Mel C Thompson

Joshua Revisited: Reworking the Most Brutal Book in the Bible Mel C Thompson

Publisher Marketing: Joshua, the bloodthirsty Middle-Eastern general of antiquity, sets out to take back the Promised Land by mass slaughter and thoroughgoing genocide, but his plans run into some complications. Along the way, before he can finish crossing the River Jordan, five unwelcome guests stumble into his camp. They are Buddhist and Jain time travelers; and tagging along with them is a prostitute from Jericho and two of Joshua's own spies, one of whom has gone temporarily insane. He tries to get rid of them by killing them, killing being his usual answer to just about every problem. But these unwanted visitors are not so easy to get rid of. In fact, he's stuck with them; and they get tangled up in almost all of Joshua's schemes, and so nothing goes as planned. This version of the Book of Joshua crosses paths, at various points, with the original, but then wanders far afield of it. It is first, and foremost, a story of the love between friends and the love that is possible between peoples. There are many roadblocks between our usual frame of mind and that of divine love. Joshua and his friends meet these challenges in their own unique and comedic ways. The book is not at all free of violence, sex, corruption, drugs, warfare, crime and greed, as these are, to this day, seemingly inescapable parts of human life and the mythology that accompanies it. The text stands as a theological conceptul-art project, as a kind of "what if" of scriptural experimentalism. Like the original book of Joshua, Joshua Revisited has twenty-four chapters, but these chapters go places the original scribes would never have wanted to go.