Chapter 5 — From Joshua to Jesus

The judges, the kings, the prophets, the exile — Israel prepared (and unprepared) for the Christ. Between the death of Moses and the birth in Bethlehem stretches more than a millennium of stumbling, learning, and forgetting again. It is the longest sustained experiment in covenant living ever attempted, and William Haines reads it not as a tribal chronicle but as a slow, costly tutorial in what it takes for a people to host the Messiah. The Hebrew Bible, on his reading, is the record of a tutorial that ended in graduation only after a very great deal of remedial work.

The Judges Era

Joshua's crossing of the Jordan looks, at first glance, like every other Bronze Age invasion: armed men, fortified towns, a swathe of conquered ground. The text refuses that reading almost immediately. The Israelite invasion of Canaan was a conditional tenancy, not an ownership, and it was tethered from the outset to a clause about sexual purity laws that distinguished Israel from the cultures it was being asked to replace. The founding of Israel was, on William's argument, the only nation in history not founded by warrior-conquest but by voluntary covenant — a people brought into being not by the sword but by an oath sworn at Sinai and re-sworn at Shechem. The land was leased, not owned, and the lease was renewable only on terms.

The military record bears this out in a way modern readers seldom notice. The Canaanite kings were not simply set upon. They were approached.

The 31 kings of Canaan were given peace terms first — only those who refused were attacked: Some groups, like the Gergashites, chose to emigrate, believing that the land rightly belonged to the Israelites. Others, like the people of Gibeon, sought peace with Israel and were granted safety. However, there were 31 kings who refused these terms and chose to wage war, ultimately falling in battle. Before entering Canaan, God instructed Moses to go to war against the Amorites, but Moses disobeyed and instead sent emissaries to offer peace. (from Joshua to Jesus - Day 1)

That last sentence is easily missed. Moses, the lawgiver, disobeys a direct order — and the editor of the text reports the disobedience without censure, because what Moses chose instead was peace. The pattern survives into Joshua's generation: emigration, treaty, and only as a last resort the battlefield. It is the inverse of every conquering empire on the surrounding map.

Once installed, the tribes proved scandalously bad at the long peace. The book of Judges is a depressing repetition of the same cycle — apostasy, oppression, deliverance, forgetfulness — and each turn of the wheel cuts a little deeper into the covenant. Yet even here, William insists, the Mosaic war-ethics outpaced 20th-century European armies in restraint. The codes governing siege, civilian harm, the treatment of trees and captives are stricter than the Hague Conventions; the wonder is not that ancient Israel sometimes failed to keep them but that anyone wrote them down at all. The deeper irony of the period is that the very people whom the judges had liberated kept asking to be enslaved again — to Baal, to the Philistines, eventually to a king. The very people who demand liberation, William notes, often most fear true freedom, because freedom requires responsibility, and responsibility is heavier than chains.

That fear is the engine of the next chapter.

The United Kingdom

Israel asked for a king "like the other nations," and the request was itself the indictment. The other nations were precisely what Israel had been called out of. And yet the Mosaic constitution had already, centuries earlier, anticipated the day the people would lose their nerve. Israelite monarchy was uniquely limited by law. Moses pre-emptively designed limited kingship: the king must hand-copy the Torah daily, he may keep no harem, he may stockpile no Swiss bank account, he must remain humble — these stipulations sit in Deuteronomy 17 thousands of years before the first European constitutional monarchy was even imagined. William's commentary on this is sharp:

What it actually means in terms of the political culture: In the Mosaic vision of kingship, only the king is commanded to be humble. Upon ascending to the throne, he must write a copy of the Mosaic law for himself, reminding him not to consider himself superior to his fellow Israelites. This contrasts sharply with the political philosophy of Phoenicia, where kings held absolute power. Ahab, for instance, displayed humility by recognising that he could not seize Naboth's vineyard, despite his anger over the situation. This separation of religion and state was a significant innovation, as it prevented the king from being viewed as divine, unlike the Pharaohs of Egypt or the kings of Phoenicia. (from Joshua to Jesus - Day 7)

The first holder of the office was almost designed to demonstrate why the law was necessary. Saul came to the throne carrying an inferiority complex he never managed to put down.

Saul came from the smallest clan in Benjamin, from the town where a terrible crime was committed. He has some kind of inferiority complex. After defeating the Amalekites, he built a statue to honour himself, which is often what inferior people do. If Saul had been a good king, he would have wanted a field marshal, someone better than him. A great leader surrounds himself with people who are better than himself. This requires self-awareness to recognise one's own weaknesses and find people who are better in those areas. One of the main qualities of good leadership is the ability to manage people and build a team that covers all the different bases, especially to make up for one's weaknesses. (from Joshua to Jesus - Day 3)

Saul's instinct is the instinct of every insecure ruler — to elevate himself rather than elevate those around him. David, in the next generation, is the corrective. Not because he is sinless (he is not), but because he understands authority as something received rather than seized. David won the birthright from Jonathan exactly as he should have done — by voluntary transfer, through Jonathan's recognition of David's superiority. The crown prince of the existing house looked at the shepherd of Bethlehem and concluded that the anointing now lay elsewhere, and he stripped off his robe and handed it over. William reads this as the model that True Family heirs in later religious history should have followed and did not: the elder honouring the chosen younger, the established line yielding to the providential one, freely and from love.

Jonathan's costlier act of love, though, was not the transfer of the robe but the confrontation of his own father.

Just as Abraham and Moses challenged God, Jonathan followed the same pattern and challenged his father. This was the most loving thing to do, as he realised that his father wanted to commit a terrible sin. The loving action was not to obey his father and commit a crime, which would bring shame upon his father's head. Instead, Jonathan stood up to his father, risking his life to challenge him. This model of critical fellowship is something we observed when we looked at Moses and the Israelites. Jonathan feared God and listened to his conscience, which is a principle we should all follow: to follow our conscience more than we follow the king, our parents, or our teachers. If any of them tell us to do something wrong, we must not do it. (from Joshua to Jesus - Day 4)

David himself eventually fell into the trap his predecessor had escaped only by accident. The Bathsheba episode is the hinge of the entire dynasty.

David becomes withdrawn and paralyzed, unable to guide or confront his children. Everyone knows what he has done wrong, making it difficult for him to address their sins, which mirror his own. As a result, everything goes wrong in David's family after this... When you actually look at his other sons... one committed murder, one raped his half-sister, and another son, the brother of the half-sister, murdered his half-brother who killed his sister. Another son tried to lead an uprising and rebellion, and yet another tried to make himself king before David had died. You can see that it makes a difference who you marry. The wives that David had married up until now didn't have children who were really qualified to be the next kings of Israel. (from Joshua to Jesus - Day 4)

The lesson is not merely that sin is bad for the soul. It is that a father compromised by his own sin loses the moral authority to raise his children, and the loss is generational. Solomon, born of Bathsheba, inherited the throne but also inherited the weakened paternal line; his harem and his foreign altars were the eventual fruit of his father's silence.

The Divided Kingdoms

When Solomon died, the kingdom split along the fault line his idolatries had widened. The northern ten tribes followed Jeroboam, the southern two remained with Rehoboam, and the next two centuries are the slow tragedy of both halves drifting towards their respective catastrophes. The prophets entered the story because the kings had stopped reading the Torah they were supposed to be copying out by hand.

Elijah is the towering figure of this era, and also, in William's reading, its most poignant cautionary tale. The contest on Mount Carmel was a hammer-blow of evidence; the fire fell, the prophets of Baal were routed, and yet within days Jezebel was hunting Elijah through the wilderness and the population had not noticeably changed its mind.

Elijah's expectations of a swift transformation in Israel are shattered, leading to his deep despair. He had anticipated that Jezebel would be swayed by the miraculous events, but her unwavering fanaticism leaves him feeling defeated. This narrative serves as a reminder that significant change often requires time and persistent effort, rather than expecting immediate results from a single event. That's where the hard work starts. You may be able to fill a stadium with 50,000 people and think that's a great victory, but then the next day it looks like nothing's changed. That's the beginning point of getting involved in the hard work of educating people and teaching them about God, about the right way of life. (from Joshua to Jesus - Day 6)

Elijah's failure, on this reading, was that he could not change. Even after the still small voice on Sinai — God's own gentle correction to his expectation that revolution comes in earthquake and fire — he gave God the identical complaint he had brought up the mountain, word for word: "I have been very jealous for the Lord… I, even I only, am left." And so God commissioned Elisha to replace him. William's epigram on the prophetic vocation belongs here: the successful prophet is the one whose prophecies do not come true, because the people repent in time and the catastrophe is averted. Elijah wanted the catastrophe.

His successors in the bloodline of Israel's purges took the lesson worse still. Jehu's coup against the house of Ahab was technically God-sanctioned; Elisha himself anointed him. And yet the biblical narrator disapproves of Jehu's bloody work even while reporting that God commanded it, and Hosea, a century later, condemns the massacre at Jezreel by name. The principle, William argues, is sober and important: even God-sanctioned violence becomes corrupt when it is carried out without true love. Zeal without love is fanaticism, and fanaticism does not build the kingdom.

How are we to evaluate any of this from the distance of three millennia? William's answer is direct.

How are we to judge these things? Are we to judge them by the best standards of today? I would say yes... Edward Colston, who lived in Bristol in the 17th and early 18th centuries, was a slave trader who made money through slavery. However, he gave away all his money and became a philanthropist, establishing schools and various buildings in Bristol. Recently, some individuals deemed it a scandalous outrage to have a statue of Edward Colston in Bristol and pulled it down... When Colston was alive and trading slaves, the idea that the slave trade was wrong was inconceivable. It was about 80 years later that the beginnings of the abolition movement started to develop. Colston was a philanthropist, and the statue was erected not because he was a slave trader, but because he was a philanthropist. (from Joshua to Jesus - Day 2)

The standard is the highest standard we know; the charity is the honest reckoning of what was possible at the time. Saul, David, Jehu and Elijah are to be measured by the Torah they had, not the Sermon on the Mount they had not yet heard — but measured they are, and the editor of Kings is unsparing.

The Exile and Return

In 722 BC Assyria swept away the northern kingdom; in 586 BC Babylon took the southern. The Temple was burned, the Davidic dynasty interrupted, the people marched east into a captivity that would last seventy years. Strangely, the exile did for Israel what two centuries of prophets had not. Cut off from land, king and Temple, the people discovered that the covenant was portable. The scriptures were collected and edited, the synagogue was invented, and idolatry — that incorrigible national vice — quietly died. The Jews who returned under Cyrus, Ezra and Nehemiah were a different people from the ones who had been carted off. They were, at last, a people of the book.

The Second Temple was a modest building compared with Solomon's, and the returning community was a fraction of its former size, but the moral centre had been re-set. The walls went up under Nehemiah; the Law was read aloud, in public, in the open square, and the people wept because they had not heard it for so long.

The Inter-Testamental Period

The four centuries between Malachi and Matthew are sometimes called the "silent years," but they were anything but silent. Alexander brought Greek; the Maccabees fought off Antiochus and his pig's blood on the altar; the Pharisees and Sadducees and Essenes began their long wrestle for the soul of Judaism; the Septuagint translated the Hebrew scriptures into the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean, so that, by the time Paul began preaching, every literate person in the empire could in principle read Isaiah. The synagogue spread across the diaspora. Apocalyptic literature flourished. The expectation of a Messiah sharpened to a point.

By the time Rome installed Herod the Great as a client king in Jerusalem, Israel had been hammered, shaped and tempered for the better part of fifteen hundred years. The people were unrecognisable from the wandering tribes Joshua had led across the Jordan, and yet the covenant still held.

Preparing for Christ

This is what the whole long arc from Joshua to Jesus was finally for. Every figure we have met in this chapter is, in William's reading, a partial sketch of the Christ who was coming: Joshua leading the people into the inheritance, David receiving the kingdom freely from Jonathan, Elijah confronting the prophets of falsehood, Jehu — for all his bloodiness — pulling down a temple of Baal, the exiles learning that God could be worshipped without a building, Ezra reading the Law aloud to a weeping crowd. Each of them got something right, and each of them got something wrong, and the cumulative pedagogy of their successes and failures was what the world needed in order to recognise the real King when he appeared.

He came, eventually, to a province ruled by a humiliated puppet of Rome, to a people who had read their scriptures so many times in synagogue that the prophecies were second nature, to a religious culture that had finally — after a thousand years of trying — purged itself of idols. He came to a covenant people who had been taught by their own history that conquest must begin with the offer of peace, that authority must be received rather than seized, that the king must be the humblest man in the country, and that zeal without love is a corruption of zeal. He came, in short, to a people who had been made just barely ready to receive him. The next chapter is his.