Conquering Canaan

"Like beautifully layered rock formations lining the walls of a desert canyon, so is the Biblical text. Story is piled upon story until the foundations are invisible. Those foundations tell a different story—one that only a trained geologist can tease from the rock, one that only a Biblical philologist, trained in the dissection of literature, can find in the text. In the first version of the book of Joshua, the kernel if you will, the Israelites barely make a dent in population density, since they conquer only two cities (Jericho and Ai). The real conquest begins only in the book of Judges and is gentler to the nations already inhabiting Canaan. Neither is the conquest a foregone conclusion since the Lord's participation in the actual fighting is a lot less emphasized. The story of this conquest as we know it developed through the accretive additions of five authors to the kernel who had very different ideas than this first author"--back cover.