Allotments for Six Remaining Tribes

The allotment of Dan is the most dramatically complicated of the tribal apportionments. Dan is given a coastal territory in the west, but the Amorites press them into the hill country and prevent them from taking possession of the lowland. Dan's response is to move entirely: they migrate north, conquer Leshem, and rename it Dan. This is the same city whose northern sanctuary becomes one of the two golden calf shrines of Jeroboam in 1 Kings — the book of Joshua is thus inadvertently explaining how Israel ends up with a sanctuary at the far north of its territory. Dan's story is a miniature version of the problem the whole allotment section is documenting: the gap between the paper allocation and the actual possession of land.

Joshua receiving his own inheritance last is a fitting close to the allotment narrative. He has presided over the distribution of land to all the tribes before taking anything for himself. The town he requests — Timnath-serah in Ephraim — is in his own tribal territory, chosen by him and given by the people rather than distributed by lot. The detail that he rebuilt the town and settled in it gives a domestic specificity to a figure who has been primarily a military and administrative leader throughout the book. He is a person with a home in the land he helped secure for others. His inheritance appears last in a list that began with Judah's enormous allotment, and its modesty contrasts with the scale of what others received.