My son wasn't very keen about the latest VCD we bought him, Joshua & the Battle of Jericho. He's more into Beep & the Band and their trouble-shooting for nursery-rhyme characters. So to accompany him (and generally to keep him from throwing a fit) I watched the cartoon next to him whilst he played Librarian i.e. stare at shelves and occasionally remove books.
The animation on the Joshua VCD is kinda low-tech. Probably no more advanced that your Saturday afternoon Doreamons and stuff. The music was kinda cheesy, the dialogue hollow. But, damn, I found myself lost in doxology in about no time!
The Jordan was flooded. C'mon, it's a bleedin' show-stopper. No-Go. You can't get across without drowning platoons of men, causing a panic, lowering morale (to put it mildly) – I mean, what worse way of beginning a war campaign could there be? Wait for a more sunny day (la). And in the meantime, firm up that wall-assault plan. Draft, brainstorm, review, redraft and do it all over again.
Because the walls the walls the walls. They're like Helm's Deep of the Ancient Near East, man! Unlike the Urukai Commander, Josh, you ain't got tons of battle equipment and loads of men you can sacrifice. Proposal: Back off. Get more men. Try an underground assault. Or a covert bomb attack inside the city. Or surround the city and starve them. Or lob fire-bombs (or goat dung, whatever helps) as a diversion whilst you search for weak spots in the wall. Or poison their water/crops/cattle. Or just beat it! Skip the city and invade some other less fortified and casualty-inflicting fortress!
But Biblical schemes aren't very accommodating to external obstacles. That's something which slowly dawns on you after a while. Giants, strongholds, torture, public ridicule, low 'success rates'(!), even death – all these Ts' (from the S.W.O.T. framework) don't mean a whole lot when God and His kids are involved. All that's required, truly, is a die-hard love for the Lord and His 'marching orders'. Strike 'O' and 'T' off the framework.
And so…how did Joshua & Co. take Jericho?
The priests carried the ark of the covenant (yup, the one Indiana Jones fought over in the Raiders) into the river, the waters parted like a curtain, creating a river corridor for the Israelites to walk through. In about a week, after marching around the Jericho walls (and earning the derision of their enemies, no doubt), plate tectonics took over, the walls fell (outwards, it seems*) and it was Game-Set-Match Israel. Apparently the city of Jericho was built on a fault line i.e. cracks in the earth's crust. What does it take to go from 'crack' to 'quake'? I dunnno, maybe a sonic boom? Or just a coupla thousand people with horns and drums having a really noisy jam session? Or maybe just the fist of God, punching the earth (like that almighty palm in Kungfu Hustler).
Whatever. In the end, Israel got what they were told they would get: a passage to Canaan. And their first major victory. But heck for me it wasn't the victory per se which blew me away. It was the victory in spite of the impossible (humanly speaking) barriers they had to overcome. And I sobbed a little at how easy I gave up at the mere thought (let alone the sight) of problems along the way. Maybe I gotta remember that S.W.O.T. doesn't stand for a lot in that other kingdom. In God's world, the S' and Os' are boundless. If even a cheap VCD can be a mighty tool – why not me?
*In A History of Israel, Walter Kaiser Jr. writes: "In much the same way as the Bible declared (Jericho) was found by the archeologists: with the booty of the city being left intact and the walls having collapsed towards the exterior of the city and not to the interior, as would be the case if they had been battered down by an invader under normal circumstances of most military invasions." (A History of Israel: From the Bronze Age Through the Jewish Wars, Walter C. Kaiser, Jr. Broadman & Holman 1998, p.154, emphasis mine)
