The Book of Joshua continues the story of Israel’s liberation from slavery by describing the entry into the Promised Land. This is how you will know that there is a living God in your midst, who at your approach will dispossess the Canaanites. The problem, of course, comes in that the Canaanites don’t want to be dispossessed. They have, after all, lived on the land for the 470 years that the Hebrew children were in Egypt and on their exodus. They had good reason to think of the land as theirs. Hence, the wars described in the Book of Joshua. Hence, the wars that go on in the Holy Land to this day. But the issue of what is whose is not limited to the Middle East — it exists throughout history and all over the world. (Witness the dispossession of the Native Peoples on this continent.) There is no easy resolution. The starting point has to be the one Jesus proposes in the gospel: forgiveness. Only after forgiving and being forgiven and reconciling and being reconcilied will humanity find a way forward without war and conflict.
