Everyone continues to sweep across Israel driving out Canaanites. God hands out victory after victory, including Jerusalem, which will be super-important later on. There is a big list of places though where Canaanites are still allowed to live because they refuse to leave. I’m not sure what that means exactly since Israel has an invincible God-powered military machine, but the Canaanites refuse to leave a few places and so they stay. Later on they are all made to do forced labor so I guess that doesn’t count, as making a treaty with them and so is allowable under the covenant with God.
They don’t do a very good job of breaking down all the altars to foreign gods though so an angel of the Lord, or possibly the Lord Himself depending on your interpretation, chewed them out pretty good for not completing their end of the deal. Again though, it couldn’t have been too bad because it is also true that the nation was on good terms with God all through Joshua’s time and beyond through the reign of the elders and leaders who had first-hand knowledge of God’s work.
The next generation didn’t do so great though. In fact they entered a time of wavering between breaking the law and following it. Basically, when things were good, the Israelites would slack off and do what they pleased, worshiping other gods and ignoring their history and covenant with God. Once they angered God enough, He would send raiders and curses and make the Israelites lose battles all over the place until they came back to Him and to their covenant out of desperation. Then, because He promised to take them back when they asked, He would raise up judges to lead the people back into a proper relationship with God, defeating foreigners and teaching the Law. Every time one of these judges would finish their work and die though, the people would fall back into sin.
That last paragraph summarizes about half a chapter in the book of Judges, which seems to sort of broadly cover several decades, maybe hundreds of years. It’s interesting to me that this complex pattern is laid out so simply. I mean we take that kind of analysis for granted today because I can scan Wikipedia for a few minutes and find a handful of infographics outlining relevant events surrounding pretty much any theme I like, but it’s hard to tease out that kind of pattern with only the tools available to a pre-roman era anthropologist/goat-herder.
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