Today we begin Joshua Chapter 10.
For the Complete Jewish Bible, click HERE.
For the King James version, click HERE.
One amazing attribute of the God we worship that will be demonstrated in Joshua Chapter 10 is…
…just how easily and effectively He can turn a major negative into a major positive.
In this case, the negative was the ungodly treaty that Israel was tricked into making with the Gibeonites and…
…the positive is how God used this situation to enable Israel to achieve victory over even more of their enemies in the Promised Land.
For the sake of breaking things down in a simple manner, understand that chapter 10 deals with Israel conquering the southern regions of the land of Canaan and chapter 11 deals with Israel taking the northern parts.
But at this point in time, Israel was still just getting started.
Keep in mind, as of now, they’ve only conquered 2 cities: Jericho and Ai.
Yet Israel learned a heck of a lot from these two battles with the native inhabitants of Canaan.
They learned what happens when they obey God’s divine commandments and…
…more importantly, they learned what happened when they didn’t obey.
The Lord was slowly but surely educating His people on the rules governing holy war and how it was so important for the soldiers to NOT rely on their own strength but on God’s power if they wanted to achieve victory.
Speaking of the rules governing holy war, one of the most important procedures Israel had to become very familiar with and learn to obey was the Principle of Herem or “The Ban”.
Recall the Law of Herem deals with God’s holy property.
Holy property was anything that was devoted to or set apart exclusively for the Lord and thus was off-limits to the soldiers to take home as war booty.
When I say “holy property”, I’m referring to the land and possessions that belonged to the enemy.
This could be anything such as the land itself, servants, concubines, livestock, houses, barns, furniture, gold and silver, clothing, jewelry, furniture…again, literally anything could be deemed as holy property if God decided to keep it.
The soldiers were allowed to take what was left over only after God had declared what belonged to Him.
Whatever items God declared was His instantly acquired the condition of being HOLY.
And what was left over remained in a COMMON state (it did NOT become holy) and thus it was okay for the soldiers to take home and use as they saw fit.
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