Joshua: A Man for All Seasons?
Joshua: A Man for All Seasons?

Summary/Abstract: The starting point of this article is the problematic situation in which is found the western scholarship dealing with the Hebrew Bible. Leonard Greenspoon identifies an increasingly fragmentation of the biblical research in the recent generations of researchers. Scholars “hardly speak the same language, and believing communities are ever more estranged from the world of arcane scholarship”. Greenspoon’s article attempts to give a reply to this situation, by proposing an integrative approach with respect to a single biblical character, namely Joshua. Subsequently, he provides a unified portrait of Joshua, gathering all the dominant attributes as they are alotted to this character in different writings. More precisely, Joshua appears in the Hebrew Bible as follower, loyal to God and Moses; as holy warrior and as a royal figure; in the Septuagint, one deals with Joshua and the problem of circumcision, as well as with Joshua and Moses. T 3. In Josephus (Josephus and the Hellenistic ideal of leadership; Joshua and non-circumcision); 4. In Rabbinic Judaism (Joshua as holy warrior; Joshua as husband and father; Joshua as prophet); 5. In Christian traditions (Joshua and the moon; Joshua as successor to Moses; Joshua as forerunner of Jesus). The article ends with an Appendix on “Joshua in popular culture”, short complement based on the writings of Elie Wiesel.

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