Joshua

← Encyclopedia

The Book of Joshua is the sixth book of the Hebrew Bible and the first of the section the Jewish canon, the Tanakh, calls the Former Prophets — the run of narrative books, Joshua through Kings, that carries Israel from the edge of the promised land to the loss of it. The placement is itself an interpretation: in the Jewish ordering Joshua stands not among the historical records but among the Prophets, read as part of one prophetic account of a people held to the terms of its covenant. It opens on a death and a commission. Moses has died on the far side of the Jordan, within sight of the country he will not enter, and the word comes to his aide that the time of waiting is over: cross the river, and take the land sworn to the ancestors. The book that follows tells how Israel, after forty years in the wilderness recorded in the Book of Numbers, came over the water under Joshua son of Nun and made the land its own. Its two halves are distinct in temper: a sequence of conquest narratives, then a long, careful apportioning of the territory among the twelve tribes, closing on a covenant renewed.

Joshua son of Nun

Joshua enters the larger story long before his own book. He is the young man who holds up Moses’s hands in the battle against Amalek, the scout sent into Canaan who brings back a faithful report when the others counsel fear, the attendant who does not leave the tent of meeting. By the close of the Torah he is the designated successor, commissioned by Moses at the command of God and filled, the text says, with the spirit of wisdom because Moses laid hands on him. He is not a lawgiver and not a prophet in the later mold; his office is narrower and more exacting — to do, exactly and without deviation, what was given to Moses to say. The book measures him by a single standard, fidelity to the instruction, and finds him faithful. His name carries its own weight: Yehoshua, the LORD is salvation — the name that later travels through Greek as Iēsous and so binds him, for readers who came after, to a second deliverer.

The crossing and the conquest

The conquest stories are the ones that traveled. They turn on the same pattern, told and retold: the human army does what it is told, and the victory belongs to God. At the Jordan the priests carry the ark into the riverbed and the waters stand in a heap upstream, so that the whole people cross dry-shod, as their parents had crossed the sea a generation before; twelve stones, one for each tribe, are set up on the far bank so that children not yet born will ask what they mean. Then Jericho, the first city, taken not by siege engines but by procession — the army circles the walls once a day for six days and seven times on the seventh, the priests sounding the rams’ horns, the people raising a shout, and the walls falling outward where they stand.

Defeat, when it comes, comes from inside. Achan keeps for himself what was devoted to God, and the army is routed at Ai until the offense is found and purged; only then is the city taken, by ambush. The Gibeonites, hearing what has happened, save themselves by deceit, arriving in worn sandals and mouldy bread to claim they have come from far away, and the treaty Israel swears to them holds even after the ruse is exposed. When five kings move against Gibeon for making peace, Joshua marches through the night and the battle runs long; the sun halts in the sky over Gibeon and the moon over the valley of Aijalon, so that the day is stretched until the work is done. The northern coalition under the king of Hazor is broken at the waters of Merom, and Hazor itself, the head of those kingdoms, is burned. The book presents the whole campaign as swift, near-total, and commanded — and it does not soften the form that command takes.

The herem

Running through these chapters is the ḥerem, the devoting of a people or a city to destruction: the ban under which the spoil of war is not kept but given over, the population not spared but put to the sword. Jericho falls under it almost entire; Achan dies for breaching it; the failure to carry it through completely becomes, in the books that follow, the seed of Israel’s later troubles. The book reports the herem without apology, as obedience — the hardest thing it asks its reader to hold, and the thing it least explains. It is offered not as cruelty but as a boundary drawn against the gods and practices of Canaan, a purity enforced by erasure, the cost of a land kept undivided in its loyalty. The logic is the same that runs through Deuteronomy, where the command is given before the crossing: the inhabitants and their shrines are to be destroyed lest Israel learn their worship and turn aside. In the chronology the book assumes, the herem is a fence around the first generation in the land — the danger it guards against is not the enemy outside but the slow seduction that the Book of Judges will record once the fence has failed. For the traditions that received the book this material has never sat easily, and much of its long afterlife is the history of readers trying to hold it at the right distance.

The division of the land

The second half of the book changes register entirely. The fighting done, Joshua turns to the slower and in some ways stranger task of apportioning the land, and the prose becomes a survey — boundaries traced ridge by ridge and wadi by wadi, towns listed by district, the inheritance of each tribe set down as a deed is set down. The allotment is made by lot, cast before the LORD at Shiloh, so that no tribe can claim it took its portion by its own arm; the land is received, not seized. Provision is made within it: cities of refuge where a person who has killed without intent may flee the avenger of blood, and forty-eight towns set aside for the Levites, who receive no territory of their own because, the book says, the LORD is their inheritance. The eastern tribes who settled across the Jordan are sent home, and a near-war over an altar they build by the river is defused when it proves to be a witness, not a rival sanctuary. The geography here is not decoration. It is the argument made concrete: this much, exactly this, was given, to these, on these terms.

The covenant at Shechem

The land secured and divided, Joshua, grown old, gathers the people twice to bind them to what they have received. At Shechem he rehearses the whole story from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob through the descent into Egypt and the deliverance, lays the choice before them — the gods of their ancestors beyond the River, the gods of the land they now hold, or the LORD who brought them up — and the people answer that they will serve the LORD. He warns them they are not able to; they insist; he writes the words in the book of the law of God and sets up a great stone under the oak as a witness, a stone that has heard the words, the book says, and will testify against them if they deny their God. Then Joshua dies, at a hundred and ten, and is buried in his own allotted ground, and the generation that knew the works of the LORD passes with him — the hinge on which the Book of Judges turns, into the long cycle of forgetting and ruin that follows.

The critical reading

Modern scholarship reads the book against its own claims. Most critical study places Joshua within the Deuteronomistic History — the long narrative running from Deuteronomy through Kings, unified by the theological outlook of Deuteronomy and its insistence that Israel’s fortunes rise and fall with its fidelity. The framework was set out by Martin Noth in 1943, who argued that a single exilic author wove older traditions into one continuous account, written to explain how the people that had been given the land came to lose it. Frank Moore Cross later revised the picture toward a double edition — a first, hopeful redaction under King Josiah in the late seventh century BCE, when reform seemed to promise restoration, and a second, darker revision after Babylonia destroyed Jerusalem and carried the people into exile in 587 BCE. On either account the book reached its shape centuries after the events it narrates, and its conquest is read less as reportage than as charter — a community in or after exile telling itself how the land had once been given, and on what terms it had been meant to keep it.

Archaeology has complicated the conquest picture further. Excavation at the named sites has not produced the cities the book destroys. At Jericho — Tell es-Sultan — John Garstang in the 1930s found a fallen wall and assigned it to Joshua, but Kathleen Kenyon’s stratigraphic excavations in the 1950s re-dated that wall roughly a millennium earlier, to the Early Bronze Age, and showed that at the end of the Late Bronze Age, the only window historically open for an Israelite conquest, Jericho was at most a small, unwalled settlement — no walls to fall. Ai, whose very name means the ruin, lay unoccupied at the relevant period; the city the book takes by ambush had already been a heap of stones for a thousand years, and the name may itself be the trace of a story grown up to explain the ruin. The pattern recurs across the named sites: where the book records a burning, the spade more often finds a gap. The broader evidence points not to invasion from outside but to the gradual emergence of Israel within Canaan during the early Iron Age: a wave of small highland villages appearing across the central hill country around 1200 BCE, materially continuous with the Canaanite world around them, a people coming into being in the land rather than coming into it. The earliest mention of that people outside the Bible is older still — the Egyptian Merneptah Stele of about 1207 BCE, which names Israel among the defeated of Canaan, a settled or tribal entity already there when Pharaoh’s scribes recorded crushing it. On this reading the book records not how the land was taken but how a later Israel chose to remember its beginnings — a people that had grown up out of the hill country telling the story of an arrival, and writing the boundary between itself and Canaan back into the moment of its birth.

Text, transmission, and study

The book did not come down in a single fixed shape. The Old Greek translation preserved in the Septuagint is markedly shorter than the Masoretic Hebrew text — by some four to five percent, with passages in a different order — and a Hebrew manuscript from Qumran, the fragment known as 4QJosh-a, matches the shorter Greek against the longer Hebrew. The Septuagint, on this evidence, was not abridging its source but faithfully rendering a different and likely earlier edition of the book, so that Joshua survives in two ancient forms at once, each a witness to the work still growing as it was copied. The critical study of all this is gathered in standard introductions to the Hebrew Bible — Michael Coogan’s The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures among the most used — and the Jericho question in particular continues to draw fresh argument, the dispute over the date and reality of the city’s fall surveyed in detail in recent work such as Titus Kennedy’s The Bronze Age Destruction of Jericho, Archaeology, and the Book of Joshua, which restates the maximalist case against the now-dominant settlement model.

Reception

For the traditions that received it, Joshua carried other freight. Jewish tradition counted it among the Prophets and read Joshua himself as the faithful disciple who completed what Moses began — the model of a leader whose whole greatness lay in carrying out, without adding to or subtracting from it, the instruction he had been given. Christian readers, noting that the name Yehoshua is the same as Yeshua — Jesus — often took Joshua as a type, a forerunner whose leading of the people through the water and into the rest of the land prefigured a later salvation; the second-century church found in the fall of Jericho and the scarlet cord of Rahab a wealth of figural meaning. The harder material, the herem above all, has been a standing problem for interpreters in both faiths, read variously as historical record, as moral test, or as a theology of the land that later readers held deliberately at arm’s length. The book has also marked the ground itself: the conquest geography helped fix the contours of the Holy Land in religious imagination, the map of an inheritance returned to again and again across two millennia of pilgrimage, exegesis, and claim.

What endures across these readings is a single insistence the book never relaxes: that the land was given, not won, and that holding it depended on remembering by whom.

→ Related: Book Of Numbers · Judges · Holy Land · Iron Age · Deuteronomy · Canaan · First Book Of Kings · Jordan River · Tanakh