Homily on Jericho

I don't wish to sound like Philip K. Dick, but... what if The Bible is a prediction of the future rather than a history of the past. I'm thinking about sound and how it can be used as a weapon (thanks to Goodman's Sonic Warfare), and I am thinking about the battle of Jericho, where Joshua blew his horn and the walls fell down.

I looked it up on Wikipedia, and it seems as if my rough idea (there was a battle, but the trumpet trauma was a mythical addition) is probably contested. They haven't found the smoking ruins of Jericho that would fit with the Biblical story - at least, they are not sure. But I rather like the idea that The Book of Joshua is a mash-up, containing a bit of history (the Judaic conquest of Canaan) and a bit of futurology, vouchsafed to the author through whatever magical trance he conjured.

The Book of Joshua becomes like an early example of cyberpunk fiction, where future technologies are part of an ongoing conflict between the powers of good and evil... and another impeccable source explains that the story was probably written after the fall of Jerusalem, when the Jewish nation was in exile and wishing for reunion and repatriation. The myth is full of meaning, full of hope and uses the past to make the present bearable.

The parallels with cyberpunk and afro-futurism are inescapable. A downtrodden people dream of a time when they can usurp the technology of their masters, and become the players instead of the played. Simon Reynolds (in War in the Jungle) talks about how the fantasies of drum'n'bass are laced with darkness, that the bleak world conjured up is a place where the technocrats of dub can defeat the system through thaumaturgical science.  

Anyway, this is less like Philip K Dick and more like Borges - a deliberate misreading of the text, an ahistorical reading - can reveal hidden interpretations. But I don't think that I am out of the loop of Biblical exegesis... check out the picture. Notice how the artist dressed Joshua's Young Team? He was messing with anachronisms, too..