If you choose you lose.
The chosen is yours but
What of the rest?
Did you pick the best?
When Joshua fit Jericho,
Think of the mess.
When the walls with great clatter
Begot fragments of matter,
Perhaps he frowned as he pondered his choice,
Thinking of his military budget
And the union demands of the horn-players,
And all that debris-clearing overtime for the deconstruction battalions.
He could have chosen ladders,
Or gate-busting rams to batter,
Or just shovels to tunnel beneath the dust-laden mud brick,
His men then springing up in the midst of the enemy
Like poisonous night-mushrooms after a rain.
But he took the traditional option,
Slaughtering every living thing within the sweep of the tumbled walls,
Not even selling the captured civilians at slave-auction,
Save Rahab the Prostitute.
She must have been given many horns to toot.
Who can say?
Another choice might have yielded less suffering
And given Rahab
A day or two of buffering.
© George Phillips, 2017
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| The Fall of Jericho Illustration from a Bible card published in 1901 by the Providence Lithograph Company from Wikimedia Commons |
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