So this past weekend at the Central Texas Colloquium on Religion I presented a paper titled “Conquest, Empire, and Irony in the Biblical Text.” The paper is an exploration of how our understanding of the narrative of the conquest of Canaan changes if we read it through an ironic lens. A number of people expressed interest in the topic, so I’ve posted the paper as a Google doc – it can be found here.
The common interpretation of the conquest, especially the book of Joshua has always troubled me. In the way it is commonly interpreted and taught in Sunday schools it portrays God as an oppressive and violent God commanding genocide. It is a text that has been used to justify acts of colonization and violence done by supposed Christians for centuries. It was used to justify the colonization and enslavement of Africans, the genocide of the First Nations peoples in the Americas, and as the picture here shows (thanks Brandon Frick for sending me this) the ongoing violence in the Middle East. As I see it biblical interpretation and theology must always be practical. If those interpretations lead to practice that undermines other aspects of the texts, there the most obvious conclusion is that the interpretation must be wrong. Yet Joshua is always a difficult text. In a heated discussion about the conquest narrative at the 2010 Emergent Theological Conversation as the evil ways the texts has been used were offered by some as reason to be suspicious of scripture, Colin Greene asked as an aside “what if the text is read ironically?” The question wasn’t explored there, but it captured by attention and led to this paper. I in no way claim to have resolved the issues in the text, but merely am proposing an alternative way of reading the text that helps resolve some of its inconsistencies and problems.
So if anyone is interested in reading something a lot longer than a typical blogpost, feel free to read the paper and contribute to the discussion.