Joshua chapter 8

After reading chapter 8:

*Now that the disobedient Achan is dead, Yahweh tells Joshua to take the whole army, approx. 600,000 men, (they only took 3,000 the last time) and destroy Ai. However, this time, Yahweh will generously let them take the plunder and livestock for themselves. What was different about this city that God let them break his prerranged rule of total destruction of life forms and saving the gold for the God?

*30,000 men were sent to hide behind the city to ambush it. Joshua and his men would attack from the front, then appear turn to tail and run, luring the fighting men away from the city in a chase. When that happens, the men in hiding are to rise up, take over the city, and then set it on fire. Things happened pretty much according to plan. The men of Ai were lured away from the city in pursuit of the Israelite army, supposedly leaving no fighting men left inside. At a signal from Joshua, the ambush began. The men of Ai saw they were trapped and the Israelite army turned back on them. There were no survivors of the Ai army except the king, who was brought to Joshua. Twelve thousand men and women of Ai were slaughtered that day. The plunder was taken, the city burned, and the king was hung on a tree then buried under a pile of rocks at the city gate.

*So, Ai was  made a permanent heap of ruins, not because of anything they had done, but because they happened to be in the way of the Israelite's path to exclusive ownership of the land of Canaan.

*After that, Joshua built an altar to Yahweh on Mount Ebal as prescribed in the law of Moses. Then he carved the law of Moses on stones. The people stood half on Mount Ebal, half on Moubnt Gerizim and recited the blessings and curses as Moses had told them to do back in Deuteronomy 11. After that, Joshua read the entire book of the law of Moses to the assembled people.

*My study bible says there is a worrisome problem with this sequence of events. The Israelites would have had to conquer more people groups to be able to assemble peacefully between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerazim. The excuse made for this problem is that the narrator of the story wasn't being particularly chronological.