From that wilderness they went on to Mattanah, and from Mattanah to Nahaliel, and from Nahaliel to Bamoth, and from Bamoth to the valley lying in the region of Moab by the top of Pisgah which looks down upon the desert.
WHILE THEY WERE HERE, at the edge of the desert of Kedemoth, Moses sent messengers to Sihon, the king of the Amorites, asking permission to pass through his territory. The Amorites dwelt east of the Jordan River, from the Jabbok on their northern border to the Arnon, which flowed into the Dead Sea on the south.
“We will go by the king’s highway,” Moses said. “We will neither turn into your fields nor drink the water of a single well.”
But Sihon refused the request.
Moreover, when he had sent spies to estimate the strength of the people of Israel, he began to fear them. They were too many and too near. Quickly, then, he mounted an army and rode toward this threat in the desert.
Israel, likewise, gathered together an army of fighting men and went westward toward Sihon.
The armies met near Jahaz. In sunlight they fought a dusty, bloody battle, and by nightfall the hosts of Israel had slain Sihon with the edge of the sword.
Thus, the children of Israel took possession of all the lands of the Amorites. And Moses settled some of the people as governors in Heshbon, the city from which King Sihon had ruled.
NEXT ISRAEL TURNED north and went up the road to Bashan.
When Og, the king of Bashan, heard of their coming, he gathered forces from everywhere within the kingdom of Bashan. He armed them and marched south to meet the people of Israel.
Now, Og ruled all the land north of the Jabbok as far as Mount Hermon, sixty cities fortified with high walls, gates, and bars. He was a mighty enemy.
It became clear to Moses that he would have to meet the armies of Og on the fields near Edrei, north of Ramoth Gilead.
During the night before the battle—when the men of Israel sat silently, hearing the enemy eating and singing and shouting taunts across the way—the Lord said to Moses, Do not fear them. I have given Og into your hand, him and all his people, all his cities, all his land. You shall do to him as you did to Sihon the king of the Amorites, who dwelt in Heshbon.
And so it was:
By noon of the following day, Israel had beaten Og so completely that no survivor was left, none to carry the sad news back to the cities, no messenger at all—until the children of Israel themselves arrived to take possession of that city.
So Israel also controlled the entire tableland of Gilead and Bashan, all the territory east of the Jordan.
FINALLY, THEN, FORTY YEARS after they had set out from Egypt as a people redeemed by the Lord their God, the children of Israel encamped in the plains of Moab between Beth Jeshimoth and Abel Shittim, on the eastern side of the Jordan, across the river from Jericho.
V
MOSES HAD BEEN eighty years old when he led the hosts of Israel out of Egypt. He was a hundred and twenty when finally the Lord allowed Israel to stand again at the borders of Canaan—here on the shores of the Jordan. And though his strength had not abated in all those years, it had come time now for Moses to die.
He would not enter the land with his people.
ON THE FIRST DAY of the eleventh month of the fortieth year since Israel left Egypt, Moses called the entire congregation together, and when they stood in a vast circle around the Tabernacle he lifted up his voice and spoke to them:
“The Lord your God is determined now to keep his promise and to lead you into the land of Canaan, even as he led your parents with signs and wonders out of Egypt.”
The fierce eye of this old man shot left and right among the people. He was looking for someone. His hair was as white as the snows on Mount Hermon, his cheeks creased like the cataracts that ran down Hermon toward the Jordan. Suddenly, he pointed.
“Joshua, son of Nun!” he cried. A small, studious man glanced up, then glanced around himself as if embarrassed to be singled out.
“Joshua, you were faithful,” Moses cried. “You and Caleb the son of Jephunneh—you two alone trusted the Lord to lead us into Canaan when the rest of Israel whimpered. The Lord therefore has chosen you to lead this people over Jordan into the land.
“As for you!” Moses swept his eyes across the entire assembly, a magnificent nation, young and strong and bright-eyed, not a slavish soul among them, not a face over fifty. “As for you, never forget the lessons of the wilderness. When you beget children and grandchildren; when you have grown old in the land, remember still to seek the Lord your God. If you search with all your heart, you will find him.
“For ask now of time past, since God created people to walk on earth, ask from one end of heaven to the other whether such a thing as this has ever happened. Did any people ever hear the voice of God speaking out of fire, as you have heard, and live? Or has any god ever attempted to take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs, by wonders and by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, by terrors, great terrors, according to all that the Lord your God accomplished for you in Egypt? To you it was shown. To you, that you might know that the Lord is God! There is no other besides him. Because he loved your ancestors and chose their descendants, he brought you out of Egypt with his own presence.
“And he made a covenant with you at his holy mountain! Not just with your parents, but with you, all of you alive and here today. He said, I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage: you shall have no other gods besides me—
“Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God is one Lord! And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And all the words which I have taught you of the commandments of God, his statutes and his ordinances, shall be upon your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.”
Moses fell silent. No one moved. His eyes wandered away from the people toward some region none of them could see. He seemed to depart from them a while; yet no one grew restless, and no one moved.
This old man had been alive as long as anyone could remember: leading them, angry, aloof, willful, right—always right, yet ever faithful—and sometimes kind. When one caught him gazing upon the people in the evening, there appeared in his eyes a dreaming gentleness. A kindness.
Softly, now, Moses said: “For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. For the Lord chose you out of all the peoples on earth to be his own possession.”
His eye sharpened: “It was not because you were many or mighty or righteous that he chose you. You have been a monumentally stubborn people. But it is because the Lord loves you. He is keeping the oath which he swore to your parents.
“Tomorrow, Israel, you will pass over the Jordan to dispossess nations greater and mightier than yourselves. But the Lord your God goes before you like a devouring fire. He will fight on your side. He will subdue these nations for you.
“And now, what does the Lord require of you but to fear him, to walk in his ways, to love him, to serve him with all your heart? Circumcise the foreskin of your heart. Be no longer stubborn. For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, mighty, terrible God, who executes justice and loves the sojourner and feeds the hungry and covers the naked.
“Love the sojourner likewise,” said Moses, and he paused, gazing at the people.
“Cleave to the Lord,” he said.
“He is your praise.
“He is your God.”
Moses was almost whispering. Most of Israel could no longer hear him. But they knew what he was saying. He had said it often before. They loved the words. Already they recited them to their children: Your ancestors went down to Egypt seventy persons; and now the Lord has made you as the stars of heaven for multitude…
As the stars of heaven for multitude.
As the stars of heaven.
THAT A
FTERNOON MOSES walked alone to Mount Nebo, some distance east of the encampment. His stride was cautious and short. He leaned heavily on his rod. But by evening he had climbed the mountain and was standing on a high ridge, gazing westward into a vermilion sun.
The Lord said, Moses, look. Look: this is the land I swore to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, to give it to their descendants. Look, Moses. Can you see?
The old man squinted against the bloody sunlight. Yes, he could see. In a mystery, he saw the entire territory from Dan in the north even unto Zoar in the south.
Yes. Yes, he could see.
So MOSES, ONE HUNDRED and twenty years old—though his eye was not dim nor his natural force abated—died on Mount Nebo.
The Lord gathered up the body of his servant, and God himself buried him, and no one knows the place where he was buried, even to this day.
There has never since arisen in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord knew face-to-face.
PART THREE
The Wars of the Lord
EIGHT
Joshua
I
THE KINGS IN CANAAN ruled small cities set on hills, five to ten acres crowded with buildings and surrounded by a wider skirt of farmland and fields outside the wall. They ruled a population that lived in the second stories of well-built houses, a people that drove its livestock inside the wall every night, into the ground level of their own houses.
Twice annually the Canaanite kings petitioned their gods for rich crops. It was the necessary ceremony of a sedentary race: if one could not go forth to find goodness, goodness must be coaxed home. Of Ba’al, the god of the thunderclouds, the kings prayed rain; of Astarte, his consort, they pleaded fertility and a fruitful harvest.
But in the spring of a particularly wonderful abundance—precisely at the harvest when northern rains and the melting snows had swelled the river Jordan to an impassable flood—the king of Jericho was praying a different prayer. One of desperation.
“O thou who mountest the clouds,” he cried. “O great Storm-god, Ba’al!”
He had been watching a new people massed on the eastern shores of the Jordan, a desert-hardened lot who, like locusts, seemed capable of eating the countryside. Already they had devoured the kings of the Amorites and the Moabites.
The king of Jericho had considered his city protected by the river. There simply were no fords in the Jordan at full flood. But this morning his outposts brought word that this people had crossed anyway. Suddenly they were at Gilgal on the west side, building altars. Men and women and children. All of them!
“O great Storm-god, Ba’al, stride the skyways, shake your spear of thunderbolt—and fight for us! Save us from this wild, dry, and swarming plague of the desert!”
II
JOSHUA THE SON OF NUN was picking his way through the darkness toward the city of Jericho. Step, step, he went by slow steps. He was a nearsighted man. He peered intently at things in order to choose where to set his foot.
But the night was dark by design. Joshua had chosen a moonless night because he planned to steal right up to the city walls and touch them.
Jericho had to be defeated first if Israel would enter Canaan to dwell there. In fact, Joshua was not going there for information. He had already dispatched two spies into the city. Their report had been remarkably accurate because a prostitute named Rahab had given them room and protection. A canny choice, they had laughed at their return. A whore’s not likely to ask questions, right?—but no one’s able to answer them better than her.
No, he needn’t spy. Joshua was making his solitary way to Jericho in order to touch its spirit and assess its strength before the children of Israel began to take the land their God had promised to their ancestors.
It was in this land that the Lord God had required of Abraham that he circumcise the males of his household, in this land that God attached promises to that sign of the covenant. And now Israel was about to receive more than words and more than signs; Israel was about to receive the soil itself!
Therefore, as soon as Israel had crossed the Jordan, Joshua, too, had required every male born in the wilderness to be circumcised in accordance with the covenant. They used flint knives, the same as Abraham had in the beginning.
Next he ordered the people to keep the Passover, and so they did on the fourteenth day of the month. On the fifteenth, Israel ate of the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain—and on that day manna ceased falling forever.
There! Close before him Joshua saw the huge black shadow of Jericho, its wall a high, wide absence of stars. Joshua the son of Nun paused. O Israel, how will you breach such stone?
But Israel had crossed the Red Sea dry-shod.
And Israel had again, in these latter days, crossed also the Jordan River on a dry bed because the Lord had blocked its waters in the north and all the water south had drained away.
Why should not Israel cross this hard wall, too?
Then step, step: Joshua resumed his slow progress toward the wall, staring straight ahead, straining his poor eyes, raising his hands, preparing to touch the stones of the powers of Canaan.
Suddenly Joshua saw with terrible clarity a man standing with a drawn sword before him.
Joshua dropped his arms and gaped a moment. Then he whispered, “Are you for us—or for our adversaries?”
The man with the sword said, “No, but as commander of the armies of the Lord have I come.”
Immediately Joshua fell facedown on the earth and worshiped.
He said, “What does my lord bid his servant?”
The commander of the Lord’s armies said, “Put off your shoes from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy.”
Joshua did so.
And then it was that Joshua the son of Nun, the leader of the forces of Israel after Moses, learned how the stones of the walls of Jericho might be breached.
III
THE KING OF JERICHO had shut the gates of his city and barred them with timber. Citizens, farmers, soldiers, all were inside. Sheep and goats and cattle; mattocks, rakes, and weapons—everything the city owned had been gathered in. The spring that watered Jericho, the best such spring in all of Canaan, ran bright and unabated. Moreover, the greatest part of an excellent barley harvest had already been stored. Not only were the new stone granaries full, but food had overflowed as well into the ancient underground silos of the first farmers of Jericho.
Jericho was ready for the longest siege. Jericho would endure.
In the middle of the night the king of Jericho climbed his wall in order to inspect its readiness for a direct attack.
There were jars of oil arranged at intervals along the top. And sluices cut through the stone. The king put his finger in these. There were smoking smudge-pots ready to ignite the oil for a rain of fire. And short arrows, the sharp bronze bolts of Jericho, bristled in the narrow stone cavities. Spears stood at the corners for men whose arms were mighty, whose eyes were accurate. And loose stones were piled here and there for the older men and the angry women to push upon the heads of Israelites who came too near with ladders.
The king inspected everything personally. Yes: whether for siege or for assault, Jericho was ready.
And the wall he stood upon was doubled. Two walls, one inside the other, connected by intermediate stone and a strong lattice of timber. Previous regencies had permitted the building of rooms between the walls. The poorest people lived there. Outcasts and whores. And stores were kept in the spaces. And though the stones had only been hammer-trimmed and laid in clay mortar, this king had himself commanded the outside wall to be coated with a thick yellow plaster up to fifteen feet high. That was his own contribution. It would require ladders to climb the wall these days. Yes: Jericho was ready.
But the king paced his wall the whole night through and prayed:
Asherah, consort of El, mother of seventy gods and of Ba’al—
He was restless. He had heard rumors regarding the might and the fury of this desert bree
d, this flinty nation come from Egypt. They worshiped a mountain God.
—O Asherah, beg the bloodiest of your children to protect us from the deity that can dry the sea for the feet of its people!
There was a moment that night when the king thought he heard the gentlest of murmurings outside the wall, almost womanly in solicitude. But it was a quick word as quickly gone, and he was left with a deeper sense of loneliness—as though Asherah had stolen away to love another better than he.
AT DAWN, AS THE SKY began to gather a grey light, the king could see the forms of his watchmen standing at the corners and in the towers by the gate. People stirred in the city. Smells of old sleep arose. A few sticks crackled into flames.
Families began muffled conversations.
The king had just decided to descend and wash himself, when a distant sound arrested him. It came from the northeast, almost inaudible, a soft rhythmic beating. But the guards were not reacting. Perhaps there was no sound after all. Yet he seemed to feel a vast pulsing in the earth and in his bones.
There!
“Guards!” cried the king of Jericho. “Captains!” he roared down to the city. “Rouse your warriors! Archers, get up! Get up! Get ready!”
There was motion at the northeast horizon. A dusty motion, like a cloud billowing up from the distant earth.
Now Jericho broke into a hectic activity. The wall sprouted warriors, rushing to their posts and their weapons.
The eastern sky streaked red. An angry boil burst at the horizon, and that northeastern cloud caught fire of the sun.
It was the armies of Israel! The entire force of the nation was marching hither in perfect order. No one hurried. All came in a wide file, a very long line.
Jericho watched. Jericho fell into a waiting silence. Jericho crouched on the wall and watched.
The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel Page 15