Joshua 9 · a question people ask
Did Israel break the Law by making the treaty?
The Law had said of the peoples of the land, "the Hivite" among them (Deuteronomy 7:1), "You shall make no covenant with them" (Deuteronomy 7:2), and Exodus says the same: "You shall make no covenant with them, nor with their gods" (Exodus 23:32). Deuteronomy 20 had also set out terms of peace for "the cities which are very far off from you" (Deuteronomy 20:15). Joshua 9 doesn't set these side by side or give a verdict on the treaty itself. The one thing it says they left undone is in 9:14: they "didn’t ask counsel from the LORD’s mouth". Then it tells what followed: the congregation murmured (9:18), Joshua told the Gibeonites, "you are cursed" (9:23), and the oath was kept (9:26). Two chapters later the book says, "There was not a city that made peace with the children of Israel, except the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon" (Joshua 11:19). Whether Deuteronomy 20's call to peace was for every city is the honest question in Deuteronomy 20.
The verses
“When the LORD your God brings you into the land where you go to possess it, and casts out many nations before you—the Hittite, the Girgashite, the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite—seven nations greater and mightier than you; and when the LORD your God delivers them up before you, and you strike them, then you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them, nor show mercy to them.”
“You shall make no covenant with them, nor with their gods.”
“Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far off from you, which are not of the cities of these nations.”
“The men sampled their provisions, and didn’t ask counsel from the LORD’s mouth.”