The Joshua Study Group at the Home of David Ben-Gurion

This chapter talks about “The Joshua Study Group at the Home of David Ben-Gurion,” which invited leading minds in Israel into Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's home to ponder together the Book of Joshua in 1958. As it analyzes the interpretations and discussions of the Joshua Study Group, the chapter also highlights the degree to which the participants reflected on the 1948 war through passages in Joshua. It explains how the group explicitly made a connection that is already evident in the name of Operation Bin-Nun, the 1948 battle at Latrun that intended to open the road to a besieged Jerusalem, after the biblical Joshua Bin-Nun. It also describes Ben Gurion, who declared that no one had better interpreted Joshua than the Israeli Defense Forces in 1948 and saw the enactment of biblical archetypes as the most fitting form of biblical commentary. The chapter also points out how the official Israeli interpretation of Joshua sought to unify the disparate Jewish immigrant communities through a war story.