“Our house is a very, very, very fine house”
Once again we’ve skipped forward many centuries between last week’s reading and today’s. Israel has long been settled in the Promised Land, sometimes called Canaan in the Bible. They conquered the peoples who were already living there—although some historians nowadays say it’s more likely that they moved in and eventually everybody assimilated into one people, rather than a wholesale “Manifest Destiny”-type conquest. I don’t know that there’s any way to know for sure, and for our purposes today, it doesn’t matter.