A Different Look at Israel and the Gibeonites!
In the course of studying Biblical covenants these past months, I became a little puzzled by the story of the Gibeonites. As you may recall, when Israel invaded the Promised Land, the people of Gibeon dispatched ambassadors to the Israelites and asked Israel to make a covenant with them (Josh. 9:3-6). Knowing that Israel’s Divine mission required destroying every nation in that land, the ambassadors pretended to have journeyed from another land far away (v. 6). As we’re told in v. 14, Israel didn’t seek God’s advice in this matter. They simply believed the Gibeonites and made a covenant with them (v. 15). Though obtained by fraud, this covenant held fast. Many generations later, God punished Israel because King Saul had violated the covenant and murdered some of the Gibeonites (2 Sam. 21:1-3). Now, this raises some eyebrows. Number one, this covenant had been obtained by deceit. Number two, God had explicitly commanded Israel to make NO covenant with the peoples of the land (Ex. ...