Limmud Oz 2021

David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, saw the IDF as a modern instantiation of the military might of the biblical Joshua. The renewal of the Jewish state seemed to him like a reenactment of the biblical story of ancient Israelites in their arrival to the Promised Land, where they settled and built their new national home, after the defeat of local Canaanite inhabitants. But the legacy of Joshua has also caused great discomfort to many. Other Zionist thinkers asserted that Joshua should be discarded because of its brutal descriptions. Scholars and educators grappled with the question of how to engage with such a core narrative of Jewish history which also raises severe moral problems. The session will discuss the use made by Zionists of the biblical stories about wars, conquests, settlement, and ethnic cleansing performed by the ancient Israelites in the Promised Land.