Promised Land and the Covenant Tradition for Today

excerpt from Joshua and the Promised Land
by Roy H. May, Jr.

The ancient Israelites understood themselves as specially chosen by Yahweh to possess the Promised Land, the land of Canaan. The stories of land theft in the previous chapter illustrate how, in the hands of the powerful, the Joshua story can be used in culturally self-centered and violent ways. Yet the foundation of the story is the idea that God chooses the least important. The "elected" are the weakest politically and economically and are given little social importance. They are empowered. In the Book of Joshua, the "Canaanites and Amorites" are always portrayed as powerful, landed people. Their kings are wealthy, their cities are large, and their armies strong. Yet in the story, the strong are cast out and the weak are settled in the land. Indeed the Israelites, and landless and wandering people, have only the power Yahweh supplies. Triumph is possible only as they rely on Yahweh, and are willing to shape their corporate lives according to Yahweh's will. Rosemary Radford Ruether says the "other side" of Israel's sense of being chosen

is the understanding that Israel's own tenure in the land is contingent onits righteousness. The gift of the land is not a possession that can be held apart from relation to God. If Israel "pollutes" the land with iniquity, "the land will vomit you out for defiling it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you" (Lev. 18:28). (7)

Defiling the land meant practicing injustice by turning the earth into a consumer item for the benefit of a few rich. How the prophets like Amos and Micah, and later Jeremiah, railed against such abuses!

The problem for ancient Israel was remembering that the land was a gift and that it belonged to God. Once that gift was taken for granted and social obligations forgotten, the land was lost. It was taken away. The problem of land was the problem of justice. It was the problem of living faithfully and managing the land to ensure justice and freedom, especially for the poor and defenseless. (8) Living in the land required, as Naim Ateek reminds us, "justice and only justice."

Covenant theology is about empowering the powerless. Through covenant God moves toward humanity. Walter Brueggemann, professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, explains:

The God of the Bible is a God who makes covenant. The object of that solidarity is characteristically the weak, poor, and marginal, who without such a partner have no voice or visibility in history as it is ordered by empire. Thus, it is in the very character of this God to be engaged for and available to those without social power of social possibility. (9)

Covenant implies bonding and solidarity. It is the foundation for responsible community organized according to justice and mercy. Covenant is a pledge that does not allow indifference. Nor does it permit trivializaing the problems of others. It points the covenant partners away from themselves and toward each other. Thus covenant, Brueggemann reminds us, provides a way of seeing others as well as a framework for understanding ourselves. (10)

Covenant guides the distribution of power and resources. Partners share. Covenant, then, is the source of hope for the poor: those with resources enter into partnership with those who lack them. Together they struggle for personal and social transformation. Just as the ancient covenant Yahweh made with the Israelites was to be practiced, so covenant today urges action. Brueggemann says, "A theology of covenanting is not worth the effort unless it leads to energy and courage for mission." That mission, he says, "is that the world is intended by God to be a community that covenants, that distributes its produce equally, that values all its members, and that brings the strong and the weak together in common work and common joy. (11)

Such a mission will be seen as impractical. After all, the real world is different. Yet as this century draws to a close, these concerns face us with renewed urgency. Surely as never before in world history, land and other property is increasingly concentrated among the few. The gap between rich and poor, landed and landless, grows wider. The United Nations Program for Development (UNDP) reports that today's world is characterized by enormous economic disparities.

The richest fifth (20%) of the world's population, concentrated almost exclusively in northern hemisphere countries, has:

• 82.7% of world gross national product (GNP)
• 81.2% of world trade
• 94.6% of all commercial lending
• 80.6% of all domestic saving
• 80.5% of all domestic investment
• 94.0% of all research and development.

By contrast, the poorest fifth (20%) of the world's population, alsmot exlusively in the southern hemisphere, has:

• 1.4% of the world gross national product (GNP)
• 1.0% of world trade
• 0.2% of commercial lending
• 1.0% of all domestic savings
• 1.3% of all domestic investment (12)

The Book of Joshua is a sobering reminder: God chooses the landless against the landed. The land finally belongs to God. Our future in it again depends on covenant, as partners with those who have no social power, lest we too be cast out for defiling it. It is on these affirmations that we can re-read and re-interpret the Joshua and the Promised Land stories for today.

Footnotes:

7. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, HarperCollins Publishers, 1992), p. 211. (return to text)

8. This paragraph summarizes the thesis of Walter Brueggemann's The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977). (return to text)

9. Walter Brueggemann, A Social Reding of the Old Testament: Prophet Approaches to Israel's Communal Life, Patrick D. Miller, ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), p. 56. (return to text)

10. Ibid. pp. 48, 51 (return to text)

11. Ibid. See especially pp. 49-51; the quotation is found on p. 51. (return to text)

12. See Erskine Childers and Brian Urquhart, "Renewing the United Nations System," Development Dialogue 1994: 1, pp. 54-55. The study is based on the UNDP Human Development Report 1992.(return to text)

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