CRITICAL NOTES.—
Joshua 9:17. On the third day] That is the same as “at the end of three days” in Joshua 9:16. “The armed men would move from Gilgal to Gibeon (about twelve miles) in the same day on which the news was heard” (Crosby). Keil, with more apparent accuracy, reckons Gibeon as eighteen or twenty miles from Gilgal, and supposes the phrase, “the third day,” to mean on the third day after the discovery of the stratagem. He adds: the third day “is not to be interpreted as meaning that their journey occupied three days,” a statement which Fay conveniently overlooks while criticising Keil’s opinion.
Joshua 9:23. Ye are cursed] “Heb. =‘arar,’ and not ‘charam,’ whence cherem” (Crosby). Thus, although the Gibeonites were not devoted in the fullest manner, they were devoted in the sense of being set apart exclusively for the menial service of the tabernacle. They were the slaves of the tabernacle, and afterwards of the temple. Like the metal of the devoted cities, which, for another reason could not be destroyed, and which was dedicated to the service of the tabernacle, so these Gibeonites were still held to be forfeited to God. No one might employ them for his own private service. In these Hivites was begun the literal fulfilment of Noah’s curse upon Canaan (Genesis 9:25).
Joshua 9:27. In the place which He should choose] Shewing that this book was written before the building of the temple; or, if the words refer to an assigned place for the tabernacle, as seems most probable, Fay’s view, that they indicate the appointment of the Gibeonites “at once to the lowest service of the sanctuary,” must be held to be correct.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Joshua 9:16-27
THE TREATY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Soon after Joshua and the princes had sworn to preserve the lives of the Gibeonites, they discovered the imposition of which they had been made the victims. The treaty was concluded without asking counsel of the Lord, and it took only three days ere it began to bring shame and work confusion. This paragraph shews us:—
I. The sacredness which should ever attach to promises. Joshua 9:18. The oath which had been solemnly sworn before the Lord might or might not have been binding. The league was obtained by entirely fraudulent representations. It might be urged that when the conditions under which it was granted were proved to be feigned and false throughout, the league itself would have no more foundation in fact than the conditions had. Whether the conditions were expressly named in the terms of the covenant or not, this could make no difference whatever to the moral obligation of the Israelites in respect to keeping the covenant. By implication, if not expressly, the treaty was made with the Gibeonites on the ground that their story was true; and none knew this better than the Gibeonites themselves. If we proceed on the assumption that Joshua was not morally obliged to keep this treaty, the history makes the sacredness of promises in general still more emphatic. He kept his word when he was not bound to keep it, because the word of one man to another is a holy thing. Whether the treaty be considered binding or not, God solemnly approved the course eventually taken.
1. A promise, once really made, should be held to be as sacred as an oath. When Christ said, “Swear not at all,” He did not mean to prevent men from giving the utmost possible assurance of fidelity to their fellows. The “yea, yea,” and the “nay, nay,” were to be felt to be as obligatory as the most solemn oath.
2. Promises should be kept, even when they have to be kept at considerable sacrifice. When David asked, “Lord, who shall abide in Thy Tabernacle?” he also answered, “He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.” He who breaks his promise in order to spare his own capital robs the estate of human trustfulness, and thus pays a personal debt with public property. Such a man steals from the faith and rest and peace of mankind generally, that he may protect himself and the comparatively small circle associated with him.
3. If possible, promises should be kept even when they have been fraudulently obtained. Herein lies the chief emphasis of this story. Seeing that the treaty had been made, it was best that it should be kept. When once the Gibeonites had been punished for their lie, it was absolutely imperative that the treaty should be respected. Hence the chastisement which God inflicted, four centuries later, for Saul’s breach of his promise (2 Samuel 21:1-14). God would have us keep our word at all times, unless the thing promised be in itself sinful.
4. If we hope that God will keep His promises to us, we must keep ours to each other. The Divine promises are only sure to us in Christ, and to break our promises to our fellows is, in this matter, to ignore Christ. The Saviour uses the same argument on the question of forgiveness: “If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
II. The opposition which is continually found in the way of truth. “All the congregation murmured against the princes.” It is not necessary to suspect the congregation of selfish motives, touching the question of spoil, because of this opposition. Probably the people feared the wrath of the Lord, because a league had been made which He had forbidden. The Israelites had recently suffered shame and anxiety and loss because of Achan’s sin, and it is reasonable to suppose that they were mainly actuated to this murmuring against their leaders by their fear of the anger of Jehovah.
1. He who contends for truth and uprightness must not expect to escape opposition.
2. Opposition to those who are faithful to truth is offered from various motives.
3. Such opposition should be firmly met (Joshua 9:19). He who contends for integrity may well stand firmly. He who strives for fidelity need not fear to be faithful.
III. The penalties which ultimately attend fraud. The Gibeonites and their children were made slaves of the tabernacle for ever. Possibly if they had come openly, and pleaded for mercy, they would have been spared, as Rahab and her family had been. Israel had no right to conclude a covenant of peace with an entire city or people; for their general guidance they were forbidden to do so; it was not safe to trust them with powers to make peace with even single cities, lest repentance had been simulated by the Canaanites, and this deception had spread to city after city, and tribe after tribe, till Israel had entered into covenant with many of the inhabitants of the land who remained in heart as idolatrous as ever (cf., Deuteronomy 20:16-18). But had the leaders of Israel asked counsel of the Lord, He might have given them the right to make peace in this or any other particular instance. This is implied in chap. Joshua 11:19. Judging by what we know of the character of God, He would certainly have commanded the Gibeonites to be spared, had they been penitent. There can be no doubt whatever about this. When God could swear by no greater, He sware by Himself: “As I live, saith the LORD GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way, and live.” The whole spirit of the Scriptures assures us that had all the Canaanites sincerely repented of idolatry, and sought Divine mercy, God would have pardoned them as readily as He afterwards spared Nineveh. This being so:
1. The bondage of the Gibeonites must be regarded as a punishment. Lying thought it could do better than candour and penitence; it set out to find life, and life was granted, but it was a life of perpetual slavery; confession would have found not only life, but liberty also. The bondage was the outcome of sin, and was meant also to be remedial.
2. This bondage of the Gibeonites was expedient, because of the Israelites. The social status of the Gibeonites was lowered, till the poorest Israelite would think little of the men, and less of their gods. Men do not learn of their slaves. The gods of Canaan, moreover, would be ignored daily by the very service which the spared Gibeonites rendered in the worship of the God of Israel. Thus God shews us that when we cannot remove a temptation, we are to disarm it. He shews us not less, how He makes all things work together for good to them that love Him. The habits of a lifetime could hardly be changed throughout an entire community by the penitence of a week. God suffers the prowess of His people to work prayer in the idolaters; He also suffers the prayer to go hand in hand with the deception. Then the slavery follows naturally as a punishment for sin—the sin of lying, and the half-repented sin of idolatry; and thus is the danger of a great temptation taken from the Israelites, and a purifying discipline, to continue through many generations, reserved for the idolaters themselves. Surely one of the most gladdening studies of heaven will be that in which the redeemed of the Lord search out the wonderful interworkings of the providence and grace by which, personally, each has been brought to his city of habitation, the New Jerusalem.
OUTLINES AND COMMENTS ON THE VERSES
Joshua 9:16-17.—FROM GUILT TO JUDGMENT.
Consider:—
I. Guilt in its relation to exposure. Sooner or later it must be revealed. The Gibeonites well knew, in their case, that it could not long remain hidden. Their feeling is very much the normal condition of guilty hearts generally. Guilt is like the moth of the summer evening; it will make for the light. The guilty heart feels that the tendency of things is ever in the direction of exposure, but hopes for concealment notwithstanding.
II. Guilt in its connection with fear. The state of mind in which the Gibeonites found themselves after the success of their ruse must have been most unenviable. The blow would come: when would it come? how would it come? Fear ever waits on sin. The guilty no sooner become guilty than they are delivered over to the keeping of fear. Even when God had brought the sin of Cain to the light, and sent him from the Divine presence, Cain was overwhelmed with a vision in which discovery was perpetually repeating itself, and death continually waiting on discovery: he cried, “It shall come to pass that every one that findeth me shall slay me.” The murderer’s vision of life was made up of two things: a state of chronic exposure, and a time of incessant judgment. Joseph’s brethren succeeded for a long while in concealing their wickedness, but not even the years which intervened between their sin and their trial could keep down the consciousness that their old act of iniquity was approaching the light. More than twenty years after their sin, they saw in the rough usage of the Egyptian lord the coming judgment of their crime: “And they said one to another, We are verily guilty concerning our brother.” A guilty heart continually goes in fear of coming exposure. It often feels about its wickedness, as one says of guilt, in a fragment by Landor:—
“It wakes me many mornings, many nights,
And fields of poppies could not quiet it,”
Owen has told us that “One lie must be thatched with another, or it will soon rain through;” and the thatching is miserable work indeed when the thatcher is driven to feel that, labour ingeniously and perseveringly as he may, the rain will come through after all.
III. Guilt finding its worst fears realised. The Gibeonites could not hope to conceal their fraud for long; they could not but be anxious as to whether their trick would be resented. Their anxiety was not without cause. In less than a week the armed hosts of the Israelites, indignant at the treatment they had received, were seen marching hastily into the territory of the Gibeonites to demand an explanation, and, it might be, to take vengeance on the deceivers. The fear of the wicked is not vain. It has its counterpart in reality. It is the shadow cast on the heart by an actual cloud. It often precedes solemn judgment. About food and raiment, Christ says to His disciples, “Take no thought for the morrow. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” No such word is ever spoken to the unrepentant man concerning the judgment that follows sin.
Joshua 9:18-20.—THE OPPOSITION OF THE PEOPLE TO THEIR LEADERS.
I. The murmuring of the congregation. Probably the people were concerned lest God should be angry. Possibly some murmured in view of lost spoil.
II. The faithfulness of the princes. They were faithful to their promise:
1. Because of the solemnity of an oath (cf. Ezekiel 17:13-19).
2. Because of the sacred name by which the oath had been sworn (Joshua 9:19).
3. Although they had previously erred in not asking counsel of God.
“The obligation of an oath should be so far held sacred by us, as to prevent our departing on pretence of an error, even from engagements into which we may have been led by mistake; the sacred name of God being of more importance than all the wealth in the world. Therefore, although a man may have taken an oath without sufficient consideration, no loss or injury can release him from his engagement.… My decision therefore would be, that whenever it is only our advantage that is in question, we are bound to perform whatever we have promised on oath.”—[Calvin.]
Joshua 9:22-25.—THE BEARING OF TRUE MEN AND FALSE.
I. The dignity that belongs to truthfulness. Truth is greater in its defeats than lying is in its triumphs.
1. It has a nobler demeanour.
2. It can discuss calmly even the details of the plan by which it has been overthrown.
3. To it, eventually, belongs the right of passing sentence.
II. The servility which, accompanies falsehood. Falsehood foreshadows its bondage in the spirit which it manifests.
1. It can argue only from motives of self-interest.
2. It pleads its very fears as excuses.
3. It accepts its sentence without remonstrance.
4. It endeavours to the last to take advantage of that sense of right in others which has been wanting in itself. “As it seemeth good and right to thee to do unto us, do.”
Joshua 9:26-27.—The Nethinim.
These hewers of wood and drawers of water were probably appointed not merely to the work indicated in these words, but to the general drudgery of the tabernacle, and subsequently of the temple. In Ezra 8:20 they are called “the Nethinim,” that is, the “given” or “dedicated” ones. Henceforth these Gibeonites, then, were not their own; they belonged unto God in a perpetual servitude. Their history, and the name by which they were afterwards known in Israel, suggest to us the following thoughts:—
I. Life forfeited by sin, but preserved by grace. The Gibeonites appear to have owed their lives to the princes; really, they owed them to God, who had so diligently taught His servants the sacredness of every promise.
1. The lives of these men had been forfeited by their own iniquity. They had become “devoted” by reason of the idolatry for which the rest of the Canaanites were actually slain. They might see their own deserts in the fate of their fellows.
2. Their lives were preserved by Divine grace. (a) By the grace of God in the leaders of the Israelites. (b) By the grace in which God afterwards shielded them from their enemies (2 Samuel 21).
II. Life preserved by grace, but preserved for work. The Gibeonites were not to be useless. They were not to be mere pensioners in the land. They were to be the servants of the temple of the Lord. God’s dedicated ones are not redeemed to idleness. They are called to arduous work, to constant work, to the humblest work. Christ washed His disciples’ feet, to shew us in what lowliness we ought to serve one another. The Psalmist sang, “I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than to dwell in the tents of wickedness.” He who owes life to undeserved mercy may well serve in continual gratitude. Secker said, “God has three sorts of servants in the world: some are slaves, and serve Him from fear; others are hirelings, and serve Him for the sake of wages; and the last are sons, and serve Him under the influence of love.”
III. Life preserved for work, and this work entirely for God. The Nethinim might not be pressed into the service of the Israelites. They were not only the servants of God, but of God only. They were dedicated, or devoted, perpetually unto Him. Those whom grace saves
(1) are not their own;
(2) they belong not unto men;
(3) they are the servants of Christ. They sing in the gladness of one who felt it no mean thing to belong unto Jehovah: “O Lord, truly I am Thy servant.” One of our modern hymns, by far too little known, breathes, through six verses, the same spirit. The last four are these:—
“No longer would my soul be known
As self-sustained and free;
O not mine own, O not mine own!
Lord, I belong to Thee.
“In each aspiring burst of prayer,
Sweet leave my soul would ask
Thine every burden, Lord, to bear,
To do Thine every task.
“For ever, Lord, Thy servant choose,
Nought of Thy claim abate;
The glorious name I would not lose,
Nor change the sweet estate.
“In life, in death, on earth, in heaven,
No other name for me;
The same sweet style and title given
Through all eternity.”
Thus should every pardoned and saved man and woman, not simply submit to, but delight in, the rank and dignity and labour of a servant of Jesus Christ.
IV. Life entirely devoted to God, and thus in the highest manner given to men.
1. No man serves his fellows, who does not serve God. That which he does for them with one hand, he more than undoes with the other. He teaches men to live “without God in the world,” and nothing can compensate for that.
2. He serves his fellows most diligently, who also serves God. It is “the zeal of His house” that leads men to consume themselves as willing sacrifices for others. Some of the most earnest of the apostles loved to begin their Epistles by calling themselves “servants (δουλοι) of Jesus Christ.” As they felt how entirely they belonged to the Saviour, they saw in the utmost which they could do for men only “a reasonable service.”
3. He who is devoted to God is anxious to serve men in the highest possible manner. He strives to serve them, not merely in things connected with the body and with time, but in priceless things touching the soul and belonging to eternity.
NEBY-SAMWIL, OR GIBEON
“The chief fame of Gibeon in later times was not derived from the city itself, but from the ‘great high place’ hard by (1 Kings 3:4; 1 Kings 9:2; 2 Chronicles 1:3; 2 Chronicles 1:13); whither, after the destruction of its seat at Nob or Olivet, the tabernacle was brought, and where it remained till it was thence removed to Jerusalem by Solomon. It can hardly be doubted that to this great sanctuary the lofty height of Neby-Samwîl, towering immediately over the town of El-Jib, exactly corresponds. The tabernacle would be appropriately transferred to this eminence, when it could no longer remain at Nob on the opposite ridge of Olivet; and, if this peak were thus the ‘great high place’ of Solomon’s worship, a significance is given to what otherwise would be a blank and nameless feature in a region where all the less conspicuous hills are distinguished by some historical name. This would then be a ground for the sanctity with which the Mussulman and Christian traditions have invested it, as the Ramah and the Shiloh of Samuel, even though those traditions themselves are without foundation. In Epiphanius’ time it still bore the name of the Mountain of Gibeon; and from its conspicuous height the name of ‘Gibeon’ (‘belonging to a hill’) was naturally derived to the city itself, which lay always where its modern representative lies now, on the lower eminence. From thence the Gibeonites ‘hewed the wood’ of the adjacent valley, and ‘drew the water’ from the springs and tanks with which its immediate neighbourhood abounds, and carried them up to the Sacred Tent; and there attended the ‘altar of the Lord,’ which, from its proud elevation, overlooked the wide domain of Israel.”—[Stanley’s Sinai and Palestine.]
HEWERS OF WOOD AND DRAWERS OF WATER
“I was forcibly reminded of one item in the sentence of condemnation pronounced upon the Gibeonites—that they should be hewers of wood—by long files of women and children carrying on their heads heavy bundles of wood. It seemed to be hard work, especially to the young girls. It is the severest kind of drudgery; and my compassion has often been enlisted in behalf of the poor women and children, who daily bring loads of wood to Jerusalem from these very mountains of the Gibeonites. To carry water, also, is very laborious and fatiguing. The fountains are far off, in deep wadies with steep banks; and a thousand times have I seen the feeble and the young staggering up long and weary ways with large jars of water on their heads. It is the work of slaves, and of the very poor, whose condition is still worse. Among the pathetic lamentations of Jeremiah there is nothing more affecting than this: ‘They took the young men to grind, and the children fell under the wood.’ ”—[The Land and the Book.]