p. 118Ladies and Gentlemen,—
Among the many recorded incidents whose existence as records is evidence of their truth, and whose truth involves the truth of higher things, a distinct place must be given to the ruse of the Gibeonites by which they averted from themselves the destruction that overtook the seven nations of Canaan. When the facts are before you as related, I think you will agree that no motive of national self-satisfaction, or any other motive but the desire to place a fact on record, could be imagined to have been at work on the part of the first writer of them. They exhibit the princes of Israel in the light of men outwitted; Joshua as making a censurable mistake; and the congregation as in a state of murmuring discontent at not being allowed to lay hands on a cluster of cities originally included in the decree of extermination, but saved by a bit of sharp practice in which the Gibeonite ambassadors got the advantage of the wise men of Israel. p. 119 The commission under which Joshua and Israel invaded the land, doomed the seven nations of Canaan to destruction, and forbad Israel to enter into any treaty or make any terms with them. They were “utterly to destroy them,” man, woman, and child. They might enter into treaty with nations on the frontiers, not forming part of the seven doomed peoples; but as regards the seven nations, they were to “save nothing alive that breathed.” Among these were the Hivites, whose capital city was Gibeon, and who occupied the adjacent district and several smaller cities (Chephirah, Beeroth and Kirjath-jearim). Among them were evidently shrewd men. “When they heard what Joshua had done to Jericho and Ai, they did work wilily.” They got up a sham travelling company of ambassadors, provided with due accoutrement of worn-out shoes and faded garments, mouldy bread, and old and rent wine leathern bottles, as if they had come from a great distance, and been a long time on their journey. These they despatched to Joshua’s camp, with the pretence that they represented a far distant nation that had heard of the fame of Israel’s achievements, and were anxious to enter into treaty alliance with them. The pseudo-ambassadors were introduced to Joshua, who questioned them. They said, “From a very far country thy servants are come, because of the name of the Lord thy God: for we have heard the fame of him, and all that he did in Egypt. . . . Wherefore our elders and all the inhabitants of our country spake to us saying, Take victuals with you for the journey and go to meet them, and say unto them, we are your servants: therefore now make a league with us.”
Joshua seeing no reason to doubt the men’s word, and feeling at liberty under the permission they had p. 120 to make treaty with distant nations, “made peace with them, and made a league with them, to let them live: and the princes of the congregation, concurring with him, sware unto them.” It is noted as a fault of omission that “they asked not counsel at the mouth of the Lord.” In three days, it transpired that the men represented the Gibeonites, one of the doomed communities. There then arose an outcry among the people against Joshua and the princes. There were excited conferences over the matter. The princes recognized the fault that had been made, and were disposed to make it good as far as their plighted word allowed. They said to the congregation, “We have sworn unto them by the Lord God of Israel. Now, therefore we may not touch them. This will we do to them. . . . let them be hewers of wood and drawers of water unto all the congregation of Israel,” and Joshua called them, and said, “Wherefore have ye beguiled us?. . . . Now, therefore ye are cursed, and there shall none of you be freed from being bondmen and hewers of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God.” Accordingly in this drudgery were the Gibeonites ever afterwards employed, as the Nethinims (or servants) or burden-bearers of the temple service.
Ladies and Gentlemen,—Consider the matter. What could have brought this story into the account of Israel’s wars against Canaan except the fact of the incident having happened? Picture the man, sitting with his pen to parchment or papyrus who wrote this the first time. What could lead him to write it? Credit or vain-glory, pride of race or pride of country, might presumably invent an embellishing incident, as has often occurred in other histories; but what is there in this to make it an embellishing p. 121 incident? What is there in this Gibeonite incident to please the people or gratify the leaders? Would not human satisfaction have led rather to the suppression of a story that makes the natives get the better of renowned invaders, and brings the leaders into question for want of astuteness, and the people of Israel into a bootless anger against a small section of Canaanites, whom they are restrained from destroying—by what? By a covenant. Why should a covenant, extorted by false representations, have such binding force with men out of love of the covenant? Does not this shew the presence of law above them—not only above the people, but above the princes and above Joshua? Joshua and the princes had it in their power to put the arrangement aside if they were only making war on their own motion and by their own power. But they hold their hands in the presence of a covenant? This is intelligible with God in their midst, as Mosaically exhibited. If God was not so in their midst—if their whole movement was a human enterprise—if they were a law unto themselves, as modern criticism suggests,—here is a scrupulosity that cannot be accounted for on the part of men not only capable but anxious to imbrue their hands in the blood of the people in question.
It is recorded that Joshua and the princes “asked not counsel at the mouth of the Lord.” Here is a something they could have done—a something they were in the habit of doing with results of very express direction in previous cases of emergency (Num. xv. 32-36; Lev. xxiv. 12; Num. ix. 8-14), but a something they did not think it necessary to do in this case, because they imagined themselves quite capable of judging the case. What was this, Ladies and p. 122 Gentlemen? Consider it. It is all plain sailing if God brought Israel out of Egypt by His power, and tabernacled in their midst by the angel of His presence in the sanctuary, as alleged and illustrated to us throughout this entire narrative. But if this were not so, here is an ingredient in the narrative that you cannot put into a rational position: viz., that the leaders on this occasion stumbled and blundered because they did not do a thing which according to modern views it was not in their power to do. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bible is full of this peculiarity, that you cannot understand it unless you accept its own representation of how and why things happened.
And now, consider what is involved in the Gibeonite motive in this misadventure? Why were they so desperately anxious to steal a treaty from Israel by stealth? Their answer to Joshua’s interrogatory exhibits them to view as witnesses and contemporaries of the exodus in its Divine character. First of all, there is what they said when they arrived in camp: “We have heard of the fame of the Lord thy God and of all that he did in Egypt.” Then to Joshua they said, “It was certainly told thy servants how that the Lord thy God commanded his servant Moses to give you all the land and to destroy all the inhabitants of the land from before you. Therefore we were sore afraid of our lives because of you, and have done this thing” (Josh. ix. 9, 24). That the Gibeonites heard this report is proved by their action, which was according to nature: but how came they to hear such a report? Could such a report get abroad if there was no Moses and Israel at work in the wilderness, as a destroying storm approaching from Egypt? It is according to common experience of the working of things among men that such events p. 123 as characterized the departure of Israel from Egypt and their sojourn in the wilderness should be reported in neighbouring countries, especially the threatened countries: but that such rumours should arise without the actual contemporary presence of a God-directed Moses and a miraculously sustained Israel in the wilderness is inconceivable. The record of the Gibeonite incident, when worked out in all its logical issues, is a literary monument and memento of the fact that, forgotten though it be by the world at large, God brought Israel out of Egypt and into Canaan by His power: that the Bible is true, and that therefore the days will come when His work with them will be resumed, and when “the nations shall again see and be confounded at all their might . . . . . and shall move out of their holes like worms of the earth, and shall be afraid of the Lord our God, and shall fear because of thee” (Micah vii. 18).