Whatever Happened to the Perizzites? Joshua 3:7-17

(Lectionary for November 5, 2017)

One can never approach the book of Joshua without reflecting on the terrible violence in the story, much of it apparently instigated and commanded by YHWH. If one read Joshua alone, and never confronted Hosea and Jeremiah or Ruth and Jonah, one might conclude that the Hebrew Bible is merely a remnant of an ancient warrior culture, glorifying conflict in the name of a God of battle, rather more Sparta than Jerusalem. And certainly, many Christians through the centuries have had great trouble including these tales into the same book that urges followers to love and cherish the Prince of Peace rather than the wielder of the sword.

When we are presented with a text from Joshua, we first must decide just what it is we are reading, history or ideology. Given what we now know from archaeology, the book of Joshua carries little in the way of pure history but is in fact constructed out of a series of old legends and folk stories, few of which carry any claim on actual history. The supposed grand and complete victories of the “invading” Israelites over a number of indigenous groups living in the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River simply cannot be proven or sustained by 100 years of spadework in the Holy Land. At site after site, careful study of the remains of the named cities indicate either no levels of destruction during the necessary times of the Bible’s accounts or no habitation at all during those times. The parade example of this fact is Jericho. Joshua’s great victory over the ancient walled city with its massive tower fortifications is myth, since during his supposed time in the city—late in the 13th century BCE—no one was living in Jericho, as the excavations of Kathleen Kenyon demonstrated nearly 70 years ago.

If that is true, and it clearly is, then just what are we to do with these stories? How can they be appropriated into the ongoing tale of the Bible without merely consigning them to some warehouse of useless and dangerous accounts that fly in the face of the Bible’s calls for peace and justice for all nations? And that brings us to the Perizzites.

They, along with the “Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites” form the list of peoples’ names that lived in the Promised Land prior to Israel’s appearance at the Jordan River. These are the peoples whom YHWH promises Joshua to “drive out before you.” And the book of Joshua then proceeds to announce that YHWH and Joshua and the armies of Israel do precisely that. In a lightening series of military victories, Joshua leads Israel into the land, first destroying Jericho, then heading north and finally south, sweeping away all those established peoples under the unstoppable direction of YHWH Sebaoth, a familiar phrase that in this context might best be translated “God of the Armies.”

This is historical nonsense and little more than a fable. And the fact of that statement is made plain by the very next book of the Hebrew Bible, the book of Judges. In chapter 3 we read the following: “Now these are the nations that YHWH left to test all those in Israel who had no experience of any war in Canaan (it was only that successive generations of Israelites might know war, to teach those who had no experience of it before); the five lords of the Philistines, and all the Canaanites, and the Sidonians, and the Hivites who lived on Mt. Lebanon” (Jud.3:1-3). The first reason that we are told that these nations are still around, after Joshua’s supposed slaughter of them, is that they were to be Israel’s war partners in order that future Israelites would know how to prosecute war, since that apparently was something that they needed always to practice! So much for Isaiah’s claim that eventually “they would not learn war any more.”

But Judges offers a second reason for the continued existence of these indigenous dwellers in the land. “They were for the testing of Israel, to know whether Israel would obey the commandments of YHWH, commanded to their ancestors by Moses. So, the Israelites lived among the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; and they took their daughters as wives for themselves, and their own daughters they gave to their sons; and they worshipped their gods” (Jud.3:4-6).

In these two ways, then, Judges calls Joshua a myth. The indigenous peoples of the land in fact were not destroyed. Quite the opposite, they remained in the land and quite openly intermarried with the incoming Israelites. But these folk were needed, says Judges, to be sparring partners for the Israelites, and to test the people of YHWH by tempting them to worship of their gods. Israel completely failed the god test, forever falling away from the commandments of YHWH, as the subsequent prophetic oracles make all too plain, but they did maintain a decidedly war-like spirit, consolidating their land under the forces of David and Solomon, though in the end being overwhelmed by the might of Assyria, then Babylon, then Persia, then Greece, then Rome.

So what did become of the Perizzites? They became part of the melting pot of Israel, as did the Hittites (see the unfortunate Uriah, husband of Bathsheba), the Hivites, and even the Jebusites, the former occupants of Jerusalem, David’s chosen capital. In the course of time, all of them disappeared, not by military conquest, but by assimilation. When the priests carry the Ark of the Covenant into the Jordan River, leading the forces of Joshua into the land, they are in reality leading Israel into a place of long and diverse settlement, a place where Israel will become just another one of the numerous occupants of a land that has seen peoples come and go for hundreds of years. And further, Israel will be forever changed by their numerous and varied contacts with these peoples; the chosen people will finally become a fabulously diverse people, united only by living in proximity with one another, but maintaining diverse worship of diverse gods.

We modern readers of the Bible must drive from our minds forever that “pure” Israelites alone lived in this land from the entrance of Joshua to the defeat by the Babylonians some 750 years later. The land of Israel remained a “mixed multitude,” as the Egyptian escapees are named at one place in the tradition. When we read the book of Joshua we are reading in fact an ideological overlay of an astonishingly diverse and complex account of peoples moving into a place and commingling with those who have lived there for centuries.

I would say for preachers that the book of Joshua and its companion book, Judges, are testaments to the diversity of YHWH’s peoples, and ironically not the story of the exclusive chosen people of YHWH. For too long the books have been read through that particular lens, but further study has taught us to open our eyes to see through the heavy ideological gauze to the reality that lies beneath. Here the Bible teaches us to celebrate the diversity and difference of peoples in the sight of YHWH. In our time, such a word is needed more than ever.