Thread by @JoelBaden

#Exodus 23:20-33

Instructions for conquest

Finished now with the laws proper, YHWH returns at the end of the Covenant Code to the narrative situation, the Israelites who are about to travel through the wilderness and soon come to Canaan. (Yes, soon - there’s no 40 years in E.)

YHWH promises Israel a divine messenger to lead the way. This will be important for us later, because the sources disagree quite sharply over how and whether the Israelites have any divine accompaniment through the wilderness. But E is consistent: YHWH sends a messenger.

Among the things that the sources differ about, how the conquest will happen is often overlooked (though not by my teacher Baruch Schwartz, who has a lovely essay entitled “Re-examining the Fate of the ‘Canaanites’ in the Torah Traditions”).

Some of the differences include who does the fighting, God or Israel; how the fighting will happen; and how long it will take. E answers all of those questions for us here, conveniently enough.

First, clearly it is God who will be doing the actual fighting. “I will annihilate them” (23:23); “I will send forth my terror” (23:27); “I will drive them out” (23:30), etc. What is Israel to do? At first, not much! Just sit back and enjoy the show, as it were.

It’s not entirely clear what the show will look like, in large part because we have here one of the great mysterious words of the Bible, in 23:28: “I will send a צרעה before you.” Traditionally, צרעה has been translated as “hornet.” Which may be stingy, but is weird here.

Of course the word occurs only in this context, here and in the D verse dependent on it (Deut 7:20) and in the Joshua verse dependent, in turn, on D (Josh 24:12). So no help from anywhere else is forthcoming.

I’ve just never bought “hornet” as the meaning here, and have always leaned toward the translation used in the JPS: “plague,” on lexical analogy with צרעת, “skin disease.” Though I realize that plagues kill more than they drive out. I guess.

In any case, there are two steps to the conquest imagined here. Step one: YHWH drives out the native inhabitants of Canaan. But not all at once, because that’s a lot of land for Israel to settle in one go. He’ll get rid of them gradually.

Even as the conquest will be a divinely waged war, it will still take place in human time, over the course of years, so that Israel can settle and secure the land. (This is pretty far from the picture we find in, say, Joshua.)

Step two: expansion. Once the promised land proper is secured, Israel will expand its borders, all the way to the Mediterranean, to the Euphrates, etc. And for that part YHWH will grant Israel victory, but it’s Israel that will do the actual fighting (23:31).

And to go with these two stages are two sets of instructions regarding relationships with foreigners. In step two, when Israel will be doing its own fighting to expand its borders, they’re instructed not to make any covenants with other peoples or with their gods.

This is sensible: Israel will be directly encountering these foreigners, and could possibly make peace with them, maybe even intermarry, etc., and thus leave themselves open to the temptation of worshipping other deities. But not so in step one.

In step one, by contrast, the peoples will be displaced before Israel has any chance to intermarry with them, or even really meet them. So the threat there isn’t treaty or marriage: it’s just worshipping the same way that the previous inhabitants did (23:24).

Don’t worship their gods or in their ways - that’s always a possibility, even when the people you’re emulating have left the scene. So E is totally consistent here in its imagining of the conquest, its procedures, its risks, everything.

And thus ends the Covenant Code - perhaps once a self-contained independent legal text, but now unquestionably integrated into its broader context, aligning with E’s narrative setting (as here) and narrative claims (strangers in Egypt, not slaves). Laws are fun, turns out.