Chron2

This is an 1890 English translation (from Arabic) of the Samaritan Chronicle, a medieval religious-historical narrative from the Samaritan tradition that retells the conquest of Canaan under Joshua. The excerpted chapters (26–50) center on a massive military coalition assembled against Joshua by Shaubak, son of a Persian king Joshua had previously slain, who rallies surviving Canaanites, Armenians, Syrians, and giant warriors bearing weapons inherited from Noah to seek revenge. The narrative's dramatic core is an exchange of formal war letters: the enemy coalition sends Joshua a boastful ultimatum — announcing 36 kings, millions of soldiers, and a giant with a steel thunderbolt that kills 500–1,000 men per throw — and Joshua responds with an extended theological counter-letter invoking God as the ultimate destroyer of tyrants and idolaters. What makes the text distinctively unusual is its linguistic and religious hybridity: written by Samaritans in Arabic, it opens with Islamic invocations ("In the Name of God, the Compassionate") and uses Quranic-style epithets for the divine while recounting Hebrew biblical history, creating a document that belongs simultaneously to multiple religious traditions. The portrayal of Joshua as a composed judicial ruler who withholds alarming military intelligence until after his people's feast, and the elaborate rhetorical formality of the war correspondence, give this version of the Joshua story a courtly, chronicle-like texture absent from the biblical Book of Joshua itself.

Chron2

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