Okay, today I want to talk about how God, the master war strategist, turned Israel’s current sticky predicament into a major big win.
But in order to do that properly, I need to explain how warfare was conducted in the Biblical era.
In ancient times, understand that siege warfare was the primary way war was waged.
You see, the 5 kings who had ganged up to attack Gibeon were rulers over what were called “Royal Cities”.
Royal cities were surrounded by huge walls and were protected by the king’s soldiers and thus were darn near impossible to penetrate.
Bottomline, unless one could find a way to get through the walls, the only other way to attack was by siege.
From the attacking army’s perspective, this was incredibly time-consuming and caused much loss of life but it could be very effective.
Because once a city was sealed off by an enemy force, that meant that nothing dead or alive could enter or leave.
Think about the implications of this.
The farmers of the city could no longer go out to tend to their crops in the fields, so the food supply would slowly but surely dwindle away.
No one was able to go out to the forest to get a fresh supply of wood to make fires for cooking food and keeping warm during the cold seasons.
And the town under siege wasn’t able to conduct trade anymore with merchant traders who sold necessary items such as medicines, salt and even weapons.
Basically, it was a waiting game until the city being attacked just crumbled internally due to starvation and the lack of resources to survive.
But here’s the thing.
Depending on the situation, the city being attacked rather than the attacking force could sometimes be in an advantageous position.
Because if the king had prepared properly, he would have stockpiled more than enough food, weapons and other resources to survive a siege being conducted against him and the residents he ruled over.
In that case, it would be very difficult if not impossible for the opposing army to win the waiting game.
What would usually end up happening is that the attacking army would lose patience and then just decide to wage an assault on the city.
However, so many soldiers would end up dying during this process that the attacking army usually just threw in the towel and returned home.
Therefore, if possible, it was always best to find a way to draw a fortified city’s king and his army outside so that their city was left unprotected.
Recall, this is exactly how Israel successfully conquered the city of Ai.
Using a small group of soldiers as bait, Israel attacked Ai and then pretending to be scared they turned around and started running in the opposite direction causing the fighting men of Ai to leave their city wide open to attack as they chased after the Israelites soldiers.
Once that happened, the city of Ai was toast.
We all know what took place afterwards.
Another larger group of Israelite soldiers who were in hiding emerged to attack the unprotected city of Ai and utterly destroyed the city and all its citizens.
Now consider the 5 kingdoms that had come together to attack their fellow Canaanites (Gibeon) simply because they were ticked off that they had entered into a peace treaty with Israel.
The 5 nation-states were already on the Lord’s to-do list, right?
Sooner or later Israel was gonna have to fight these kingdoms anyway.
So what did God do?
He just speeded up the process of their destruction by using Gibeon as bait to draw these five kings and their armies out into the open leaving their cities unprotected and easy pickings for Israel.
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