Season 1, Episode 3
Joshua: Epic Slaughter (2009)
Take the paucity of evidence from the previous episode and multiply it by 10 and you have the level of conjecture this episode depends on. Yes, there is still room for some conjecture between the archaeological evidence and the textual clues about Joshua, but still, with all the other historical battles BC to choose from, it’s strange and yet perfectly natural to choose Joshua’s conquest as a subject for an episode. And, as you might expect, the result is another venture into the world of salaciousness and sloppy logic.
Joshua, the leader of the Israelites...Rusty Locke (That’s possibly the worst porn name I’ve ever heard of.)
Rahab, the hooker with a heart of gold...Christiana Leucas
Spy, an Israelite spy who ends up in the House of Love...David Jon Wilson
Bethelite King/Bad Guy #1...Michel Triplett (Not of Belleville)
Caleb/Israelite Soldier/Spy....Josh Bradley
Main Female Villager....Abby Walla (There were others female villagers, but this was the main one.)
David George (Professor of Classics, St. Anselm College)
Richard A. Gabriel (Distinguished Professor, Royal Military College of Canada)
Steven Weingartner (Author, Chariots Like a Whirlwind)
Mark Schwartz (Dept. of Anthropology, Grand Valley St. U.)
Joshua presents a bit of a problem, because his “Epic Slaughter” is in fact what we would call “Small Scale Genocide.” The reason we would call it “small scale” is because the number of people involved for the operation as a whole was tiny by modern standards. That’s one of the things that Battles B.C. downplays. They keep trying to scale up our expectations. And yes, there are a couple of chilling moments of brutality which are played up for the full History Channel scandal effect. The Israelites are commanded to kill every living thing (including livestock, and maybe even anaerobic life forms) when they take the land. But the thing about trying to recreate Joshua through scripture that the Battles B.C. people don’t want to talk about is just how much of the story as we have it is about the politics and culture of the time of the writing (which scholars will note is much much later) and thus just how much of the story is pure parable and analogy. The fact that even in David’s time (which was several generations down the line) we are told about mixed ethnic populations in the region (Uriah the Hittite, anyone? He’s not Uriah the Israelite.) should serve as warning about taking too much stock in the genocidal aspects of the Joshua story.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that we are going to reconstruct the story using the Old Testament and archaeology and period analogs as our basis for reconstruction. It’s probably good for us to feel discomfort in the notion that we are supposed to celebrate mass murder of women and children. (Make no mistake, that’s what we are supposed to believe Joshua did.) On the other hand, we might remember that such language (“I destroyed this city and sold its inhabitants as chattel and pissed on the still smoldering ashes of their homes”) is to some extent typical ancient hyperbole. If we are to believe every inscription on every wall in Assyria then we’d have to imagine a lot of smiting going on and we might well wonder what eventually went wrong because nobody ever loses a battle in those inscription stories. You have to take the material with a grain of salt, after all. Sometimes a whole shaker is called for.
Of course, all of this is beyond the scope of a series which just wanted another excuse to have a bearded guy stand in front of a green screen and wave a sword around his head so the f/x people could give us another cartoon spurt of neck blood flying from a Canaanite at the appropriate speed for that sort of thing. Again, the methods of combat talked about don’t translate into the sword wielding animation. The map showing Joshua’s “strategy” is often of such scale that the effect would be the same as trying to talk about the Normandy invasion by holding up a globe and drawing a big arrow from England to France across the channel. Yeah, thanks for the detailed information there.
Much time is spent on what is clearly the best part of the story, the part where Joshua’s spies have to hide out with a prostitute in Jericho named Rahab, the hooker with a heart of gold. As with Bathsheba in the previous episode, I think it took every ounce of restraint the makers of this series could borrow to prevent them from just going ahead and including a hard core porn insert while letting the scholars talk about why it makes perfect sense for spies to hide out with a prostitute. Actually, the case there is pretty logical, though one might still allow for other conjectures for why a prostitute and her family would be spared the general slaughter of Jericho.
Now, watch as the talking heads try to dance around the whole “making the sun stand still” bit as well as the “walls falling flat” and oh, yeah, the fact that the Ark of the Covenant is paraded around the town. But if the Ark was powerful why couldn’t they just aim it at the walls? Why would they even need a prostitute/spy to let them know about the weak points in the defenses if they had a super-weapon? Don’t expect hard questions like this, much less any attempt to answer them.
Also covered in some detail is the battle of Ai, where things almost go wrong, but then work out in the end as Joshua and his men fight the Canaanites in a ruined old town. I’m fairly sure that much of this episode was either an apology for calling David a ruthless and somewhat unscrupulous killer and also because in addition to trying to get the 300 audience on board the Battle BC folks also figured they’d pick up some of the people who liked Inglourious Basterds for one of the three wrong reasons to like that film.
I’d say that this would be the worst of the lot, but Epic Slaughter actually has a prequel coming up in the form of an episode called Moses: Death Chase. I’m not making that up.
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