Joshua — themes & analysis

Joshua opens with a crossing. Moses is dead. The people are camped on the east bank of the Jordan in the place where Deuteronomy ended. Joshua is commissioned by God with the words that have become liturgy: be strong and courageous, do not be frightened or dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. He sends two spies into Jericho. They are sheltered by Rahab the prostitute, who hides them under stalks of flax on her roof and lets them down by a rope through her window in the city wall. They return with their report. The people break camp and come to the river.

The Jordan is in flood — chapter 3 takes care to mention this. It is harvest time and the river is overrunning its banks. The priests carrying the ark of the covenant step into the water at the head of the column. The flow is cut off. The waters from upstream pile up in a heap at a town called Adam, and the people cross on dry ground. The whole nation passes over while the priests stand with the ark in the middle of the river bed. After they have crossed, twelve men — one from each tribe — go back to the river and bring up twelve stones from the place where the priests stood, and Joshua sets them up at Gilgal as a memorial.

The parallel with the Red Sea crossing in Exodus is exact and intentional. The book wants the reader to feel that the deliverance from Egypt is being completed here. The same waters part. The same dry ground appears. The same trembling people pass through. The river is the threshold. On the east side they are nomads; on the west side they are about to become a settled people in a land. The crossing is the founding act of the new condition.

The twelve memorial stones at Gilgal have a specific liturgical purpose, spelled out in chapter 4. When in time to come your children ask, what do these stones mean, then you shall let them know: Israel crossed over the Jordan here on dry ground. The whole crossing is being framed — as the Passover was framed in Exodus — as a future memory. The act is designed to be remembered. It is the inauguration of a national history with deliberately constructed monuments, and a model for how Joshua wants its events to be carried forward.

Where to follow it: Joshua 1 (the commissioning), Joshua 3 (the crossing), Joshua 4 (the twelve stones), Joshua 5 (first Passover in the land).

Jericho is the first city in the land. It is heavily fortified, with the population shut up against the Israelite advance. The instructions God gives Joshua in chapter 6 are unlike any military instructions in any other ancient narrative. March around the city once a day for six days. On the seventh day, march around it seven times. The seven priests carrying the seven trumpets of rams' horns will blow them, and then the people will give a great shout, and the wall will fall down flat, and the people will go up, every one straight ahead.

This is the strangest siege in literature. There is no battering ram. There is no tunnel under the wall. There is no starvation, no betrayal, no negotiation. There is a procession with an ark and a number of horns, and after seven days the wall comes down. The text gives the bare account without explaining the mechanism. Whatever historians and archaeologists have made of it — and the archaeological evidence at Tell es-Sultan is famously contested — what the book is doing is theological. The first city is taken not by conventional siegecraft but by liturgy. The land is being given, and the giving is being shown.

Then the dark side. The instructions also include the herem — the dedication of the city to total destruction. The Israelites are to put everyone in Jericho to the sword: men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys. Only Rahab and her household are spared, because she had hidden the spies and tied a scarlet cord in her window. The silver and gold and bronze and iron are to go into the treasury of the Lord's house. Nothing else is to be taken; everything is to be destroyed.

The herem is the moral problem of the book, and there is no point softening it. It is a category of warfare that appears in other ancient Near Eastern texts — Mesha's Moabite Stone records a similar dedication of captives to a god — and it is presented in Joshua as the express command of God. Modern readers of every theological persuasion have struggled with what to do with these texts. Some have read them as mostly hyperbolic, since the rest of the book and Judges show clearly that the inhabitants were not in fact all destroyed. Others have read them as historically conditioned commands tied to a specific moment that the larger biblical witness moves beyond. Others have read them as a permanent scandal the canon does not resolve. The honest reader takes them seriously as something the text itself is asserting, and lets them sit as the difficulty they are.

Where to follow it: Joshua 6 (the fall of Jericho), Joshua 9 (the Gibeonite deception), Joshua 10 (the long day at Aijalon), Joshua 11 (the northern campaign).

After Jericho, the next target is Ai — a much smaller town. Joshua sends three thousand men, expecting an easy victory. They are routed. Thirty-six Israelites are killed, the rest flee, and the hearts of the people, the text says, melted and became as water. Joshua tears his clothes and falls on his face before the ark. Why have you brought us across the Jordan, he asks, only to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites to destroy us?

The Lord's answer in chapter 7 is sharp. Israel has sinned. They have transgressed the covenant by taking some of the things devoted to destruction at Jericho. The herem has been violated. Until the violator is found and the devoted thing destroyed, no victory will come. Joshua brings the people forward by tribes, then by clans, then by households, then by individuals. The lot falls on a man named Achan of the tribe of Judah. He confesses: he saw a beautiful Babylonian mantle, and two hundred shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold weighing fifty shekels, and he coveted them and took them, and they are buried under his tent. The plunder is dug up. Achan is brought out, with his sons and daughters and oxen and donkeys and sheep, into the Valley of Achor, and they are stoned and burned with fire. They raise over them a great heap of stones that remains, the text says, to this day. The valley is named Achor — trouble.

The scene is one of the most disturbing in the book and one of the most carefully constructed. The narrative wants the reader to feel that the prosperity of the people in the land depends on a kind of collective integrity. One man's hidden disobedience contaminates the whole. The image of the secret thing buried under the tent — the one bad spot on the collective body — is the book's controlling metaphor for failure. The execution that follows is brutal even by the standards of the book; the inclusion of Achan's children in the killing is one of the passages later Jewish and Christian commentators have struggled most with. The text presents it without softening.

What the chapter is doing structurally is setting up the second taking of Ai in chapter 8. With the contamination removed, the city is taken by a careful military stratagem — an ambush, a feigned retreat, the city emptied of defenders, the army in the city set on fire. The whole population of Ai is killed. The contrast between Jericho's miraculous fall and Ai's tactical fall, and the placement of the Achan story between them, is the book's argument: the giving of the land requires the people to be the kind of people the giving requires. When they are not, the giving stalls.

Where to follow it: Joshua 7 (Achan found and executed), Joshua 8 (Ai taken; the altar at Ebal).

Almost half of Joshua — chapters 13 through 21 — is taken up with the apportionment of the land among the twelve tribes. To a modern reader these chapters can look like a tax assessor's report: this is the boundary of the territory of Reuben, these are the cities of Simeon, this is the inheritance of the children of Manasseh according to their families. The detail is forbidding. It is also the theological point. The land that has been promised, and given, and taken, is now being possessed in pieces by particular families with particular boundaries running between particular hills and particular springs. The promise is being made specific.

Reuben, Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh receive their inheritance east of the Jordan, where they had asked for it under Moses. The other nine and a half tribes receive their territories west of the Jordan, with Judah getting the largest southern territory, Ephraim and Manasseh dominating the centre, and the smaller tribes distributed around them. The Levites receive no territorial inheritance — the Lord is their inheritance — but they are given forty-eight cities scattered through the territories of the other tribes. Six of those cities are designated cities of refuge, where someone who has killed unintentionally can flee from the avenger of blood and have his case heard.

The cities of refuge are one of the most striking legal institutions in the Hebrew Bible, and Joshua is where they are actually established on the ground. The institution recognizes the reality of blood feud — a man killed accidentally still has a family with the right of vengeance — and tries to break the feud cycle by providing a sanctuary in which the manslayer can live until the death of the high priest, after which he can return home. It is one of the early attempts in human legal history to interpose a public institution between a wrong and the private vengeance it would otherwise produce.

The long allotment chapters end with a striking theological note. Chapter 21 closes: thus the Lord gave to Israel all the land that he swore to their ancestors that he would give them. Not one of all the good promises that the Lord had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass. The line is the book's theological climax. The promise to Abraham, six hundred years earlier — to your offspring I will give this land — has been fulfilled. The argument of the book is complete. What follows in the closing chapters is the question of whether Israel can keep what has been given.

Where to follow it: Joshua 13 (territories yet to be taken), Joshua 14 (Caleb claims Hebron), Joshua 20 (cities of refuge), Joshua 21 (Levitical cities; promise fulfilled).

Chapter 24 is the literary climax of the book. Joshua, an old man, gathers all the tribes of Israel to Shechem and summons their elders, heads, judges, and officers. They present themselves before God. Joshua speaks for God and gives them, in his own voice and in the voice of the Lord, a long historical recitation. Long ago your ancestors lived beyond the Euphrates and served other gods. I took your ancestor Abraham from beyond the river and led him through the land of Canaan and gave him many offspring. I sent Moses and Aaron and plagued Egypt. I brought you out of Egypt. I gave you a land on which you had not laboured, and towns that you had not built, and you live in them; you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards that you did not plant.

Then the demand. Now therefore revere the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the river and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. The book has not previously been very interested in which gods the people might be tempted by. Here it acknowledges them: gods from beyond the Euphrates, gods from Egypt, gods of the Amorites in whose land they now live. The choice is among real options.

If you are unwilling to serve the Lord, Joshua continues, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the river or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living. Then the line that has been carved into a thousand church entrances and household plaques: as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. The people answer. Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods. Joshua, in a strange move, presses them. You cannot serve the Lord, he says — for he is a holy God, he is a jealous God, he will not forgive your transgressions or your sins. The people insist. So Joshua makes a covenant with the people that day, writes the words in a book, and sets up a great stone under the oak in the sanctuary of the Lord as a witness.

Then Joshua dies. He is one hundred and ten years old. They bury him on his own land at Timnath-serah. The bones of Joseph, which the Israelites had carried out of Egypt, are buried at Shechem in the plot of land Jacob had bought there. Eleazar the high priest dies and is buried in the hill country of Ephraim. The book ends with three burials — three settled bodies in the soil of the inheritance. The promise that began at Ur with one childless man has come to rest, on the page, in three graves and a covenant under an oak.

Where to follow it: Joshua 22 (the altar of witness), Joshua 23 (Joshua's first farewell), Joshua 24 (covenant at Shechem).