The Strong Sense in which Joshua-Judges is Historiography

Notre Dame’s Center for the Philosophy of Religion is to be warmly thanked for making a blockbuster symposium available online, entitled “My Ways are Not Your Ways: The Character of God in the Hebrew Bible” (HT: John Anderson). So far I’ve listened to the presentation by Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff on Reading Joshua, the reply by atheist philosopher Louise Antony,¹ and the Q & A that followed. The exchange helped me see the following two issues more clearly than before.

Jeremy Curley notes in the Q & A that we don’t normally recount the Puritans’ escape from persecution and establishment of a “city set on a hill” in the New World by following it up with an account of how the Puritans in turn persecuted the Quakers. My immediate thought was: Yes, we do, if we are writing historiography in a strong sense. Any decent history of colonial America is going to include accounts of both, with the inevitable dissonance that results. This points back to Wolterstorff’s thesis, that the hagiographic sections of the book of Joshua were consciously juxtaposed by the author/redactor to the “down-to-earth” sections of the same book and of Judges 1. According to W the juxtaposition is not mindless but indicative of the felt sense that the hagiographic accounts are to be read in light of the “down-to-earth” accounts. If this is the case – and I think it is – Joshua-Judges and especially, the Primary History taken as a whole, is historiography in the strong sense.

If this is the case, furthermore, Louise Antony’s denial of the ethical correctness of the hagiographic genre – “hysterical” is her tongue-in-cheek characterization of her position – turns out to be in sync with the biblical ethos. It is not the biblical narrative which gives us the hagiographic sections of the book of Joshua without non-hagiographic context. It is post-biblical interpreters who abstract and pervert content by so doing.

On the other hand, I am in complete disagreement with Antony with respect to her apparent claim that there is never a place for one-sided hagiographic narrative. My daughter Anna, all of 6 years old, recently spent many hours visiting the Martin Luther King Jr. attractions in Atlanta. Anna was extremely attentive. Her mother explained everything in Italian in great detail. But Paola left out the part about MLK being a womanizer who deeply disrespected his wife Coretta Scott in coincidence with his greatest rhetorical exploits, and how Coretta remained faithful to her faithless husband.

There is a time and place for everything. For hagiography, and hagiography contextualized. For peace, and for war, and the killing of innocent people that ensues. Indeed, there is a time to take sides, and a time not to take sides. It would seem as if Antony’s “perfect piety” disallows such complexity – my guess: only in principle, the better to eat theists alive – not in practice.

That said, I am not convinced that Wolterstorff solves the theological problems the book of Joshua entails. As far as I can see, the divine command to exterminate the autochthonous inhabitants of Canaan in Deut 20:15-18 was meant to be read as a description of what the Israelites should have done, but did not do. It is no different in 1 Samuel, vis-à-vis Amalek. But in the latter case, the narrative ups the ante, because, through Samuel, fulfillment of the command is achieved. Nonetheless, the descent of the people into historical disaster is not thereby averted. The people continue to lose their way, religiously speaking, nor is it given even temporary respite from lethal struggles with external enemies. All of this conforms with history in the most literal of senses. A world ordered in this way has to be judged a failure, unless it can be judged in light of what it has not yet become. In the midterm, that would require, within the range of realistic possibilities, an aftermath of what clinical psychologists call “post-traumatic” or “adversarial” growth (on this concept, check out Eleanor Stump here). Of course, this is exactly the sense in which Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel understood the exile. In the long term, such a world literally cries out to be replaced by a new heavens and a new earth of the sort an apocalypse like that of John describes. At the center of that description, the one who will wipe away every tear, is a “slain lamb” who alone is fit or worthy to do so.

¹ Antony’s Love of Reason, published in her edited volume, Philosphers without Gods, is a disarming description of her intellectual journey; I can’t wait to read her “Atheism as Perfect Piety,” forthcoming in God and Ethics, ed. by Robert K. Garcia and Nathan L. King.

Comments

[Ranger]

I've read some of Antony's stuff before, and read the book you cite in the footnote. I've also heard her lecture. She's really interesting. I don't have time to reread her "testimony" right now, but if I remember there are points where she comes across as almost angry that she lost her faith, and definitely angry at the authority figures in her life (parents and priests) for allowing it to happen.

You can still hear some of that tension in her lectures. I'm fairly confident (though could be wrong) that she's a Platonist, holds to objective morality and is even anti-abortion. I'd love to hear her interaction with Wolterstorff (who I love), but since yesterday I've been trying to get the lectures to work and haven't been able to do so...I'm also really interested in Gary Anderson, John Hare and Chris Seitz.

[JohnFH]

Antony is a Platonist, so far as I can tell. An atheist who is also an idealist is an interesting combination. Objective morality is guaranteed to be objective . . . on faith, so far as I can see.

Wolterstorff does a fine job. He even explains infallibility and inerrancy to the crowd. That was a nice extra to throw in. Great for the Catholics, who are supposed to believe in inerrancy - the Magisterium is clear on the point - but often don't know how to go about in a responsible manner from the intellectual point of view.