Violence and the Foundation of Place: Some reflections on conquest narratives in the Book of Joshua
The above photograph was taken at an exhibit at the Winnipeg Graffiti Gallery created by Jordan Stranger. The exhibit was called "I am not an Indian" and features a Canadian flag with the front cover of the Indian Act superimposed upon it. As the red runs to the bottom, you see it turns into the bloody handprints of children, finally collapsing into the graves of residential school victims. This image is countered by the "tree of life" in the foreground that surrounded by various cultural symbols that point a way forward to a more truly multicultural Canada via the rainbow streamers connecting the pole back to the flag.
Introduction
In this paper I begin by examining
the role violence plays in the construction of the political geography of
Israel by providing a close analysis of the conquest narrative found in the
book of Joshua. I focus on this text because it has strong resonances with the
violent social imaginary that emerged in the late medieval/early modern period
that Willie Jennings has named the “colonial moment.”[1] This so-called “colonial moment”
names the time in the western social imaginary where the medieval experience of
complex political space was replaced by the modern experience of simple space.[2] In this move, Christians
have been actively complicit in the displacement of place-bound indigenous
peoples throughout the world and especially here in Canada. The Israelite
Conquest narrative provides divergent readings vis a vis the role of violence
in place-making that can be used to imagine a Christian approach to
place-making that resists the place-eroding violence that has characterized
colonial modernity.
A Theologia
Crucis for Political Geography
At
the heart of the Christian confession is the political claim that “Jesus is
Lord.” The claim that “Jesus is Lord” has a very particular cruciform grammar
in Christian usage. We must always remember that it is “Jesus” that modifies
the meaning of the word “Lord.” Indeed, the so-called constantinian settlement
is perhaps best understood as the shift from a type of Christian grammar
wherein “Jesus” modified our conceptions of lordship to a grammar in which a
triumphalist conception of lordship begins to modify the meaning of “Jesus.” In
its cruciform usage, the claim that “Jesus is Lord” speaks to a political
geography that refuses the violent erasure of bodies in the establishment of
place. The glory of God is revealed in the visible, suffering body of Christ
which inspires the Christian refusal to torture and erase indigenous bodies
that have legitimate claim to a place in God’s good creation.
Violence and Mercy in the Construction
of Israelite Geography during the Conquest
If as I have suggested above, a
Christian theology of place should be cruciform in nature and thus refuse or at
least subvert the role of violence in the foundation of places, then we are
immediately confronted by the problem of the profligate violence of the Bible
and, in particular, the conquest narrative found in the book of Joshua.[3] Christians have long been
troubled by the violence of Joshua’s exploits, but I am not here going to
attempt to explain away all the troubles of this text. Instead, I will try to
draw out two strands of thinking within the book of Joshua regarding the
relationship of violence and place creation. The first strand I want to draw
out is the violent one, which I will refer to as Joshua Trajectory One, or JT1.
Time and again throughout the conquest narrative, places come into being or are
given new significance as places by the acts of violence committed there. But
there is another strand, what I will call Joshua Trajectory Two, or JT2, which
is less pronounced but no less important, that may offer us resources for
thinking about non-violent place-making in our post-colonial context.
The JT1 narrative begins at Gilgal. Gilgal
serves as the staging ground for the southern conquest. Gilgal’s narrative
significance is founded through the liturgical re-enactment of the divine violence
of the Exodus. Twelve stones are set up to mark the crossing of the Jordan at
Gilgal, simultaneously invoking the crossing of the Red Sea and the swallowing
up of Pharaoh’s armies beneath the deep. It is clear that the Canaanite nations
get the message of their impending doom for “their hearts melted, and there was
no longer any spirit in them, because of the Israelites” (Josh. 5.1b, NRSV).
Next, Joshua circumcises all Israel – again invoking the divine violence of the
Passover and the death of the first-born of Egypt. This ritual violence at
Gilgal gives rise to a new place name, Gibbeath-haaraloth,
literally “the hill of the foreksins.”
Having established the place from
which holy warfare will be conducted upon the land through acts of ritual
violence, and the invocation of the memory of divine violence in the Exodus,
the narrative turns its attention to the conquest of Jericho. Jericho is the
archetypal conquest in the JT1 narrative. As Daniel Hawk notes, the conquest of
Jericho invokes the divine violence of the Exodus in that “on a deeper level,
the ark initmates a symbolic association with the Jordan crossing [and thus the
Red Sea crossing]. Jericho’s walls, like the Jordan, represent a boundary which
will be dismantled in a spectacular manner.”[4] When Joshua defeats the
armies of the Five Kings in chapter 10 the conquest narrative reads like a series
of Russian nesting dolls. Each subsequent conquest bears the image of its
immediate predecessor, a rhetorical device that keeps the memory of the
archetypal Jericho narrative as the controlling image. We can see how the
memory of past violence not only legitimates, but provides the form for future
violence in these texts. This is not unlike the role memory plays in modern war
making – Canadian imperialism uses the formulae “Lest we forget” and “Je me
souviens” while our American collaborators favour the more active epitaph of
9/11, “Never forget.”[5]
Yet
it is precisely the archetypal conquest narrative of Jericho in which an
alternate vision of place-making begins to emerge, what I have called the JT2
narrative. The chilling instruction for the conquest was to “show them no
mercy” (Deut. 7.2). Yet Joshua spares Rahab and receives no divine sanction for
so doing. John Walton has recently argued that herem has been consistently misunderstood and mistranslated to give
us the impression that the kind of divine warfare that herem represents is the utter physical destruction of one’s
enemies. First he makes the typical move of pointing interpreters to other ANE
conquest accounts to show how violent hyperbole functions in this type of
literature as a matter of genre.[6] The hyperbolic
characteristic of this literature alone creates space for survivors of herem warfare, so the idea that Rahab
could be spared is not prima-facie
ruled out. Yet the way Rahab is shown mercy is a more substantial act of mercy
than the mere escaping of victims through the flames that the hyperbole defense
provides. Enter Walton’s proposed revision of the herem concept. Herem is a
species of the concept of holiness. In the Hebrew imagination, holiness has to
do with the setting apart of specific places, persons, or things for sacred
use. Herem is an intensified version
of this account of holiness that Walton argues, when applied to holy warfare,
is about the removing of “identities” from use. Thus herem need not necessarily refer exclusively to physical destruction
rather it should be understood as the effective destruction of Canaanite
identity.[7]
If we grant Walton’s notion of herem as identity destruction, then
perhaps we can understand the act of mercy granted to Rahab. She is spared, set
outside the Israelite camp for a period of purification, yet ultimately added
to the people of Israel. Her old identity as a Canaanite is relativized or
eliminated and she and her household are assimilated into the new Israelite
nation-state. Yet is this not just a refutation of physical genocide under the
cover of cultural genocide?[8] Perhaps, and we must take
seriously the fact that our own Christian history has been complicit in the
removal of indigenous identities from use – most acutely felt in our Canadian
context in the residential school system.[9] Yet the particular case of
Rahab resists being fully identified as a victim of cultural genocide, if only
partially. Rahab’s place in the larger canon of Scripture, and particularly as
she is remembered in the NT is one that preserves her identity as a woman in a
genealogy that almost exclusively names men (Matt. 1:5), and is held up as a
Gentile counterpoint to Abraham, thus preserving her status as a righteous
foreigner (James 2:23-25).
At Jericho we thus see a subtle new
trajectory for how we might invoke memory in place and identity formation. The
memory of violence and the threat of a future perpetration of violence loom
large at Jericho. Jericho is the moment where the divine violence of Exodus is
focused into the political violence of conquest. Jericho transforms the
archetypal story of Exodus into a military type that will be recapitulated on city
after city. Yet at the very bleakest moment of the transformation of divine
violence into the realm of the political, we find a profound act of mercy that
reverberates across the entire canon of Scripture. As I have tried to outline,
the sparing of Rahab is not unproblematic for modern sensibilities, but it
opens up a sense of contingency in the conquest narrative that invites us to
imagine alternatives to the supposed necessity of perpetual violence in place
making and maintenance.
The Modern Turn to Simple Space and the
“colonial moment”
In comparing the JT1 and JT2
narratives, we find that there are particular orientations to memory,
narrative, and time, that are determinative for the violent or non-violent
character of political place-making. In the JT1 account, the future
does not exist. The vision of conquest is always fixed on events of the past
which makes it impossible to make moral determinations regarding the
particulars of present conquests. Each kingdom falls in a glorious similitude to
the archetypal conquest of Jericho, which is itself a ritual invocation of the
divine warfare of YHWH against the Pharaoh and his minions. William Cavanaugh
has noted that the violence of modern nation states follows a similar tact –
constantly invoking the “myth of religious violence” in order to subdue the
alleged irrational violence of religious zealots and indigenous peoples with
the world-ordering violence of the secular state.[10] Daniel Hawk observes that
the violent conquest of Israel is a creation narrative that brings order and
rest to the land (Josh. 11:23).[11] According to Cavanaugh,
the “myth of religious violence” functions as a modern creation myth that
legitimates the secular violence that wipes away the irrational violence of
indigenous and religious forms of life.
In
modernity, it is secular violence that extends the sphere of enlightened
rationality to all those poor religious and indigenous peoples who insist on
holding onto identities that resist capitulation to the given identities of the
nation-state. This emergence of secular violence represented the collapse of
the complex space of the medieval period in which various guilds, aristocrats,
church institutions, etc. held overlapping jurisdictions that represented an
intensely variegated political geography. By recasting these other
stake-holders as irrational or illegitimate, the central state was able to
establish simple, homogenous geographies in which each subject related directly
to the sovereign in an identical way. In the idiom of the JT1 narrative, all
other identities are removed from use and each citizen of the modern state is
told to relate to one another on a universal scale.
This
exchange of place-based and local identities, for a homogenous and universal
one, is precisely where Willie James Jennings has identified the creation of the
category of race. The elimination of complex space quickly gives way to a
temporalizing of identity such that all human beings, rather than being
understood through place-bound identities are understood on a temporal scale of
race that places the most advanced, temporally, evolutionally,
civilizationally, on the white end of the scale and the most barbaric,
backward, irrational, and violent on the black end, with all the peoples of the
world placed somewhere along this scale.[12]
The separation of bodies from place
and land based identities served as the mechanism by which black and brown
bodies were enslaved and murdered while their lands were laid claim to by
Christian settlers. Just as we saw in the JT1 narrative, the memory of
archetypal violence such as the Exodus and the Jericho conquest blinds Israel
from being able to make particular judgments regarding the various nations they
conquer, each conquest is but a type of the glorious original. In the same way,
the modern imagination has been shaped by the myth that identities that are
bound up in the particular, religious, or indigenous, are inherently and
irrationally violent.
The
myth of religious violence serves as a creation myth for the modern age which
blinds us to the particular histories and material conditions that lead to
these occasional violent outbursts. Thus the same archetypal response of
secular state violence is brought to bear against dissidents to the new status
quo. We might think of the Oka crisis along these lines – to Canadian settler
society, the sudden resurgence of indigenous troops in war paint upon our
television screens was yet another example of the type of outburst that occurs
when the “natives get restless.”[13] In the end the Canadian
military was brought in to deal with it and the problem went away, or at least
dropped off our screens. Once the painted bodies of Mohawk braves had
disappeared from view again, settler society could comfortably go on; perhaps
wondering idly why “those people” do not just get jobs and accept the basic
commitments of Canadian citizens. This is but another way of asking why
indigenous people do not accept the homogenous identities that the supremacy of
the modern state graciously allows its citizens to bear. As long as indigenous
people continue to insist on their indigeneity, our settler state will continue
to follow its own regressive logic to occasionally inflict violence until their
unique identities are removed from use and they disappear into the Canadian
body politic.
The Eucharist and the Possibility of
Peaceful Place
The subject of the disappearance of
bodies for the sake of the body politic has been taken up in depth by Cavanaugh
in his celebrated book, Torture and
Eucharist.[14]
Yet, at the end of that book, he draws attention to the Eucharistic imagination
of the Chilean church that opened up spaces of resistance to state power in
which bodies could be allowed to continue existing visibly.[15] In my telling of the JT2
narrative, I have tried to show that right at the centre of the archetypal
conquest narrative, there is at least one body that a new space of grace is
created for – the body of the prostitute Rahab. Rahab, as an original
inhabitant of the land, is given space within the body politic of Israel that
allows her to at least partially preserve her identity publically. While not an
altogether unproblematic narrative, the JT2 trajectory at least opens up a
different role for memory to play in the creation of political geography.
Cavanaugh notes that in the early
years of the Pinochet regime, secular social organizations were illegal. But,
“Since the regime claiming to be the savior of Christian civilization could not
directly attack the church, the only alternative social space to remain open,
precariously at that, was under the church’s protection.”[16] The Catholic church
operated a Vicaria that served as cover for a large network of organizations
that worked to identify, document, and challenge the abuses of the regime. When
the regime disappeared bodies and asked the public to forget, the church sought
to remember these disappeared bodies, reframing victims as martyrs and giving
them a future in the body politic.[17] By naming the victims as
martyrs, the victims were spared the ignominy of being unidentified and
forgotten and were given an eschatological future that brought focus to the
present evils of the regime.
This practice of remembrance is
known as the act of anamnesis in the
Eucharistic life of the church. Contrary to the body-politic of the state, “the
true body of Christ is the suffering body, the destitute body, the body which
is tortured and sacrificed.”[18] As such, the body of
Christ makes space for all those who have been violently disappeared from our
political geographies. The church is an eschatological reality – it lives from
the future, “it is a thing that is not. The church inhabits a space and time
which is never guaranteed by coercion or institutional weight, but must be
constantly asked for, as gift of the Holy Spirit.”[19]
The church, as a place that is
received as a gift from the future, rather than a violent invocation of the
past, thus has no need to abolish the identities of those who gather around the
Eucharistic table to receive the gifts of God. Remember that the nations stream
to God’s holy mountain as the nations (Is. 2.2).[20] The practice of anamnesis in the Eucharist is not a use
of memory that obscures the present. In the re-presentation of the elements we
see the broken body of Jesus made visible again which thus opens up the gates
to the altar where all may receive this gift and have their own broken bodies
made publically visible again. Remembering Christ’s life, death, and
resurrection around the table gives us hope that even the most violently erased
bodies have a visible future guaranteed to them. The canon refuses to forget
the body of Rahab, even as so much of the former identity of the people of
Canaan is removed from use. In like manner, the church refuses to forget the
bodies of indigenous children whom we were complicit in erasing.
Conclusion
The Canadian church has been
complicit in the erasure of the bodies of indigenous children through our
participation in the residential school system. Whether we want to admit it or
not, it is part of our history and there is a reading of scripture, my JT1 trajectory,
which legitimates this tragic participation. But there are alternatives. The
trajectory I have named JT2, can be carried forward by way of Cavanaugh’s
account of the Eucharistic imagination as a way of imagining an approach to
place-making that opens up space for previously silenced and erased bodies.
Eucharistic anamnesis can provide an
eschatological future for the disappeared bodies of indigenous children who
were refused a present by the regressive imagination of state power. Moving
into a post-TRC Canada provides the church an opportunity to learn how to
remember correctly in order that we might provide a way to open up space in our
political geography for the bodies and place-based identities of our indigenous
brothers and sisters.
[1] Willie
James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race
(New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 2010), 64.
[2] John
Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Cambridge,
MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 268ff.
[3] A good place to begin to get
a sense of the scope of this problem are with these two books, C. S.
Cowles, ed., Show Them No Mercy: Four Views on God and Canaanite Genocide,
Counterpoints (Grand Rapids, Mich: Zondervan, 2003); Christian Hofreiter,
Making Sense of Old Testament Genocide: Christian Interpretations of Herem
Passages, Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs (New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 2018).
[5] There are other examples of
violence and place making can be observed throughout Joshua, such as the story
of the Valley of Achor in chapter 7.
[6] John
H. Walton, The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest: Covenant, Retribution,
and the Fate of the Canaanites (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, an
imprint of InterVarsity Press, 2017), 169.
[8] Raphael Lemkin was the first
modern theorist to articulate our contemporary understanding of genocide, and I
recognize that it is somewhat anachronistic to bring the moral freight of this
term into this text. Yet Lemkin is helpful in that, inspired by the atrocities
of history, was inspired to create a language for naming these particularly
vile parts of the human experience. Lemkin’s definition of genocide is quite
broad, and the UN would only go on to adopt parts of it, particularly
privileging his account of physical genocide. Yet Lemkin had an account of
cultural genocide that would be preserved in the UN declaration in the clause
regarding the systematic removal of children as this was seen as a systematic
removal of a peoples’ identity. Thus the residential school system is indeed an
act of genocide against indigenous peoples and the way in which the “redemptive”
stories of people like Rahab and the Gibeonites are told against this backdrop
must be thought through with care.
[9] “Indian Residential Schools date
back to the1870’s. The policy behind the government funded, church-run schools
attempted to “kill the Indian in the child”. Over 130 residential schools were
located across the country, with the last one closing in 1996,” from http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=39 accessed Oct. 15,
2019.
[10] William
T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots
of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), 210.
[12] The Spanish in particular, had
incredibly elaborate ways of placing every conceivable shade of person on this
scale, even accounting for the complexities of inter-racial marriages, see the
charts in Jennings,
The Christian Imagination, 36; 80.
[13] Cavanaugh makes a similar
argument regarding the Iranian revolution, see Cavanaugh,
The Myth of Religious Violence, 49.
[14] William
T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of
Christ, Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Oxford, UK Malden, Mass:
Blackwell Publishers, 1998).
[20] Interestingly in the opening
chapters of Deuteronomy, Moses notes that many of the territories of the
nations through which Israel wanders are guaranteed to them as their own unique
inheritance, and Israel is not to molest them.
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