_THE STRATAGEM OF THE GIBEONITES._
JOSHUA ix.
We now resume the thread of the story interrupted by the narrative of
the transaction at Ebal and Gerizim. We learn from the testimony of
Rahab of Jericho, as uttered to the spies (chap. ii. 9), that the
terror of Israel had caused the hearts of the inhabitants of the
country to faint, and that the fame of all that had been done for them
by Jehovah had quite paralysed them. But when the host of Israel
actually entered Western Palestine, and began their conquest by the
destruction of Jericho and Ai, the inhabitants seem to have plucked up
courage, and begun to consider what could be done in self-defence. It
is very probable that they found considerable encouragement from what
happened at Ai. There it had been seen that Israel was not invincible.
Insignificant though Ai was, its people had been able to repel with
great success the first attack of the Israelites. And though they had
been destroyed in the second, this was achieved only by the combined
influence of stratagem and an overwhelming force. The supernatural
power under which Jericho had fallen had not been shown at Ai, and
might not come into play in the future. There was therefore yet a
chance for the Canaanites, if they should combine and act in concert.
Steps were therefore taken for such a union. The kings or chiefs who
occupied the hills, or central plateau of the country; those of the
valleys, interspersed between the mountains; and those occupying the
Shephelah, or maritime plains of Philistia, Sharon, and
Phœnicia;--all the nations comprised under the well-known names
Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites,
entered into a league of defence, and prepared to confront Joshua and
the Israelites with a determined resistance. The news of the
confederacy would bring a tremor over some timid hearts in the camp of
Israel, but would cause no serious anxiety to Joshua and all the men
of faith, who, like him, felt assured that the Lord was with them.
There was one native community, however, that determined to follow
another course. The Gibeonites were a branch of the Hivite race,
inhabiting the town of Gibeon, and some other prominent towns in the
great central plateau of the country. Gibeon is undoubtedly
represented now by the village of El Jib, situated about half-way
between Jerusalem and Bethel, four or five miles distant from each.
Dr. Robertson describes El Jib as situated in a beautiful plain of
considerable extent, on an oblong hill or ridge, composed of layers of
limestone, rising as if by regular steps out of the plain. In the days
of Joshua, it was a place of great importance, a royal city, and it
had under its jurisdiction the towns of Beeroth, Chephirah, and
Kirjath-jearim. Its inhabitants were in no humour to fight with
Joshua. They had faith enough to understand what would be the
inevitable result of that, and therein they were right, and the
confederate kings were wrong. On the other hand, they were not
prepared to make an honest and unconditional surrender. They probably
knew that the orders under which Joshua was acting called on him to
destroy all the people of the land, and they had no assurance that,
being of the doomed nations, open submission would secure their lives.
They resolved therefore to proceed by stratagem. A detachment was
appointed to wait on Joshua at his camp at Gilgal, as if they were
ambassadors from a distant country, and represent to him in pious tone
that they had come from afar, "because of the name of the Lord his
God, having heard the fame of Him, and all that He did in Egypt, and
all that He did to the two kings of the Amorites that were beyond
Jordan, to Sihon King of Heshbon, and to Og King of Bashan." They came
with the desire to show respect to the people whose God was so
powerful, and to be allowed, though far off, to live at peace with
them. Then they presented their credentials, as it were; showing the
old sacks, the shrivelled bottles, the musty bread they had brought
with them, and the clouts upon their feet and ragged garments which
attested the great length of their journey. "Those old Gibeonites,"
says the "Land and the Book," "did indeed 'work wilily' with Joshua.
Nothing could be better calculated to deceive than their devices. I
have often thought that their ambassadors, as described in the
narrative, furnish one of the finest groups imaginable for a painter;
with their old sacks on their poor asses; their wine bottles of goat
skin, patched and shrivelled up in the sun, old, rent, and bound up;
old shoes and clouted upon their feet; old garments, ragged and
bedraggled, with bread dry and mouldy,--the very picture of an
over-travelled and wearied caravan from a great distance. It is
impossible to transfer to paper the ludicrous appearance of such a
company. No wonder that, having tasted their mouldy victuals, and
looked upon their soiled and travel-worn costume, Joshua and the
elders were deceived, especially as they did not wait to ask counsel
at the mouth of the Lord."
It was just the completeness of the disguise that threw Joshua and the
men of Israel on their guard. For at first the idea did occur to them
that the strangers might be neighbours, and therefore of the nations
that they were called on to destroy. On closer inspection, however,
that seemed out of the question; indeed, the supposition was so
utterly preposterous that it was deemed hardly fitting to bring the
matter before the Lord. It is as plain as day, Joshua and the elders
would reason; the evidence of what they say is beyond question; theirs
is no case of perplexity requiring us to go to God; we may surely
exercise our common sense and make a league with these far-travelled
men. In a short time they will be back in their own country, far
beyond our boundaries, and the only effect of their visit and of our
league will be a fresh tribute to the name and power of Jehovah, a
fresh testimony to His presence with us, and a fresh pledge that He
will bear us to success in the enterprise in which we are engaged. And
when the confederate kings that are now leaguing against us hear that
this distant people have come to us to propitiate our favour, they
will be struck by a new terror and will be the more easily subdued.
We see in all this the simple, unsuspecting spirit of men who have
spent their lives in the wilderness. As for the Gibeonites, there was
a combination of good and bad in their spirit. They remind us in a
measure of the woman with the issue of blood. In her there was
certainly faith; but along with the faith, extraordinary superstition.
In the Gibeonites there was faith--a belief that Israel was under the
protection of a remarkable Divine power, under a Divine promise the
truth of which even Balaam had very recently acknowledged--"I will
bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee."
Undoubtedly a religious feeling lay at the bottom of the proceeding. A
great divine Being was seen to be involved, who was on Israel's side
and against his enemies, and it would not do to trifle with Him. But
in their way of securing exemption from the effects of His
displeasure; the grossest superstition appeared. They were to gain
their object by deceit. They were to get Him to favour them above
their neighbours through an elaborate system of fraud, through a
tissue of lies, through unmitigated falsehood. What a strange
conception of God! What blindness to His highest attributes,--His
holiness and His truth! What amazing infatuation to suppose that they
could secure His blessing through acts fitted to provoke His utmost
displeasure! What a miserable God men fashion to themselves when they
simply invest Him with almighty power, or perhaps suppose Him to be
moved by whims and prejudices and favouritisms like frail man, but
omit to clothe Him with His highest glory--forget that "justice and
judgment are the habitation of His throne, mercy and truth go before
His face."
The conduct of the men was the more strange that it was impossible
that they should not be speedily found out. And it was quite possible
that, when found out, they would be dealt with more severely than
ever. True, indeed, Joshua, when he did detect their plot, did not so
act; he acted on a high, perhaps a mistaken sense of honour; but they
had no right to count on that. Timidity is a poor adviser. All it can
do is to turn the next corner. True faith, resting on eternal truth,
acts for eternity. True faith is often blind, but in the deepest
darkness it knows that it is on the right track, and under the
guidance of the eternal light. Blind faith is very different from
blind fear. Faith holds on in full expectation of deliverance; fear
trembles and stumbles, in perpetual dread of exposure and humiliation.
"A lying tongue is but for a moment;" and the Gibeonite fraud lived
just three days. Then it was discovered by Joshua that the Gibeonites
lived in the immediate neighbourhood. But before that, he had made
peace with them, and entered into a league to let them live, and the
princes of the congregation had confirmed it by an oath. Nothing could
have been more provoking than to discover that they had been duped and
swindled. It is always a very bitter experience to find that our
confidence has been misplaced. Men whom we thought trustworthy, and
whom we commended to others as trustworthy, have turned out knaves. It
is hard to bear, for we have committed ourselves to our friends in the
matter. What would Joshua and his people think now of the supposed
tribute to the God of Israel, and the impression expected to be made
on the confederate kings? Before all the inhabitants of Canaan he and
his people were befooled, humiliated. Not a man in all the country but
would be making merry at their expense. Yet even that was not the
worst of it. They had been guilty of over-confidence, and of neglect
of means that were in their hands; they had neglected to get counsel
of their God. They had trusted in their own hearts when they ought to
have sought guidance from above. The trouble was their own creation;
they were alone to blame.
We cannot but respect the way in which Joshua and the princes acted
when they discovered the fraud. It might have been competent to
repudiate the league on the ground that it was agreed to by them under
false pretences. It was made on the representation that the Gibeonites
had come from a far country, and when that was seen to be utterly
untrue there would have been an honourable ground for repudiating the
transaction. But Joshua did not avail himself of this loophole. He and
the princes had such respect for the sanctity of an oath that, even
when they discovered that they had been grossly deceived, they would
not resile from it. It seems to have been the princes that took up
this ground, and they did so in opposition to the congregation (ver.
18). The fact that the name of the Lord God of Israel had been invoked
in the oath sworn to the Gibeonites constrained them to abide by the
transaction. It is a good sign of their spirit that they were so
jealous of the honour of their God, and of the sanctity of their oath.
They came out of the transaction with more honour than we should have
expected. Personal interests were subordinated to higher
considerations. They carried out that great canon of true
religion--first and foremost giving "glory to God in the highest."
But though the lives of the Gibeonites were spared, that was all. They
were to be reduced to a kind of slavery--to be "hewers of wood and
drawers of water for the congregation and the altar of God." The
expression has become a household word to denote a life of drudgery,
but perhaps we fail to recognise the full significance of the terms.
"I was forcibly reminded of this," says the author of "The Land and
the Book," "by long files of women and children (near El Jib) carrying
on their heads heavy bundles of wood.... It is the severest kind of
drudgery, and my compassion has often been enlisted in behalf of the
poor women and children, who daily bring loads of wood to Jerusalem
from these very mountains of the Gibeonites. To carry water, also, is
very laborious and fatiguing. The fountains are far off, in deep
wadies with steep banks, and a thousand times have I seen the feeble
and the young staggering up long and weary ways with large jars of
water on their heads. It is the work of slaves, and of the very poor,
whose condition is still worse. Among the pathetic lamentations of
Jeremiah there is nothing more affecting than this: 'They took the
young men to grind, and the children fell under the wood' (i. 16).
Grinding at the hand-mill is a low, menial work, assigned to female
slaves, and therefore utterly humiliating to the young men of Israel.
And the delicate children of Zion falling under the loads of hard,
rough wood, along the mountain paths! Alas! 'for these things I weep;
mine eye, mine eye runneth down with water, because the comforter that
should relieve my soul is far from me: my children are desolate,
because the enemy prevailed.'"
Respecting the after history of Gibeon and the Gibeonites we find some
notices in the Old Testament, but none in the New. At one time there
was a sanctuary at Gibeon, even after the ark had been removed to
Mount Zion; for it was at Gibeon that Solomon offered his great
sacrifice of a thousand burnt offerings, and had that remarkable dream
in which, in reply to the Divine offer of a choice of gifts, he chose
wisdom in preference to any other (1 Kings iii. 4 _sq._). But the most
remarkable reappearance of the Gibeonites in history is in the reigns
of Saul and David. For some unknown reason, and probably quite
unjustly, Saul had put some of them to death. And in the reign of
David, probably the early part of it, when a succession of famines
desolated the land, and inquiry was made as to the cause, the reply of
the oracle was: "It is for Saul and his bloody house, because he slew
the Gibeonites." And it was to avenge this unjust slaughter that seven
descendants of Saul were put to death, on that occasion when Rizpah,
the mother of two of them, showed such remarkable affection by
guarding their dead bodies from the beasts and birds of prey. It is
possible that even after the Babylonian captivity some Gibeonites
survived under their old name, because it is said in Nehemiah that
among the others who repaired the wall of Jerusalem were "Melatiah the
Gibeonite, and Jadon the Meronothite, the men of Gibeon, and of
Mizpah" (iii. 7). Only it is uncertain whether Melatiah was of the old
Gibeonite stock, or an Israelite who had Gibeon for his city. While
the old Gibeonites did survive they seem to have had a miserable lot,
and the question might have been often asked by them--Did our fraud
bring us any real good? Is life worth living?
Does anything resembling this fraud of the Gibeonites ever take place
among ourselves? In answer, let us ask first of all, what is the
meaning of pious frauds? Are they not transactions where fraud is
resorted to in order to accomplish what are supposed to be religious
ends? Granting that the fraud of the Gibeonites was not for a
religious but for a secular object--their deliverance from the sword
of Joshua--still they professed, in practising it, to be doing honour
to God. It is the part of superstition at once to lower the
intellectual and the moral attributes of God. It often represents that
the most frivolous acts, the uttering of mysterious words, or the
performance of senseless acts have such a power over God as to bring
about certain desired results. More frequently it holds that cruelty,
falsehood, injustice, and other crimes, if brought to bear on
religious or ecclesiastical ends, are pleasing in God's sight. Is
there anything more truly odious than this severance of religion from
morality and humanity,--this representation that fraud and other
immoral acts have value before God? How can anything be a real
religious gain to a man, how can it be otherwise than disastrous in
the last degree, if it develops a fraudulent spirit, if it perverts
his moral nature, if it deepens and intensifies the moral disorder of
his heart? If men saw "the beauty of holiness," "the beauty of the
Lord," they could never bring their minds to such miserable
distortions. It is pure blasphemy to suppose that God could thus
demean Himself. It is self-degradation to imagine that anything that
can be gained by oneself through such means, could make up for what is
lost, or for the guilt incurred by such wickedness.
And this suggests a wider thought--the fearful miscalculation men make
whensoever they resort to fraud in the hope of reaping benefit by
means of it. Yet what practice is more common? The question is, Does
it really pay? Does it pay, for instance, to cheat at cards? Have we
not seen recently what swift and terrible retribution that may bring,
making us feel for the culprit as we might have felt for Cain. Does it
pay the merchant to cheat as to the quality of his goods? Does it not
leak out that he is not to be trusted, and does not that suspicion
lose more to him in the long run than it gains? Does it pay the
preacher to preach another man's sermon as his own? Or, to vary the
illustration. When one has entrapped a maiden under false promises,
and then forsakes her; or when he conceals the fact that he is already
married to another; or when he controls himself for a time, to conceal
from her his ill temper, or his profligate habits, or his thirst for
strong drink, does it pay in the end? The question is not, Does he
succeed in his immediate object? but, How does the matter end? Is it a
comfortable thought to any man that he has broken a trustful heart,
that he has brought misery to a happy home, that he has filled some
one's life with lamentation and mourning and woe? We are not thinking
only of the future life, when so many wrongs will be brought to light,
and so many men and women will have to curse the infatuation that made
fraud their friend and evil their good. We think of the present
happiness of those who live in an atmosphere of fraud, and worship
daily at its shrine. Can such disordered souls know aught of real
peace and solid joy? In the case of some of them, are there not
occasional moments of sober feeling, when they think what their life
was given them for, and contrast their selfish and heartless devices
with the career of those who deal truly and live to do good? Bitter,
very bitter is the feeling which the contrast raises. It is bitter to
think how unfit one is for the society of honest men; how the master
one is serving is the father of lies; and how, even when the master
does grant one a momentary success, it is at the sacrifice of all
self-respect and conscious purity, and with a dark foreboding of wrath
in the life to come.
All Eastern nations get the character of being deceitful; but indeed
the weed may be said to flourish in every soil where it has not been
rooted out by living Christianity. But if it be peculiarly
characteristic of Eastern nations, is it not remarkable how constantly
it is rebuked in the Bible, even though that book sprang from an
Eastern soil? No doubt the record of the Bible abounds with
_instances_ of deceit, but its voice is always against them. And its
instances are always instructive. Satan gained nothing by deceiving
our first parents. Jacob was well punished for deceiving Isaac.
David's misleading of the high priest when he fled from Saul involved
ultimately the slaughter of the whole priestly household. Ananias and
Sapphira had an awful experience when they lied unto the Holy Ghost.
All through the Bible it is seen that lying lips are an abomination to
the Lord, but they that deal truly are His delight. And when our
blessed Lord comes to show us the perfect life, how free He is from
the slightest taint or vestige of deceit! How beautifully transparent
is His whole life and character! No little child with his honest smile
and open face was ever more guileless. In the light of that perfect
example, who among us does not blush for our errors--for our many
endeavours to conceal what we have done, to appear better than we
were, to seem to be pleasing God when we were pleasing ourselves, or
to be aiming at God's glory when we were really consulting for our own
interests? Is it possible for us ever to be worthy of such a Lord?
First, surely, we must go to His cross, and, bewailing all our
unworthiness, seek acceptance through His finished work. And then draw
from His fulness, even grace for grace; obtain through the indwelling
of His Spirit that elixir of life which will send a purer life-blood
through our souls, and assimilate us to Him of whom His faithful
apostle wrote: "He did not sin, _neither was guile found in His
mouth_."