The King of Ai and the Altar at Mount Eval

The text highlights the moral dimension of the conflict, emphasizing that Israel's wars of conquest must not be exercises in gratuitous bloodshed, unrestrained plunder and cruel vengeance. While it is necessary to put the inhabitants of Ai to death in the course of the battle, their king, the symbol of their temporal might and power, is dispatched without recourse to torture, while his body is shortly thereafter removed from the gallows and buried without mutilation, two telling departures from the conventions of ancient warfare. The placement of the passage describing the assembly at Mount Eval is to emphatically declare that Israel can only survive the passage over the Yarden and the entry into Canaan if they put God's Torah at the forefront of their concerns and their mission as His people as their national objective.