Spying in the Bible 10 - 1406 BC (1)

Joshua's Intriguing Intrigue (1)

During his tenure as leader of the Israelites, Joshua led a couple of large intelligence campaigns. Interestingly, one of Joshua’s spying campaigns was a great success and the other was a terrible failure. While the Bible makes it clear success or failure was due to whether or not the people had God’s favor at the time, lessons can still be learned about the spying operations. This is because there were still earthly causes of their success or failure that God worked through to accomplish his ultimate plan.

Joshua began his attempted conquest of the Promised Land, much like Moses had, by sending out spies to reconnoiter the land and its people. In Joshua’s campaign, the initiation of the Intelligence Cycle, which is the Tasking and Requirements stage, was essentially the same as Moses’ campaign, where policy makers (military leaders) needed to know tactical information about the enemy in order to make a policy decision on how to meet their objective of invading the Promised Land. At first glance, it may appear these two intelligence gathering campaigns were similar, but from an operational and management standpoint, Joshua and his mission were very different from Moses’ thirty eight years earlier. Joshua, who had espionage experience himself and had learned lessons from the previous failure, developed a much different collection plan, as recorded in the Planning and Direction step of the Intelligence Cycle (Joshua 2:1).

Then Joshua son of Nun secretly sent two spies from Shittim. “Go, look over the land,” he said, “especially Jericho.” So they went and entered the house of a prostitute named Rahab and stayed there.

The first thing to note here is that Joshua used two professionals, whose names were not recorded. The second thing to note is that the spies were sent out secretly. This is vastly different from Moses’ operation. They spies were not sent based on political reasons and they had no conflicts of interest. Also, since there were only two of them, instead of twelve, they would have been able to travel more clandestinely. From an OPSEC standpoint, with the Israelite public not knowing about the mission, there was no risk of the enemy finding out about it through them.

With regard to the direction to the spies, they were very minimalistic, trusting in the spies’ abilities and allowing them much needed operational flexibility. That approach also inherently gives the spies broad authority to do what they need to do to successfully complete their mission. That flexibility and authority ended up coming in very handy as is apparent later in the story. That is a large contrast with Moses’ overly detailed instructions to the twelve spies from the first campaign. Josephus expands upon the directions given to the spies recording they were asked about the “intentions” of the populous (Antiquities of the Jews, Book V, Chapter 1).

...sent spies to Jericho to discover what forces they had, and what were their intentions.

These are still minimalistic instructions, but Josephus’ account adds the component of asking about the mentality of the enemy, which the spies do report upon their return. The spies then went and accomplished their mission and came up with a uniform report that they would give as raw intelligence when they returned as Josephus records. This completed the Collection and Processing step of the Intelligence Cycle. Josephus explains that the spies reconnoitered Jericho and did a good job of clandestinely pretending to be tourists (Antiquities of the Jews, Book V, Chapter 1).

...they took a full view of the city of Jericho without disturbance, and saw which parts of the walls were strong, and which parts were otherwise, and indeed insecure, and which of the gates were so weak as might afford an entrance to their army. Now those that met them took no notice of them when they saw them, and supposed they were only strangers, who used to be very curious in observing everything in the city, and did not take them for enemies...

When the spies were in Jericho, they stayed with a woman named Rahab, who throughout the Bible is referred to as a harlot. When the Bible states that the spies “lodged there”, it means they specifically went there to lodge. A common question that arises from these verses is why they would specifically go to the house of a prostitute to stay and find lodging. Josephus sheds some light on this when he writes that the spies stayed at an inn and that Rahab was the innkeeper. While the two accounts appear to be contradictory, they are actually both historically accurate and valid.

During this time most inns were commonly also brothels and if Rahab was the innkeeper she would have lived there and been the Madam of the house, and likely also a prostitute. Therefore, the house of the prostitute Rahab was the inn for which she was the innkeeper. This type of establishment is where visitors would have stayed when traveling to Jericho, so it would have been normal for the spies to stay there since they were pretending to be visitors. While staying there, Rahab saw through their cover stories and gave the spies valuable intelligence that the people had been expecting the invasion for quite some time and that they were scared of the Israelites (Joshua 2:9-11).

“I know that the LORD has given you this land and that a great fear of you has fallen on us, so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you. We have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to Sihon and Og, the two kings of the Amorites east of the Jordan, whom you completely destroyed. When we heard of it, our hearts melted in fear and everyone’s courage failed because of you, for the LORD your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below.”

These verses confirm the success of God’s plan to use the conquest of Sihon and Og’s kingdoms as PSYOPs, that is to strike fear into the enemies ranks and thus, damage their morale.