The Scriptures are replete with stories of deception. And often, strangely, it is those who we regard as righteous who are doing the deceiving. And, even more strangely, their deception is often rewarded, or even praised. Consider Jacob, Tamar, the Egyptian midwives, Rahab, to name just a few.
Frustratingly for most modern Christian readers, the text is usually silent about the fact that these stories seem at odds with the Ninth Commandment. Of course, rather than “You shall not lie”, the Ninth Commandment actually says “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour” (Ex. 20:16), a slightly less straightforward instruction. Yet, such straightforward instructions about lying can be found elsewhere (Lev. 19:11, Col. 3:9), and we know well that the Devil is the Father of Lies (John 8:44) and the Deceiver (Rev. 12:9).
Although such problems are entirely worth probing, we do well when reading Scripture to allow our interests to be led by the text. Its priorities will often be starkly different to our own, and we should be more perturbed by how our concerns are at odds with those of the text, than with how one text is seemingly at odds with another.
Let us consider one of these deception stories, and see how we might allow the text’s concerns to shape our own.
The Conquest of Ai
In Joshua 7, Israel is defeated by Ai as punishment for the sin of Achan. In Joshua 8, the Achan incident behind them, the LORD sends Israel back to fight with the promise of victory like that at Jericho. Unlike Jericho, however, this victory will come via an ambush:
“And [Joshua] commanded them, “Behold, you shall lie in ambush against the city, behind it. Do not go very far from the city, but all of you remain ready. And I and all the people who are with me will approach the city. And when they come out against us just as before, we shall flee before them. And they will come out after us, until we have drawn them away from the city. For they will say, ‘They are fleeing from us, just as before.’ So we will flee before them. Then you shall rise up from the ambush and seize the city, for the Lord your God will give it into your hand. And as soon as you have taken the city, you shall set the city on fire. You shall do according to the word of the Lord. See, I have commanded you.” – Joshua 8:4-8 (ESV)
The plan is a success, and Ai is successfully tricked. But this is where our unease may begin. Isn’t this deception dishonest, or at the very least dishonourable, for the people of God–even in war?
We could (and, to some extent, should) legitimately answer that question with reference to well-regarded Christian ethical positions on warfare. Plenty of great minds have argued for justified deception during hostilities.
Yet the text seems to have little interest in the ethics of the tactic. Admittedly, in Joshua 8:1-2, God does not specifically command victory to be carried out this way; he merely tells Joshua to “arise, go up to Ai” because the king and city have been “given into [Joshua’s] hand.” The battleplan seems to come from Joshua. Perhaps Joshua implemented a sinful way of receiving a promised blessing.
And yet, no comment is made on the morality of his actions. That is not what the text is interested in.
Close attention to the text, however, will reveal what it is interested in. In fact, a single word can help:
“Joshua arose early in the morning and mustered the people and went up, he and the elders of Israel, before the people to Ai. And all the fighting men who were with him went up and drew near before the city and encamped on the north side of Ai, with a ravine between them and Ai. He took about 5,000 men and set them in ambush between Bethel and Ai, to the west of the city. So they stationed the forces, the main encampment that was north of the city and its rearguard west of the city. But Joshua spent that night in the valley.” – Joshua 8:10-13
The word we have translated as “rearguard” in 8:13 is “aqev” (עקב), literally “heel”. The word is never used in this figurative sense elsewhere in the Old Testament, and so we have here an instance in which the translators have opted for a description rather than a translation. The word is used largely to refer simply to heels (e.g Gen. 3:15, Gen. 25:26), once to horse’s hooves (Jud. 5:22), and sometimes footsteps (e.g. Ps. 56:6). Even this latter use doesn’t stray far from its literal meaning.
So why make use of this peculiar (and particular) word?
Well, the “heel” is not without associations in Scripture; and so by using this word, the author of Joshua calls these to mind. And it is in exploring these associations that we can begin to make sense of the deceptive ambush in Joshua Chapter 8.
The Serpent Crusher
The heel’s first prominent association in Scripture is the Promised Seed of the Woman from Genesis 3:
“The LORD God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this,
cursed are you above all livestock
and above all the beasts of the field;
on your belly you shall go,
and dust you shall eat
all the days of your life.
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel” – Genesis 3:14-15
From this point on, the Biblical narrative chronicles the enmity between these two lines of offspring. Yet, as successive generations fail to crush the serpent, God finally sends the Offspring (Gal. 3:16) who will crush the serpent– Christ, who “came to destroy the devil’s work” (1 John 3:8).
Yet, in spite of the failings of Eve’s offspring, the dynamic of their conflicts with the offspring of the serpent often foreshadow the final conflict between Christ and Satan. Violent or deceptive serpentine figures (the Pharaohs in Genesis 12 or Exodus 1, Athaliah in 2 Kings 11, Haman in Esther) continually threaten God’s people, who are often represented by a woman and her seed, (Sarai and the unconceived Isaac in Genesis 12, the Hebrew midwives in Exodus 1, Jehosheba and Joash in 2 Kings 11, or Queen Esther herself). These serpents are usually defeated or foiled, ironically, by some kind of deception – a sweet, poetic justice for those whose father is the Father of Lies.
By presenting Joshua as one who overcomes with his “heel”, the text invites us quite explicitly to see Joshua as the next installment in this conflict, and another foreshadowing of the final victory of the Offspring.
Notably, both Joshua and Jesus achieve victory by means of a tree. The King of Ai meets his end, in 8:29, by being impaled on a pole, or hung on a tree – a sign, in the Torah, of being cursed by God (Dt. 21:23). Likewise, Christ defeats Satan with his tree, the cross. We can sometimes imagine that Christ’s “victory” relates solely to his resurrection, but Scripture speaks differently: “And having disarmed the [demonic and Satanic] powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (Col 2:15). Yet, although Christ’s tree inflicts a curse upon the Serpent, it also wins the possibility of forgiveness for the Serpent’s offspring by taking that curse upon himself.
Such a reading of this text would escape us if we were distracted by Joshua’s conduct, or even by broad and general truths about God which we might extract from the passage.
Previous generations of expositors have been alert to these typological links however. On the typology of Satan in this text, Origen (c.184-c.253), albeit with some characteristically dubious thoughts about other details in the text, noted: “Ai means chaos. But we know chaos to be the place or habitation of opposing powers of which the devil is the king and chief.”1
On the typology of Christ, Origen writes: “The cross of our Lord Jesus Christ was twofold. Perhaps to you it seems an astonishing and novel word that I say, ‘the cross was twofold,’ that is, it is twofold and was for a double reason. For the Son of God was indeed crucified in the flesh, but invisibly on that cross the Devil ‘with his principalities and authorities was affixed to the cross.’”2
We have begun to tease out, then, the meaning of this deception story, and are not the first to do so. And yet, the heel has more to tell us.
Jacob
The “heel” is associated with another biblical figure–Jacob. His name literally means “heel” (in Hebrew, Jacob sounds more like “yakov”, being the same as “aqev”), referring to the fact he was born grasping the heel of his twin brother Esau. Figuratively, the name means “supplanter”. Jacob’s birth and naming signal that he will be someone who gets by in life through cunning, trickery, and deceit–by grabbing at people’s heels, rather than looking them in the eye.
Consider the chief Jacob story–the deception of Isaac. Compelled by his mother Rebekah, Jacob tricks His blind old father into giving him the blessing which, by right, belongs to Esau the firstborn. Jacob dresses in thick furs, so as to smell and feel like Esau, and so Isaac blesses him. When all is revealed, Esau and Isaac comment on the fittingness of the situation:
“But [Isaac] said, ‘Your brother came deceitfully, and he has taken away your blessing.’ Esau said, ‘Is he not rightly named Jacob? For he has cheated me these two times. He took away my birthright, and behold, now he has taken away my blessing” – Genesis 27:35-36
Now, whatever we make of Jacob and Rebekah’s actions, we must bear in mind that Isaac is in the wrong to begin with. The LORD made clear when the twins were born that Jacob, not Esau, was the child of promise and that the older should serve the younger (Gen. 25:23). Yet Isaac favoured Esau above Jacob (Gen. 25:28), even when Esau married foreign women and tormented his mother and brother (Gen. 26:34-35). Isaac’s eventual blindness symbolises his inability to perceive God’s favour for Jacob, and he finally falls prey to his own appetite, just like Esau with the bowl of pottage (Gen. 25:29-34) and Eve with fruit which pleased her eye (Gen. 3:6).
So God uses Jacob’s deception to humble Isaac, and to divert the blessing to Jacob, whom he had chosen. The younger son was, indeed, rightly named Jacob. In God’s sovereignty, his heel grabbing had, one way or another, ensured the promises remained on track. Blessing came to the supplanter. Victory came by the heel. We have already mentioned other similar stories throughout Scripture: Tamar, the midwives, Rahab.
With this in our minds, the significance of the ambush at Ai becomes clearer. What at first might seem to us a morally questionable military tactic is placed in a typological line of high pedigree: God poetically deceiving the offspring of the deceptive serpent to win blessing for the offspring of Eve.
At Ai, Joshua pulls a Jacob. Jacob used the heel in cunning, humbling Isaac; Joshua used his heel in similar cunning, humbling Ai. Jacob disguised himself in furs to gain a blessing; Joshua disguised himself in defeat to gain a victory.
And this, too, points us to the cross.
Did the cross not look like defeat and retreat? The Devil was at work to make the cross happen–he entered into Judas before he betrayed Christ. The cross is where he strikes Christ’s heel. But more fool him–because at the cross, Christ pulls a Jacob, or a Joshua-at-Ai. The “defeat” of the cross is how Christ wins the victory over Satan.
Understanding the cross as a form of cunning is another idea strange to our modern minds, but it is not without precedent in the church. Gregory of Nyssa (c.335-395) famously compared Christ’s death to bait on a fish hook. In Gregory’s understanding, Christ’s flesh concealed his Deity to the spiritual forces of evil, duping them into devouring him, to their own destruction. He writes:
“…in order to secure that the ransom in our behalf might be easily accepted by Him who required it, the Deity was hidden under the veil of our nature, that so, as with ravenous fish, the hook of the Deity might be gulped down along with the bait of flesh, and thus, life being introduced into the house of death, and light shining in darkness, that which is diametrically opposed to light and life might vanish; for it is not in the nature of darkness to remain when light is present, or of death to exist when life is active.”3
The merits of Gregory’s illustration have been variously debated. Yet we can see here that the thought of the cross as a divine ambush, comparable to Joshua 8, was not an alien thought to more ancient minds.
Conclusion
We have seen then that close attention to the text of Joshua 8 helps us to make sense of why this deceptive ambush is recorded, especially in a book in which most conquests are succinctly summarised. It has unique lessons to teach us.
Our concern may be with the ethics of the characters, but this is not the text’s concern. Rather, Joshua 8 is concerned with showing us that God overcomes his enemies and how God overcomes his enemies. If the Offspring association illuminates the former, the Jacob association illuminates the latter.
Paul told Timothy that the holy scriptures, by which he meant the Old Testament, made him “wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15). He meant such passages as this — because salvation in Christ Jesus is a capacious, many-textured reality. Biblical typology does not simply draw a straight line from one Old Testament story to Christ; it follows lines from one type to another, picking up elements of each until all of those find their fulfilment in Christ (and, indeed, his body, the Church). Christ is the greater Joshua, yet in Joshua 8’s terms, that includes being the greater Offspring and the greater Jacob.
In closing, let us note a small difference between Jericho and Ai. At Jericho, all was devoted to destruction, bar the precious metals for the house of the LORD, and Rahab and her family (Jos. 7:24-25). Yet at Ai, in a sign of lavish grace, God allows Joshua and the people to take the plunder for themselves (8:2). The crushing, cunning victory is one shared by the people. And so it is with the crushing, cunning victory of Christ. Hence we read Paul’s blessing upon the church: “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you” (Rom. 16:20).
Rhys Laverty (BA, GDip) works part-time for The Davenant Institute, alongside studying Davenant’s MLitt degree. He writes a weekly blog for Ad Fontes and co-hosts the Ad Fontes Podcast. He also podcasts about film and TV on For Now We See. He lives in Chessington, UK, with his wife and two children.
- Origen, “Homily VII” in Homilies on Joshua, trans. Barbara J Bruce, ed. Cynthia White (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2002), 86 ↩︎
- Origen, “Homily VII” in Homilies on Joshua, 86 ↩︎
- Gregory of Nyssa, “Dogmatic Treatises etc.” in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, accessed 19/09/2020, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf205.xi.ii.xxvi.html ↩︎