Today’s reading: Joshua 9; Luke 22
I’m really curious what God would have instructed Joshua about the Gibeonites if he had asked Him about it before making a covenant with them.
On the one hand, God gave Israel explicit instructions that they were not to make any covenants with these specific groups of people, or to allow them to continue to live among them. So from that perspective we might expect that God would have told Joshua that the Gibeonites were deceiving them and were one of the groups they were to wipe out, and they could have killed them and then gone to take their cities.
But on the other hand, the Gibeonites didn’t show up to make a treaty because Israel seemed like a strong nation and would therefore make a good ally, they showed up to make the treaty in recognition of Israel’s God. Gibeon had heard what Yahweh did to Egypt, and they had heard how He delivered Sihon and Og into Israel’s hands, and they had heard what He did to Jericho and Ai, and they recognized that this was not a god they could contend against and instead came to ally themselves with His people. This to me sounds a lot like the words of Rahab, but instead of being an individual response to the works and power of Yahweh, this is a national response to the same.
This makes me wonder if God wouldn’t have instructed Joshua to make the treaty with the Gibeonites as he did anyway. Maybe this is why God didn’t step in to stop the treaty or to proactively give Joshua a heads up about where these people were from (which He could certainly have done). Maybe God allowed the deception to work because the Gibeonites were rightly recognizing God as worthy of following and rightly seeking to align themselves with Him. Isn’t that exactly the right response to the miraculous displays of power, provision, and deliverance for Israel???
And maybe I’m reading this wrong, but their punishment for the deception ironically sounds very Levitical to me. By that I mean that not all Levites could be priests, only the descendants of Aaron, but the various Levitical families had roles and tasks in service to the tabernacle/temple. In making the Gibeonites servants who will be drawers of water and cutters of wood for the altar of God, in the place where He will choose, this gives the Gibeonites a more direct role in the Israelite worship system than any of the non-Levitical tribes had.
And while I may be misunderstanding that, because Joshua doesn’t seem to intend it as a positive thing, it is not without precedent in the Old Testament. Israel was God’s chosen people, but they were constantly rebelling and turning away from God. But there are also people from outside of Israel that recognize Yahweh for who He is and align themselves with Israel, like Rahab and Ruth, both of whom end up in the line of David, and therefore ultimately the line of the Messiah. It honestly wouldn’t surprise me if God, seeing this nation recognize and turn to Him, decided to give them a pseudo-Levitical role in His worship in response to their faithfulness.
What do ya’ll think, am I over thinking this, or do you think there might be something there?
No comments:
Post a Comment