Joshua Confronts his Demons

Hidden inside some of the most boring passages in the bible is a mind-bending saga of giant cannibalistic demon bastards. What can we learn from this?

This is part four of my series on interpreting Joshua without insisting God is pro-genocide. This post can hopefully stand alone, but here are links to parts one, two, and three. The references to Origen and the Epistle of Barnabas are from part two.

Two posts ago, we looked at church father Origen’s reading of Joshua, which takes the conquest narrative to be primarily an allegory. Origen believed that the horrible aspects of the text we saw in part one made literal reading of the book impossible for Christians, and reinterpreted most the the book’s violence as a mindset with which to confront our own sins.

Some friends have helped me realize I didn’t quite get the early church’s position right. A more accurate statement is that essentially all church fathers believed an allegorical/non-literal reading was an acceptable way to read the text, but only some of these (mostly in the Eastern church) believed such a reading was necessary in light of Jesus’s self-revelation.

But even knowing all this, the allegorical approach feels kind of weird. Part of this is of course because I’ve internalized Evangelical Christianity’s claims that its ways of reading scripture are the only ways of reading scripture, but part of it is because reading allegorically makes it possible to go off the rails and count rabbit holes the way we saw in the Epistle of Barnabas.

So in today’s post I want to argue that you can build up a spiritual warfare reading from the text itself, framing the story in a way that makes Origen’s reading feel much more grounded.

(Aside: as somebody who once led a “weird things in the bible” bible study, this is one of my favorite weird things — a bizarre supernatural epic told almost entirely in minor entries in the boring lists of kings and countries you might normally skim over. A mystifying, convicting story hiding in plain sight!)

Let’s take a moment to find our place in the text. Chapters 1 through 9 of Joshua are devoted to conquest:

• God calls Joshua to lead the Israelite people

• God destroys the walls of Jericho so the Israelites can conquer it

  • (Bookended by Rahab, the faithful outsider, and Achan, the faithless insider)

• The Israelites catch the inhabitants of Ai in a trap and destroy them

• The Gibeonites trick Israel into letting them survive as their slaves

The climax occurs in chapters 10 and 11 as various Canaanite kings try to stave off the inevitable with various offensive strikes on the Israelite army. These (spoiler alert) fail because God is on the side of the Israelites, and the Canaanites are put to death.

The rest of the book consists largely of long lists explaining how the Israelite tribes split up the land, followed by the resolution of some tribal disputes.

So when we read Joshua 11, we’re looking at the end of Joshua’s conquest — the final campaign that at last gives the land “rest from war”. And the very last battle looks typical enough:

At that time Joshua went and destroyed the Anakites from the hill country: from Hebron, Debir and Anab, from all the hill country of Judah, and from all the hill country of Israel. Joshua totally destroyed them and their towns. No Anakites were left in Israelite territory; only in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod did any survive.

If you’ve been reading the Old Testament in order and kept careful track of every single people group, your face should look like this:

But since most of us read this kind of passage in… well, a different frame of mind, let’s stop to review.

(If you don’t care about tracing all the biblical references, you can use ctrl-F to skip ahead to “giant, cannibalistic, undead demon-spawn” to get to the applications)

Reading the Old Testament chronologically, we’d have most recently seen the Anakites in Deuteronomy, when Moses tells the people:

Hear, Israel: You are now about to cross the Jordan to go in and dispossess nations greater and stronger than you, with large cities that have walls up to the sky. The people are strong and tall—Anakites! You know about them and have heard it said: “Who can stand up against the Anakites?” But be assured today that the Lord your God is the one who goes across ahead of you like a devouring fire. He will destroy them; he will subdue them before you. And you will drive them out and annihilate them quickly, as the Lord has promised you.

We learn that the Anakites are strong and tall, and so Israel has given them the respect that all tall people deserve.¹ But we don’t have to take Moses’s word for it, we’ve actually seen the fear ourselves in the narrative when the spies originally sent to Canaan come back terrified:

But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

This gives us slightly more data to work with: the Anakites are descended from (and closely related to) the Nephilim, another (very tall) people group to look up.

What do we know about the Nephilim? We’ve seen them once before, in Genesis:

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

This is a bit vague, especially if you don’t know that the Old Testament often uses “sons of God” to refer to the sorts of heavenly beings we’d now refer to as angels and demons.

How do we know that a demonic reading is “correct” here? It helps that ancient Jewish writers spent a lot of time thinking about this, and the non-biblical book of Enoch retells the story in a lot more detail. (Like, thirty-six chapters of detail.)

In Enoch, the “sons of God” are collectively referred to as “the Watchers”, and they descend from the sky seeking to sleep with human women. And it gets weird:

These and all the others with them took for themselves wives from among them such as they chose. And they began to go in to them, and to defile themselves through them, and to teach them sorcery and charms, and to reveal to them the cutting of roots and plants. And they conceived from them and bore to them great giants. And the giants begot Nephilim, and to the Nephilim were born Elioud. And they were growing in accordance with their greatness. They were devouring the labor of all the sons of men, and men were not able to supply them. And the giants began to kill men and to devour them. And they began to sin against the birds and beasts and creeping things and the fish, and to devour one another’s flesh. And they drank the blood. Then the earth brought accusation against the lawless ones.

The rest of the book is so unbelievably wild that the only way I know to communicate its sheer over-the-top-ness is through the official trailer for the book’s Xbox adaptation.

So, at least one Jewish writer believed the Nephilim were giant half-demon people who roamed the earth cannibalizing men and committing tantalizingly vague sins against birds.

But people write lots of weird stuff and we should probably ignore this as some sort of fan fiction, except that we can’t because the New Testament cites the book of Enoch approvingly, including the part about the Watchers.

Jude writes:

It was also about these that Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied, saying, “See, the Lord is coming with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment on all, and to convict everyone of all the deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”

The quote, you might note, is not found anywhere in the Old Testament, because it’s actually taken from Enoch 1:9. And this helps us understand Jude’s allusion from a few verses earlier:

And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling—these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day

Which is exactly what happens to the Watchers at the end of Enoch! (2 Peter also contains this allusion, if you’re counting.)

So let’s review: the Anakites are descended from the Nephilim. The only other reference to the Nephilim in the Old Testament suggests that Nephilim are giant bastard offspring of human women and (male?) demons. (I don’t know if demons have genders.) The New Testament confirms this reading by approvingly citing a book whose entire premise is exactly that definition of the Nephilim.

Something weird is happening.

And it’s going to get weirder. The other significant reference to the Anakites parenthetically describes them as a subset of the Rephaites:

(The Emites used to live there—a people strong and numerous, and as tall as the Anakites. Like the Anakites, they too were considered Rephaites, but the Moabites called them Emites. Horites used to live in Seir, but the descendants of Esau drove them out. They destroyed the Horites from before them and settled in their place, just as Israel did in the land the Lord gave them as their possession.)

Who are the Rephaites? Here we have a bit more to work with. Most straightforwardly, a handful of other references in the Torah depict them as giant enemies of Israel and note that Og, their one-time king, slept on a bed that was about 13 feet long.

But unlike the Anakites, the Rephaites show up in historical records! They’re not a traditional people group in the sense of the Hittites or the Assyrians, but rather a shadowy supernatural faction from Ugaritic poetry, described as residents of the underworld somewhere between “living” and “dead”, and often associated with warrior kings from long before. And indeed, later references (click the link and ctrl-F “Rephaim” for details) in the Hebrew Bible seem to capture these shades of meaning too.

So now, with all this in mind, let’s return to Joshua’s final battle:

At that time Joshua went and destroyed the Anakites from the hill country: from Hebron, Debir and Anab, from all the hill country of Judah, and from all the hill country of Israel. Joshua totally destroyed them and their towns. No Anakites were left in Israelite territory; only in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod did any survive.

This isn’t just a battle between Joshua and some random tribe nobody has ever heard of. This is a battle between Joshua’s human army and giant, cannibalistic, undead demon-spawn.

And this story — the saga of the Anakites — bookends the entire conquest. The first spies Israel sends to Canaan come back terrified of the Anakites, and the campaign finally ends when Joshua defeats them.

So however we read the events in between, the overarching battle between God (and his people) and demons ought to be at the forefront of our minds, not merely a metaphor we use to get out of the uncomfortable bits. And once you take into account (as the early church did) that Joshua and Jesus are translations of essentially the same Hebrew name,² the layers get even deeper.

(Aside: Michael Heiser, in his book “The Unseen Realm”, takes this even further, arguing that Deuteronomy 32 is about God allowing demons to take over non-Israel nations as their gods and the Canaanite conquest’s main target isn’t the Canaanites but the Nephilim/Anakites/Raphaites — the unseen demonic forces “pulling the strings.”

Heiser’s perspective can be expanded into a thoughtful and profitable reading of the entire Old Testament, but it’s too long for this post and I’m not certain I’m convinced of the whole thing. For more “raw data” to work from, you can see a summary of Old Testament Demonology I wrote up a few years ago.)

How should this reading change me?

Evangelical readings of scripture can overemphasize “figuring out the facts” and underemphasize letting the bible shape our character and emotions more directly. We would do well to heed Paul’s instruction in 2 Timothy:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Teaching and correction are mentioned, but the end goal isn’t correct doctrine but correct praxis: equipping oneself to do good works!

If we read the narrative Israel’s conquest of Canaan as deeply shaped by spiritual warfare, we find ourselves catching glimpses of the story Origen found so many years ago. The focus on God’s commands, the complete and utter annihilation, the unwillingness to compromise all come together as harrowing encouragement to seriously confront our own sins.

My goal in this series of posts has been to provide frameworks to read Joshua profitably (as opposed to telling you “the answers” — what will stand out to you isn’t and shouldn’t be exactly what stood out to me), but as an example here are some things I’ve gotten out of this perspective:

• In a literal sense, taking seriously the Bible’s perspective on the demonic, in which wicked supernatural powers are in fact at play in the unjust and fallen power structures we see in the world around us. This has a real impact on the way we pray and ought to help us (I’m not very good at this) to love people even as they participate in serious evil. It also means as Christians we’re called to pay attention to structural and systemic brokenness, which in our own context means taking perspectives like Critical Race Theory seriously. I wrote more about this in The Surprising Joy of Exorcism.

• More metaphorically, one of the central themes in the Christian life is sanctification: working towards ever-greater righteousness and putting our sins “to death”.

  • Joshua’s violent imagery doesn’t necessarily “teach” me anything about sin (I’m already aware that sin is bad.) But seriously reflecting on it can and does convict me to take it seriously, and especially the need to root out all of it, not just keep it to a level I think is acceptable.

  • Like Joshua, we’ll fail to completely eliminate sin, and we’ll experience life in the tension between the story of absolute success the author clearly wants to tell and the necessary concessions to human failure and limitations.

• Joshua’s challenge to the Insider/Outsider binary is also not really “new information”, but a conviction to take seriously something we should already have known.

  • Recall from last time that Rahab (the Canaanite) is treated as one of God’s people while Achan (the Judahite) is excluded. Similarly Caleb, who has Kenizzite blood (and hence is not a “full” Israelite), is treated with particular honor for his faithfulness.

  • This intentionally confronts the audience’s view on who God is closest to. Mark will pick up this theme in the New Testament, with the disciples consistently treated as outsiders and random strangers treated as insiders.

  • In the context of spiritual warfare, an obvious but difficult application is to avoid the human standards by which we judge holiness. The repeated revelations that the “insiders” had nothing to do with God and the “outsiders” were closer than we thought possible are frightening and humbling — to quote an anonymous monk, “Never look down on anyone. You do not know whether the Spirit of God prefers to dwell in you or in them”

(If you find readings in this or any other vein, I would love to hear about them!)

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1. If you’ve only met me over Zoom, this is a joke about the fact that I am six-foot-five.

2. Jesus being Yeshua, which is a later form of Joshua’s name Yehoshua.