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    The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest: Covenant, Retribution, and the Fate of the Canaanites
    Unavailable
    The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest: Covenant, Retribution, and the Fate of the Canaanites
    Unavailable
    The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest: Covenant, Retribution, and the Fate of the Canaanites
    Ebook394 pages5 hours

    The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest: Covenant, Retribution, and the Fate of the Canaanites

    By John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Biblical Foundations Award Winner

    Holy warfare is the festering wound on the conscience of Bible-believing Christians. Of all the problems the Old Testament poses for our modern age, this is the one we want to avoid in mixed company.

    But do the so-called holy war texts of the Old Testament portray a divinely inspired genocide? Did Israel slaughter Canaanites at God's command? Were they enforcing divine retribution on an unholy people? These texts shock. And we turn the page. But have we rightly understood them?

    In The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest, John Walton and J. Harvey Walton take us on an archaeological dig, excavating the layers of translation and interpretation that over time have encrusted these texts and our perceptions. What happens when we take new approaches, frame new questions? When we weigh again their language and rhetoric? Were the Canaanites punished for sinning against the covenanting God? Does the Hebrew word herem mean "devote to destruction"? How are the Canaanites portrayed and why? And what happens when we backlight these texts with their ancient context?

    The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest keenly recalibrates our perception and reframes our questions. While not attempting to provide all the answers, it offers surprising new insights and clears the ground for further understanding.

    The books in the Lost World Series follow the pattern set by Bible scholar John H. Walton, bringing a fresh, close reading of the Hebrew text and knowledge of ancient Near Eastern literature to an accessible discussion of the biblical topic at hand using a series of logic-based propositions.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIVP Academic
    Release dateAug 15, 2017
    ISBN9780830890071
    Unavailable
    The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest: Covenant, Retribution, and the Fate of the Canaanites
    Author

    John H. Walton

    John H. Walton (PhD, Hebrew Union College) is professor emeritus of Old Testament at Wheaton College Graduate School. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including Old Testament Today, with Andrew E. Hill; volumes on Job and Genesis in the NIV Application Commentary series; the six-volume Lost World series; and Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology. He was also coeditor, with Craig Keener, of the ECPA 2017 Bible of the Year winner, the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible.

    Read more from John H. Walton

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    Reviews for The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest

    3.5/5

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    • 5/5
      John Walton again brings his wealth of knowledge about the Ancient Near East to clarify a very challenging portion of scripture. He tackles tricky verses head on, such as Gen. 15:16 and evaluates the Hebrew behind it. He also offers many illuminating details about Hebrew idioms and cultural context. In Walton's definition (which he accredits to Kenneth A. Matthews), "4th generation" does not mean "400 years" but "the generation you will not see."
    • 3/5
      A series of propositions attempting to contextualize the narratives of the Israelite conquest of Canaan in its ancient Near Eastern world.The work has much to commend it: it is important to understand what is going on in terms of the ancient Near Eastern world, and not our own. The authors do well at setting that groundwork, and suggesting how maintaining order is one of the primary concerns for life at the time. The authors are most convincing in their more thorough treatment of the Hebrew word herem as not necessarily meaning "devote to destruction" as much as to "put under a ban," to have something's identity changed to be made more useful for the divinity. Sometimes things were destroyed when put under the ban, but it was not necessary to do so. The authors' application to the Christian being made devoted to God and have their identity changed is a good parallel.The authors' arguments about the sinfulness of the Canaanites having nothing to do with their elimination from the land is a bit more of a stretch. They spend much time discussing it, attempting to reframe the language of certain verses about it, but one has to wonder why so much effort has to go into this particular idea. They at least demonstrate that the sinfulness of the Canaanites is by no means the driver of the conquest. But they go a bit too far in presuming that it had nothing to do with it.For all of their profession of trying to understand the Conquest in terms of the ancient Near Eastern world, the authors' Protestant biases are on full display regarding works, morality, and the law. The idea that the Law, featuring situational laws, was not intended to be literally obeyed is absolutely not at all anything which makes sense according to the history of interpretation. At many points the Protestant confession of works having nothing to do with salvation is set forth, even though one would never get such an impression from the Old Testament at all, and one has to completely misread Paul to see it in the New Testament. There's a lot of good and deep contextual forms of assistance in here, looking at how things are marked off as holy to a god in the ancient Near Eastern world, and illuminating the nature of warfare and the aspects of existence of other groups. It is disappointing that it gets muddled with much more modern ideologies and designs.**--original galley received as part of early review program; final work was actually read.

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