Joshua and the Israelites have been doing nothing but killing in this book—killing by the thousands, killing women, killing children, killing animals—but it is the death of these five men, who aren't even innocents, that inspires the most revulsion. There's an obvious reason for this, one Stalin understood: "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." All the other killings in Joshua are mass killings. This is the only time the book of Joshua gives us death in a tight close-up, and it's appalling.
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