Joshua is so closely associated with the fall of Jericho in Hebrew tradition that it is therefore necessary to place his lifetime around 1400 B.C. Moses, on the other hand, appears to be linked to a period about two hundred years later, for the Hebrews slaved in the cities of Rameses. The story, then, of Joshua following Moses seems to be a confused version of two originally different episodes.
ENGBERG, The Dawn of Civilization
Here the scholar substantiates our claim, unfortunately he does not see that these stories are not history, hence his confusion. They are not confused versions of different episodes, but confused myths about Creation. Thus the book of Joshua is not a sequel to Exodus but a parallel, dealing with the same subject. In spite of the fact that both God and Moses selected Joshua as the next leader, it is not so. As Cain is the same as Adam, and Abraham the same as Noah, so Joshua is the same as Moses. The Bible presents Moses as a deliverer, or Savior, and this is both the nature of Joshua and the meaning of his name. He is the Savior of this myth, and what he saves is, as before, the Life Principle in bondage to matter. Thus with Joshua we are right back at the beginning of Exodus again. And such is the entire Bible—cosmology mythologized. As Genesis and Exodus, with their elaborations, are Involution and Evolution, there is nothing else to write about. These are the Bible’s themes and its books may, and should, be divided accordingly. Their present sequence is the work of a later priesthood that either ignorantly or maliciously confused them. The key to it lies not in the textual sequence, but in the planetary sequence, and so it is this we will follow.
But where, you ask, is the figurative earth this time? It is Jericho instead of Egypt. The parallel is cunningly hidden by presenting Joshua’s Red Sea incident first, that is, the crossing of the Jordan. We, however, will follow the Creative process.
1. Now Jericho was straitly shut up because of the children of Israel: none went out, and none came in (as in Egypt).
2. And the Lord said unto Joshua (as he did unto Moses), See, I have given into thine hand Jericho (Egypt), and the king thereof (Pharaoh), and the mighty men of valour (his charioteers).
3. And ye shall compass the city, all ye men of war, and go round about the city once. Thus shalt thou do six days.
4. And seven priests shall bear before the ark seven trumpets of rams’ horns: . . . and the priests shall blow with the trumpets (the seven plagues of the Moses myth, and both are chemical disintegration) (Chap. 6).
And for twenty-five hundred years the Jews have been blowing a ram’s horn, the shofar; I hope that they will now see that this is as mythical as all the rest.
16. And it came to pass at the seventh time, when the priests blew with the trumpets, Joshua said unto the people, Shout; for the Lord hath given you the city.
20. So the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets: and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city.
Here we have in cryptic form the long account of Egypt’s conquest, namely, the destruction of matter. We have also a fact not revealed in Exodus, that the destruction of matter is accomplished by vibration—we called it radiation, and the scientist, fission. As stated elsewhere, all the details of Creation cannot be presented in one myth, hence the many. Collectively they tell a fairly complete story, but only abysmal ignorance of the subject can look upon them as racial history. And this, we claim, the Jews have done since 400 B.C., hence their racial delusions, one of which is their right to take whatever they want. Another is that they bless all places, and now we find that they not only destroy Jericho but put a curse upon it.
17. And the city shall be accursed, even it, and all that are therein, to the Lord: only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all that are with her in the house, because she hid the messengers that we sent (the Hebrews’ “wooden horse”).
Rahab is the same harlot as in Revelation, and sparing her is but an occult way of saying not all matter was destroyed.
All ancient mythologists and cosmologists considered matter evil and accursed, and so, once free, Joshua, the life-force, pronounced a curse upon it and all who would restore it. And yet with only a colon between, the mythologist drops a hint that it is phoenixlike matter he is talking about and not a city. Jericho will be rebuilt.
26. And Joshua adjured them at that time, saying, Cursed be the man before the Lord, that riseth up and buildeth this city Jericho: he shall lay the foundation thereof in his firstborn, and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it (Chap. 6).
From the standpoint of Evolution the destroyed matter of this earth must not be restored, yet sometime, someone will again “lay the foundation thereof in his firstborn and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it.” This means that the matter or energy of this earth will someday be reused to build another—”Eternal process moving on,” “World(s) without end.” And in the day thereof the foundation will be laid by the firstborn Principle, number 1, and its physical part set up by the last, or youngest, number 7. And this is what we find so stated in 1 Kings 16:34, added for no reason whatever save to show that Joshua’s prophecy came true. “In his day did Hi-el the Bethelite build Jericho: he laid the foundation thereof in Abiram his firstborn, and set up the gates thereof in his youngest son Segub, according to the word of the lord, which he spoke by Joshua the son of Nun.” Now regardless of etymology, Hi-el is just High God, of Beth-el, God’s house, or source, and Abiram is Abraham, not the father of a race, but the father principle of the earth. And such are all Old Testament prophecies found in the New—not prophecies at all, but references to a known certainty—Evolution.
21. And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword (as they did in Egypt) (Chap. 6).
If this be history, why should an army that so recently had to be fed on manna, and Joshua’s was so fed, utterly destroy a rich and well-stocked city? Why did they not just move in, occupy it, use its animals for food, and so on? Because this army was not human; it was nature destroying matter that she might build organic forms from its energy. And so all must go save “the silver and gold and vessels of brass and iron,” symbols of earth’s chemical riches, stolen this time from Jericho. These were “consecrated unto the Lord”—the Hebrew “fence” for stolen goods; “they shall come into the treasury of the Lord.” The “tabernacle of the Lord” is now “the treasury of the Lord,” the human body, on which a later priesthood built a treasury for loot; another even built a Vatican on it.
That this Hebrew conquest of Jericho is a myth is proved by recent discoveries. According to Barton, the pre-Israelitish city of Jericho was so small that “the whole of it could have been put into the Colosseum at Rome.” Thus there was no great city of Jericho at that time for the Jews to take.
And now comes the Red Sea parallel: the children of Israel are about to pass over a body of water again on dry land. And this passing over takes place at precisely the same time as that of Exodus. What is more, the same rites and ceremonies are repeated, though differently placed to hide the parallel. They celebrate the Passover; they are also circumcised. “And the Lord said unto Joshua, This day have I rolled away the reproach of Egypt from off you,” 5:9. The reproach of “accursed” matter. But they were circumcised in Moses’ day. This is not a second cut-off, but a tip-off that this is a wholly unrelated myth.
They remove from Shittim (the Jewish concept of matter, elsewhere called dragon-dirt) and arrive at the river Jordan, the evolutionary equivalent of Jabok, over which Jacob passed in Involution. Here they tarry three days, during which the officers instruct the people.
3. And they commanded the people, saying, When ye see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, and the priests of the Levites bearing it, then ye shall remove from your place, and go after it (Chap. 3).
The three days represent that halfway goal where, as in Peleg’s day, “the earth was divided” into Involution and Evolution. Here the genetic principle, the Levites, is awakened and begins to “pass over,” the ark, as we said, being the carrier. And now the Red Sea miracle.
13. And it shall come to pass, as soon as the soles of the feet of the priests that bear the ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth, shall rest in the waters of Jordan, that the waters of the Jordan shall be cut off from the waters that come down from above; and they shall stand upon an heap.
Jordan is the mythic “river of life,” whose waters came “down from above,” Involution; and when they were cut off they did literally “stand upon an heap,” a heap of matter called earth. These are “the waters standing in line” that Moses saw, and later crossed.
And now as in Moses’ day, the people gather stones and build a memorial, that their descendants may remember that here “the Lord of all the earth” wrought miracles for the elect of all the earth, the Jewish people. So runs the parallel, but it is not yet complete, for here again the elect of all the earth are starving and the Lord of all the earth passes another miracle, no, not another, the same, a shower of manna. One would think that if the Israelites could build such magnificent structures as they did in Moses’ day, they would not need divine charity so soon after. But this is not subsequent history, it is duplicate mythology. Thus we are no farther along in Evolution than we were at the Red Sea crossing. What is more, it is not human evolution or moral warfare. The Pentateuch does not deal with human life and its conquest of evil, but with Life and its conquest of matter. This is the subject of both Exodus and Joshua, and we see they differ little when misplaced things are put in their proper places.
In the last chapter of Joshua we get a hint of the ultimate point Life reached as represented by this character. In spite of the fact that the Israelites have been wandering in the wilderness more than forty years, they still have Joseph’s bones with them, and these they bury in Shechem. Now Shechem, in Involution, was the place where Joseph was found wandering in the wilderness. And this point on the opposite side is not even in the human kingdom. In the meantime, they had passed through the land of the Genesic giants, here called the Anakim, whose cities were “high and fenced up to heaven,” as in Moses’ day. There were also Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Hittites to be slaughtered, as in Moses’ day, and all for the benefit of the Godites, as in Moses’ day. Now it was in the battle with the Amorites that Joshua performed his greatest miracle—causing the sun and moon to stand still. Today, even our literalists admit that this is some sort of mythology, but even in this they are mistaken, for this is the one part of Joshua that is not mythology, nor has it any occult meaning. It is merely an excerpt plucked bodily from the Book of Jasher, a collection of war songs, and war songs consist of poetic imagery and wild exaggeration of national deeds and heroes. Such are the words: “And the stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” So also, “Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou moon, in the valley of Ajalon.” Yet as late as 1664 the pope of Rome issued a bull condemning Copernicus and upholding Joshua. Such are the results of literally interpreted scripture.
These literalists should read their Bible more intelligently, particularly Joshua. It is trying to tell us the true nature of Causation, a nonmoral and violent power. Only when they recognize it will they understand “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” it flings upon them. This is the real “revelation” of the Old Testament, completely destroyed by the epigonous ignorance of the New. Jewish scholars consider the Pentateuch the most important and truest part of their scriptures; this is correct because it accords with nature, the one true source of truth.
What do we see when we look out into space at night? Millions of stars, and stars are suns and suns are centers of violent forces. When an old sun dies it becomes a young planet and that violence is still in it, hence the earthquake and volcano. When life forms appear on it, that violence is in them also; it is in us and it is this that drives us to war and killing. Then we pray to it for peace. If we would have peace we must first learn the cause of war. This is what the honest Jhwhist is trying to tell us, so let us read and learn.
18. And the Lord said unto Joshua, Stretch out the spear that is in thy hand (Moses’ rod) towards Ai; for I will give it into thine hand. . . .
24. And it came to pass, when Israel had made an end of slaying all the inhabitants of Ai in the field, in the wilderness wherein they chased them, and when they were all fallen on the edge of the sword, until they were consumed, that all the Israelites returned unto Ai, and smote it with the edge of the sword.
25. And so it was, that all that fell that day, both of men and women, were twelve thousand, even all the men of Ai.
26. For Joshua drew not his hand back, wherewith he stretched out the spear, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai.
27. Only the cattle and the spoil of that city Israel took for a prey unto themselves, according unto the word of the Lord which he commanded Joshua (Chap. 8).
These are literal words; do the literalists see in them any evidence of divinity, morality, love, and mercy? That they are but symbolic words is proven by our archeologists. According to them, the city of Ai was a ruin long before the Hebrews appeared; indeed, the name in Hebrew, ha’Ai, means “the ruin.” It was destroyed before 2000 B.C., and not rebuilt until some four hundred years after the alleged time of Joshua. Thus the author is not writing history; he is writing theology. In the Book of Numbers these wars are called by their rightful name—”the wars of Jehovah,” that is, the wars of the Creator. We said the Bible is the greatest indictment of God ever written, but this Hebrew Hitler has only gotten started; we should read on until we either blush for shame or else admit that the Bible is a book of mythology.
7. So Joshua ascended from Gilgal, he, and all the people of war with him, and all the mighty men of valour.
8. And the Lord said unto Joshua, Fear them not: for I have delivered them into thine hand; there shall not a man of them stand before thee.
9. Joshua therefore came unto them suddenly, and went up from Gilgal all night.
10. And the Lord discomfited them before Israel, and slew them with a great slaughter at Gibeon, and chased them along the way that goeth up to Bethhoron, and smote them to Azekah, and unto Makkedah.
11. And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Bethhoron, that the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: they were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword (Chap. 10).
And what had these people done that they should be stoned from heaven? Nothing except that they were in the way of “the chosen of the Lord,” for which he will do anything—miracles, murder, massacre and mayhem. “Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for thy possession.” Psalm 2:8. Today the Arabs are in their way so Ali Baba beware.
That Joshua’s maneuvers were a military impossibility makes no difference to the believers; nor does the fact that the Jews at the time were nomads, shepherds, not warriors. Such race-glorification was common in those days; the Babylonian tablets tell a similar tale about the king of Akkad plundering city after city, the source, perhaps, of the Hebrew story.
28. And that day Joshua took Makkedah, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and the king thereof he utterly destroyed, them, and all the souls that were therein; he let none remain: and he did to the king of Makkedah as he did unto the king of Jericho.
29. Then Joshua passed from Makkedah, and all Israel with him, unto Libnah, and fought against Libnah:
30. And the Lord delivered it also, and the king thereof, into the hand of Israel; and he smote it with the edge of the sword, all the souls that were therein; he let none remain in it; but did unto the king thereof as he did unto the king of Jericho.
31. And Joshua passed from Libnah, and all Israel with him, unto Lachish, and encamped against it, and fought against it:
32. And the Lord delivered Lachish into the hand of Israel, which took it on the second day, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls that were therein, according to all that he had done to Libnah.
33. Then Horam king of Gezer came up to help Lachish; and Joshua smote him and his people, until he had left him none remaining.
34. And from Lachish Joshua passed unto Eglon, and all Israel with him; and they encamped against it, and fought against it:
35. And they took it on that day, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls that were therein he utterly destroyed that day, according to all that he had done to Lachish (Chap. 10).
Such is the record, but only part of it. Little wonder the poet E. A. Robinson on reading it exclaimed: “A most bloodthirsty and perilous book for the young. Jehovah is beyond a doubt the worst character in fiction.” We blame the movies and the comics for juvenile delinquency but there is nothing in them to compare with Joshua and his God. To help His “chosen” this God destroyed Egypt and drowned its people; He even drowned “all in whose nostrils was the breath of life.” And we’re supposed to worship him. If so, then we are all devil-worshipers.
The Jews firmly believe they are “the chosen people”; what they do not know is that that which chose them is the devil. If the reader cannot accept this, he should read again the book of Joshua. There this Jehovah commanded Joshua to kill thirty-one kings and possibly a million men, women and children. If this be not the devil’s work, what is it? And whom did this killer choose to do His dirty work? Jacob, Joshua, Moses and David, criminals all. Yet they were men “after God’s own heart.” If so, God must be like His men. This is what the Torah is telling us, and only when the Jews realize it will they understand themselves and their tragic history.
Now this is not anti-Semitism. The scriptural Jews are but symbols of life and that includes us all. Their ancient priests deceived us but so did their Christian counterparts and for 2,000 years.
These see no theistic lesson in Joshua. On the contrary, they use it to show us the rewards of faith in God. He stopped the sun, He divided the sea for His chosen; He sent down manna from heaven for them—and hailstones for their enemies. This is that false security the scriptures offer. On the basis of it fools let serpents sting them to prove their faith, others refuse inoculation and deny their children blood transfusion. Such false faith must be destroyed. A mythical God is a spiritual “Maginot Line”—a comfort when all is well but useless in time of trouble, war, for instance. When that occurs both sides pray to this God, but God is on the side of the heaviest cannon. Here cannon power is God’s aid, and whoever gets there with “the mostest” wins. Now, that aid is El Shaddai’s power, atomic energy, and this is our security today not the God of religion. Lacking any diviner aid some of our preachers tell us that God withdrew from his world after this miraculous age; they must now learn that this miraculous age was mythology’s age, and its God but mythology’s stage equipment.
Forty wars in one generation should convince any intelligent person of these facts, but for lack of such intelligence, war only magnifies the illusion. Its helpless victims cry out to God because they know not what else to do. The Church is quick to capitalize on this, and so we have a revival of faith—the public’s extremity is the priests’ opportunity. During the Second World War they told us repeatedly, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” If so, it was only because there was no wisdom or understanding either; there was only that religion-born ignorance that produces foxholes. From these the tortured souls of men may cry to God as an instinctual reflex, but if they could reason from war to cause, their “Prayer from a Foxhole” would read like this:
Now I lay me down to sleep
Where bullets fly and vermin creep;
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the human race will take
The measure of a God whose will
For moral man is Kill and Kill.
“The fool saith in his heart, There is no God”—and another fool saith there is; but for two thousand years the affirmative fools have run the world and so they branded all who differ with them as atheists, infidels, social outcasts, etc. Yet what other attitude is there for the enlightened? Strip the theists of their mythological authority and you see the atheists have been right, not in denying a Creator, which they do not, but in denying the God of religion, which they do and rightly so. It is from these that all enlightened government comes, including that of our founding fathers, most of them atheists and we could fill pages with their atheism. In spite of this fact no avowed atheist can hold a government position. This too is due to religion. The Church fears atheism, not because it is inimical to human welfare but because it is inimical to its welfare. The churchmen want their mythical God because in him they live and move and have their cake and eat it too. The Church has thus become an institution for the care and maintenance of God, not man. You can say anything about man, and the Church will do nothing, but speak one word against its God and the whole benighted crew will rise in wrath against you. They should read Joshua again, then ask themselves which is the true God, the God of Joshua or the God of Jesus? They cannot both be right, yet Joshua was written before the darkness fell completely. That darkness is still upon the churchmen and while they sleep nature’s savage forces kill and kill; compare them with Joshua’s God and you find they agree completely.
If this God is the father of Jesus Christ, then this book is blasphemy, and the Jews have libeled God as well as Pharaoh. It makes him the complete antithesis of his son. The question then is, Which is right, the Old Testament or the New? Volumes have been written to resolve this paradox and all have missed the point. Their authors, as ignorant of the Old Testament’s subject as its lesson, have made the change to appear as due to man’s increasing knowledge of the goodness of God, when all the while it is due to his decreasing knowledge of Causation and Reality. As we have said, the people of the mythopoeic age knew the true nature of these, and just as we receded from them was their knowledge lost. The first part of the Old Testament being the nearest to that age contains this knowledge, but as its books increased, that knowledge decreased, until it culminated in the New Testament, which, from the standpoint of metaphysical truth, represents the nadir of human understanding. Thus the Old Testament is right and the New is wrong. Its God is the true God—a soulless, senseless power whose only “righteousness” is biologic Tightness, and whose only “grace” is survival fitness. The one sin in its eyes is weakness, laziness, complacency. This in time these mythological Israelites became, and to punish them this God raised up nations to destroy them. And only when great heroes rose again to plunder and despoil was His wrath averted. Ehud burying his knife in the fat King Eglon’s belly, and Jael driving the nail into Sisera’s head, were glorious deeds in His sight and worthy of recompense; which is just another way of saying that moral principles mean nothing to the Creative Principle. It has but one goal, Evolution, and whatever stands in its way must be destroyed. Yes, God “is a man of war” and destruction is in his hands.
And what does that make man? In war man is but a victim of a merciless power, using him for its own end, the evolutionary goal. And since war is a means to this end, man, in waging it, is a murderer climbing to Utopia on the corpses of his fallen brothers. He must find a better way than that devised by God. These things he cannot see because he has been blinded by a false theology. This is one of the evils of religion.
War is an instrument devised by God for the salvation of man—Evolution. Its purpose is to destroy what we will not, to tear down the fixed inadequacies that the more adequate may be built. War is nature’s spasmodic effort to change the status quo, but we will have none of that. As soon as one war is over, we lay the foundations of another. Blinded and obsessed by religion and commercialism, we set up old boundaries, old sovereignties, old systems and old ways, when the purpose of war is to destroy them. Do you not see then the part we self-righteous wrongdoers play in war? Were we to make peace a time of war on our social evils, there would be no need of military war.
To escape this man must find an intellectual as well as a moral equivalent for war, something that can bring about change without violence—brains instead of battles, books instead of bullets. But where are the brains to write such books? Try one and you’ll be an atheist and an infidel. Here is the place for your “rugged individualism,” but no, we’ll think no new thoughts, make no changes where personal and material things are concerned; we’ll keep right on provoking war below and trusting to “divine providence” above to give us peace. According to the Pentateuch, there is no such above but only a savage below and the Pentateuch is right.
This is the lesson the Old Testament is trying to tell us. As plainly as the occult can make it, it denies a moral and merciful Deity and presents instead a nonmoral and merciless Principle—the genetic of our theory. It is this, or its creation, our desire nature plus our ignorant minds, that drives us into war, and as long as we are ignorant of it we are in our glorious wars but dupes and boobs and victims of it. This is the vital knowledge religion is hiding from us. Instead of teaching us the facts of life it tells us everything moral, merciful and just must come from God, the very opposite of the truth. Everything moral and merciful we’ve ever dreamed of—peace, brotherhood, Utopia— must come from the epigenetic, ourselves. This can be summarized in the word consciousness, the evolving factor. When this is sufficiently moralized, intelligized and civilized we will see our dream realized. This is Christ-consciousness, and this is what the New Testament offers us—life as lived by moralized, intelligized and civilized humanity. That this way of the New Testament will someday prevail over the Old is inevitable, but no such world is possible yet. We too are in “the wilderness” and never will we reach our “Promised Land” while we remain as now, epigenetically inadequate to our place in genetic Creation.
What we need today is a complete reexamination of war in terms of Causation, Creation, biology and economics, uninfluenced by religion and its false securities. As Clemenceau said, “War is too important to leave to generals,” so, peace is too important to leave to God. Fortunately the idea is now dawning on the race, hence our nascent but promising United Nations— the supernational instead of the supernatural. In this the collective will of the moral epigenetic will control the individual’s genetic will to war and conquest.