The City as “Container”
Photo by Malte Schmidt on Unsplash
Every once in a while I imagine what it would be like in church to read aloud a biblical text that we would never read aloud. We would never read such a text aloud in church because it offends, or because it strikes us as completely irrelevant to our life and to our faith. What follows here is a kind of thought experiment concerning the text of Joshua 12:1-24, or more specifically vv. 9-24. These verses occur at the end of Joshua 1-12 that tell of Israel’s forcible “conquest” of the land of promise that was accomplished through a violent conflict, and the final defeat of the “Canaanites” who inhabited the land. The chapter is situated just as the Book of Joshua pivots in chapter 13 to report on the division and allocation of the land by Joshua. Thus these verses are a kind of summary conclusion as well as a preparation for what follows.
In Joshua 12:1-6 the narrative report concerns the defeat of kings on the east side of the Jordan that was already accomplished by Moses. (See Deuteronomy 2:26-36 on Sihon of Heshbon and Deuteronomy 3:1-17 on Og of Bashan.) Moses had already assigned the conquered land of Sihon and Og to the two and a half tribes in the East:
Moses, the servant of the Lord, gave their land for a possession to the Reubenites and the Gadites and the half-tribe of Manasseh (Joshua 12:6).
Of more interest to us is Joshua 12:7-24 that concerns the conquest of the western territory that is accomplished by Joshua. Verses 7 and 8 provide a quick summary of the western conquest by reviewing the geography of the land of promise and by mentioning Israel’s traditional enemies. But then, in verses 9-24, the narrative becomes a list in which the text patiently recites the roster of thirty-one kings defeated in the west of the Jordan. The kings have no names (unlike Sihon and Og in the east), but are identified only by their city-kingdoms, thus a focus not on the kings but on the territory. Many of these named city-states are known to us, some are not. Of special note, of course, is Jerusalem (v. 10). We get the four great fortress cities of Lachish, Gezer, Megiddo and Hazor (vv. 11, 12, 19, 21). With the repeated recital of “one” after each entry in the list, it sounds not unlike a bill of sale when said kingdoms are safely and promptly delivered (that is, “delivered into the hands of…”). All of these names of the defeated are said to be “kings.” In context this surely means city-kings, those who presided over and exercised power over specific territory dominated by a city or a town. It is reasonable to assume that not all of these “kingdoms” were very extensive, as the land could not support so many large kingdoms. Some must have been very small. The extent of each depended upon the capacity of the ruler to extend control and influence, so that some were more powerful and some less so. In this reckoning, nonetheless, all of them possessed the quality of a “kingdom,” or a city-kingdom, and so each belongs to the great recital of victory for Joshua and his people.
So imagine reading aloud in church (with an introduction) verses 9-24 and the list of thirty-one kings. Or, pause now and read the list aloud. Take your time and remember that each city-kingdom named on the list is savored as a victory for YHWH and YHWH’s people. Beyond that, each such city-state would evoke in Israel a specific concrete memory of what it was like to have been in battle, with some wounded and some killed in action. The recital of the cities is an evocation of a mighty struggle; conversely, the recital is inescapably also a consideration, if we have courage and imagination, of what it was like to be on the defeated end of the battle, with the losses and deaths and wounds pertaining thereto. That mighty struggle is credited to Joshua; we may suppose, however, that this was not a single “Grand Strategy” for victory, but rather a series of local uprisings in which peasant Israel was aroused to resent and reject the exploitative domination of city-states that majored in taxation of the produce of the subsistence peasant farmers. All of the victories are credited to Joshua and finally to YHWH. But it is probable that the named list is a gathering of together much data from many different local conflicts. The final “count” of “thirty-one kings in all” is a sigh of relief that the grip of the predatory tax system imposed by the city-kings has been broken, freeing subsistence farmers to enjoy the produce of their labor. We may imagine as the text is recited (in what must have been many celebrations) that the reiteration of “one, one, one, one…” evoked pride and elation and grief over losses as the names of one city-king came after another. One could imagine an eight-year-old child keeping count as the number of victories/defeats is called out with specificity. Insofar as these are precious victories over established urban powers, such victories must have been highly improbable and, therefore, all the more wondrous.
We may imagine that these victories are not unlike the rush of Gideon and his small army in the guerilla raids he led:
So the three companies blew the trumpets and broke the jars, holding in their left hands the torches, and in their right hands the trumpets to blow; and they cried, “A sword for the Lord and for Gideon!” Every man stood in his place all around the camp, and all the men in camp ran; they cried out and fled. When they blew the three hundred trumpets, the Lord set every man’s sword against his fellow and against all the army; and the army fled as far as Bethshittah toward Zererah, as far as the border of Abelmeholah by Tabbath. And the men of Israel were called out from Naphtali and from Asher and from all Manasseh, and they pursued after the Midianites (Judges 7:20-23).
Imagine reading such a text in a local congregation. Such a recital would seem strange indeed in any congregation I know. For the most part our US congregations are all settled in, with a sense that the world is ordered and reliable, and anything like the crisis in the Book of Joshua is remote from our memory or our experience. (We might, in such a congregation, make connections to the current combat in Ukraine, or to the lingering bewilderment about our war in Vietnam.) None of that, however, will account for the strangeness of this recital.
So why recite such a list? Because it is the story repeatedly reiterated and re-performed in the long history of the world. Because the story of the world is the stubborn conflict between entrenched predatory power and the aroused agency of the exploited. Consider a city-state. Listed one at a time (“one, one, one, one”), the city-states invite reflection on what a city-state or a city-king or a city-kingdom or a city is like in a society. We may consider why it is that in most of our US states, our cities are assemblages of progressive political opinion while the surrounding countryside is conservative. Or more immediately for me, I live in the quite progressive town of Traverse City, Michigan that is amid a quite conservative Grand Traverse County. Our common life requires endless negotiation between progressive town and conservative county. Sometimes the negotiation is peaceable and constructive, sometimes it is a conflict.
Thus the “conquest” movement of Joshua, the force of a “peasant revolt,” is a segment of the ongoing struggle between haves and have-nots, of peasants and overlords, of urban and rural. The struggle portrayed in the biblical text is a part of a very large, very old, and very contemporary struggle. The difference in the biblical rendering of the struggle, of course, is that the biblical text dares to assert that YHWH, the great emancipatory God, is deeply engaged in the struggle. Thus the subsistence peasants claim YHWH as their own patron: “A sword for YHWH and for Gideon.” In this reading, moreover, the city—city-king, city-state—is regarded as the great enemy of YHWH and YHWH’s intent for society.
If we were to read the list in church—slowly, patiently, one-at-a-time—these cities, we might raise the question, “What is a city or a city-state or a city-kingdom?” At the outset of such a question we must recognize that these ancient “cities” were organized in feudal ways that are quite unlike our contemporary capitalist cities. Agreed! But we may ask the question in a way that assumes that there are commonalities from the old cities to our current urban culture. In moving toward an answer, I have been helped along by Edward Soja and his book, Postmodern Geographies: The reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989). His book is quite technical and is filled with jargon that I could not fully understand. Nevertheless, I did glean some pages that helped me to think afresh about cities. Aided by the companion research of Anthony Giddens, Soja asserts:
[These claims] that cities are distinguished (presumably from rural or non-urban) by their size, density, heterogeneity, anomic, functional solidarities, geographical concentricities and axialities—are not inaccurate. But they conceal the more fundamental specificity of the urban that arises from the conjunction of nodality, space, and power. Cities are specialized nodal agglomerations, built around the instrumental “presence availability” of social power (p. 153).
Soja goes on, following Foucault:
They are control centres, citadels designed to protect and dominate through what Foucault called “the little tactics of the habitat,” through a subtle geography of enclosure, confinement, surveillance, partitioning, social discipline, and spatial differentiation (p. 153).
While Soja intends these terms to apply to a modern capitalist city, little imagination is required to see that the same terms may readily refer to the ancient Canaanite cities in our text.
Such cities were, as now, conjunctions of “nodality, space, and power.” Such cities then, as now, were concerned for control through “enclosure, confinement, surveillance, partitioning, social discipline and spatial differentiation.” Of course the scale of such control was modest. But the inclinations were present then, as now. Beyond that, Soja follows Giddens to conclude that the city is:
a “storage container” of administrative resources” around which states are built (153-54).
The city-states were the venues of surplus wealth, military force, the scribes of learning, and the temple with priests to bless the enterprise and to function as a media center to construct compelling images of social reality. What a city as a “container” contains is wealth, power, wisdom, all of which can be mobilized for control, management, and exploitation. The matter is, of course, more complex because cities also “contain” the best of art, culture, and learning, so that the matter is always ambiguous.
In any case, let the congregation hear the names of the cities. Let the congregation wonder why their defeat was so much celebrated. Let the congregation wonder how it is that we, variously, are part of the “city as container” and enjoy its gifts, and to some extent we are exploited by it and so are filled variously with fear or resistance. It will be best to focus on particular cities: Gezer or Lachish or Megiddo or, alternatively, on our gated communities or perhaps on our seemingly endless banks or on our spacious university campuses. All of these are elements of human achievement and human control and, for some, human wellbeing.
When we have pondered the belated demise of these cities, then we may consider how such cities—whether defeated and destroyed or reformed and renewed—may be vehicles for covenantal neighborly society. The new “city” (“cities”) is not a planned technopolis; it is rather an assemblage of wealth, power, and wisdom in the service of covenantal neighborliness. Thus we can flip our Bibles from this odd recital in Joshua to the visionary promise of Isaiah concerning the new city to come. God is about to create a New Jerusalem. Note well: “Jerusalem” is the third city in Joshua’s list, so perhaps a new Jericho, a new Ai, a new Lachish, a new Gezer, a new Megiddo, etc. etc.
This new city, the one taken by Isaiah to be produced amid God’s historical process will be:
a city without the cries of distress (Isaiah 65:19);
a city without infant mortality (v. 20);
a city with a settled just economy, without the contagion of eviction or the predatory practice of eminent domain (vv. 21-22);
a city without children born into unbearable calamity, such as poverty or lack of health care (v. 23);
a city to which God is deeply attentive (v. 24);
a city where there is no more hurt or war or violence (v. 25).
Finally, it is promised, the coming city will be without tears:
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away (Revelation 21:4).
For the writer of the Book of Revelation, this promise is not in a never never land of another world; it refers to a new city that will displace the tired violent city of Babylon (Rome).
Imagine!
No more tears about gun violence;
No more tears about eviction;
No more tears about health care denied;
No more tears about second rate schools;
No more tears about predatory lending;
No more tears about neighborhood displacement.
Joshua could not have anticipated all of this. He did know, however, that a city is a “container” of “administrative resources” that can readily and often is a producer of tears. The Joshua movement against these thirty-one cities might have been nothing more than greedy violence. Or it could have been an assertion of covenantal possibility for social organization. I suspect that which of these it was depends on us, and our capacity to recognize the landscape of power, wealth, and wisdom. (See Jeremiah 9:23-24 on wealth, power, and wisdom; see Hebrews 11:39-40 on the way in which the significance of earlier work depends on us.)
Walter Brueggemann
February 9, 2023
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles. He continues to be a highly sought-after speaker.
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