 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, click the NakedBiblePodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heiser's approach to the Bible, click on New Start Here at NakedBiblePodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 212, Joshua's Hunk Quest of Jericho and the Eugoritic Carrot Epic. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heiser. Hey, Mike, how you doing? Pretty good. Pretty good. We're getting into some eugoritic today. Isn't that great? Yeah, say that fast, 10 times an hour. Yeah, trust me, I had to say it a couple of times to get it right. It's, uh, I'm interested about it. I know nothing about it, so. Yeah, well, you're not alone. I'm going to learn something today. As if I learn you know what, Mike, I think this may be the only podcast, not granted. I don't listen to every one, but I'm going to make a claim that you will learn something new every Naked Bible Podcast episode. Well, I hope so. I hope that's true. I feel like it is true. Yeah, it probably is. You know, for, for most listeners, it probably is and that's a good thing. Can't imagine another podcast packing and cramming as much data and info as you do. Yeah, right. I can't imagine another podcast tackling eugoritic or doing a series of Leviticus either. Unfortunately, our podcast is one that you really can't do anything else while you listen to it. You can't be doing chores or work or something because it's too dense. So, so like you might fly off the treadmill. Is that what you're saying? Well, you just won't retain what you're saying. And yeah, I mean, you know, focus. It is. Get off the treadmill and listen. You literally have to sit still in the, in the, in the dark, in a fetal position and just gently rock back and forth while you listen to all this because it's, it's so much data, but I don't know. That's a good thing. It's good because of the, of the data, but you know, it's not an easy digestible podcast, which I guess is could be a strength, but it's also weakness, but hey, it is what it is. You take it. Yeah. I mean, it is what it is. That's right. And I assume this episode's going to be no different. True. True. Yeah. You know, this is a real familiar story. You know, obviously Joshua's conquest of Jericho. I mean, how many times have we either heard or taught this in Sunday school or heard a sermon on it? I mean, even people like, you know, who read, you know, 0.001% of the Bible probably know this story. And, you know, we sort of think we know it and we might be able to sort of track through all of the elements. You know, you got the covenant, you know, remade at Shechem and you got the crossing of the Jordan, you know, with the Ark of the Covenant and the parting of the waters there and the, you know, the captain of the Lord's host, you know, all that stuff, the spies, Rahab, you know, we pretty much have all the story elements down and then the weird marching around the city and the blowing the horns and the walls collapse. Okay. We've got it. But what we don't realize is that there are a number of similarities between all of that in the wider conquest account of Jericho and something called the Karat or Kirtah Epic from Ugarat. And so that's where we want to land today and just sort of talk about what the similarities are and then, you know, how an ancient reader might have processed, you know, these similarities when the biblical writer is doing this. Now, one of the things that the outset here is to sort of talk about, you know, the order of events or the order of, you know, the exposure of one piece of literature to the writer of another, you know, which came first, chicken or the egg, you know, was Joshua written first, was the Karat Epic, you know, written first. The short answer is it's kind of a muddled mess. And, you know, we're not going to put, you know, too much, you know, stock on really any theory of authorship for either. That isn't really what's important. What's important is that the similarities are actually there. But there will be people, you know, who are listening to this who think, well, you know, God forbid that a biblical writer actually use, you know, ancient Near Eastern material, you know, surely the book of Joshua must have been written first. And then, you know, the euguritic guys getting stuff from Joshua. Well, you know, not so much. I mean, I think if there's anything definite in there, the person who wrote the Karat Epic isn't, you know, saying, oh, I can't do this job until I read the book of Joshua. That I think is pretty much secure. But to kind of address the authorship a little bit here at the front before we actually get into the bulk of the episode here, I want to read from Howard's commentary. This is Dave Howard's commentary. I think it's the new American commentary series on the authorship and date of Joshua. So let me just read a few things, and then we'll go into, hey, what in the world is the Karat Epic anyway? Well, and I'll read a few more things from some other sources, and then we'll sort of jump into the actual parallels here. So when it comes to the authorship and date of Joshua, Howard writes this, the book is anonymous. The book of Joshua is anonymous. The Talmud and some rabbis, Rashi, Kimshi attributed it to Joshua. But some saw parts of the book as written by later hands, such as the account of Joshua's death or other fragments. Now, modern critical scholars generally attribute the book to the Deuteronomistic writer or writers, which are roughly the seventh through the sixth centuries BC. Let's just stop there. Now, what he's talking about here is the idea that Joshua wrote Joshua is very late. There's nothing in the book to establish that. The book is anonymous. It doesn't attribute its authorship to anybody. And so you have these rabbinical traditions. Now, the modern view of this whole issue, something, this thing called the Deuteronomistic writer, that might be new to a lot of people in the audience. It's actually a big deal in biblical studies. And it's the idea that the books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and then the historical books all the way up through Second Kings, were all written at the same time by either the same person or a small group of persons. In, as the quotation said, as Howard said, the seventh or sixth centuries BC. Now, you think, well, how can that be for Deuteronomy? Deuteronomy is part of the Torah, you know, a law of Moses. That would have been, you know, Mosaic. And, you know, you get into all these issues of Mosaic authorship. There are a number of reasons why a lot of people think Deuteronomy is late and wasn't written by Moses. This goes back to the whole JEDP thing and all that sort of stuff. Even if you keep Deuteronomy, you know, in the Torah. And, again, if you're thinking that Deuteronomy was composed with the intention of being the fifth of the first five books and so on and so forth, you can still look at this as Joshua through Second Kings written much, you know, centuries after the fact, after the conquest, by the same literary hand. Try to think of it that way. If the Deuteronomy thing distracts you, that's fine. The reason why scholars, you know, say that isn't just source critical. It's that there's, there are theological things in Deuteronomy that are not in the other books of the Torah, like the Laws for the Passover. I keep bringing this example up because it's so obvious. The focus on centralized worship and sacrifice in Deuteronomy, whereas, you know, the patriarchs are sacrificing wherever they want to. You know, they're just things like this that kind of separate Deuteronomy and chronology from the other material that's in the Torah. But again, this is, it's a very complex kind of topic. But the idea is that these kind of concerns you worship only at one place, you know, the Passover is now a national festival and you have to come to the temple or the place where the Lord will set his name. This reflects circumstances of Israel already being in the land. And that of course is going to be post Joshua because of the time Joshua ends and when the Book of Judges starts, the conquest is still not complete. You know, it's not the same situation as it is later on. And there are things about, again, Deuteronomy and Joshua judges in the historical books that sort of unify them in terms of themes, in terms of specific statements like the statement unto this day is a big one. Things that push the composition of those books later. And so since they have similarities between them and since obviously the historical books are later, but they share these similarities with Deuteronomy, you know, somebody came along and said, well, it was a historian living at around XYZ time and he and maybe a few other people decided to essentially, you know, write all of this stuff at the same time because none of the books, none of these books, other than Deuteronomy, again, if you're going to go with the Law of the Moses, Law of Moses phrase, none of the other books are attributed to anyone. So it, you know, there are a number of reasons why this chunk tends to be viewed as written at the same time. So that's the standard, you know, critical view. Now if, if it, let's just for the sake of discussion, let's just go with that. Seventh or sixth centuries BC, well, Ugar, it was destroyed circa 1200 BC. So you would have to either, it would be certain if you adopt this chronology, it would be certain that the book of Joshua comes later, something written at Ugar, even after the city's destroyed, could have been preserved in archives somewhere that describe, you know, could have come across the Kierta Epic from Ugar. You know, so the chronology would work out in that particular way. And it's not unreasonable that they, somebody, again, in the professional scribal class would have access to the Kierta Epic in this story. Now there are other things to consider though. I mean, it's not that need of a picture. Going back to Howard, Howard says, Joshua undoubtedly wrote portions of the book, and he bases this on Joshua 2426, which reads as follows. Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God, and he took a large stone and set it up there under the terribent that was by the sanctuary of the Lord. Now it's very obvious if Joshua is writing these words on a stone, even a big stone, and set it up under the terribent tree that was by the sanctuary of the Lord, he's not referring to the whole book. If you go back in Joshua 24, what is really referred to there are the words of this, you know, covenantal renewal, you know, kind of thing going on. So, you know, it's a smaller portion, but it does say this is the only place in the book where Joshua is said to have written something. And so Howard is viewing Joshua as a genuine historical source. And so it's like, well, you know, Joshua evidently wrote some of this stuff, because this verse alludes to the fact that he wrote some of the stuff. That's fair, that's kind of obvious. So he says, Joshua undoubtedly wrote portions of the books, again, referring again to the content of the covenant that people had made at Shechem. But there are no further indications here or elsewhere in the Bible concerning the book's authorship. Now Howard continues, and he starts talking about the date. And he writes this, there are no formal indicators in the book or elsewhere about the date of its writing, just the whole thing now, not this little part in Joshua 24, that we're going to give Joshua credit for, you know, coming from his hand. But as far as the whole book, again, there's nothing that indicates any kind of chronology, any kind of date. Back to Howard, he says, however, the formula until this day can be instructive in indicating a general date for the book or at least parts of it. Childs, who's an Old Testament scholar, has noted that the use of the formula in Joshua 1563 and 1610, again, until this day, points to a period not later than the 10th century BC. This is because Joshua 1563 mentions people from the tribe of Judah living in Jerusalem alongside Jebusites, whom they could not drive up. Since David captured Jerusalem from the Jebusites circa 1003 BC, according to 2nd Samuel 5, 6 through 10, presumably the Jebusites did not live there in any significant numbers much later than that time. Furthermore, Joshua 1610 mentions Canaanite inhabitants of Gezer among the Ephraimites, since an Egyptian pharaoh, probably Siamun, which his dates are 978-959 BC. This Egyptian pharaoh destroyed the Canaanites at Gezer and gave the town to Solomon as a dowry. That's in 1 Kings 3.1, 1 Kings 9.16. Since all of that happened, the reference to Canaanites and Gezer would have come from a period prior to that, so prior to giving them to Solomon. Other references to unto this day would seem to make more sense if a relatively long period of time had elapsed between the events, the events of the book, and the time of writing. The reference in Joshua 625, however, about Rahab still being alive to this day, would seem to indicate a date much earlier. Furthermore, the boundary descriptions in chapters 18-19 seem to have come from survey descriptions written at the very time. Then he gives a few verse references to the boundary descriptions in chapters 18. Joshua was responsible for writing about the covenant renewal ceremony in chapter 24. Again, so that would have been contemporaneous. The reference to Rahab, however, is not conclusive because it may be her descendants in view, just as the reference to David in Hosea 3.5 refer to his descendants, not to him. Let me read you Hosea 3.5, which says, afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God and David their king, and they shall come and fear to the Lord and to his goodness in the latter days. Now, we know when Hosea is writing, 8th, 7th century, something around there. But he refers to David. Well, that doesn't mean David's still alive. It's a way of referring to his descendants. What Howard's pointing out here is even this reference to Rahab in Joshua 625, it might not actually be Rahab. It might be her descendants, which would push that chronology much later. It's not necessarily something you can hang your hat on as being written in the time of Joshua, the person himself. So it's not conclusive, like he says. And so this is the way Howard concludes his statement. We conclude that portions of the book were written in Joshua's day and that it was substantially complete by the time of David at the latest. Okay, so he's going to push it. He's going to say Joshua's day up until about, let's just call 1000 BC. Now, that's earlier than modern critical scholars would put it. They would push it into the 8th, 7th, maybe even beyond that to the 6th century BC. But any of those dates would be after the time of the composition of the Karat Epic. Because the Karat Epic had to be written before the city of Ugar is destroyed in 1200 BC. So you're not going to be able to get the book of Joshua, the book, before the Karat Epic. So don't even go there with that. That's just not going to work. Now, one other thing to notice here is that none of these possible early chronological indicators really involve the battle itinerary, the battle of Jericho, even the Rahab reference again, is an after-the-fact reference. And it could be even, again, chronologically pushed forward even more based on the Hosea 3.5 parallel idea. And what we're going to talk about today really concerns the battle of Jericho itself and the events just prior to it. Those are the things that are parallel by the Karat Epic. So you ask, well, what in the world is the Karat Epic, or the Kirta Epic? You'll see it referred to both ways. Karat is spelled K-E-R-E-T, Kirta is K-I-R-T-A. It's also known as the Legend of King Karat. So what is this thing? Now, I'm going to read a little bit from Craigie, Craigie's book. This is Peter Craigie, Ugarit and the Old Testament, which is a nice little paperback book. It's very, very handy, very condensed, worth having if you're interested in Ugarit and Ugaritic stuff. Craigie writes about the Karat Epic. It's a story that survives in three tablets, two of which are broken in several places, and therefore the story is incomplete in the sense that where the tablets are broken, you can't quite read everything. But most scholars think that the story itself is represented by these three tablets. So at one point, this would have been the whole story, but because this is all we have and it's broken in places, we don't quite know every detail of it, but it is substantially known and it very likely is complete in terms of at one time. This was the whole thing. So here's what Craigie writes. He says, the ancient legend of Karat was recorded on three clay tablets, all a fairly large size with the writing in three vertical columns on each side of the tablets. The story concerns a king who was already regarded a figure from antiquity in the time of the kingdom of Ugarit. So this would have been referring to a guy who lived, again earlier than the actual composition, back to Craigie. His name was KRT, usually vocalized as Karat, though it is rendered Kirta in some translations. The story begins with a description of the terrible plight in which King Karat found himself. As a consequence of various disasters, almost all of his family had been destroyed. And worse still, though he had seven wives, each had died from some misfortune, leaving the king without progeny or an heir to the throne. Devastated by disaster, the king went weeping into his room, but when sleep eventually overpowered him, he had a dream. And this is, he quotes, Craigie quotes a few lines from the Karat epic that goes like this. As he wept, he fell asleep. As his tears flowed, he slumbered. Sleep overwhelmed him as he lay down, slumber overpowered him as he curled up. Then in his dream, L came down. In his vision, there was the father of humans. And drawing near, he asked Karat, why is it that Karat weeps? Why does L's favorite son shed tears? That's the end of the excerpt back to Craigie. Karat responds to the Supreme God, L, by indicating his desire for sons and an heir. And so he is ordered to offer sacrifices both to L and to the God Baal, after which he is to prepare a great army and set out on a military campaign for the state of Udom, that's UDM, ruled over by King Pabil. The purpose of the campaign is not simply to secure booty and victory, but to demand that Pabil's beautiful daughter, Hurai, that's H-U-R-A-Y, be given to King Karat in marriage. On waking from his sleep, Karat puts into action the instructions he had received from the God L and sets out for Udom with a massive army. On the third day of the expedition, the king comes to a sacred shrine of the goddess Athirat. There he makes a vow that if he obtains the princess Hurai, he will donate great sums of silver and gold to the goddess. Then he continues on his journey, and after four more days of travel, his army pitches camp before Udom. King Pabil sends messengers who offer Karat various gifts, but he refuses them all, insisting that he desires only the princess Hurai. After some demure, the princess is given to King Karat, who then returns to his own land. In the years that follow, Karat and Hurai become the parents of many sons and daughters. Years later, a misfortune again strikes King Karat, this time in the form of a grave illness. I'm going to break in here and say, this is just a very basic summary. We're going to get to some very specific details that you're going to see pretty easily match what goes on in Joshua. One of them is here, but I just want to draw attention to it here because it's easy to miss. King Karat is going to get sick again, and most scholars of this material would say that it's probably due because he forgets to fulfill his vow to Athirat. Remember, he met her three days in the goddess, promised this and that? Well, the story never has him doing that stuff, so he apparently forgot to fulfill his vow to the goddess, and now he gets sick later. Back to Craigie. The story is less clear at this point, for the text is broken and incomplete, but it seems that the sickness of Karat is prolonged and affects the health and stability of his kingdom. The rains are curtailed, the crops reduced, violent men have grown strong, and the exploitation of the weak and the powerless. But the supreme god, El, enters the story again and seeks a god from among the members of the divine assembly, divine council, who would be able to heal Karat from his sickness. When none is found, El creates a female spirit, whom he sends to Karat with instructions to heal him. The spirit, Shatakit, went to Karat and touching him with a magic wand healed him of his sickness, and the failing king's zest returned. After eating, Karat's strengths returned, and he once again sat on his throne, fully in control of his royal powers. But his son, Yasib, thinking perhaps that his father was still sick and not in control of his powers, had hatched a plot to overtake the kingdom. Yasib approached the king and boldly declared the king's failings, which had been a consequence of sickness. But he had badly underestimated the father's renewed vitality in the story, which began with Karat desperate for a male heir concludes with the same king declaring a curse on his overambitious son, Yasib. Now, that's basically the story. It's the end of Kregi's quote. You say, well, what does that have to do with Joshua? You could probably guess it's the military part of the story that has something to do with Joshua. And there are a handful of sources that refer to this. If you go into serious commentaries in the book of Joshua, you'll get a few footnotes here and there about kind of vague references to similarities between Karat and Joshua, the conquest of Jericho. There's actually an article, and again, I will put this in the folder that newsletter subscribers can get access to, by Mary Kay, Dan Braver, and Jan Vim Vasellius. It's called The Unity of Joshua 1-8, and it's relation to the story of King Karat and the literary background of the Exodus conquest. It's from the Scandinavian journal, The Old Testament, and it was written in 2008. Now, the article is very technical. So I'm not going to go through the article or anything like that, but I will read the abstract here and then maybe a few points as we proceed here. Here's the abstract to the article, and this gives you an idea of what our episode is really going to focus on from this point forward. They write, the story of the campaign against Jericho and its taking in Joshua 1-6 is usually assumed to be a composite narrative in which episodes from various sources have been put together, resulting in a text which exhibits a considerable number of discontinuities, especially in the field of chronology. In this article, it is argued that the chronological indications can be joined in one framework of twice seven days, two periods of seven. In the middle of the first week, the crossing of the Jordan is found, and whereas the second week is concerned with the taking of Jericho. It is argued that this scheme mirrors the euguritic story of King Karat going to the city of Udom in order to obtain the princess Hurai as his wife. The arguments in favor and against the assumption of a relationship of emulation between the two texts are discussed, and the possibility of an encompassing intertextual relationship of the biblical account of Exodus and conquest with the story of King Karat is cautiously advanced. And that's the end of the abstract. I like the wording there, cautiously advanced, because as we go through these things, you're going to see that, well, okay, there's some elements there that are really strikingly parallel, and then there are other things that just have no relationship at all. So you have to wonder, as you go through, do we have two writers using the same literary conventions in two separate stories, and that's the way to understand this, that they're both sort of dipping into the same well, literally, to take their story, or are they bouncing off each other, again, in some ways? It's an open question. So don't let anybody out there in the internet, the wild, wild world of biblical studies in Middle Earth, tell you that the writer of Joshua had to sit down with this copy of Karat and just stole the story. Nobody believes that. The scholars who are into this don't believe that. What the issue is, is there are similarities. You might have had an awareness on the part of the writer of Joshua, the Jericho conquest story, be aware of Karat, but you could also have two writers drawn from the same well. So with that said, let's go through the major similarities here. The first one between the two, the first one is chronology. Now, in the article I mentioned, the one from the Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament on this topic, they spend the first half of the article going through Joshua 1 through 6 to sort of ferret out indications of a linear sequence of events, things like, you know, the next day, or on the day after the next day, you know, these little like time phrases that will show up in a narrative. They go through the whole thing. It's actually quite detailed. It might be a little bit mind-numbing for those of you who read it, but what they're trying to do is they're trying to take all of the time indicators in Joshua and they show that it produces two periods of seven days from the time where they're, you know, the Israelites under Joshua are ready to go into the land all the way up to, you know, the time when Jericho is taken. You're dealing with like two units of seven days. And that becomes important because when you look at the carrot epic, it has the same layout. So the first similarity is that the fact that in both cases, in both texts, there's a trip of seven days by the leader, okay, Joshua in one case, carrot in the other, toward cities. Their destinations are cities. The week is divided into, you know, the period of seven days in both cases is divided up in half, two halves with an important event right in the middle. Now the important event on the first period of seven days in Joshua is all of the stuff that gets associated with the crossing of the Jordan. So you have the, you know, you have the covenant ceremony of the circumcision ceremony, then they wait, you know, a few days and then they have the event where, you know, we've got, you know, the crossing of the Jordan, the miraculous crossing there where the waters part, you know, with the, they take the ark over and they put the stones in the middle of the Jordan, all that stuff. Again, this is, that's the Sunday school stuff we're familiar with with the story, but that happens in the middle of the first seven day period. Now in the carrot epic, this is the way that the authors of the article put it. Whereas in the book of Joshua, rituals are performed at the crossing of the Jordan on the fourth day and right in the middle. When the priests and the ark in a central role in a memorial of stones being erected afterwards, in the carrot epic, the king makes a vow to Athirat at her temple. Okay, so in both cases, you've got the first period of seven days intersected, bisected by some event that involves divine activity. In the case of Joshua, it's the covenant renewal, it's the, it's the parting of the waters, you know, for the ark of the covenant, you know, the ark, of course, is marks the presence of Yahweh, goes across the Jordan and the carrot epic. It's, it's, you know, bumping into the, the temple of Athirat. And of course, Athirat herself, the temple, then carrot promises her certain things. And, you know, he makes a vow to her. He doesn't offer anything to her. He makes a vow about offering something to her later, but there's this divine encounter, divine activity event right in the middle of the first seven days. Okay, so that's a parallel and you might think, well, you know, who cares? You know, you're, you're expecting these stories, especially in the Bible, that God's going to be one of the players in the story. And of course, in other ancient Near East solution, God's pop up all over the place. So big deal. Well, it's just one of several things and it's the way the story starts in first seven days. Now, number two would be at the crossing of the Jordan on the fourth day, again, in the book of Joshua now, there was a covenant renewal. There are certain ritual acts performed, creating a binding relationship between the Israelites and God. Now that covenant gets violated very quickly, very quickly because, you know, we know the story of Achan. I mean, sure they go in, they take Joshua and like, excuse me, they take Jericho, but it seems like no sooner does that happen. And that's only seven days removed that we've got a problem. We've got the Achan problem. So there's something that goes wrong with what was promised the deity. And Joshua and the people promised God their loyalty. They promised, you know, to enter into this covenant relationship with him. They're going to obey the commands. They're going to go in there and do what they're told. You know, they're not going to touch things that are put under the carrom, which of course is what Achan does. You know, they promise to do, you know, certain things and not do other things, and they blow it. You know, it only takes another seven days and they just blow it. Now in the Carrot epic, the article notes this, a comparable breaking of the obligation contracted near the middle of the week of the journey is found in the Carrot story. In that case, not by a minor character, but by the protagonist himself. In other words, the king, sort of the Joshua figure. It's not a minor player like Achan. It's the leader. He's the one that breaks faith. Back to the quote, Carrot neglects to offer to Athiroth, the offering he had promised on the third day of his campaign. And because of that, he becomes ill and is at death's door. Now that's later on. It's much later on. But the violation occurs right here. And according to the authors, if we're tracking the relationship between Carrot and the Joshua account, the violation occurs at the same place in the story. You know, but the effect of it in the Carrot epic's case is only felt much later. In the biblical story, it's like, you know, right there, you know, right on the heels of a success of Jericho. We've got the Acod incident with I. But again, the argument is that the similarity here is that the violation occurs at the same time. Third, when we begin the second week, the second period of seven days in both stories, you have, again, some striking similarities. And I'm going to read again from the article. This is the way they summarize this. After these seven days, the second part of the story starts in both cases. In both instances, instructions for the action against the city are given by the deity. Joshua is instructed by the Lord himself. At first, through a divine messenger, Joshua 5, that's the captain of the Lord's host. Carrot receives his instructions from El in a dream. Carrot receives a complete set of instructions before he leaves for Udom. And both periods of seven days occur after his dream. Joshua, by contrast, is provided with his orders in two installments. So there's a difference here. In Joshua 1, 2 through 9, he receives fairly general instructions, the implications of which only become entirely clear to the readers, when Joshua instructs the spies to inspect, especially Jericho, and when the Israelites set out across the Jordan. The meeting in Joshua 5, 13 through Joshua 6, 5 gives Joshua directions on how to conquer Jericho and what has to be done on which day. This is explicitly indicated by the Lord and carried out to the letter by Joshua. So again, the point of the parallel is that when the second period of seven days begins, we've got divine instructions for when you get to the city, this is how you set up. This is how you lay siege to it. So we have that happen in both stories. Number four, and this is where it gets a little more particular, the siege of seven days. There's a seven day siege in both episodes. So again, to quote another source, this is going to be from Dozman's commentary, his anchor Yale commentary on Joshua 1 through 12. He writes this, the seven day cycle is prominent in ancient Near Eastern literature and in the Hebrew Bible. Fleming, who is another author, identifies the seven day procession as a motif of war in the Ugaritic story of Kerat. He recognizes the same theme in the seven day procession around Jericho and suggests that the period of seven days may be the conventional way of describing siege warfare in the ancient Near East. Now I'm going to stop there. That's important. In both stories, you have a seven day procession with respect to the city being the target. So that's a pretty striking parallel as far as doing a certain thing. Laying siege in the city or surrounding it, moving around it, whatever, a procession for seven days. The quote though points out an important thing. The author here does what is quoting Fleming. The point is that this may be sort of a stock description of how to describe siege warfare in the ancient Near East. So it may not be that one, the biblical writer or the writer of the Kerat epic, they're not cross fertilizing each other. It may be, this is just the way that siege warfare is described because you get this in other places. Look back to the quote. The motif also appears in the war between Ahab and Ben Haddad, where the deity again plays a prominent role in the Israelite victory. And he quotes now from First Kings 2029. They encamped opposite one another seven days. Then on the seventh day, the battle began. Again, think about that quote. This is just breaking in now again. Think about that quote. That quote does suggest that this is how you do siege warfare. They camp opposite one another for seven days. On the seventh day, the battle began. Maybe it just, because of the way wars were conducted, it took seven days to be ready. It took seven days to do X, Y, Z. Or this was just a thing that they did. I mean, it's not really clear, but you have this idea show up. Back to the quote. In this battle with Ahab and Ben Haddad, this battle results in the collapse of a wall that kills 27,000 men. So you actually even have a wall collapse in the First Kings 20 episode that involved, again, this seven-day reference to, you're doing something for seven days before you attack. And so what the writers here are wondering is that, well, you got this in Joshua. Yeah, it's a little odd in Joshua because they're going around the city, but they do that. On the seventh day, they do it seven times. Now, that's not in view anywhere else, but you've got this seven-day period at the end of which the battle is engaged. And in Jericho's case, it doesn't last very long because the walls collapse and then they just invade. But you have this motif elsewhere. And so scholars wonder, well, we've got this in Karat, got this in Ben Haddad and Ahab. Maybe this is just sort of how they did things. Walton, we'll just chime in here, Walton with a sentence here in the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Background Commentary. He writes, The legend of Kierta for Mughar, it records how King Kierta waits outside the city of Udom for seven days before the king of Udom appeals for peace. Now, I threw that in here because, again, it's not that Karat's armies circling the city seven days like Joshua, that the parallel is just seven days. But it's interesting here how the king in the city, the city of Udom, why doesn't he appeal earlier than the seventh day? Again, maybe this was just what you do. You find out on the seventh day what their intentions are. I mean, honestly, scholars are not sure about this, but there seems to be something to the seventh day pattern that appears in Joshua and Karat and First Kings chapter 20. Maybe there's something to this. So it's definitely a parallel as far as the number of days before the battle is engaged, but there are obvious differences. Again, the encircling and then on the seventh day, the seven times. That's a clear difference. Number five, the two authors of the Scandinavian journal article, Graeber and Veselius, they write this. Both Joshua and Karat besiege a city again for six days. In other words, they're doing something for six days. Joshua and the people of Israel walk around Jericho every day without making any noise. Remember that detail the story in the Bible. Karat orders his people to remain around Udom for six days, but does not allow them to undertake any military action. So they surround the place. They're not circling it, but they surround it. And he says, we're not going to do anything until the seventh day. In both cases, back to the quote, no real war takes place on these six days. On the seventh day, there's an enormous noise in both stories after the period of calm and quietness in the preceding six. In the Jericho episode, horns are blown, the Israelites shout, followed by a collapse of the city wall of Jericho. After that, the city is at the mercy of the Israelites, and they can go on to conquer the rest of the Promised Land. King Pavel of Udom in the Karat story is unable to sleep on the seventh day because of the noise which the animals inside the besieged city of Udom produce. He decides to negotiate and offers Karat gold and silver. After Karat has refused this and asked for the king's daughter, Hurai, instead, as he was told to by the god El, the daughter comes out to Karat the same day, ready to become his wife and to bear him children. So that's the end of number five. So what they are arguing here, what they're suggesting here, that's a better word, is that within the seven-day pattern, six days of doing something but not attacking, and then you've got the engagement on the seventh. For the six days leading up, there's quiet in the Joshua story. They're not allowed to do anything, you just march around. That's all you do. You don't attack, you don't say anything, you remain silent. In the Karat story, we're not told that the animals inside the city, and this is what happens when cities are under siege. You've got to have your animals for food supply and whatnot. They're in the city there with them. We don't read about any real complaint, any real problem during the six-day period. On the seventh day, the king just, there's just as loud noise. All the animals are making noise now. I got to do something here. We can't live like this. So he tries to negotiate. Of course, all the Karat wants is the woman. Scholars are saying, well, this is something of a parallel as well. You've got this period of quiet, which is hot and unusual, before you hit the seventh day when everything gets resolved, when there's an engagement, when something happens. Now, those are the five major parallels between the two stories. What I'm hoping you're thinking at this point is, I could see why people would talk about this. There are some similarities here. We got some chronological similarities. We've got a timeline similarity. We've got a seven-day pattern. In between the first week, we've got some divine encounter and all that stuff. There's some parallels here, but I'm also hoping you're thinking to yourself, what I expected more than that. Okay, because there are other things that are ancient Near Eastern texts that are parallels to Old Testament passages that quite honestly are a lot more striking than this. So you may have expected more of that. And you're saying that because you know the biblical story well. And there are a lot of disconnects between the two, a lot of clear disconnects. So what do we do with this? I think it's very evident that you can't argue again coherently. I mean, again, this is internet theology. And I don't know, we're doing this topic because I got some email about it, wanting to do the topic, so I put it on my list. So I don't really know what the person who asked you was reading, but chances are you can go out on the internet and find stuff on this. And you're bound to run into something that like the stuff in Genesis, like other stuff in Exodus, people essentially just kind of mouthing off and saying, well, you know, the Bible, biblical writers just steal in this story. It just, you know, you're sitting down and taking this material and plagiarism, it's just ridiculous. Okay, that's not, not only did people in the ancient world have no sense of intellectual property, especially in Old Testament ancient Near Eastern context, but it's just not that tight. It's nowhere near that tight. You have some similarities here, but if the biblical writer sat down with a copy of Carrot and said, boy, I need this to write my story, he did a pretty inept job. I mean, he's got some basics here, but there's so much new material that it makes you wonder, well, how can we even view this as any sort of dependence? See, because that's where internet theology wants to take you. They want to talk about dependence of one author, the biblical author on some ancient Near Eastern material, as opposed to what the writers of some of these excerpts that I've read are suggesting. They're not suggesting literary dependence. They're suggesting common patterns of the way you write things in the ancient world. That is not dependence. That is being an intelligent writer and knowing either in terms of historical convention, i.e., how a siege warfare runs, you know, either some historical connection to the way things were done or literary conventions and how a scene is set up or written. One or the other and probably a little bit above. That is more viable. That's the kind of thing that scholars talk about, common literary, social, cultural conventions that wind up being included in stories or stories are structured according to those things. And since we've got Israel and Ugar and, you know, everybody's sort of in the same region of the world. Writers, scribes, the scribal elite in all these cultures, they're going to be well read. They're going to visit libraries. They're going to see correspondence. They're going to read literature from other places. They're going to be able to read in more than one language. Elamarno letters are a good example of this. They're going to know these conventions, and they're going to be the people who are actually tasked with writing this stuff. It's not like, what do we think is going on in biblical writing? And I'm speaking again to the internet theology crowd. How do you think this happens? That some guy, he was a slave and now he's out of work or whatever. He got fired or got kicked out of the gang. And you go out there in the desert and die now. And so he goes out, well, I need to write something down here. I need to produce something in writing now. But I'm going to go steal something and make up a composition and hope it sells and I can make my livelihood that way. Again, it's absurd. You have a literate class of scribes who are well read. They understand the craft. They have intellectually been cross fertilized with the writings of other peoples and other places. And they know how to intelligently produce a piece of writing so that the people within their class, people who are used to reading, and literacy is not this widespread phenomenon. They know how to craft something so that it is viewed as a professional job, as something respectable, something competent. That's what happens. You don't have people running around stealing pieces of writing and then making their own and hoping it sells or hoping it has influence. That is a cartoonish way to look at how not only the Bible but other ancient Near Eastern documents were composed and why they were composed and why they have similarities between them. Similarities relate to the scribal culture, the literary conventions that the scribes know and know from other places. That's why we have these similarities. They're from the same region. This is why we have similarities. Then there's also the element of polemic and things like that where writers do want to take shots at somebody else's religion or somebody else's battle or somebody else's king. They do want to do that and they know just how to do it because they've been exposed to the literature of that other place. They know what they're doing and they're good at it. These things aren't impromptu. They're not just wholesale cheating and copying it. Again, that's internet theology. That's internet biblical studies. It's not what we're talking about here and nobody in the academy is going to view things so cartoonishly and simplistically. For the sake of our episode here, try to get into a little bit of not application like it's sermonic, but how do we think? How do we apply this to our thinking about the Old Testament, about how this particular section of Joshua was put together? You can't really psychologize the writer. I think it's always a mistake to try to pretend that we know what the writer was thinking exactly. Good writers will write their content in such a way that you can make some good guesses at that kind of thing, but we don't want to overly psychologize. Maybe that's a better way to put it, the writer here. There's no clear explicit polemic, for instance, between the first six chapters of Joshua and the character. We can't point to anything and say, oh, he's really shooting at that. Again, that's not really evident here. We don't have a clear explicit polemic. We can't really psychologize the writer, therefore, but we can ask questions like, well, what impression would the Joshua story, the Joshua narrative give someone familiar with the carrot epic? Let's say you had somebody who knew the carrot story and then they read Joshua. What impressions would they take away, especially if they were a Canaanite, especially if they were someone who worshipped El and Baal and Afirat? We can ask questions like that. If you're familiar with the carrot story, again, if you're a Gentile, you're a Canaanite worshiper of the deities mentioned in the carrot story, or even if you're an Israelite and you know what Canaanites think religiously, how would you have processed the Joshua one through six story? Again, if you're familiar with the one and you read Joshua's story, you should be able to see the similarities and what might occur to you as you read them? What thoughts might it challenge you with? Again, I would say especially if you're a Canaanite, but again, even if you're an Israelite, you know how those people over there, what they're thinking theologically. How might they process this? What impression would it create? Well, let's just make a few observations here, but let's ask to start off here. Who was it that told Joshua and Carrot to assemble for the siege? Who was it that gave the instructions? Now, the Canaanites or A Canaanite would know that Israelites referred to their God, they referred to Yahweh as El. If they've read any kind of biblical material or they've had a conversation with a theologically serious Israelite, the theologically serious Israelite is going to say Yahweh is El. He is El or Ha El, he is the God. They're going to identify with El if you're an Orthodox, we'll call him an Orthodox Israelite. That doesn't mean that you think Yahweh does all the stuff that El does because El does pretty crazy stuff, pretty nasty stuff, pretty immoral stuff. What I mean by that is they're going to view Yahweh as the highest of all gods. He is Lord of the Pantheon. He's Lord of the spiritual world. There's no higher God. A Canaanite is going to view El as in that position. Now, it's true that Baal is the one who gets called most high, but Baal has to ask permission of El to do certain things. El is the real authority. Baal is referred to as most high because he basically acts as El's proxy or vice-regent. He runs everything and El sort of is in the background. But El is the highest authority I regard because Baal has to ask his permission to do things. That's just the way it is. So you're going to, as an Israelite, you think there is no higher authority than Yahweh. He doesn't have to ask permission to do anything. So in the Joshua story, you have the highest deity, the highest God. Give Joshua instructions. In the Carrot story, that deity is El. Now, you say, well, what's the big deal? Well, you could read, and again, this is just a thought experiment here, thinking how would this have been received. You could read this, again, if you were familiar with the Carrot story. You could read Joshua and his commissioning as evidence of the favor of El on an Israelite. In other words, El is blessing the Israelites because isn't Joshua like trying to get rid of the Canaanites in the land? Isn't this like our history where we used to be living in this land and then, you know, we were driven out by Joshua and the Israelites? How'd that happen? Well, it was because the God you thought was on your side was really on their side. I mean, you could see how a Canaanite could, again, process the story like that. It would be ironic and probably irritating that, well, what did we do wrong that El is over there blessing them? Maybe the Israelites are right. Maybe Yahweh is El. Maybe Yahweh is the highest authority. After all, we were the losers here. Again, you could see, you know, how, again, a Canaanite would process the story because of where the information, where the plans and where the success of the military campaigns, you know, go in the Joshua story. They might be thinking thoughts like that. Again, we don't know, but they might be. Again, like I said, this is a thought experiment. What about the midweek ritual, the midweek cultic events, you know, the supernatural encounter stuff? Again, you have the Joshua story of sacrifices to reenact the covenant. God acts on behalf of Israel by parting the waters for the ark. Parting of the waters, of course, hearkens back to the parting of the Red Sea event. Again, I think that's intentional. In the carrot epic, carrot makes, he's the king, and he makes a vow to athirah at her temple at the midway point. So you have something going on at the midway point in both stories. Now, you could look at this. Again, if you were familiar with the carrot story, and then you read Joshua, you could ask yourself, well, wait a minute, how come in the middle of this seven-day thing with Joshua, they didn't include athirah? What happened to her? Is that a diss against our goddess? Is that a diss against athirah? Frankly, when I think of it, because I'm a literate Canaanite here, all this Israelite stuff that I've ever read, there are no goddesses, at least that are positive. Israelite, the priestly class, they wouldn't use this term, but the biblical class, the biblical writers, they don't endorse the idea of a goddess anywhere. My neighbor, the Israelite, over here, he kind of sneaks goddess worship in during the week or whatever, because you got that going on outside the scope of the biblical writers. But the stuff I read in their religious literature, they just don't have any room for athirah, except as a villain. This feels disrespectful to me as a loyal Canaanite. What happened to athirah? It's like she just gets pushed out of the picture. Then you might recall, wait a minute, that parting of the Jordan stuff, that goes back to the Red Sea. It's like, well, athirah didn't do any parting of the waters, so maybe I shouldn't complain too much. Maybe the Israelites have a good reason to lower athirah or entirely eliminate her from consideration of the pattern. Maybe it is a theological statement to eliminate her and replace her with the God who parted the Red Sea. Again, this is just a thought experiment, but if you were a Canaanite familiar with both pieces of literature, you could read it and wonder, hey, what happened to athirah? Third, the beginning of the second week. In both cases, we have instructions for action against the city, given by the deity. Joshua was instructed by Yahweh at first through the captain of the Lord's host. Carrot gets his instructions from El. What's the big difference? Those are similarities, but what's the big difference? On the biblical side, the divine warrior imagery gives the reader the distinct impression that Yahweh himself fights for Israel. In other words, Yahweh takes a personal interest in his people. El didn't fight for Carrot. El gives him his instructions, but he doesn't show up as a man of war, like the captain of the Lord's host. He's not boots on the ground, whereas Yahweh is. Is El weaker? Is he afraid? Is he less interested? Again, you could see how someone could either, and maybe the writer does mean to telegraph some of these things, I don't know, but you could see how a reader might ask him or herself those questions. Why is it that Israel's God is boots on the ground and ours is not? Fourth, the Seventh-day Siege. Fleming, back to that quote from the Anchor Yale commentary, when Fleming is quoted, Fleming argues that on the basis of the Carrot text from Magard that the seven-day period represents this sort of pattern. Not only the pattern that you get with siege warfare, but he also kind of zeroes in on, if we didn't go back and quote that article. But in that article, Fleming zeroes on the number seven, and he argues in a number of cases that seven is often associated with the work of God, the work of a deity, and that the siege, it involves God because of the Ark of the Covenant there. So some scholars wonder, well, that kind of transforms the story a bit, where again it indicates God's personal involvement. I would also say, Fleming doesn't mention this specifically, but I would also say that it's transformed by the Divine Warrior in Magir of Joshua 5. Again, Yahweh is boots on the ground, Yahweh is boots on the ground, and El is not. Now Butler, in his commentary, adds these thoughts to the Seventh thing. It's interesting to note, he says, this is Butler in the word biblical commentary. It's interesting to note that in the flow of the biblical story, a seven-day period is frequently associated with being made fit for sacred space or entering sacred space. Again, that's really my words summarizing some of the things that you can see in his commentary. But it is interesting, if you actually do a search for seven-day periods, they're not always having to do with divine activity. They're not always, again, fixated on being prepared to occupy sacred space, or if you have some kind of blemish, or you've been ritually impure, you wait seven days, then you're okay. But there are a lot of them. There are a lot of these things, these seven-day periods, that have something to do with divine activity, or being fit to occupy sacred space. And if the issue is sacred space, then God is there. Again, God has boots on the ground in the Joshua story. Now, Carrot, of course, gets in the air. Well, good for him. He got in the air. He got a wife, so now he can have kids. But Israel gets more than that. Israel is being prepared at the ceremony there in between the first week. They are fit to occupy sacred space through the covenant renewal, through the parting of the waters. They go into Canaan. They go into Yahweh's land. Remember Deuteronomy 32-89? Israel is the Yahweh's portion. Jacob, this is a lot of inheritance. And these were the parameters of the land that God chose Yahweh took for himself, and so on and so forth. Israel, as a people, is now going into that space. And their task is to eliminate that which God doesn't want there, so that he will occupy that sacred space. So while Carrot gets in the air, again, good for him. He gets a wife, now he can have kids and he'll have an heir to the throne. Israel is claiming the land for Yahweh. Israel is transforming it into sacred space for their entire posterity, not just one kid who's going to occupy the throne. I mean, it magnifies the whole story. If you associate, again, the elements of the story, in this case the seven, the number seven element, with what happens in the story and how the number seven is used elsewhere, especially in the Torah, especially in connection with how do we keep the land pure, the laws that are there about, you know, not only ritual impurity, but also, you know, just moral purity, that was all connected to the land. Again, I'm thinking back, but a lot of you probably haven't seen this or heard it, but I did a series at church on this, and one of them was about this. You could watch the YouTube videos on my YouTube channel. But if the impurity, the moral impurity got to such an extent, they were promised, the Israelites were promised, that you will be expelled. You'll be expelled from the land, and God even said, I'll leave. I don't want to be in this place. I'm going to kick you out and I'm going to leave. So there's this sense, again, that the land itself is sacred space. And again, ritually, the number seven occurs in lots of these, sacred space kind of contexts. And you have the seven that goes back, again, to the siege warfare, the siege of Jericho. Again, the seventh day they go around seven times. And scholars, again, just wonder about what the number seven really conveys here. And if you are, again, in our thought experiment, if you are the Canaanite, you know, looking at this, and you're noting the comparisons of the story, and the number seven is one of these comparisons. And you look at the way your story winds up, and you think, well, you know, good, you got a wife, and King Carrot had an heir, and his heir turned out to be kind of a jerk anyway, he has to curse him at the end. But he still got what El promised. And then when you look at the Israelite side, the promise is so much bigger. It's not only to one guy and one kid, it's to the whole nation. Again, Yahweh is boots on the ground, acting on behalf of an entire people. You know, the entire nation itself, Yahweh's earthly family, get into a little Divine Council theology here, but Yahweh's earthly family is the focus, is the inheritor of the story, the story of the conquest of the land. It's not just for one guy, it's not just for Joshua. It's for everybody. And in Carrot it's only the king and his one son. You know, Yahweh fights for his people and his children collectively. If you're a Canaanite, only the king gets any favor. Again, would a Canaanite have actually had that thought? Again, I don't know, but I think it's possible that they could have. Why is Yahweh, why is their God so interested in everybody, the whole people? Whereas over here, El is acting on behalf of one guy, and El even calls that one king his favorite. What about the rest of us? If you do think thoughts like that, again, as a Canaanite, as an outsider, and this is part of the rationale for Israel to be a peculiar people, to be a kingdom of priests, you know, you might think thoughts like good grief, I wish our God thought about us the same way, but he doesn't. He doesn't. So again, to wrap up here, we don't really know why these elements are there. There's not a clear polemic in this case. Again, I think it's fair to do our little thought experiment about how a literate person, familiar with both religions, you know, Israelite theology and Ugaritic religion, familiar with both, familiar with both texts, reading through them both, noting the similarities, but also noting some of the important differences, you know, things that could have popped into their head about and made them wonder about, you know, why is it that Israel just seems to have this special relationship with her God, their God? And we're just kind of over here. Now, if it's, you know, well after the fact, you know, if this was written centuries later, again, you're not going to have the native Ugaridian thinking these thoughts, but you're going to have outsiders, you know, people from Canaan who, you know, should be there or shouldn't be there or whatever. They're going to know the biblical story. They're going to know, again, the traditions of El and Baal, and they're still going to be worshiping those other gods. We know that from the biblical story on into the monarchy and the divided monarchy and whatnot. The worship of El and particularly Baal is a big deal. They're the chief competitors to Yahweh of Israel. Again, we know that from the books of Samuel and Kings, you know, again, that's sort of like Old Testament 101 stuff. We know that. So, again, even if it's further removed, this is, you know, the way that the story is cast. This is their history. And if you are an outsider and you may have been looking at all this wanting to be an insider, is the point. And I can't prove that and there's no specific polemic, but it's just kind of interesting. So, for the purpose of this episode, when we do encounter similarities, I think the takeaway here is as you do your Bible study and you're using sources, you're reading commentaries, you're reading articles, you know, study Bibles, whatever it is, you're going to run into some of this stuff. And I think it's a good exercise to ask yourself how an Israelite reader, a Canaanite reader, when you have, you know, instances of parallelism, how they would have processed the story, how each person would have processed the story. You put them in the same room, how would they talk about it? What questions would the similarities and the differences raise for the Israelite and the Canaanite? Because we need to ask those same questions ourselves as we try to interpret the text, as we try to think about the text. Well, you know, what kind of questions do the similarities and the differences raise? Because, you know, at the bottom line is they're going to be theological questions. At the end of the day, they are going to be theological questions. They're going to be questions about our God or our gods and us and our destiny and why we're here and does he love us or not? These are theological questions. And just because somebody lived a long time ago, it doesn't mean that they're not wondering about their destiny, about what their God thinks of them. They are. They're people. They're like us in that respect. They're going to have the same set of questions. So I think it's a useful thing to keep in mind when we come across things like this and to tear yourself away from, again, the cartoonish internet theology, you know, this chicken or egg theology, like, you know, people are passing documents around and like cheat sheets. It's just ridiculous. It's just more complicated than that. And frankly, it's deeper than that. It's more meaningful than that. So again, hopefully, this just gives us a little indication on when we run into this stuff, you know, how might we think about it? How might we approach it? Very interesting, Mike. In fact, we've got several of these topics coming up. I think are going to be interesting. So that's why I love this podcast, Mike. It's good stuff. You're not going to learn this stuff anywhere else. If you're me, you know, I'm not going to go out and, you know, pick up the carrot epic or text, you know, I'm not going to. It's not on your Amazon wish list. No, it's not. It's not. It probably needs to be, but there's just not enough time, hours in the day to get everything done that I want to. So that's why I and I know everybody else relies on you to do that stuff for us, Mike. So you can digest it and give it back to us in 60 minutes or less. So we appreciate that. Good. All right, Mike. Well, with that, I just want to remind everybody we probably will vote on the next book that we're going to cover coming up probably in June. So we're still a couple of months out. So I just wanted to throw that out there that be looking forward to the voting on the next book of the Bible that we'll cover on the podcast. Go up to my website to drmsh.com on the right hand side and subscribe to the newsletter. There you go. All right, Mike. Well, just like that, I want to thank everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. God bless. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com. To learn more about Dr. Heiser's other websites and blogs, go to www.brmsh.com.