Yehoshua 10: Miraculous Messages

 

Last time after discussing the Giv'onites' duplicity we began to examine the larger context of the war of conquest.  We discovered that the commentaries disagreed concerning the option of extending overtures of peace and surrender towards the Canaanites.  Even assuming, as Ramban does, that ALL enemies were to be accorded the opportunity to surrender, in the end, the text indicates that the overwhelming majority of Canaanite towns and cities opted for warfare.  In fact, when the Giv'onites sued for peace, their Canaanite kin responded by launching an immediate and devastating attack:

 

     Adoni-Tzedek king of Jerusalem heard that Yehoshua had captured and destroyed the A'i just as he had done to Yericho, and that the inhabitants of Giv'on had peacefully surrendered to Israel and were accepted into their midst.  They became very fearful, because Giv'on was a great city, one of the cities of the realm, a city larger than the A'i with men who were all mighty.  Adoni-Tzedek king of Jerusalem sent to Hohum king of Chevron, Piram king of Yarmut, Yafi'a king of Lachish and to Devir king of Eglon, saying: 'join me to smite Giv'on, for they have peacefully surrendered to Yehoshua and to the people of Israel!' (Yehoshua 10:1-4).

 

Under siege, the people of Giv'on sent messengers to Yehoshua at Gilgal, some thirty kilometers distant, and requested their immediate aid to defeat "all of the Amorite kings who dwell in the hill country" (10:7).  Not losing a moment, Yehoshua and the armed forces commenced their march at nightfall and continued their advance all night long.  They surprised the Canaanite kings with their sudden arrival (at daybreak?) and "God discomfited them before Israel…"  The kings' forces fled but were pinned down by a sudden downfall of hailstones on the slopes of Beit Choron, a miraculous intervention that inflicted more enemy casualties than the Israelite forces.

 

THE SUN STOOD STILL

 

What happened next is nothing short of remarkable, even in the context of a Biblical narrative:

 

Yehoshua addressed God on the day that God had given over the Amorites before the people of Israel, and he said in the presence of all Israel: 'Oh sun, stand still in Giv'on, and moon in the valley of Ayalon!'  The sun was still and the moon stood motionless, until the nation avenged its foes.  Is it not written in Sefer Ha-Yashar?  The sun stood still in the middle of the heavens and did not hasten to set for a full day.  There was never a day like that one, neither before nor after, that God should listen to the plea of a man, because God waged war for Israel (10:12-14).

 

As the day waned and the sun began to drop towards the horizon, Yehoshua realized that the enemy forces would soon escape under cover of darkness.  Seeking to secure more daylight hours for the Israelites to rout their foes, Yehoshua called upon the sun and the moon to cease their inevitable course and to stand motionless, thus extending the radiance of the afternoon indefinitely.  In a show of Divine intervention never before witnessed in the history of the world, God acceded to his request and as a result, Israel inflicted a punishing blow on the Canaanite kings of the south.

 

Of course, the short passage raises many provocative questions.  Did the celestial bodies, whose immutable motion is the universal paradigm for permanence and predictability, the basis for our Newtonian conception of conventional time as consistent and unchanging, truly stop their motion and stand still?  What is the significance of the reference to the otherwise obscure "Sefer Ha-Yashar" or "Book of the Upright," a work only attested to in one other Biblical reference (Shemuel 2:1:18).  Why does God choose to intervene in such a striking way in order allow Israel the opportunity to vanquish its foes?  Why is Yehoshua selected to be the recipient of such singular Divine intercession?

 

THE LITERALISTS

 

The first of our questions is the most pressing, and the commentaries predictably disagree on the matter.  Most adopt the Rabbinic tradition preserved in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Avoda Zara 25a:

 

The Torah states (concerning the offspring of Ephraim) that "his descendants will fill the nations" (Bereishit 48:17).  When did the reputation of Ephraim become known worldwide?  At the time that God caused the sun to stand still for Yehoshua (who was a descendant of the Tribe of Ephraim).  For how long did the sun stand still?  Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi says: for 24 hours…Rabbi Eliezer says: for 36 hours…Rabbi Shemuel bar Nachmani says: for 48 hours…

 

Though the Sages disagreed on the length of time that the sun stood still, they concured that it did, in fact, stand still, just as the straightforward reading of the text indicates.  If so, then not only does the episode highlight God's resounding intervention in the Israelite triumph but perhaps more importantly emphasizes an unmistakable axiom of Biblical tradition: God is a transcendent all-powerful Being Who bends nature to His will. 

 

The ancients universally believed that the gods were powerful but mercurial beings, possessing in full measure the foibles of their human worshippers, and primarily engaged in either banal and sensual pursuits or else crimson conflicts, both of which much resembled the goings-on down below on the terrestrial plane.  Like their human adulators, the capriciousness of the gods derived, in part, from the fact that they too were notoriously subject to the whims of fortune.  Held in sway by forces of fate that were beyond their control, the nature gods were often powerless to intervene or to save.  The sun, and to a lesser degree the moon, were regarded as gods by all polytheistic societies, some of whom went so far as to venerate them as especially important and even primary deities.  The reasons for such singular devotion are not difficult to ascertain: the rhythms of daily life, the seasons of planting and harvest, the steady counting of days, months and years are all conditioned by the sweeping progress of the solar disk across the heavens, while the great and inexorable cycles of birth and death are mirrored by sunrise and sunset, spring and autumn. 

 

GOD AS NATURE'S MASTER

 

"Shemesh" (the Hebrew word for Sun) was the Canaanite version of the fetish.  Because climatic conditions in Canaan could just as easily produce cloudy or stormy weather more than half of the year, and because success of the crops was completely dependent upon sun-obscuring rainfall rather than upon irrigation, Shemesh never achieved the prominence accorded to, for instance, his natural rival the storm god "Ba'al" or Ba'al's seductive cohort "Ashtoret," the goddess of fertility and love.  In Egypt, by way of contrast, the sun god "Ra" was fervently and universally adored, for his brilliant radiance in the perennially cloudless skies nurtured the crops brought forth by the black alluvial fields watered by the Nile. Ra was even regarded as the progenitor of Pharaoh himself.  Nevertheless, even in Canaan, Shemesh was a force to be respected and obsequiously appeased, and scattered Biblical references make it abundantly clear that sun worship was not at all foreign to the Canaanite landscape (see Devarim 4:19, 17:3, Melakhim 2:23:5-11).

 

As the battle at Giv'on came to a close, the Israelite forces triumphant, Yehoshua called upon the sun and moon to stand still in their tracks so that the people might avenge their foes.  Miraculously, the celestial spheres comply, proclaiming with an astounding display that nothing is beyond the ability of the God of the Hebrews.  Completely incorporeal, absolutely powerful, of a perfect oneness defying description, Israel's God, the God of heaven and earth and all that they contain, demonstrates His utter mastery of the forces of nature that all other peoples, in Canaan and elsewhere, submissively worshipped and irrationally feared.  Taken together with the sudden downpour of hailstones that initiates the rout, perhaps the text here seeks to emphasize God's utter mastery over all the gods, even those whose respective powers tended to be at odds with each other.  Thus, Ba'al is bent, and Shemesh is shaped to conform to the will of the Omnipotent Creator. How unlike their limited and disparate abilities was His omnipotence, His closeness and immediacy wholly distinct from their indifference and remoteness.  The sun complies just as surely as a loyal servant obeys the word of his master, and faithfully ceases its inexorable progress until released by its Creator to finally complete the course.

 

THE COMMENTARY OF THE RALBAG

 

It should be noted that at least one of the medieval commentators hesitated to adopt the simple reading of our text, since it easily eclipsed any of the miraculous exploits of Yehoshua's own mentor Moshe, an unthinkable conclusion.  Rather, the thirteenth century French rationalist Rabbi Levi ben Gershom (RaLBaG), explained that the thrust of the passage concerns the victory of the Israelites:

 

"until the nation avenged its foes," "because God waged war for Israel".  Yehoshua's plea was that "before the sun had set at Giv'on or the moon at the valley of Ayalon, the people of Israel would complete the rout of their foes…the people were able to miraculously avenge themselves…in such a short time…for God's abilities are not limited…and He heeded Yehoshua's prayer" (commentary to 10:12).

 

In other words, the miracle was not that the sun actually stood still, but that the people of Israel succeeded in thoroughly trouncing the southern kings in a very short time, BEFORE THE SUN COMPLETED ITS COURSE AND SET.  The motion of the sun did not slow, but rather Israel was able to summarily inflict a crushing defeat that should have taken a much longer period of time.  God acceded by granting them a swift and utter victory, "because God waged war for Israel".

 

Besides being an accomplished Biblical commentator and philosopher, Ralbag was also an astronomer and mathematician.  He invented the Jacob's Staff, a device used to measure the angular separation between celestial bodies, and the forerunner of the astrolabe.  While it may be tempting to cast Ralbag's interpretation in the light of scientific empiricism and its implied downplay or dismissal of miracles, Ralbag himself clearly predicates his rejection of the literal meeting upon theological grounds: "God, blessed be He, does not effect miracles except for some pressing need or in order to inculcate true opinions, and here neither of these conditions apply…"  Why, avers the Ralbag, need God intervene to halt the motion of the sun if the main point of the endeavor was for Israel to achieve victory?  After all, they can well accomplish that aim without recourse to such an overt display of Divine prowess.  At the same time, the text makes no mention of a pedagogic aspect to the episode, and instead casts the matter in a purely pragmatic light: God intercedes so that Israel can militarily prevail, not so that they can come to appreciate some abstract truth about His governance of the world.  Of course, Ralbag would not accept our earlier reading, which detected in the event a rebuttal of polytheistic beliefs concerning the divinity of the sun god and his host.  At the same time, it should be noted that Ralbag does not question God's ABILITY to slow or stop the sun's progress, but rather His WILLINGNESS to do so.

 

THE "SEFER HAYASHAR" AND THE INTERPRETATION OF IBN EZRA

 

Concerning the mysterious "Sefer Ha-Yashar" or "Book of the Upright," traditional sources offer a number of intriguing but fanciful theories, understanding the appellation to refer to an existing volume of the Torah or Prophets, be it Genesis, Deuteronomy or Judges (see Tractate Avoda Zara 25a).  As pointed out earlier, the only other explicit Biblical reference to the work is from 2 Shemuel 1:18, David's moving elegy over the death in battle of King Shaul and Yonatan, his son and David's true friend:

 

David composed this lament concerning Shaul and Yonatan his son, to teach the people of Yehuda to draw the bow.  Behold it is recorded in Sefer Ha-Yashar:  'Beautiful Israel, on your high places have they been killed.  How have the mighty fallen!…'

 

This fleeting reference, however, provides no information concerning the work's provenance other that it perhaps related to warfare or battle, and was probably composed in poetic form rather than in prose.  Significantly, while our reference from Yehoshua is one of triumph and victory, the elegy of David recalls a shattering defeat:  the slaying of Israel's first monarch at the hands of the Philistines. 

 

Rabbi Avraham Ibn Ezra (twelfth century Spain) offers a more cautious interpretation concerning references to otherwise obscure texts, and in the process he illuminates an important but under-appreciated aspect of the Biblical canon.  In context, the Ibn Ezra addresses the equally cryptic "Book of the Wars of the Lord" (Sefer Milchamot Adonai), mentioned only one time, in Bemidbar 21:14:

 

This (Sefer Milchamot Adonai) was a self-contained work that recorded God's battles on behalf of those that revere Him.  It would seem that it dated from the time of Avraham.  After all, many works have been lost and are no longer extant among us, such as the "Words of Natan" (Divrei Ha-Yamim 1:29:29), the "Vision of Ido the Seer" (IBID 2:12:15), the "Chronicles of the Kings of Israel" (Melakhim 1:14:19), as well as the songs and proverbs of Shelomo (Ibid 1:5:12).

 

Ibn Ezra posits that Sefer Milchamot Adonai was actually part of a much larger corpus of works, composed during various times during the Biblical period and mentioned in passing in various Biblical books, which have been lost.  Sefer Ha-Yashar would presumably also be counted among these works.  What is striking about Ibn Ezra's formulation is that it suggests that the books of the Bible do not at all comprise the total literary output of the Jewish people during the fifteen centuries of the Biblical period.  Many other works were composed by important figures, but were simply lost to posterity.  While the issue of the Biblical canonization process is beyond the scope of this article, suffice it to say that Ibn Ezra's explanation indicates that the incorporation of texts into the Biblical canon was neither arbitrary nor a function of a paucity of material.  Rather, only those works that carried the imprimatur of Divine authorship (the Torah) or genuine Divine inspiration (the Prophets and Writings) were incorperated, providing that the thrust of their message was deemed sufficiently vital.  That they were preserved in more or less intact form is extraordinary, and highlights the reverence that ancient Israel had for the sacred texts that addressed what they regarded as life's most urgent and critical concerns: our relationship with God and our relationship with others.

 

Whatever the exact nature of the Divine intervention that took place at Giv'on on that day, it was momentous enough to be included in a separate work documenting God's righteous acts of salvation.  Although that work may have been subsequently lost, the effects of the Israelite triumph – and God's astounding involvement – continued to live on in the collective memory of the people for eternity. 

 

Next time, we will begin to investigate in earnest the moral dimension of the wars of conquest.  Readers are asked to read chapter 11 in preparation.