Summary: Bible - Book of Joshua

The GIST

Joshua is the sixth book of the Bible and the one in which a long-standing promise is finally kept. For generations the people of Israel have been told that the land of Canaan would be theirs. They have come out of Egypt and outlasted the wilderness. Moses is dead. Now his successor, Joshua, takes them across the Jordan River, and the book follows what happens: the entry, the battles, the careful sharing out of the territory among the twelve tribes, and a last gathering at which the nation is asked to bind itself again to its God.

The book is framed by two speeches, God's commission to Joshua at the start and Joshua's farewell at the end, and it falls into clear parts: the entry and conquest (chapters 1 to 12), the division of the land (13 to 22) and the conclusion (23 and 24). It opens the long history that continues through Judges, Samuel and Kings. In those later books Israel is repeatedly unfaithful and finally loses the land. Here, by contrast, Israel is for the most part obedient, and receives it. The real main character is God, who takes the initiative and whose power, not Israel's skill in arms, decides the battles.

What It Says

A new leader (chapter 1). After the death of Moses, God commissions Joshua to lead the people over the Jordan and promises him, "Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you." One instruction is repeated until it cannot be missed: "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest." Joshua is to keep the law of Moses before him day and night.

Rahab and the spies (chapter 2). Joshua sends two men to look over Jericho. They lodge at the house of a woman named Rahab, and when the king of Jericho sends for them she hides them under stalks of flax on her roof and says she does not know where they went. She tells the spies that she believes their God has given them the land, and asks that her family be spared. The sign agreed between them is a line of scarlet thread tied in her window.

Crossing the Jordan (chapters 3 to 5). The crossing is told as a miracle that mirrors the crossing of the sea under Moses. The priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant step into the river, the water stops, and they stand "firm on dry ground in the midst of Jordan" while the whole nation passes over. Twelve stones are taken from the riverbed and set up at Gilgal, so that when children in time to come ask, "What mean ye by these stones?" the story will be told. At Gilgal the men are circumcised and the Passover is kept. The manna that fed them in the wilderness stops, and they eat the produce of the land. Then Joshua meets a stranger with a drawn sword who identifies himself: "as captain of the host of the LORD am I now come." Joshua falls on his face.

Jericho, Achan and Ai (chapters 6 to 8). Jericho falls in a way no general would plan. The people march around the city in silence for six days, with priests blowing trumpets of rams' horns before the ark. On the seventh day they circle it seven times and shout, and "the wall fell down flat." Rahab and her household are brought out safely. The victory is followed at once by a humiliating defeat at Ai, where thirty-six men are lost and the people's courage melts. The cause is one man. Achan has secretly kept plunder that was to have been devoted to God, a fine garment, silver and a wedge of gold, and buried it under his tent. He is found out and stoned, and the place is named the valley of Achor. Ai is then taken by an ambush. Joshua builds an altar on Mount Ebal and reads the whole law aloud to the assembled people.

The Gibeonites and the southern campaign (chapters 9 and 10). The people of Gibeon save themselves by a trick. They arrive in worn-out shoes with dry and mouldy bread, pretending to have come from far away, and Israel swears peace with them before discovering they live nearby. The oath is kept, but the Gibeonites are made "hewers of wood and drawers of water." When a coalition of Amorite kings led by the king of Jerusalem attacks Gibeon for making peace, Joshua marches through the night to defend it. Hailstones fall on the enemy, and Joshua speaks the famous words, "Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon." The south of the country is then overrun.

The northern campaign and a summary (chapters 11 and 12). A great alliance headed by the king of Hazor, the leading city of the north, is beaten at the waters of Merom, and Hazor is captured and burned. The narrator sums up: Joshua took the whole land, and the land had rest from war. Chapter 12 lists the defeated kings, thirty-one of them west of the Jordan.

Dividing the land (chapters 13 to 22). By now Joshua is old, and the second task begins: putting the people in possession. The allotments made by Moses east of the Jordan to Reuben, Gad and half of Manasseh are confirmed, and the land of Canaan is divided by lot among the other tribes, with Eleazar the priest presiding alongside Joshua. Individual scenes break up the lists of borders and towns. Caleb, who with Joshua had trusted God when the other spies did not, comes forward at eighty-five to claim what he was promised: "Now therefore give me this mountain." The tabernacle is set up at Shiloh. Cities of refuge are designated, and the tribe of Levi receives forty-eight cities in place of a territory. The section reaches its conclusion in a sentence: "There failed not ought of any good thing which the LORD had spoken unto the house of Israel; all came to pass."

The text is candid, all the same, that the picture is not quite complete. Judah could not drive the Jebusites out of Jerusalem. Manasseh could not take certain cities, and the Canaanites remained. And when the eastern tribes go home and build "a great altar" by the Jordan, the others take it for rebellion and prepare for war, until it is explained that the altar is not for sacrifice but a witness that those beyond the river belong to the same God.

The farewell (chapters 23 and 24). Joshua, "going the way of all the earth," calls the leaders together and warns them to hold to the law and not to mix with the nations that remain. Then at Shechem he gathers all the tribes, retells their history from Abraham's father onward, and puts the choice before them: "choose you this day whom ye will serve." His own answer has become one of the best-known lines in the Bible: as for him and his house, they will serve the LORD. The people answer, "God forbid that we should forsake the LORD, to serve other gods." A covenant is made and a great stone set up under an oak as witness. The book ends with three burials: Joshua, dead at a hundred and ten; the bones of Joseph, carried up from Egypt and laid to rest at Shechem; and Eleazar the priest.

Why It Matters

Within the Bible's own story, Joshua shows what faithfulness looks like and what it brings. Its message is the central one of the history it introduces: obedience leads to success, and disobedience, as with Achan, to ruin. Land is its great subject. The land is God's to give or to withhold, and for later readers who had lost it in exile, the book was at once a sign of God's faithfulness and a reminder of their own failure. Joshua himself is drawn as a second Moses, sending spies, crossing water on dry ground, keeping the Passover and mediating a covenant.

It is also among the most troubling books in Scripture, and honest readers in every tradition have said so. Its wars are fought under the ban, in which whole populations are destroyed. Some scholars describe this as genocide; others regard the term as anachronistic, point out that such language was a convention of ancient war reports, or stress that the conflict is presented as a religious one about removing temptation to idolatry. One commentator admits there is no real way to make these accounts palatable to modern readers. Others advise reading the book for what it teaches about God and for what it meant to its first audiences centuries after the events it describes. The stories of Rahab and the Gibeonites, outsiders who are spared, complicate the picture from within.

Historians, for their part, largely do not treat the conquest as a factual account. Most scholars think the book was composed as part of a larger history in the late seventh century BC, in the reign of King Josiah, and revised after the fall of Jerusalem. Archaeology has generally pointed to Israel emerging gradually from within Canaanite society and not by invasion, though the evidence at particular sites, Hazor and Jericho among them, is still argued over. Jewish tradition in the Talmud attributed the book to Joshua himself.

Who Should Read It

Read Joshua if you have followed Israel's story through the exodus and the wilderness and want to see where it lands. It contains some of the best-known scenes in the Old Testament and repays readers interested in leadership after a great founder and in how communities define themselves. It should be read with open eyes, since it raises hard questions about violence in the name of God that the Bible itself goes on wrestling with.