God Made the Canaanites Repair the Land Before Israel Arrived

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The Fields the Canaanites Burned

Word came up the trade roads that a nation of freed slaves was walking north out of Egypt, and the Canaanites went out to their own fields with torches.

They burned the standing grain. They took axes to the young orchards and cut the saplings through at the root. They pulled down houses they had been born in and left the beams where they dropped. They rolled stones into the mouths of the springs until the water stopped coming. If the country was going to be taken, the takers could have ash, rubble, and dry wells.

What God Had Sworn to Abraham

God had promised Abraham something more particular than a country. The oath named houses full of every good thing. Cisterns already cut into the rock. Vineyards and olive trees already old enough to carry fruit. Not a ruin to move into. A place to walk in and eat.

So the short road closed. Instead of the direct way up the coast, Israel went around, and around again, striking camp and pitching it for forty years while the smoke settled over Canaan and the black fields sat.

The People Who Were Afraid of a Worse Country

They had come out of Egypt saying it to each other in the dark. "What if the place we are going to is not as good as the place we left." Egypt was a garden with a river running through the middle of it, and they had seen it every day of their lives.

God answered them plainly. "The land you are coming to is not like Egypt." Hebron was the poorest ground in Canaan, stony and hard, and Hebron was built seven years before Zoan, and Zoan was where the kings of Egypt kept their palaces. If the refuse of the one country outranked the crown city of the other, the argument was over. Every land on earth has something in it that another land lacks. That one lacks nothing.

Forty Years of Putting It Back

The Canaanites went back to work. Men who had cut down their own orchards dug holes and set new saplings in them and packed the soil around the stems. They cleared the stones out of the springs and waited for the water to rise. They raised the fallen houses. They hewed cisterns into the rock, cut storage caves into the hillsides, and planted fruit trees of every kind they could get seed for.

Nobody came. The threat had walked off into the desert and stayed there, and a boy who had watched his father burn the grain grew into a man who spent his summers grafting vines. The country filled up again.

And when the harvests came in, they did not eat them.

Something kept the fruit on the shelf. A man would carry figs into the house and set them down and not touch them, and he kept his sons off them, and his wife and his daughters. The jars stayed sealed. The bins stayed heavy. Whatever was in the country to be enjoyed sat there, year after year, not being enjoyed, while the people who had grown it went on eating whatever they had eaten before.

What Israel Walked Into

Near the end of the forty years God gave Moses an errand that had nothing to do with anyone alive. "Go down and tell the first fathers," He said. "Tell Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that I have dealt generously with their children in every particular I agreed with them. I built the houses. I planted the vineyards. I made the pools of water." The land had come up so complete that it did not lack even reeds for arrow shafts.

Then Israel crossed the Jordan and walked in.

The houses were standing and stocked. The cisterns were cut and holding. The vines were old, the olive trees older, and the storerooms would not close. Every plank and every root and every stone lip of every well had been put there by people who had sworn that these particular strangers would inherit nothing at all.