Parshat Shlakh

Daniel W - June 20, 2025

Stories
- 12 Spies
  - They're in the desert after Sinai - God tells Moses to pick 12 spies, they go into the land - they come back saying it's a land of milk and honey with big scary giants - everyone freaks out but Caleb and Joshua - God says you will wander in the desert for 40 more years, only Caleb and Joshua enter the land - the other spies die of plague
  - The weeping of the Israelites is, traditionally, the reason for Tisha B'Av
- Also there's tzitzit
- Rahab
  - Joshua sends two spies into Jericho - Rahab hides them, let them escape - Rahab demands protection for her family/clan, and is rewarded with it for assisting in the destruction of Jericho - later on, the Israelites will exterminate all the human beings and livestock in the city
  - She's seen as a worthy convert, some rabbis attest she marries Joshua
Joshua and Zionism
- Joshua was unpopular for years, especially after the Christians took him up
- Rachel Havrelock, The Joshua Generation
  - Occupation (kibbush), settlements in the West Bank (hitnahalut), border (gevul), Zionist pioneers (Halutzim, the name for the infantry in Joshua 4:13)
  - According to Ben-Gurion, Jews could not correctly interpret Joshua before the rise of the State of Israel.
  - Ben-Gurion has a study group in his home in 1958, which is publicized
  - Yigael Yadin claims archaeological proof that the war was in 1200-1250 BCE and created a pure monotheistic society formed by the descendants of liberated slaves.
  - the book of Joshua supports militarization of the settlement process by way of verses that castigate tribes for their failure to annihilate their neighbors
  - Names for settlements come from Joshua as well, Ofra (1975) and Mitzpeh Yericho (1977) which both boldly claim themselves as biblically predestined, on the same land, and to be the flagships of a movement
  - 1993, Moshe Levinger's Ichud Rabbanim group respond to Oslo: Insisting with Joshua locution that "all" the land belongs to "the entire" Jewish people across all time, the ruling invalidated Israeli elections and rejected the authority of state representatives
  - Evangelical protestantism as Jewish interpretation of Joshua
What should we do with Joshua?
- Rejection
  - S. Yizhar: The horrific descriptions in the book of Joshua, where one inherits, dispossesses, and annihilates a people, and calls it a "settlement." How does one people have the right to dispossess another people and inherit its land?... This is the extreme of radical fanaticism that has been known throughout history... This is why, with all my might, I rise up in revolt against Joshua
    - Suggestion that Israel is no different from any other conqueror of the land
- Historical interpretation?
  - The book says it itself, kind of: No amount of violence can render Jerusalem homogeneous
  - Canaanites, Jebusites and everyone else were not likely ethnically or racially different from the tribes of Israel
  - I conclude, along with archaeologists, that the nation of Israel did not emerge during the escape from Egypt and migration to a lost homeland, but instead was consolidated when regional groups supported a national army intended to resist imperial military threats
  - Genetic studies connecting people in contemporary Lebanon with skeletons found in Sidon, calling them "Canaanites," though of course they could be Phoenician or Israelite - or those Danites that kept moving around, maybe
- Religious interpretation
  - Robert Allen Warrior, of the Osage Nation of American Indians, "read Exodus with Canaanite eyes" (209)
What should we do with Rahab?
- Not do: Rabbi Halpern for Jewish Journal
- the household maintained several alliances and was open to multiple partners.
- The homeland begins in a woman's home. - Rahab exerts her autonomy in order to preserve the social unit of utmost importance. In this way, Rahab's household becomes a locus of power in the land, and the nation of Israel begins in the house of Canaan