“Y’hoshua captured Makkedah that day, defeating it and its king by the sword. He completely destroyed them, everyone there — he left no one; and he did to the king of Makkedah what he had done to the king of Yericho.”-Joshua 10:28
After Joshua had executed the five kings, from verse 28, we’re told with great emphasis that Israel had attacked and utterly destroyed everyone in the region of Makkedah.
There were a total of 7 cities in Makkedah called LIVNAH, LACHISH, GEZER, EGLON, HEBRON and DEBIR.
Again, it’s interesting how the Scriptures go out of their way to tell us that indeed each city was attacked and we’re given a blow-by-blow description of how the conquered residents were treated.
In a nutshell, per Holy War protocol, all of the citizens were killed and their possessions and farm animals were taken as war booty.
One of the reasons the Scriptures give us so much painstaking detail is because the author wanted to make it crystal clear that in this particular case Israel did EXACTLY as they were instructed by God through Moses neither flinching to the left nor the right.
And just as a quick review, in case you forgot, the instructions I’m referring to is the protocol expected to be obeyed during a Holy War.
Since EVERYTHING belonged to God, it was God alone who would decide what possessions He would keep for Himself and what would be okay for the soldiers to keep.
Those things devoted to the Lord literally became God’s holy property.
Those things the soldiers were allowed to keep had their holiness status reversed and thus it was okay for the common man to use them.
Recall that Jericho was an exception because it was the first city taken.
It was considered to be the First Fruits of the Promised Land and thus in this case, everything was devoted to God.
However, starting from the 2nd city taken (the city of Ai), God only kept the enemy residents and their homes and buildings to Himself (all of the infrastructure).
Everything else the Israelite army was free to take.
And again, as gruesome and difficult as this is to stomach for some people, the way God received what was reserved for Him was to have it destroyed and in most cases completely consumed in flames (and yes, this included every man, woman and child).
To conclude, understand that the last couple of paragraphs in Joshua 10 were to demonstrate that Joshua and his fighting men had learned their lessons from their past blunders in failing to obey the holy war law of HEREM or the ban.
Their obedience was well rewarded because by this point in time, Israel had pretty much succeeded in taking the southern portion of the Land of Canaan.
The reason I say “pretty much” is because when we get into Chapter 11, we’re going to encounter some verses that seem to imply that Israel didn’t completely destroy all of the southern cities.
This would mean that God’s instructions were not completely carried out.
However, this point appears to be incidental since apparently the Lord didn’t punish them for this.
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