Today’s biblical contradiction is a timely warning about not paying attention to your own propaganda. It is also a reminder of the danger of totalizing statements. The question today is, when did the ancient Israelites think they had conquered Jerusalem?
Biblical scholars will often tell you that the book of Joshua tells the story of the complete subjugation of the land from south to north in one campaign, while the book of Judges indicates that the conquest was piecemeal and took place over an extended time. This is not correct. The idea that the conquest was total and immediate is certainly found in Joshua, but so is the idea that it took much longer. The book of Judges (as well as 1 and 2 Samuel) just adds further wrinkles.
This story starts in Joshua 10. The Israelites have conquered Jericho (in the Jordan valley) and Ai (in the central highlands), completely destroying them and murdering the inhabitants. The Canaanite people of Gibeon (also in the central highlands) have tricked the Israelites into making peace with them, at the cost of becoming slave labor. The king of Jerusalem, Adonizedek, mobilizes other kings of the southern highlands to attack Joshua and the Israelites, and that goes about as well as you’d expect.
Five cities are explicitly described as being completely annihilated: Makkedah, Libnah, Lachish, Eglon and Debir. But of one city, Gezer, it is only said that their army is destroyed (Josh. 10:33), and of Jerusalem itself, there is not a word in the rest of the account of the southern campaign. Were those cities also destroyed, implicitly?
That is the conclusion urged by the summary at the end of the chapter:
40 So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings; he left no one remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded. 41And Joshua defeated them from Kadesh-barnea to Gaza, and all the country of Goshen, as far as Gibeon. 42Joshua took all these kings and their land at one time, because the Lord God of Israel fought for Israel. (Josh. 10:40-43; all translations here NRSV)
And this isn’t the only totalizing statement in this part of the book:
16 So Joshua took all that land: the hill country and all the Negeb and all the land of Goshen and the lowland and the Arabah and the hill country of Israel and its lowland, 17from Mount Halak, which rises towards Seir, as far as Baal-gad in the valley of Lebanon below Mount Hermon. He took all their kings, struck them down, and put them to death. 18Joshua made war a long time with all those kings. 19There was not a town that made peace with the Israelites, except the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon; all were taken in battle. 20For it was the Lord’s doing to harden their hearts so that they would come against Israel in battle, in order that they might be utterly destroyed, and might receive no mercy, but be exterminated, just as the Lord had commanded Moses. (Josh. 11:16-20)
This summary passage knows about the sparing of the Gibeonites, but that is the only exception according to this text. The implication is clear: Gezer and Jerusalem must have been destroyed.
Except that it isn’t so. In chapters 15 and 16, which describe the territories of the tribes of Judah and Joseph (the latter comprising Manasseh and Ephraim), Gezer and Jerusalem’s inhabitants have survived. Gezer is conquered but not annihilated (Josh. 16:10), while Jerusalem’s Canaanite population remains in an uncertain state (Josh. 15:63: “the Jebusites dwell with the children of Judah at Jerusalem unto this day”). Do the Jebusites live in a free Jebusite city, alongside Judahite territory, or do both peoples live side by side in the city? Whatever the answer, whoever wrote chapters 15 and 16 clearly paid closer attention to chapter 10 than our totalizing author(s) did. As I said, the idea that Canaanites survived the conquest is already in the book of Joshua.
Further totalizing statements in Joshua follow, which could clear up the status of Jerusalem. At the end of the tribal allotment of the land, the narrator sums up the story so far.
43 Thus the Lord gave to Israel all the land that he swore to their ancestors that he would give them; and having taken possession of it, they settled there. 44And the Lord gave them rest on every side just as he had sworn to their ancestors; not one of all their enemies had withstood them, for the Lord had given all their enemies into their hands. 45Not one of all the good promises that the Lord had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass. (Josh. 21:43-45)
These statements would not be true if Jerusalem has not been at least subjugated, and would certainly be falsified if the city remains Canaanite and free.
This is where the book of Judges comes in to make everything even more confused. Chapter 1 of Judges lists all the Canaanites left in the land, and includes two notices about Jerusalem. They do not help matters at all.
Then the people of Judah fought against Jerusalem and took it. They put it to the sword and set the city on fire. (Judges 1:8)
But the Benjaminites did not drive out the Jebusites who lived in Jerusalem; so the Jebusites have lived in Jerusalem among the Benjaminites to this day. (Judges 1:21)
These two passages describe two different campaigns against Jerusalem, and must be in addition to the campaign waged by the tribe of Judah at Joshua 15:63. The three campaigns also have completely different results. The successful campaign by Judah in Judges 1:8 must follow the unsuccessful one in Joshua. But to avoid contradiction with Judges 1:21, you would have to say that, somewhere in the 12 verses between these two notices, there must be an implicit resettlement of Jerusalem by the Jebusites so that the Benjaminites could fail to drive them out again. Where did these Jebusites come from, after the defeat in Judges 1:8? After all, one who has read Joshua knows what happens after a city is set on fire: complete annihilation.
So is Jerusalem conquered or not? The contradictions continue. In the hideous story of the Levite’s concubine, the Levite refuses to stay in Jerusalem because it’s entirely inhabited by Jebusites (Judges 19:11-12). So it is not conquered.
But in the fairy-tale (and composite) story of Goliath, David puts the giant’s head in Jerusalem (1 Sam. 17:54). So it is conquered.
But in the story of David’s early days as king, he captures Jerusalem (2 Sam. 5:6-9). So it wasn’t conquered before, but it is conquered now. From here, at last, Jerusalem’s status is settled, at least in terms of the biblical narrative. But it was a long and winding road, involving multiple authors, multiple lines of tradition, and very different views of the past.
Thankfully, there’s no reason to take any of these accounts as accurately reflecting what happened in the early Iron Age Levant. However, it is clear certain authors/editors were more careful than others. The exultant propaganda of the later editor(s) of Joshua made the situation much muddier. “All?” “Not one?” Even when you have complete control of the narrative, it’s hard to make totalizing statements cause anything but trouble. Similarly, the editor of Judges 1 has produced a very clumsy account that generates only confusion.
Yet the conscientious writer who connected Joshua 10 with Joshua 15 and 16 was a propagandist too. At this distance, it is impossible to say whether this writer had some sources that they treated with great deliberation, or were as much a fabulist as the totalizing author(s). If all the authors of Joshua, Judges and Samuel had ever met, they might have had a fistfight in the street over who was right, but they agreed on one thing: the only good Canaanite was a dead Canaanite. People who build their ideologies today by substituting some other group for “Canaanite” and some other place for “Canaan” build a lethally stark politics on a farrago of contradictions. The mad brute that needs to be destroyed is not some enemy, but propaganda itself, whether it be bluntly totalizing or diabolically careful.
Stewart Moore: Stories 
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