306 Yair Zakovitch
and views. Has the world frozen? Has it ceased changing in the past two
thousand years? Have not whole realms of thought developed since the
Bible’s composition? Have contacts between the culture of Israel and other
world cultures not left their marks on our worldview? We live in a dynamic,
changing, developing world, and in the light of the transformations in it,
we fi nd ourselves reevaluating each day — indeed, every hour — our posi-
tions, beliefs, and values. It is unreasonable to expect that we would now
make our way by a torch lit on our path some three thousand years ago.
It is imperative for readers to recognize, therefore, that the Bible was not
written in order to express their values. We are neither the Bible’s censors
nor its spokespeople. Th e distance between the Bible and ourselves is vast;
if we want to understand what is written in it, we must not engage in apolo-
getics, nor must we ignore those parts that repulse us or try to manipulate
or interpret them in ways that do not do them justice. We must study the
Bible and try to appreciate it in the context of its time, against the back-
ground of the cultural life of its period and the abundance of worldviews it
expresses. Written over roughly a thousand years, the Bible does not refl ect
a monolithic ideology. Over the centuries of its composition, ideological
and philosophical changes left their marks. Even in any one generation, not
everybody shared a single worldview.
A mindfulness of the historical context in which Joshua was written will
explain to us why its writers adhered to ideas that awaken such opposition
in us today. Th e Bible was the manifesto of the monotheistic revolution,
which shook the most basic foundations of belief; it was a revolution that
required, fi rst of all, persuading the Israelites that they shared nothing with
the surrounding people, with the culture or religion of Canaan. It was pre-
cisely the close relations between Israel and Canaan — between their lan-
guage and ours, their literary patterns and ours, and, to a signifi cant extent,
also their religion and ours — that required a path that would set out a clear
boundary, a high wall between us and them. Th is, by the way, is the reason
why the law was given to Israel not when they already inhabited their land,
when they were in close proximity to the Canaanites, but rather in the wil-
derness, in a cultural vacuum with no other people around — all to teach
us that our laws are diff erent and our religion is diff erent from every other
people’s.15 It is the fear of idolatry that lies behind the idea of the herem
— total extermination — as it is described in Deuteronomy:
When the Lord God brings you to the land that you are about to enter
and possess, and He dislodges many nations before you . . . and you defeat