NOTES for Jos 9:1-27

The alliance, deceitfully concluded by one of the local cities with Joshua, became a lesson to both him and all the rest. To understand the situation, it is important to remember that treaties with pagan nations (and such were all of them then, except the Hebrews) were permissible for God's people only in the event that they lived outside the borders of the land that God had destined for the Hebrews. The point here was not some special religious squeamishness, but rather that a people still far from being spiritually mature needed a kind of greenhouse, where pagan temptations would not exist at all, or at least where there would be a minimum of them. However, the people had to create this greenhouse for themselves, albeit with God's help. Here there was no demand for the obligatory physical extermination of all the inhabitants of pre-Hebrew Palestine — it was rather a question of destroying local altars, but such an attempt meant inevitable war, and wars in those times were waged quite brutally. Besides, the destruction of the altars effectively meant for the people to whom they belonged either assimilation or exile.

This is precisely why, understanding how matters stood, the inhabitants of Gibeon deceived Joshua, pretending that they had come from afar: they knew that in such a case they could pay off the Hebrews, just as they often paid off nomads at the time by concluding a treaty with them for the more or less regular payment of tribute. Such a treaty is what they propose to him, having beforehand concealed the location of the city from which they came. Joshua, as can be seen, is by no means striving for war for the sake of war or for conquests as such: he is ready to conclude an alliance and end the matter peacefully, since such an opportunity presents itself to him. But at the same time he forgets to ask God whether such an alliance is needed by Him, and gets himself into a predicament.

Here before us is a rather common story in a fallen world: it often seems to us that in our life and even in God's work, which is entrusted to us, there are important things about which one can and should ask God, and there are secondary ones, which we can perfectly well figure out ourselves, with our own minds, by our own strength. In reality, however, it turns out that in God's work, as in spiritual life in general, there are no such matters. They may merely seem simple to us and resolvable without God, but even if we do indeed manage to resolve them in this way, the solution will be completely different from what God wants, and can bring an absolutely unexpected and undesirable result. The lesson turned out to be illustrative and memorable, and its consequences affected all subsequent Hebrew history — for in it, as in life in general, nothing passes without leaving a trace.