Reading Joshua as Christian scripture

Abstract

The perception of historical and ethical difficulties associated with Joshua in the twentieth century have led to difficulties in appropriating it as Christian Scripture. I argue that from the perspective of cultural memory Joshua nonetheless has an important role as Scripture, but, moreover, that in engagement with patristic interpretation such difficulties call for Joshua to be read in a different way from that in which it has been since at least the time of Calvin onwards. I develop a way of reading based on recent anthropological approaches to myth, such as those of Victor Turner and Seth Kunin in particular. I combine this treatment of myth with Paul Ricoeur's approach to narrative hermeneutics and the hermeneutics of testimony to produce a reading of Joshua in dialogue with its reception and use in order to argue for a constructive contemporary means of reading Joshua as Christian Scripture