Joshua

The promise made to Abraham was about a land, and this is the book where Israel gets it. Joshua is often remembered for its first half — a river crossing, a city whose walls fall after a week of marching, a defeat caused by one man's theft, a coalition beaten in a long day of fighting — but the second half is longer, and it is a survey document: borders, town lists, cities of refuge, and forty-eight towns set aside for Levites who receive no territory of their own. That imbalance is the book's argument. What matters is not the campaigns but the deeds. It is also the hardest book in the Old Testament for a modern reader, because those campaigns include the herem, the devoting of whole cities to destruction, and the book neither hides it nor explains it away. This bundle sets out what the text says, the reasons it gives, and how readers have handled it, without pretending the difficulty is not there. And it keeps the book's own tensions visible: a narrator who says not one word of God's promises failed, a few pages after saying much land still remains.

Themes

• Be strong and courageous — Said four times in the first chapter, three of them by God, and tied not to military confidence but to keeping the book of the law.
• The land as gift — Every victory is credited to Yahweh, and the allotment is by lot rather than by conquest — you receive your portion, you do not earn it.
• Outsiders who come in — Rahab and the Gibeonites both survive by recognising who Israel's God is, and both end up inside Israel — in a book about clearing the land.
• The herem — Cities devoted to destruction. The book states it plainly, gives its stated reasons, and this bundle names how readers divide over it rather than resolving it.
• Not one word failed — 21:45's verdict on the promises, set against 13:1's 'much land remains' and Judges 1 — a tension the book itself creates.
• Memory built into the ground — Twelve stones from the riverbed, an altar on Ebal, a heap over Achan, a stone under an oak at Shechem — the book keeps making the land tell the story.
• Choose this day — The last chapter puts the covenant to a vote and warns that they are not able to keep it — and they say they will anyway.

Outline

• 1. Be strong and courageous — A commission, a promise about every place the sole of the foot treads, and the eastern tribes agreeing to cross and fight first.
• 2. Rahab — Two spies, a house on the wall, a woman who names Yahweh as God in heaven and earth, and a scarlet cord.
• 3. Crossing the Jordan — Priests carrying the ark step into a river at flood stage, and the water stands in a heap upstream.
• 4. Twelve stones — Memorials built from the riverbed so children will ask what they mean, and so all the peoples of the earth will know.
• 5. Circumcision and the manna — A generation marked at Gilgal, a Passover kept, the manna stopping the next day — and an armed figure who takes neither side.
• 6. Jericho — Six days of silent marching and a seventh of seven circuits — and a household spared because of a promise made to a Canaanite.
• 7. Achan — A small defeat with a large cause, and a search by tribe, family and household for a cloak, silver and gold buried under a tent.
• 8. Ai, and the altar on Ebal — An ambush that works, and then the whole nation standing between two mountains while the law is read aloud.
• 9. The Gibeonites — Mouldy bread, worn sandals, an oath sworn without asking God — and an oath kept anyway.
• 10. The long day — Five kings against Gibeon, hailstones, a poem quoted from the book of Jashar, and a rapid southern campaign.
• 11. Hazor — A northern coalition with horses and chariots, and a summary that says Joshua took the whole land.
• 12. Thirty-one kings — A list of defeated kings, one by one — the campaigns recorded as an inventory.
• 13. Much land remains — Joshua is old, and the first thing said to him is what has not been done. Then the two and a half eastern tribes' territory.
• 14. Caleb — Eighty-five years old and asking for the hill country with the giants in it, because of a promise made forty-five years earlier.
• 15. Judah — Borders and town lists, with Caleb's daughter asking for springs and a note that the Jebusites were not driven out of Jerusalem.
• 16. Ephraim — A short chapter that ends the way chapter 15 did — with Canaanites still living in the territory.
• 17. Manasseh — Zelophehad's daughters claim their inheritance, and the house of Joseph asks for more land and is told to clear the forest.
• 18. Shiloh and the survey — Seven tribes still without land, a surveying party sent out to write the country in a book, and lots cast at the tent of meeting.
• 19. The seven lots — Simeon inside Judah, Zebulun, Issachar, Asher, Naphtali, Dan — and last of all a town for Joshua himself.
• 20. Cities of refuge — Six towns where someone who killed without intent can be safe until trial — the law's answer to blood vengeance.
• 21. The Levites' towns — Forty-eight towns with pasture, given by every tribe to the tribe with no territory — and the verdict that not one word failed.
• 22. The altar by the Jordan — An altar built by the eastern tribes nearly starts a civil war, until someone asks what it is for.
• 23. Joshua's charge — An old man's warning: hold fast, don't intermarry, and know that the same God who kept every promise will keep the other kind too.
• 24. Choose this day — A covenant at Shechem, a history told in God's own voice, and a people who insist they will serve him after being told they can't.

Chapters

• Joshua 1 — A succession speech, and the striking thing is what the courage is attached to. Four times Joshua is told to be strong and courageous, and the longest of them is not about armies at all: be careful to do all the law, and this book shall not depart from your mouth.
• Joshua 2 — The first person in the promised land to say who Yahweh is, and say it correctly, is a Canaanite prostitute. Her speech quotes the exodus back to two Israelite spies, and the book puts it immediately before the destruction of her city.
• Joshua 3 — The crossing is staged as a liturgy rather than as a military operation. The ark goes first with a deliberate gap behind it so everyone can see it, the people consecrate themselves the day before, and the water stops only when the priests' feet are already in it.
• Joshua 4 — The whole chapter is about memory. Twelve stones come out of the riverbed and go up at the camp so that when children ask what they mean, someone has to tell the story — and a second twelve are set in the river itself, where nobody will see them again.
• Joshua 5 — Before a single battle, the army is deliberately disabled: every man is circumcised and left to recover in enemy territory. Then the manna stops, the Passover is kept on the produce of the land, and a man with a drawn sword answers Joshua's 'are you for us or for our enemies?' with a flat no.
• Joshua 6 — A seven-day siege in which nothing is besieged. The army walks around the city once a day in silence behind seven priests with trumpets, and on the seventh day seven times, and then shouts. The one thing anybody is told to do is not to take anything — and the one household saved is the one that helped the spies.
• Joshua 7 — The smallest defeat in the book gets a whole chapter, because the cause is inside the camp. Thirty-six men die at a town the scouts said would need only three thousand, and the reason turns out to be a cloak, two hundred shekels of silver and a bar of gold buried under one tent.
• Joshua 8 — The second attempt on Ai works because of an ambush, a feigned retreat and a signal — ordinary military competence, in a book that mostly reports God doing the fighting. And then the whole nation stops campaigning to stand between two mountains and hear the law read, women, children and foreigners included.
• Joshua 9 — The only people in Canaan who survive by cunning rather than by force. The Gibeonites arrive with mouldy bread and worn-out sandals claiming to be from a far country, and Israel's leaders make a treaty without asking God — and then keep it, at cost, for centuries.
• Joshua 10 — Israel's first defensive war is fought for a city that tricked them. Five kings besiege Gibeon for surrendering, Joshua marches all night, and the day is remembered for two things the narrative attributes to God rather than to the army: hailstones that killed more than the sword, and a sun that did not hurry to go down.
• Joshua 11 — The northern campaign against the largest force in the book — an army with horses and chariots, as many as the sand on the seashore — and the one order that stands out is what to do afterwards: hamstring the horses and burn the chariots. The equipment that would have made Israel a military power is destroyed on purpose.
• Joshua 12 — A chapter that is entirely a list: two kings east of the Jordan defeated under Moses, and thirty-one west of it under Joshua, each one counted 'one'. It reads like an inventory because that is what it is — the campaigns turned into a ledger before the land is divided up.
• Joshua 13 — The first sentence spoken to Joshua in the second half of the book is not congratulation but a correction: you are old, and there remains yet very much land to be possessed. Then the territory is divided anyway — including the parts nobody holds.
• Joshua 14 — An eighty-five-year-old man asks for the one part of the country still occupied by giants, because of something Moses promised him forty-five years earlier — and because he wholly followed Yahweh, a phrase repeated three times in nine verses.
• Joshua 15 — The longest allotment chapter, and it ends on a sentence that undoes its own confidence: as for the Jebusites, the children of Judah could not drive them out, so they live with the children of Judah at Jerusalem to this day.
• Joshua 16 — Ten verses for the tribe of Joseph's southern half, and the last one is the same admission Judah's chapter ended on: they did not drive out the Canaanites of Gezer, so they live among Ephraim to this day and became forced labourers.
• Joshua 17 — Five women appear in the middle of a land survey and win their case. Zelophehad's daughters, who had no brothers, come to the priest and to Joshua and say Moses commanded that we be given an inheritance among our brothers — and they get one, which is why Manasseh has ten portions rather than nine.
• Joshua 18 — Seven tribes have not taken their land, and Joshua's question is a rebuke: how long will you be slack to go in and possess it? The solution is bureaucratic — a survey party of twenty-one men walks the country, writes it in a book by cities in seven portions, and brings the document back.
• Joshua 19 — Six more lots, and then a seventh that is not a lot at all: after everyone else has been settled, Israel gives Joshua a town of his own, which he asked for — and the man who divided the whole country is the last person in it to receive anything.
• Joshua 20 — Six towns are set aside where someone who has killed accidentally can run and be safe from the avenger of blood until the case is heard — the law's answer to a society where a family was expected to settle a death itself.
• Joshua 21 — The tribe with no land gets forty-eight towns with pasture, contributed by every other tribe — so the priesthood lives scattered through the whole country rather than concentrated anywhere. And then the chapter gives the book's verdict: not one word of all the good promises failed.
• Joshua 22 — A civil war is nearly started by a misunderstanding about a building. The eastern tribes go home and put up an altar by the Jordan; the western tribes muster for war; and the thing that stops it is a delegation that goes and asks what the altar is for.
• Joshua 23 — An old man's farewell to the leadership, and its argument runs on one hinge word. Everything God promised has come to pass — not one thing has failed — and therefore the same certainty applies to the warnings: if you turn, the good things will go the way the promises came.
• Joshua 24 — The book ends with a covenant ceremony at Shechem in which God tells the story himself, in the first person, from Abraham's idol-worshipping father to the land they are standing on — and then Joshua tells them they are not able to serve this God, and they insist that they will.

Browse all books