Perhaps I'm missing something...... -- Mimetic Theory and Literary Study

[ Show ]

Support VoyForums

[ Shrink ]

VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: [1], 2 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 09:38:43 04/14/08 Mon
Author: Kiernan
Subject: Perhaps I'm missing something......

Reading the Achan story in Joshua 7 this morning, I found myself unable to read the story mimetically without at least somewhat exonerating Achan of his guilt. It seemed to me that, according to a Girardian reading, Achan marks himself as a potential victim by taking the "forbidden" items - he breaks a prohibition. The people then lose at Ai - chaos in the community. So they stone Achan, and then attribute the murder to God: "and the Lord turned from the fierceness of His anger" (Joshua 7:26). This seems to present us with a mythic God, one who demands violence to expel violence.

Yet, the Lord had originally established the prohibition as an anti-idolatry measure (as Goodhart observes, the main theme of the OT). In Joshua 6:18, the Lord tells Joshua, "But as for you, only keep yourselves from the things under the ban, so that you do not covet them and take some of the things under the ban, and make the camp of Israel accursed and bring trouble on it." While acknowledging that I come to this text with the perspective of faith (which may skew my reading), this seems to me to be, not only an anti-mimetic ban (don't imitate the city of Jericho) but also a ban against the mechanism itself (don't imitate the idolatrous - i.e., divinization of the victim - religion of Jericho). Read from this light, Achan's action jeopardizes the separation of God and the victim.

How do we reconcile these two elements of the text? Am I missing something here (as I'm pretty sure that I am....)?

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

Perhaps we are all still missing something...... -- Betsy Peters, 14:15:51 04/15/08 Tue