Screen Shot 2017-04-29 at 8.25.40 PMBack in February of 2010, while reading Eric Siebert's book entitled Disturbing Divine Behavior, I engaged in a stimulating e-exchange with two friends (Brian Zahnd and Brian Schmidt) about the implications of a Christocentric reading of the conquest / genocide narratives in the Book of Joshua (I now prefer the terms "Christotelic" a la Peter Enns or "Cruciform" which I first heard through Zahnd). We were challenged to pursue a high view of Scripture that takes seriously the Bible's invitation to and modeling of what Derek Flood would later describe as "faithful questioning" of the text (in his excellent book, Disarming Scripture). 

During that discussion, I claimed such faithful questioning did not begin with Christ and the New Testament authors who question Old Testament reports of divinely-sanctioned violence. In truth, we see the practice already at work in the Old Testament … and not only when the Prophets question the Law (Jeremiah 7:21-23) or when the Chronicler contradicts earlier interpretations of David's life (compare 2 Samuel 24 with1 Chron. 21). Such faithful questioning of the Joshua conquest already occurs right within the book of Joshua. 
 
OT scholar, Matthew Lynch, would confirm this for us in a video interview with CWR here: https://vimeo.com/101826159. He followed that up with a fine series of articles that begins HERE.
 
At the time, I identified two competing voices at work within Joshua that I labelled state-sponsored spin texts versus investigative journalist texts.

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