchingly represented in the Hecuba of Euripides, where the desolate mother, once a queen; now bereft of husband, sons, friends, a bondslave in a foreign land, is dri~en in her desperation to appeal to the only hope left, her daughter, who is permitted, though not a lawful wife, to share the bed of Agamemnon. And though this is but fiction, we can hardly doubt that it is fiction in which fact is not too highly coloured. But if Roman and Greek ambition had learned that extending privileges of citizenship to the vanquished would largely increase the power of the victor, we have a return, and more than a return, to the older order of things at the downfall of the Roman Empire. The worst atrocities of the early ages found a parallel in the scenes of bloodshed, lust, and rapine which marked the steps of the barbarian swarms who destroyed the remains of Roman power. Goths, Vandals, Huns, Lombards, Franks, Saxons, Bulgarians, and Turks vied with one another in pitiless cruelty. Even later times still have known a" Spanish fury" and a sack of l\fagdeburg. And were civilisation again to fall into decay, and the savage tribes of Africa or Asia once more to gain the mastery, the old law would once more assert its force, and the sins of races enervated by luxµry would receive their usual punishment. Thus, then, we are face to face with the same vast difficulty whether Joshua received any command from God or not. We have the same question to answer, how God could permit, nay, even apparently arrange for the com- mission of, these awful crimes, with the intense suffering which they must necessarily bring in their train,* and yet retain His character for mercy and loving-kindness. And the only answer that can be found is that there is another order of things in the future, whereby it is His will to remecry whatever inequalities He has permitted to exist here. (2) But we may carry the argument a step further. The conception of God which we now put forward as an objection to the morality of the Old Testament is derived from the teaching of the New. No such idea of God as that which we now entertain was entertained by earlier ages. Why this was the case we cannot tell. That it is a fact can hardly be denied. It can be no matter of wonder if men in those days acted according to their belie£ They conceived of God as a God of strict and vigorous justice. No other view of Him had been as yet made known. Where is the inconsis- tency of their considering themselves, and acting as, the ministers of One who has shown, both before and since, that He does take terrible vengeance • There is a remarkable passage in the Saxon Chronicle on the miseries suffered by English people during the reign of Stephen, when the Norman barons worked their will, uncheoked by authority, "when men ae.id openly that God and His saints slept." xiv INTRODUCTION