Thus, I will throw the following ideas out, in undeveloped form, which struck me over the course of the book (largely by virtue of listening to Rabbi Menachem Leibtag's excellent shiurim):
1) Logistics
Rabbi Menachem Leibtag notes that in the first part of the book (dealing with conquest of Israel), the big logistical challenge for Joshua is the walled cities. It is one of the details that 40 years earlier Moshe had asked his spies to look for (are the cities fortified). A walled city is naturally very hard to conquer, and must be conquered by a long, beleaguering seige, or a bloody storming of the walls with unthinkable losses to the attacking army. Thus, the whole first part of the book is a pattern about how the Jewish people conquered these fortified cities:
a. with Yericho, God made a breach in the wall.
b. with the Ai, God gave Yehoshua a battle plan where they pretended to retreat, and then drew the army of the Ai out of their city, where they were easier to defeat.
c. The Givonim came and tricked the Jews, claiming to be from far away. But ultimately Yehoshua and the elders honored the treaty (or modified it by cursing them and making them water drawers and tree cutters). This treaty led the next set of Canaanites to fear that the Givonim had ceded strategic territory to the Jews. These 5 kings took their armies to attack the Givonim, and the Givonim called to Yehoshua for help. Again, 5 kings with their armies outside of their fortified cities.
2) Early on, in Chapter 7, after the victory over the city of Yericho, Achan took from the spoils of war, the cherem, which was to be designated for God. In later battles, we see that they are allowed to take spoils. Furthermore, Achan's sin is described as the sin that causes the loss at the hands of the Ai. What is so bad about Achan's sin that the entire people are punished?
Rabbi Menachem Leibtag points out, in a shiur on the OU website, that the Navi describes the entire people as having sinned against God. How can this be, if only one person did it?
He suggests that the reason that the people couldn't take from the spoils of the battle of Yericho is because God did most of the work, and they had to learn to acknowledge God's role in helping them. When the spies, fresh from the victory over Yericho, said that the Ai were easily defeatable, and didn't mention God's help, and indicated they only needed 3,000 soldiers, not the whole army for the job(i.e. it would be purely by the might of their hands, not through God's assistance), they evidenced a failure to properly acknowledge God's providence over them.
This, too, was the sin of Achan. He took from the spoils (the cherem) because he felt he could--he did not adequately realize that God had really won the battle of Yericho for them. In fact, the idea is that Achan's sin was just a symptom of the failure to show gratitude and recognition to God that was common throughout the nation. Thus, the entire people sinned, and they sinned in such a way as to undermine their very purpose of existence in the land of Israel--to be a people representing and serving God. Thus, they lost to the Ai.
That's all for now. In the next posts, I hope to deal with:
1) the moral issues involved in the wars with the Canaanites
2) a textual support for a position of the Rambam which we will look at,
and
3) the cities of refuge.
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