Joshua 10

The Longest Day

Commentaries by Rowena Loverance

Works of art by Unknown Byzantine artist, Unknown French artist [Paris] and Unknown Western Roman Empire artist

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Unknown French artist [Paris]

The Longest Day; Israel's Enemies Humiliated, from The Crusader Bible (The Morgan Picture Bible), c.1244–54, Illumination on vellum, 390 x 300 mm, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; MS M.638, fol. 11r, Photo: Courtesy of The Morgan Library & Museum

A Mirror for Princes

Commentary by Rowena Loverance

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One can almost hear the pounding hooves and the clash of weapons emanating from the pages of the Morgan Crusader Bible.

In the centre of the top register of this two-tiered image is Joshua, astride a bay horse caparisoned in white; blood spurts from the end of his lance as his victim topples backwards from his horse. As the Crusader poet Bertran de Born exulted:

Trumpets, drums, standards and pennons and ensigns and horses white and black we soon shall see, and the world will be good. (Paden 1986: 398)

Outlined against the royal blue sky and with raised arm, Joshua appears a second time in the top tier, commanding the sun and moon (Joshua 10:12–13), which are both depicted in the heavens at the upper right of the composition. At the right of the lower register, he is shown a third time, in this instance standing without his helm and holding a lance, as he exhorts the Israelite captains to place their feet on the necks of the Amorite kings (10:24), reminding them that it is God who has given them the victory (10:25).

The Morgan Crusader Bible has long been thought to have been produced in Paris at the court of Louis IX in the mid-1240s, around the time he was planning the Sixth Crusade. Joshua had been regularly invoked since the start of the Crusades and Louis IX may have made a personal connection: when he commissioned the Old Testament windows of the Sainte-Chapelle (1238–48), the Joshua cycle was placed directly behind Louis’s own place in the chapel.

The forty-six folios of the Crusader Bible were painted without text; this, and its comparatively large size, suggest it was intended to offer the reader a visually immersive experience. The multiple captions seen today were added at intervals in five languages over the next four hundred years: Latin, Persian, Arabic, Judaeo-Persian, and Hebrew.

Louis’s crusade in 1250 proved a failure, but the story of Joshua still served him as a model to institute domestic reforms, designed to set him and his kingdom right with God.

 

References

Gaposchkin, M. C. 2008. ‘Louis IX, Crusade and the Promise of Joshua in the Holy Land’, Journal of Medieval History, 34.3: 245–74

Paden, William Doremus, Tilde Sankovitch, and Patricia H. Stäblein (eds.). 1986. The Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born (Berkeley: University of California Press)


Unknown Western Roman Empire artist

Liberation of a Beleaguered City, c.400, Boxwood carving, 45.5 x 22.5 x 10.3 cm, Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst der Staatliche Museen, Berlin; Inv. 4782, bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen, Berlin / Jürgen Liepe / Art Resource, NY

Be Strong and of Good Courage

Commentary by Rowena Loverance

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So rare is this high-relief wooden sculpture that it is impossible to be at all certain either of its provenance or original purpose. It was said at the time of its acquisition in 1900 to be from Egypt, but is associated with late-Roman Ravenna in current scholarship. It may have been part of a tiered series of narrative scenes, from which the other tiers are now missing. It is usually dated on stylistic grounds to the early fifth century (Von Törne 2010).

Joseph Strzygowski (1862–1941), who purchased the object for the new Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, was the first to note parallels for the figures visible here hanging on forked staves. They recall scenes of the execution of the Amorite kings (Joshua 10:26) that can be found on the Vatican Joshua Roll. Since then, although other possible historical interpretations of the scene have been suggested, a biblical interpretation remains the most likely.

Reading around the sculpture’s curved surface, we can follow the arrival on foot of the Israelites after their forced march. Joshua is perhaps the damaged figure in the middle register. The Gibeonites sallying forth to help him are also shown, as is the flight of the Amorites on horseback and the execution of their kings (just four, rather than the five mentioned in the text). More soldiers, shown small scale, man the walls, two taller figures stand sheltered within a city gate, and three monumental bearded figures loom protectively outside the walls.

These protective figures have been read as Christian saints, and there are certainly Christian references elsewhere on the relief—the leading foot-soldier carries a labarum, the standard popularized in the early fourth century by the Emperor Constantine. Origen, in his Homilies on Joshua, assimilates Joshua with Jesus, and presents the battle for Canaan as a spiritual struggle, the internal battle against the principalities and powers that incite to sin (Homilies 1.6). Presiding over but disengaged from the carnage below, the protective figures radiate a feeling of security and endurance, of confidence in the eventual outcome of the struggle. This is surely the core message of Joshua 10: ‘Do not be afraid or dismayed; be strong, and of good courage’ (10:25).

 

References

Origen. 2002. Homilies on Joshua, The Fathers of the Church, vol. 105, trans. by Barbara J. Bruce (Washington, D.C: The Catholic University of America Press, 2002)

Von Törne, Anna E. 2010. Stadtbelagerung in der Spätantike—das Berliner Holzrelief (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag)


Unknown Byzantine artist

Scenes from Joshua 10, from the Joshua Roll, c.950, Tempera and gold on vellum, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City; Vat. Pal. graec. 431, sheet XIIIr, By permission of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, with all rights reserved

On a Roll

Commentary by Rowena Loverance

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We are not viewing this tenth-century luxury object as its commissioner would have done: the sheets would have been glued together to form a roll slightly more than 10.5 metres long. This explains why this sheet may seem unlocalized—the town of Gibeon, a seated female figure personifying the town, and the sun standing still overhead all appear at the end of the previous sheet. On this sheet we see Joshua speaking to the Lord (Joshua 10:12), the battle beneath God’s cloud of hailstones (10:11), and the report to Joshua of the finding of the five kings (10:16). On the next sheet the five kings hang from their forked staves.

These images must have struck a chord with the wider public, for they were widely copied in subsequent centuries, in illustrated Octateuch manuscripts, and on ivories.

The Byzantines were practised at typology, so they mined the book of Joshua, the sixth book of the Octateuch, for a variety of models. They saw themselves as an elect nation, the new Israel, so would have taken pride in scenes of God raining down destruction on Israel’s enemies (Eshel 2018: 106). Joshua’s role in leading the Israelites into Canaan made him a role model for military leaders campaigning to recover the Holy Land from the Arabs. The parakoimomenos (keeper of the king's bedchamber) Basil, a well-known art patron, and emperors Nicephorus Phocas and John Tzimisces, all of whom campaigned in Syria and Palestine, have been put forward at various times as possible patrons of the Roll.

Joshua belongs to the pre-kingly period of Israel, yet the Roll depicts him enthroned, haloed like a Byzantine emperor and with his feet on a suppedaneum (foot rest), surrounded by his soldiers, as he prepares to pass judgement on the defeated Amorite kings. Here it is clearly the righteous ruler who is being invoked.

The current flattened state of the Roll limits our understanding of the sense of motion it must have originally conveyed, as Joshua’s divinely-inspired victories rolled inexorably on, like those of the Roman emperors related on the triumphal columns which were still standing in Constantinople when the Roll was made.

 

References

Eshel, Shay. 2018. The Concept of the Elect Nation in Byzantium (Leiden: Brill)

Wander, Steven H. 2012. The Joshua Roll (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag)


Unknown French artist [Paris] :

The Longest Day; Israel's Enemies Humiliated, from The Crusader Bible (The Morgan Picture Bible), c.1244–54 , Illumination on vellum

Unknown Western Roman Empire artist :

Liberation of a Beleaguered City, c.400 , Boxwood carving

Unknown Byzantine artist :

Scenes from Joshua 10, from the Joshua Roll, c.950 , Tempera and gold on vellum

Emergency Stop

Comparative commentary by Rowena Loverance

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Earth stopped. The Holy City hit a mountain

As a tray of dishes meets a swinging door

(X. J. Kennedy, ‘Joshua’) 

If the sun and moon were to stop moving for a day, what chaos would be caused? Could the earth survive?

Only in the last two generations has humanity had the power to destroy its own planet. With this new sensitivity to humanity’s capacity to cause global disaster, we are bound today to read Joshua’s command to the sun and moon to stop in their courses (Joshua 10:12–14) in a very different way from previous generations. That he does so to enable him to complete his military relief of the Canaanite town of Gibeon, and the defeat of the besieging Amorites, could appear to us to be a gravely insufficient justification.

The stopping of the spheres may simply be a literary trope, of course. This literary line of thought is strengthened by the reference in Joshua 10:13 to ‘the Book of Jashar’—a lost book, mentioned only twice in the Hebrew Bible (cf. 2 Samuel 1:18), perhaps containing battle hymns. What is more, there are other such cosmic allusions embedded in the narratives of the Bible. Rather than Joshua 10’s continued sunlight, Exodus 10 describes three days of darkness as one of the plagues inflicted upon Egypt before the Exodus, and in the book of Judges the Song of Deborah tells of how the stars in their courses fought against Sisera (Judges 5:20).

Perhaps the extraordinary events of Joshua 10 may refer to an actual eclipse. This hypothesis was first proposed in 1918, but only very recently has science been able accurately to test it. Based on their recent research, two Cambridge physicists have argued that the events of Joshua 10 took place on 30 October 1207 BCE, in the afternoon: the oldest solar eclipse ever recorded (Humphreys and Waddington 2017).

But the real issue posed for modern readers by the text may not so much be this sun-stopping, science-stretching event, as the genocidal destruction apparently commanded by God (Joshua 10:40). There is now widespread scholarly agreement that, although the text recounts events of c.1200 BCE, it forms part of the work of the Deuteronomist historian(s), receiving its final editing in the exilic period in the mid-sixth century BCE. Some contemporary writers (Collins 2005: 62) have commented on the irony of the fact that in this text the Hebrews apparently show no misgivings in doing to others what they themselves have just suffered.

Recent instances of genocide have brought home the urgent need to come to some accommodation with these herem (total destruction) texts, which are connected with ideas about the importance of radically ‘purifying’ a land. But one should not jump to the conclusion that readers of these texts through history have always had such ideas as their principal focus. The three artworks chosen here—from three different medieval contexts—reveal a more complex picture.

The original provenance of the remarkable and rare carved wood relief, now in Berlin, is not known, but it seems to date from the fifth century, a time when Joshua was being cited as a prefiguration of Christ by both Eastern and Western writers.

By the mid-tenth century, when the Joshua Roll was created in Constantinople, the use by Byzantine emperors of Old Testament warrior prototypes (such as Joshua) as exemplars is well-attested, as they sought to wrest control of Syria and Palestine from rival Islamic caliphates. Western crusaders made these links too, as evidenced by the folios dedicated to the Joshua story in the Morgan Crusader Bible (10r–11v)—not to mention episodes such as their solemn circumambulation around the walls of Jerusalem in 1099, before its bloodthirsty sack, which self-consciously replicated the sack of Jericho in Joshua 6.

All three works are unflinchingly honest in their use of graphic images of warfare. But they vary in the role they give to the cosmic intervention in the battle. The Berlin relief does not refer to it at all; the Joshua Roll reverses the biblical order of events and makes the hailstones the culmination of God’s intervention. Only the Morgan Bible gives centre stage to Joshua’s hubristic command to the sun and moon to stand still.

At a time when human hubris could have cosmic consequences, it seems that both theologians and artists have yet fully to explore the significance of the Deuteronomist writer’s unique event: ‘when the Lord hearkened to the voice of a human being’ (10:14) and made the movement of the spheres serve the outcome of a military campaign.

 

References

Collins, John J. 2005. The Bible After Babel: Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company)

Hofreiter, Christian. 2018. Making Sense of Old Testament Genocide: Christian Interpretations of Herem Passages (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Humphreys, Colin, and Graeme Waddington. 2017. ‘Solar Eclipse of 1207 BC Helps to Date Pharaohs’, Astronomy & Geophysics, 58.5: 5.39–5.42

Kennedy, X. J. ‘Joshua’. In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955–2007, p. 89. © 2007 X. J. Kennedy.  Reused with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press

 

Next exhibition: Joshua 20

Joshua 10

Revised Standard Version

10 When Adoʹni-zeʹdek king of Jerusalem heard how Joshua had taken Ai, and had utterly destroyed it, doing to Ai and its king as he had done to Jericho and its king, and how the inhabitants of Gibeon had made peace with Israel and were among them, 2he feared greatly, because Gibeon was a great city, like one of the royal cities, and because it was greater than Ai, and all its men were mighty. 3So Adoʹni-zeʹdek king of Jerusalem sent to Hoham king of Hebron, to Piram king of Jarmuth, to Japhiʹa king of Lachish, and to Debir king of Eglon, saying, 4“Come up to me, and help me, and let us smite Gibeon; for it has made peace with Joshua and with the people of Israel.” 5Then the five kings of the Amorites, the king of Jerusalem, the king of Hebron, the king of Jarmuth, the king of Lachish, and the king of Eglon, gathered their forces, and went up with all their armies and encamped against Gibeon, and made war against it.

6 And the men of Gibeon sent to Joshua at the camp in Gilgal, saying, “Do not relax your hand from your servants; come up to us quickly, and save us, and help us; for all the kings of the Amorites that dwell in the hill country are gathered against us.” 7So Joshua went up from Gilgal, he and all the people of war with him, and all the mighty men of valor. 8And the Lord said to Joshua, “Do not fear them, for I have given them into your hands; there shall not a man of them stand before you.” 9So Joshua came upon them suddenly, having marched up all night from Gilgal. 10And the Lord threw them into a panic before Israel, who slew them with a great slaughter at Gibeon, and chased them by the way of the ascent of Beth-horʹon, and smote them as far as Azeʹkah and Makkeʹdah. 11And as they fled before Israel, while they were going down the ascent of Beth-horʹon, the Lord threw down great stones from heaven upon them as far as Azeʹkah, and they died; there were more who died because of the hailstones than the men of Israel killed with the sword.

12 Then spoke Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord gave the Amorites over to the men of Israel; and he said in the sight of Israel,

“Sun, stand thou still at Gibeon,

and thou Moon in the valley of Aiʹjalon.”

13And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed,

until the nation took vengeance on their enemies.

Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stayed in the midst of heaven, and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day. 14There has been no day like it before or since, when the Lord hearkened to the voice of a man; for the Lord fought for Israel.

15 Then Joshua returned, and all Israel with him, to the camp at Gilgal.

16 These five kings fled, and hid themselves in the cave at Makkeʹdah. 17And it was told Joshua, “The five kings have been found, hidden in the cave at Makkeʹdah.” 18And Joshua said, “Roll great stones against the mouth of the cave, and set men by it to guard them; 19but do not stay there yourselves, pursue your enemies, fall upon their rear, do not let them enter their cities; for the Lord your God has given them into your hand.” 20When Joshua and the men of Israel had finished slaying them with a very great slaughter, until they were wiped out, and when the remnant which remained of them had entered into the fortified cities, 21all the people returned safe to Joshua in the camp at Makkeʹdah; not a man moved his tongue against any of the people of Israel.

22 Then Joshua said, “Open the mouth of the cave, and bring those five kings out to me from the cave.” 23And they did so, and brought those five kings out to him from the cave, the king of Jerusalem, the king of Hebron, the king of Jarmuth, the king of Lachish, and the king of Eglon. 24And when they brought those kings out to Joshua, Joshua summoned all the men of Israel, and said to the chiefs of the men of war who had gone with him, “Come near, put your feet upon the necks of these kings.” Then they came near, and put their feet on their necks. 25And Joshua said to them, “Do not be afraid or dismayed; be strong and of good courage; for thus the Lord will do to all your enemies against whom you fight.” 26And afterward Joshua smote them and put them to death, and he hung them on five trees. And they hung upon the trees until evening; 27but at the time of the going down of the sun, Joshua commanded, and they took them down from the trees, and threw them into the cave where they had hidden themselves, and they set great stones against the mouth of the cave, which remain to this very day.

28 And Joshua took Makkeʹdah on that day, and smote it and its king with the edge of the sword; he utterly destroyed every person in it, he left none remaining; and he did to the king of Makkeʹdah as he had done to the king of Jericho.

29 Then Joshua passed on from Makkeʹdah, and all Israel with him, to Libnah, and fought against Libnah; 30and the Lord gave it also and its king into the hand of Israel; and he smote it with the edge of the sword, and every person in it; he left none remaining in it; and he did to its king as he had done to the king of Jericho.

31 And Joshua passed on from Libnah, and all Israel with him, to Lachish, and laid siege to it, and assaulted it: 32and the Lord gave Lachish into the hand of Israel, and he took it on the second day, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and every person in it, as he had done to Libnah.

33 Then Horam king of Gezer came up to help Lachish; and Joshua smote him and his people, until he left none remaining.

34 And Joshua passed on with all Israel from Lachish to Eglon; and they laid siege to it, and assaulted it; 35and they took it on that day, and smote it with the edge of the sword; and every person in it he utterly destroyed that day, as he had done to Lachish.

36 Then Joshua went up with all Israel from Eglon to Hebron; and they assaulted it, 37and took it, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and its king and its towns, and every person in it; he left none remaining, as he had done to Eglon, and utterly destroyed it with every person in it.

38 Then Joshua, with all Israel, turned back to Debir and assaulted it, 39and he took it with its king and all its towns; and they smote them with the edge of the sword, and utterly destroyed every person in it; he left none remaining; as he had done to Hebron and to Libnah and its king, so he did to Debir and to its king.

40 So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded. 41And Joshua defeated them from Kaʹdesh-barʹnea to Gaza, and all the country of Goshen, as far as Gibeon. 42And Joshua took all these kings and their land at one time, because the Lord God of Israel fought for Israel. 43Then Joshua returned, and all Israel with him, to the camp at Gilgal.