Circumcision and Passover at Gilgal

The ritual preparation in chapter 5 is the book's way of saying that the conquest will be conducted as a religious act, not a military campaign in the ordinary sense. The circumcision of the wilderness generation restores the sign of the covenant that Abraham received in Genesis 17. The people cannot enter the land in the full sense without it. The name Gilgal, explained as rolling away the disgrace of Egypt, is the book's characteristic aetiological move — a place name becomes the trace of a defining event. The keeping of the Passover at this moment links the inheritance of the land directly to the deliverance from Egypt, making the crossing of the Jordan the completion of the Exodus rather than a separate story.

The cessation of manna is one of the most quietly dramatic moments in the Pentateuchal-Joshua narrative. The manna appeared in the wilderness because there was no food; it stops when there is. The text notes this with a spare economy: the manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land, and the Israelites no longer had manna; they ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year. Forty years of wilderness provision ends with a single meal. The encounter with the commander of the Lord's army is brief but structurally significant: it establishes that the campaign about to begin is not Joshua's operation but God's, and that the sanctuary logic operative at Mount Sinai — remove your sandals, the ground is holy — is now operative at the threshold of Jericho.