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Word: Joshua
Joshua is a brutal book. It’s filled with death and destruction. On multiple occasions, the Israelites go into cities and kill every living thing. Men, women, children, animals… “not sparing anyone that breathed.” All at God’s order. As someone who is trying to follow God, what are you supposed to do with that? To be honest, it would be easier for me if Joshua wasn’t in the Bible.
This was a difficult design to do. Honestly, I didn’t want to do it, but I want to stay true to the text, and in this case the text read like The House of Blue Leaves fight scene from Kill Bill Volume 1… except it had more violence.
Hoping there’s less blood in Judges…
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Mate love your work!!! good stuff!! have u put these into after effects yet? they would look sweet as motion graphics
Thanks, Joel! Haven’t even thought of bringing them into AfterEffects, but that’s a great idea. I haven’t really messed with AE much, but it would be cool to try something with these someday.
This is an great design. Love the blood splashes. Sin puts us is a bloody situation huh?
To be able to understand such violence and bloodshed, you need to put your mind and understand the situation going on at that time, it’s part of understanding the motivations for God to wipe out every living thing. Usually, these people were EXTREMELY bad, in these places, the sin was like nothing you have heard before, the first child of a family was sacrificed to idols and his blood was drank as an offering, also there was multiple orgies everywhere, raping… what you see today in the news but multiplied a hundred fold. It was people beyond redemption destroying and influencing Israel.
@Noe: Good point and important to remember. I hear what you’re saying, but I still have difficulty thinking of God commanding the murder of children, and that is exactly what the Bible says. For me, I have to look at Jesus for my most accurate representation of God’s heart and accept that there are parts of the Bible that I may wrestle with until I leave this world. Thanks for the feedback!
[...] helped settle disagreements. Sorta like the Jewish People’s Court. For sure it wouldn’t be as bloody as Joshua, right? Wrong. Ancient Israel had a slightly different (and much more violent) definition of the [...]
Like, Noe said, These people they were driving out were EXTREMELY bad. God said to Abraham that he was giving the Amorites 400 years to repent (Genesis 15:12-16).
“In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.”(Verse 16)
And then all the weird rules in Leviticus about sex with animals and stuff are there because the people in the land before the Israelites arrived did that kind of stuff.
powerful. sobering.
[...] a new one every Friday. I also include some reflections on the book and design. Some designs are violent, some are weird and some are plain offensive, but so is the Bible, right? Currently I’m in the [...]
[...] difficult verses, passages or books. When I read it, the book seemed bloody, brutal and ugly and so my design was as well. I didn’t like reading the book or creating the design and I said that in the write-up. Looking [...]
Hmm; nobody’s brought this up yet?
“Jesus” is Greek for “Joshua.” (Yep, the Messiah is named BY NAME in zechariah 3.) The book of Joshua, therefore, is subject to some really interesting parallels in God’s design. On every page, I found direct parallels. Vernon McGee noticed it too, but I can’t find anything online at the ready (sorry.)
The Christ is full of mercy and compassion, but that includes totally extinguishing the enemies to his beloved people. Mayhem and carnage? You bet. But that’s passion for his bride, and cleansing the New Earth of the taint of sin.
You guys are all nuts. Fundementalist much? This is why people fly planes into towers in America. They are believing the same shit you are. Seriously. Stop. You are the taint Joshua was trying to wipe out. Being a nut is being a nut. If you want to call it faith, that’s fine. But you’re still a nut. Stop being a taint. Stop believing nutty things.
Charlie,
Though the passage in Zechariah 3 can be validly interpreted to be a messianic text for Christians, Jeshua or Joshua was also a high priest at the time of Zerubbabel’s reigh, when Zechariah was prophesying.
But it would have been foreign to Jewish readers to think of the Messiah as a member of the priestly order, because priests came from the tribe of Levi, whereas the Messiah was universally understood to have been from the tribe of Judah in the line of David.
Thanks to the author of the epistle to the Hebrews, we now understand that the messianic mission was in part a priestly mission, which legitimates messianic interpretation of texts like Zechariah. Woop!
And Jason, you might want to take a look at the text below the design. Christians generally aren’t alright with the idea of wholesale slaughter. Jesus advocated a completely non-violent ethic, and lived it out, too. The reason Joshua is hard to take for Christians is because of the Jesus-centred non-violent ethic that the New Testament holds.
It’s hard to do, but if we are to be faithful to the whole Bible, we can’t really accept or justify the violence in Joshua, but we also can’t pretend it’s not part of the biblical witness. It does a disservice to the Bible to say that if there are bits we don’t like or can’t understand then we should conclude that they aren’t really true. As an anabaptist Christian, I struggle so much with Joshua, but I figure that if Jesus read this stuff and came up with ‘Love your neighbour, turn the other cheek’, then that means we can feel a little better knowing that there is a way to interpret this that doesn’t bring us into contradiction with Jesus.
blessings