RT Article
T1 Narrative Disjunction, Artful Occlusion, and Cryptic Commentary in Joshua 1–12
JF Religions
VO 15
IS 4
A1 Baker, Robin
LA English
PB MDPI
YR 2024
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1884161502
AB The book of Joshua is a book-length crux interpretum. Its cultivation of two concurrent narratives that contradict one another has fascinated commentators since antiquity. This is only one of its hermeneutically challenging features. Most modern commentaries attribute these features to an uneven process of redaction. Focusing on chapters 1–12, this essay argues that incongruity, ambiguity, and disjunction are essential elements of a rhetorical strategy in which form and content are imaginatively correlated, and that the text contains many cryptic clues that are necessary to elucidate its meaning. It contends that Joshua is the product of a bold literary innovation that is motivated by a sustained and uncompromising determination to unsettle facile assumptions about YHWH and Israel’s history. It concludes that the book challenges us to re-evaluate not only the answers we thought it gave, but even the questions we ask of it.
K1 Eden
K1 Peor
K1 Gibeonites
K1 Achan
K1 Rahab
K1 form follows content
K1 reverse writing
K1 anagram
K1 Wordplay
DO 10.3390/rel15040388