Life — July 22, 1915 — page 29: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This is a satirical cartoon from Life magazine (1927) depicting the biblical account of Joshua's military victory. The scoreboard shows a baseball-style game between "Strikes" and "Hittites," with references to ancient cities (Arks, Sodom, Gomorrah, Athens, Sparta). The humor lies in treating a biblical military conquest as a modern baseball game. Joshua—depicted as an athlete mid-leap—is shown as a baseball player rather than an ancient general. This anachronistic presentation mocks either contemporary fascination with sports culture or perhaps religious narratives themselves by rendering them through the lens of 1920s American popular entertainment. The signed cartoonist (Wildhack) uses the familiar scoreboard format to create comic incongruity between sacred history and modern sport.