The Joshua Generation: Conquest and the Promised Land

The biblical study group at the home of David Ben-Gurion

Lofty rhetoric surrounded the study sessions in Ben-Gurion’s home and their potential impact: “These publications as well as the future ones will add interest to the study of the Bible on the part of our Jewish brethren the world over and on the part of all lovers of the Bible, and that there will thus be given a modern interpretation to the ancient prophecy: ‘For out of Zion shall go forth the Law’” (Gevaryahu, 1960). ⁷ Such a statement may overstate the relevance of the study group to the general public, yet the participants gathered twice a month both to please the Prime Minister and to generate a distinctly Israeli school of biblical interpretation. The perceived deficiencies of extant interpretation stemmed from the largely diasporic provenance of Jewish exegesis and the latent anti-Semitism of much modern critical biblical scholarship. The project of Israeli biblical interpretation consciously pursued in the Ben-Gurion study group looked to correct these trends and to forge a more direct relationship with the biblical text. ⁸ Although the conversations about the book of Joshua assimilate biblical themes into the context of Israel in the 1950s, the speakers rely on traditional Jewish commentary as well as modern biblical criticism.

Tinged by recent memories of the war of 1948, the exegesis expressed in the study sessions at the prime minister’s home brings a decidedly military framework to bear on the biblical book. ⁹ By design and necessity, such a framework had been absent from the history of Jewish biblical interpretation, so Ben-Gurion’s group felt free to draw a fairly straight line of identification between the Joshua Generation and the young State of Israel. After all, the prime minister had not invited biblicists into his home to discuss purely academic matters. Ben-Gurion, who declared that no one had better interpreted Joshua than the Israeli Defense Forces in 1948, saw the enactment of biblical archetypes as the most fitting form of biblical commentary. ¹⁰ In his view, Israeli soldiers and their civilian counterparts were living the myth of Joshua. In place of chronicling miracles or accentuating God’s role in the conquest, Ben-Gurion probed “history, strategy, conquest and settlement according to the book of Joshua” (Ben-Gurion, 1971b). Shemaryahu Talmon, a prominent lecturer in Bible at the Hebrew University, stated the case more directly: “I think that the whole attempt at evaluating the strategic probability of Joshua’s conquest began in earnest since the War of Liberation (1948)” (Ben-Gurion, 1971b). ¹¹

Each meeting of the Joshua study group focused on a theme or episode in the biblical book and featured the address of a particular speaker. A lively discussion followed the formal presentation, after which the speaker could respond to questions and reiterate his arguments. Yigael Yadin, the Hebrew University archeologist who excavated the city of Hazor allegedly destroyed by Joshua, spoke to Ben-Gurion’s desire for historical proof. As former chief of staff of the Israeli army, Yadin also analyzed the military strategies employed by the biblical general. In his lecture on “Military and Archeological Aspects of the Conquest of Canaan in the Book of Joshua,” Yadin held fast to the basic historicity of Joshua’s conquest and found it “amusing” that whereas “civilians express doubt as to the military probability of the Book of Joshua on the basis of military principles that they have never experienced, military men, almost without exception, accord full authority to the military descriptions in the Book of Joshua” (Yadin, 1971: 71).

Although he did not insist that events had transpired exactly as described in the Bible, Yadin maintained that the archeological record proves:

A cultured Canaanite city, a fortified city, a city with sanctuaries − whether Lachish, Bethel or Hazor – ceases suddenly to show signs of life. It is a conclusive fact from an archeological point of view that all Canaanite cities were destroyed at the same time. The cities were destroyed, burnt down, and their inhabitants never returned to rebuild them. If one of them was restored, then it was only in a poor and wretched manner. (Yadin, 1971: 76)

Yohanan Aharoni, Yadin’s former student and fierce rival, opened the session devoted to “The Settlement of the Tribes of Israel in the Land” with the thesis that the tribes of Israel participated in semi-regular migrations mirroring those of other regional groups in the period. The detailed, somewhat relentless boundary lists of Joshua 12−22, according to Aharoni, record these migrations. Contesting claims result from a dynamic process of tribal comings and goings. Aharoni maintained that a grand military conquest never occurred; instead Israelite tribes moved incrementally into woodlands, wilderness, and the interstitial zones of Canaan. The investment in borders, from Aharoni’s point of view, derived from the experience of living in border zones and a protracted settlement process of slow habituation and absorption. The borders shifted, he maintained, in situations of greater and lesser security. Although Israel neither attacked nor eradicated Canaanite culture, it eventually overtook it from the margins.

In describing the arrival of ancient Israelite tribes, Aharoni seemed to have the founders of kibbutzim in mind:

On the one hand, the Israelite tribes learned from the Canaanite inhabitants as true and diligent students, and, on the other hand, they were not swallowed up by the superior culture surrounding them … Eventually, they realized an original, independent culture and their own borders despite the fact that they borrowed so much from the Canaanites in the land. (Aharoni, 1971: 232)

David Ben-Gurion reconciled Aharoni and Yadin’s positions in his own innovative thesis that stands as the last word in the study sessions on Joshua. According to his “national Torah,” only the family of Joseph migrated to Egypt, endured slavery, and returned to Canaan under the leadership of Joshua (Ben-Gurion, 1971b: 311). There they reunited with their brethren and fought together against the enemies in their midst. The war served to unify the tribes and to release the Hebrews in the land from the negative influence of their former neighbors. By bringing home the elite members among the People of Israel, Joshua also reinvigorated the monotheism of the tribes who had remained in the land. Monotheism, for Ben-Gurion, was not primarily a religious trait, but an indicator of Israel’s unique national character.

Ben-Gurion’s position enabled him to solve the exegetical crux of the two speeches with which the book of Joshua ends. Chapters 23 and 24 each contain a farewell address by Joshua, but Joshua reinstitutes the covenant between Israel and God only in chapter 24. Where source criticism answers the problem of repetition by attributing the passages to scribes of different periods, Ben-Gurion perceived two separate audiences addressed by the dying leader. In chapter 23, Joshua encourages the community that escaped Egypt – the new immigrants (olim hadashim) in Ben-Gurion’s formulation – to uphold the Torah given to them by Moses. “Chapter 23 does not even mention the exodus from Egypt, because those who came from Egypt did not need to hear the story” (Ben-Gurion, 1971b: 328). The story of the exodus, however, provided the needed inspiration for the indigenous Hebrews to abandon local customs and participate in the establishment of an independent polity. In chapter 24, which describes a covenant ceremony at Shechem, ¹³ Joshua chastises the majority of Hebrew tribes who had degenerated into Canaanite idol worship and recounts their history in order to provide them with a template of correct behavior. For those who never left the land and never knew Moses – the veterans or longstanding residents (vatikim) as Ben-Gurion imagined them – this serves as Sinai.

On the basis of the two inferred audiences, Ben-Gurion made a series of transhistorical claims. Canaan had always been a land inhabited by Hebrews. Not only did Joshua find compatriots there who were ready to take up arms, but Abraham also traveled to Canaan because of the presence of like-minded residents. For Ben-Gurion, this meant that the link between modern Jews and the land transcends the spiritual and historical dimension. Jews are indigenous to this land and their separation from it caused centuries of trauma. Ben-Gurion subjected the concept “indigenous” to a very particular definition. On the one hand, the fact that most tribes never left establishes the indelible link between the People of Israel – which Ben-Gurion easily glossed as “Jews” – and the land; on the other hand, the local tribes “were closer in spirit to their Canaanite neighbors,” a backward group that required redemption though “the return of the elite among the Hebrew people to the land” (Ben-Gurion, 1971b: 326). Ben-Gurion did not equate the indigenous Hebrews with any specific group in his own time or the elite returnees with his own Ashkenazi, socialist, secular cohort, but he did figure himself as the modern Joshua and the primary task before him as facilitating immigration and ameliorating the educational and spiritual state of world Jewry. ¹⁴ As in the times of Joshua, Ben-Gurion believed that he could unify world Jewry and promote “an independent Hebrew culture” through Jewish nationalism (Ben-Gurion, 1971a).

In spite of his identification of two distinct Hebrew groups, Ben-Gurion was obsessed with proving the cohesiveness of the ancient nation. In his mind, the People of Israel had no competing or coextensive identities. “There was no tribal way of life,” argued the Prime Minister, the tribes were simply interchangeable administrative divisions (Ben-Gurion, 1971b: 368).

Ben-Gurion’s mythmaking operated at different levels. First, he framed the history of the modern state in terms of biblical narrative and defined exodus, conquest, and settlement as events of the present. Then he used this mythicized Israeli present to interpret Scripture. In this way, the tribes of ancient Israel became units of the Israeli army and the example of the army proved the unity of ancient Israel. As much as the Bible legitimized and justified modern Israel, the context of modern Israel allowed the Bible to be read correctly.

According to Ben-Gurion, Jews could not correctly interpret Joshua before the rise of the State of Israel. Unable to reenact its concepts, these readers missed their meaning. Israeli war and settlement embodied Joshua and exhibited the national dimension of Torah neglected over so many centuries of exile. As the materialization of occupation and settlement proved the veracity of Joshua, it also placed stress on contemporary bodies and locations to signify biblical truths. Even in his mythic certainty about the unity of Israel, Ben-Gurion’s abiding anxiety can be sensed regarding the dissipation of the collective that might occur after the death of a national founder. Ben-Gurion focused on the collective, continuous presence of Hebrews in their homeland. Parallel to the book of Joshua, his emphasis on an inaugural war that fulfills destiny functioned as a myth intended to obscure a very different social reality. Conjuring up indigenous Hebrews from the pages of the Bible was more pointedly a technique of circumventing Palestinian claims or absorbing them into a Jewish national paradigm.

Water and Borders

Water, war, and national myth all consumed David Ben-Gurion when he convened his study group on Joshua in 1958. Ben-Gurion’s other grand conceptual project at the time was the National Water Carrier, the conveyance of water from the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) and subterranean wells to burgeoning Jewish areas. The absorption of local water sources and the connection of Jewish communities through nationalized waters motivated his signature infrastructure project. While the Joshua study group met, construction of the National Water Carrier was underway. Both projects expressed Ben-Gurion’s impulse to centralize power in a national government.

Although deeply invested in nationalizing the Jewish people, the flow of water, and the territory gained through United Nations recognition and war, Ben-Gurion never fixated on a particular set of borders. ¹⁵ In 1918, Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi wrote Eretz Yisrael, a book in Yiddish that insists upon the very physical nature of the liturgical Jewish utopia. They remained uncommitted to any particular boundary system, dissuading their readers from considering “the ideal boundaries that are promised to us according to tradition” or “historic borders that have changed many times and evolved by chance” (Biger, 2004: 58). Although the connection to the land has a biblical basis, the borders will depend upon “the cultural, economic and ethnographic conditions of the population that lives there today” (Biger, 2004: 58). For Ben-Gurion, the Bible promoted Jewish unity, but it was the practice of immigration and settlement that would determine the contours of the nation.

This theory corresponds with Ben-Gurion’s position on the Arab nationalisms developing simultaneously with Zionism. Although his positions often changed, Ben-Gurion never fetishized boundaries. In the 1920s and early 1930s, he advocated a federation encompassing Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine – the British holdings of the formerly Ottoman Middle East. The Arab federation would have provisions for a Jewish state or autonomous Jewish regions if Jewish immigration were permitted throughout the lands of the federation (Teveth, 1985: 129). No Arab who wanted to remain in a Jewish region would be dispossessed and, if Iraq were part of the federation, then no Jew would be dispossessed from an Arab region. ¹⁶ In practical terms, the federation idea came to an end with the Palestinian General Strike of 1936−1939. ¹⁷

In his recent biography of Ben-Gurion, Shimon Peres portrays him as an enthusiastic architect of the two-state solution (Peres, 2011). ¹⁸ Prepared to accept British partition schemes, Ben-Gurion found the international recognition that accompanied the United Nations partition of Palestine all the more acceptable. However, when the opportunity to conquer more territory arose in the 1948 war, Ben-Gurion presided over Joshua-like evacuations and destruction of Palestinian towns. His flexibility regarding borders served another purpose: indeterminate borders could always be expanded by war. And so they were.

Ben-Gurion did not object to a Jordanian West Bank, but he identified two central problems with the post-1949 status quo: the separation of Jews from their spiritual capital in Jerusalem and the truncation of the water system. Addressing the water problem, Ben-Gurion commissioned the National Water Carrier (NWC) to carry fresh water from the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) to the center and south of the country in order to facilitate immigration and development. In effect, Ben-Gurion nationalized any water in the territory recognized as Israel. ¹⁹ By designing a nationalized mode of distributing water, Ben-Gurion promoted state centralization and overrode local or regional systems of management. Leila Harris and Samer Alatout argue that Ben-Gurion sought to fulfill his political ideal of mamlakhtiyut – national centralization as prevailing over political affiliations – by constructing national space as the only operative scale and centralizing all state water through two institutions – “Tahal for water strategic planning and Mekorot for distribution networks” (Harris and Alatout, 2010: 153).

The nationalized system of pipes and pumps enabled the growth of Israel and became a target for Palestinian resistance. Fatah’s first operation in 1964, launched under the pseudonym “al-Assifa” (“the storm”), was an attempt to blow up the station where Jordan water was pumped into the main line of the Israeli national water carrier. The action was prevented by the Lebanese border patrol as part of a joint plan with Jordan to protect the states from Israeli reprisals. The second Assifa operation, planting explosives at the water carrier near Tiberias, was similarly unsuccessful (Cooley, 1973: 94; Hart, 1984: 182−183; Sayigh, 2000: 107; Shlaim, 2001, 232). Despite their failure, such acts of resistance served as reminders that the space in question did not support a unified nation. Ben-Gurion’s centralization of water led, in part, to the nationalization of Palestinian resistance and the ongoing struggle over settlement.

Ben-Gurion could not solve Jewish alienation from Jerusalem through public works projects. In order for the biblical political past to be present and to properly unify the revived People of Israel, Jews needed to have access to all of Jerusalem. This was achieved, not by Ben-Gurion, but by Moshe Dayan, the general who fashioned Ben-Gurion as “the Moses of our time” and himself as Joshua who finally made it to the Jordan (Dayan, 1978: 77). ²⁰ Ecstatic over what he perceived as the repatriation of an ancient capital, Ben-Gurion encouraged Jewish settlement in Jerusalem. However, cognizant and even somewhat respectful of Palestinian nationalism as well as King Hussein’s political aspirations, he rejected the annexation of the West Bank. In the name of unifying Israel, Ben-Gurion advocated holding Jerusalem as a capital and the Golan Heights as a vital water source but withdrawing from all other conquered territories. ²¹ He saw separation from others as ultimately vital for Jewish nationalism; “The word Hebrew,” he glossed, “designates not only a certain identity, but a separation from others” (Ben-Gurion, 1971: 323).

In spite of his investments in national unity based on a secular biblical Jewish culture, collective solidarity eluded Ben-Gurion. Zeev Jabotinsky split from the World Zionist Organization, Mapam split from Mapai, the religious parties were brought into government in the name of coalition building, and the generals defied him. Later, Gush Emunim marched into a kind of extra-Israeli space they named “Judea” and “Samaria,” and Israeli Jews remembered where they came from and engaged in identity politics. The tribal order, so to speak, held and then intensified after Ben-Gurion’s death. In a sense, Ben-Gurion’s great fear of a fragmented period following the halutzim () – the Joshua Generation – was realized. An appraisal of the first decades of the State of Israel shows that a system of more local allegiances had accompanied the Jewish national project from the beginning.

The book of Joshua

In the split structure of the book of Joshua, the first twelve chapters recount the plot of Israel’s ritualized march from exile into homeland where they defeat the resident peoples and claim their patrimony, and the second twelve chapters largely stop the action in its tracks with lists of the towns and the borders for each tribe. The first half of Joshua narrates a scorched earth conquest, whereas the second half provides descriptions of regions where the tribes of Israel blend with the very people they were just said to have exterminated. Yigael Yadin’s sense of the conquest derives from the first half of Joshua, whereas the second half of Joshua informs Yohanan Aharoni’s interpretations. No part of the book quite supports David Ben-Gurion’s theory, yet its form bespeaks a similar desire for a nationalized polity.

The account of the conquest in the first half of Joshua provides a militarized founding myth of the nation of Israel. It recounts how twelve tribes cross the Jordan River, face groups of allied kings and follow Joshua to defeat “all of the land” (Josh 10:40, 11:23). The image of an organized army produces a collective group named Israel, “all of the warring nation” (10:7). ²² The image of vanquished kings distinguishes Israel from the other peoples inhabiting the land. The book portrays the People of Israel arriving from beyond the borders of the land in order to eradicate those who live within them. This utter destruction and demographic transformation can only occur through God’s intervention (10:12−14). In presenting a cohesive (and largely silent) national collective and its utterly depraved opponents, the book of Joshua seems to lack the characteristic ambivalence of biblical narrative. Its border lines and battle lines appear fixed and rigid.

The emphatic tone of Joshua reflects its purpose as a founding narrative within which eventual allies each play a role. Although it is difficult to fix when – or if – the various groups named as constitutive tribes and clans achieved political union, the book of Joshua depicts such a golden age. The idea of the nation results from the opposition of other peoples and the exigencies of battle. Yet the localized, regional depiction of the tribal settlements implies the patchwork nature of the national fabric. ²³ Joshua’s army represents a paradigm of national cohesion retrojected on the past in order to facilitate the centralizing impulses of a later moment.

As it preserves local traditions, the second half of Joshua undoes the image of an integrated army enjoying peace after a resounding victory. Why would a story that establishes the indelible link between a people and a territory so quickly betray itself? This is because the national configuration established in the book of Joshua requires the incorporation of various smaller social units. The national narrative must accommodate local and regional forms of power and their militias as it enlists them in the project of a centralized state. The inclusion of the disparate geographical traditions in Joshua 13−21 is a means of both recognizing and coopting these regional forms of power. ²⁴ Through skillful editing, the book incorporates constitutive regional traditions as it neutralizes their political claims and promotes centralization. ²⁵

The myth of the conquest becomes a collective memory that sustains national cohesion or activates it at times of battle or disaster. Yet, in order to be collective, the memory of the conquest must satisfy multiple constitutive archetypes. In the name of including many different groups within the People of Israel, the book of Joshua contains multiple, contradictory territorial traditions. A competition between regionalism and a movement of centralized nationalism informs the context of the book of Joshua and explains its two distinct sections. ²⁶ The national movement would like to overpower the regional system – this, I argue, explains the violent nature of the conquest account – but it must claim and reimagine it in order to achieve its own aims. As a national myth, the conquest seeks not only to overcome the indigenous claims that it denounces outright, but also a network of intersecting, local claims to land, resources, and power. ²⁷

The conquest

After victories over the cities of Jericho and Ai, Joshua faces leagues of kings from the south and north. These grand battles facilitate the subsequent plot of settlement and support the idea of a unified people in sudden possession of vast tracts of land. The battle reports incorporate themes of creation to advance the idea that more than a coincidence of historical contingencies, the rise of a nation represents a fulfillment of destiny that purifies and renews the world. Creation itself undergoes realignment in the process. As holy war blends with cosmogony in Josh 10, Yahweh recreates His people as a nation of heroes and battles the forces of chaos in the form of desert kings.

The battle begins when the king of Jerusalem contemplates with terror the implications of Joshua’s capture and proscription of Jericho and Ai. The recent alliance between Gibeon, “the great city filled with warriors,” and Israel extends the implications to a point intolerable to the king of Jerusalem (Josh 10:2). ²⁸ The king of Jerusalem first speaks of the Gibeonites, rather than Israel, as heroes. The group defended by Joshua and God are outsiders. This would seem counterintuitive in a formative national myth, yet it conveys something important about the nature of Israel. Although the Gibeonites tricked Israel into this alliance and bear the mark of unbelonging and subservience, they have a treaty with Israel. The battle at hand substantiates that such a treaty can be neither dissolved nor disregarded. The urgency of this point, pressed in reference to the Gibeonites, speaks to the nature of Israel as a conglomeration of clans, tribes, migrants, and local signatories to a treaty. Israel serves as the umbrella term for these groups. Each act of joining Israel in turn requires reinforcement of the idea of Israel and the treaties that constitute it. That Gibeonites, not ethnic Israelites, are protected dramatizes the strength of the treaty. “Making peace with Israel” is no light matter (10:1). ²⁹

Joshua goes to Gibeon bringing “all” the nation and “all the heroes of war” (10:7). ³⁰ Where the king of Jerusalem spoke of Gibeonite warriors, Joshua manifests the warriors of Israel. In going out from the camp at Gilgal to protect an ally, the warriors of Israel become a “whole nation.” The emergence of a unified Israel is nothing less than a cosmic event: “neither before nor since has there been such a day” (10:14). Giant stones fall from the sky as the sun and moon halt their circuits in order to witness the war. The victory is decisive: Israel “crushes the necks of the kings beneath their feet” and Joshua becomes canonized as the only man to call God into war (10:14).

A summary of conquered territories concludes the miraculous victory of Joshua over the kings of the south:

Joshua conquered all of the land, the mountains, the Negev, the coastal plain, and the watersheds. Not a survivor remained from all the kings and every soul was proscribed as the Lord, God of Israel had commanded. Joshua conquered them from Kadesh Barnea to Gaza and from all the land of Goshen to Gibeon. Joshua captured all these kings and all their land in one fell swoop because the Lord, God of Israel, fought on Israel’s behalf. Joshua and all Israel returned to the camp in Gilgal. (Josh 10:40−43)

However, “Kadesh Barnea to Gaza and from all the land of Goshen to Gibeon” is not the area conquered in the preceding battles. Robert Boling finds it strange that a purported summary “covers both more and less than is reported” (Boling and Wright, 1982: 297). I identify it as one of the many collated regional traditions that are no less invested than the national mythos in their boundary systems. This characterizes the double voice of the second half of Joshua – traditions that contest the national paradigm appear constitutive. Oriented toward southern deserts and Egypt, the coordinates do not correspond with the picture of the homeland presented at the beginning of the book, “Your borders will be from the desert to the Lebanon and from the Great River, the River Euphrates, (all the land of the Hittites) until the Great Sea where the sun cycles” (Josh 1:4). ³¹

Not only do the alleged boundaries of Joshua’s southern victory – “from Kadesh Barnea to Gaza and from all the land of Goshen to Gibeon” – fail to realize God’s initial promise to Joshua, but they also contradict other records of the selfsame places. “All the land of Goshen” is, in anachronistic terms, the “ghetto” where the People of Israel dwelled in Egypt. A boast following Joshua’s defeat of the northern alliance lists Gibeon as the one city that made peace with Joshua, leaving “the Hivites dwelling in Gibeon” (Josh 11:19). The proud assurance that Joshua destroyed everything “from Kadesh Barnea to Gaza” destabilizes the very myth of the conquest. Kadesh Barnea, as recorded in Numbers and Deuteronomy, serves as the People of Israel’s primary desert home. There, the spies contest God’s story of the Promised Land and persuade their cohorts to resist a life of endless war, and there, in retaliation, God condemns a generation to death in exile.

Conflicting traditions confer an ambivalent status on Gaza. One text recounts that Joshua’s heroic slaying of giants stopped short “only in Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod”, where Anakites remain (Josh 11:22). ³² God later reminds Joshua of his failure: “you are old, past your prime and much of the land remains to be seized… Namely, that of the five Philistine lords of Gaza, Ashdod, Askelon, Gath, and Ekron” (Josh 13:3). If Kadesh Barnea recalls the failings of his fellow spies, then Gaza points to Joshua’s most egregious failure. An alternate tradition emplaces Gaza, its satellites and villages within the territory of Judah (Josh 15:47). The book of Judges ascribes an active victory over Gaza to the tribe of Judah: “Judah captured Gaza and its borderlands, Askelon and its borderlands, and Ekron and its borderlands” (Judg 1:18). ³³

As the frame story in the book of Judges grants Judah victory over Gaza, it further praises Judah for subjecting Jerusalem to annihilation: “the People of Judah fought and captured Jerusalem; they subdued it with the sword and set the city aflame” (Judg 1:8). This tradition celebrating Judah’s presence in the capital shows unawareness or disregard for the tale of Joshua’s momentous victory over the king of Jerusalem (Josh 10:22−27, 12:10). In the same chapter of Judges that fixes Judah in Jerusalem, a juxtaposed Benjaminite tradition sounds less sanguine: “The People of Benjamin did not dispossess the Jebusite residents of Jerusalem, so the Jebusites dwell with the People of Benjamin in Jerusalem until today” (Judg 1:21). Even the story that attempts to press Judah’s right to Jerusalem lapses and admits to a mixed city of Jebusites and Benjaminites.

In Joshua, the Jebusite presence in Jerusalem seems to be the most stable element of traditions about the city. In the boundary list of the tribe of Judah, one border skirts “the Jebusites, that is Jerusalem” (Josh 15:8). Judah’s territory comes close, but does not encompass its eventual capital. Josh 15:63 maintains the Jebusite presence in Jerusalem despite the attempts of the Judahites to expel them, so “the Jebusites dwell with the People of Judah in Jerusalem until today.” Josh 18, which enumerates the boundaries of Benjamin, emplaces Jerusalem in Benjamin’s domain, but refers to it gentilically as “ha-yevusi,” () “the Jebusite city, that is Jerusalem” (Josh 18:28).

These variations likely reflect historical fluctuations. The centralizing party invested in the figure of Joshua, the leaders of Judah, and the tribe of Benjamin all staked claims on the Jebusite city. The members of Ben-Gurion’s study group appraised the traditions historically and explained the contradictions in terms of political change. In response to Josh 12:10, which lists the king of Jerusalem among the kings slain by Joshua, and Yigael Yadin’s lecture on “Military and Archeological Aspects of the Conquest of Canaan in the Book of Joshua,” the biblicist Abraham Malamat noted that Judg 19:10−12 speaks of Jerusalem as a foreign city − “Jebus, it is Jerusalem” – and recalled the tradition that King David vanquished Jerusalem (2 Sam. 5:6−8). For Malamat, the various traditions showed that Jerusalem “passed through many hands in the time of the conquest and settlement” (Malamat, 1971). Yadin, in response, perceived only stages of conquest: “The first stage is not true occupation and settlement, just raids, destruction, and battles” and the second stage is “settlement in the cities” (Yadin, 1971: 99). In the manner of the book itself, Yadin managed the contradictions of Joshua as pertaining to discrete stages of conquest and settlement.

Beyond the historical possibilities, the claims accrue and assume a simultaneous nature in biblical texts. As they suggest competing sites of power articulated in terms of biblical traditions, the unstable nature of borders and the overlapping claims of sovereignty result in a contested land within the text of the Bible. Multiple claimants and various inhabitants appear in the space conquered by Israel and chosen by God. The nation of Israel and the God who fights on its behalf are concepts projected onto the space of the land in the name of fixing a political form not supported by the social setting. Ultimately, these concepts share the space of the land with other interests, and the banished peoples reappear as neighbors. The second half of Joshua portrays the co-presence of different groups who seem to move in and out of alliance and affiliation with Israel. Periods of peace and war fluctuate according to external military threats, as well as how local resources are shared. With such shaky support from allegedly constitutive traditions, the conquest seems to be the tradition most out of step with settlement patterns.

Regionalism

If Gaza is the land of indestructible giants and Jerusalem is the divided city, then is regionalism simply a state of permanent dispute in which elastic boundaries necessitate charismatic military leaders? Contemporary definitions of regionalism see the flows of water and energy that link people across national, ethnic and economic lines as the basis of social and political systems (Elmusa, 1998; Jägerskog, 2003; Taylor, 2003). The distribution and management of vital resources requires a level of political cooperation that transcends power differentials. For example, the destruction or compromise of a water source by any riparian party affects all who draw from it. Because the action of any single party impacts its whole system, regionalism takes account of everyone present, including the disenfranchised or politically marginal.

Turning from texts about territory to texts about water, a regional system emerges from the book of Joshua. The story of how Achsah the daughter of Caleb acquires water rights represents the reconciliation of conflicting claims. ³⁴ Married to her kinsman Othniel as a prize for the conquering of Kiriyat-Sefer (Debir), Achsah returns to her father Caleb in order to renegotiate the borders of her land. She explains the deficiency of her patrimony: “You have given me away as Negev (desert) land, now give me springs of water” (Josh 15:19). Understanding what it takes to survive in the desert, Caleb redistributes a water system with upper and lower springs (Josh 15:16−19, Judg 1:12−15). As one of the few women depicted in the book of Joshua speaks to a collective need, water rights are negotiated within a non-military discourse. This dialogue that pertains to water rather than war stands out in a book focused on battle. The text introduces a female speaker who is, therefore, not a soldier in order to show that, no matter the conquering army, access to water concerns everyone present. Water acquisition is a local procedure involving negotiation. After the battles, a young woman faces the necessary fact of residence: everyone has to draw from existing sources of water. This need, more tangible than the national narrative, forms the basis of a regional system.

Where Achsah’s gender points to the more inclusive nature of regional claims, her father Caleb’s ethnic label further suggests that the book of Joshua is a narrative intended to absorb disparate groups into a national formulation. In Josh 14, Caleb comes forward to press his land claim as a representative of the people of Judah. At the same time, the text twice identifies Caleb as “son of Jephunneh the Kenizzite (14:6, 14),” as if his father were an outsider, and yet Caleb was incorporated into Judah. ³⁵ Rather than an exceptional or marginal case, Caleb is best understood as representative of the kind of local claims that the book of Joshua assembles in order to depict a national narrative. In other words, Caleb, Othniel, and Achsah are outsiders that comprise the internal terrain of Israel. They are the figures with which the book of Joshua creates a tribe of Judah and a People of Israel. Their status as Kenizzites/Judahites/People of Israel highlights both the regional nature of their claims to resources and an Israel comprised of multiple, shifting participants. ³⁶

As it defines the nation of Israel through battles to displace opponents, the book of Joshua betrays the absence of nationalized territory. In its place are sites of overlapping claims where, it seems, local inhabitants jointly access resources. This regionalist depiction accounts for the people present and their collective needs. Although the war stories of Joshua attempt to override this image, the border lists reinforce it. The vehement language and contradictions in the book disclose that social reality during the stages of the book’s composition and dissemination did not conform to the conquest myth. In this sense, the parallel between the modern State of Israel and the book of Joshua goes beyond what Ben-Gurion intended. In both cases, the myth itself attests to the very fluid and varied social setting that it aims to overcome. Where nationalism struggles with non-nationals, civilians, and localized affiliations, regionalism, reflecting shared hydraulic systems, acknowledges the “cyclical flows that cut through political and security borders” (Weizman, 2012: 18).