Theopedia

Book of Joshua

As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.

— Joshua 24:15

Overview

Joshua records the conquest of the land of Canaan by Israel under Joshua’s leadership, and its distribution by lot among the tribes that received their inheritance west of the Jordan.1 It connects immediately with the Pentateuch, showing how God fulfilled his promise to Abraham to give his descendants the land of Canaan for an inheritance (Gen. 17:8), a promise repeated throughout the Mosaic legislation and kept constantly in view.1 As the first of the Old Testament’s historical books, Joshua presents Israel’s affairs “on the divine rather than the human side,” tracing God’s own providential dealings with the covenant people rather than merely recording military events.2

Timeline

  • Israel prepares to cross the Jordan: God appoints Joshua to succeed Moses and tells him to be strong and brave. Joshua orders Israel to get supplies ready to cross into the promised land (Josh. 1).
  • Rahab hides the spies: Joshua sends two spies to scout Jericho. Rahab, a prostitute, hides them from the king’s men, and they promise to keep her family safe (Josh. 2).
  • Israel crosses the Jordan: Priests carry the ark into the flooded Jordan River, and the water stops flowing. All Israel crosses into Canaan on dry ground (Josh. 3-4).
  • Circumcision and Passover at Gilgal: At Gilgal, Israel’s men are circumcised, and the people celebrate Passover. The next day the manna stops, since they now eat food from the land (Josh. 5).
  • Jericho’s walls fall: As God commands, Israel marches around Jericho for seven days. On the seventh day the walls fall. The city is destroyed, but Rahab’s family is spared (Josh. 6).
  • Achan’s sin and defeat at Ai: Achan secretly keeps loot that belongs to God. Israel is badly defeated at Ai until his sin is found out and punished (Josh. 7).
  • Ai conquered; the law read at Ebal: Israel captures Ai by ambush. Joshua then builds an altar at Mount Ebal and reads the whole law to the assembled nation (Josh. 8).
  • The Gibeonites’ deception: Pretending to be travelers from far away, the Gibeonites trick Joshua into a peace treaty. Israel spares them but makes them woodcutters and water carriers (Josh. 9).
  • The southern campaign; the sun stands still: Joshua defends Gibeon from a group of Amorite kings. He defeats them as the sun stands still, then conquers the cities of southern Canaan (Josh. 10).
  • The northern campaign completes the conquest: Joshua defeats a northern alliance led by King Jabin of Hazor at the waters of Merom. He burns Hazor, finishing the main military campaigns (Josh. 11).
  • The land divided by lot: Joshua and Eleazar divide the conquered land among the tribes by lot. They set up six cities of refuge and give the Levites forty-eight cities (Josh. 13-21).
  • Covenant renewal at Shechem: Now old, Joshua tells Israel’s elders to stay faithful. He leads the people in a covenant renewal at Shechem and pledges his own family to the LORD (Josh. 23-24).

Author and Date

The book’s authorship cannot be settled from its title alone, any more than the two books bearing Samuel’s name can.3 Jewish tradition ascribes it to Joshua himself, excepting the closing five verses, but the book records transactions that, on the most obvious reading, occurred after Joshua’s death: the Danite migration to Laish (Josh. 19:47) is the same event Judges 18 narrates, and Rahab is described as dwelling “in Israel to this day” (Josh. 6:25), implying she was still living when the author wrote.3 Unless that notice is a later addition, the book was written by some unnamed prophetical man after Joshua’s death, possibly one of the elders who outlived him, since Rahab could well have survived the conquest by forty years or more.3 The reference to the Book of Jasher (Josh. 10:13) is sometimes taken as evidence of a still later composition, but Barrows judges this inconclusive, since nothing requires that title to name a work of fixed, datable contents rather than a growing collection of national songs.3 Nothing in the book’s style or diction places it later than Judges or Ruth.4

Historical and Literary Context

Joshua’s conquest fulfills the Abrahamic covenant’s promise of land (Gen. 13:14-15; 15:18-21; 17:8), a promise the entire body of Mosaic law kept in view.5 Its central act, the extermination of the Canaanites, known as herem, “devoted to destruction,” follows a pattern of corporate judgment Scripture applies elsewhere: Benedict Pictet lists it alongside the flood, the destruction of Sodom, and the plague on Egypt’s firstborn as instances where God’s judgment fell on a whole people for accumulated sin, citing directly, “for the abominations of the Canaanites, their wives and children were devoted to destruction” (Deut. 20:16).6 The conquest’s supernatural elements, most sharply the sun standing still over Gibeon (Josh. 10:12-14), are of a piece with the rest of the book’s place in the history of redemption; Barrows compares it to the sundial-shadow miracle under Hezekiah (2 Kings 20:8-11; Isa. 38:7-8) as a case where Scripture reports a real effect without specifying the means by which God brought it about.7

Structure

The book falls into two main parts.8

The conquest itself (chs. 1-12). Joshua, already designated Israel’s leader (Num. 27:15-23), receives his charge to cross the Jordan; spies survey Jericho; Israel crosses the river on dry ground and is circumcised at Gilgal. Jericho falls, Achan’s sin brings temporary defeat at Ai before the city is taken, the law is ratified at Mount Ebal, the Gibeonites secure a treaty by deception, and Joshua defeats first the southern and then the northern coalitions of Canaanite kings.8

The division of the land (chs. 13-24). The conquered territory is allotted by lot among the tribes, a process begun in chapters 13-17, interrupted by the people’s own slowness, and completed at Shiloh.9 Six cities of refuge and forty-eight Levitical cities are appointed, and the two and a half tribes settled east of the Jordan are sent home (chs. 20-22). The book closes with Joshua’s charge to the elders (ch. 23), his final charge and the covenant’s renewal at Shechem (ch. 24), and notices of the deaths of Joshua and Eleazar and the burial of Joseph’s bones.9

Major Themes

The land as covenant fulfillment

Joshua narrates God keeping a promise made centuries earlier: that Abraham’s descendants would possess Canaan (Gen. 17:8).1 Every campaign and every allotment in the book serves that one purpose, so that the conquest’s real subject is God’s own faithfulness to his word, worked out through Israel’s battles rather than merely alongside them.

Herem and divine justice

The ban on the Canaanites reflects a pattern Scripture applies to other instances of accumulated, national sin, not an isolated or arbitrary act.6 Pictet places it alongside the flood and the judgment on Sodom as an example of corporate judgment falling on a people for their own long-standing wickedness, grounded in the same principle by which God later “visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the children” under the law’s own terms (Exod. 20:5).6

Joshua as a type of Christ

“The name Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew Jehoshua, Joshua,” Berkhof observes, adding that the name “was borne by two well known types of Jesus in the Old Testament,” Joshua son of Nun among them.10 Pictet draws the same connection by contrast: the name of Saviour “eminently applies to Christ, who procured for us a deliverance, not temporal, such as Moses and Joshua procured for Israel, but a spiritual deliverance.”11 The typology extends to the rest Joshua won for Israel in the land: Oren Rhea Martin traces how Hebrews 3-4 treats that rest as “a type of God’s heavenly rest,” achieved only “in some measure” under Joshua and so still anticipating “the eschatological rest for the people of God.”12

Covenant renewal and exclusive loyalty

Joshua’s closing charge presses Israel to put away every rival god and serve the LORD alone, framed as his own household’s standing commitment: “as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD” (Josh. 24:15). The people’s answering pledge renews, at the conquest’s close, the same covenant loyalty the book’s whole narrative has been tracing from its first chapter.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Barrows, 241. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), chap. 20, “The Historical Books,” 240. ↩

  3. Barrows, 243. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Barrows, 243-44. ↩

  5. Barrows, 244. ↩

  6. Benedict Pictet, Christian Theology, trans. Frederick Reyroux (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1845), 183: “For the abominations of the Canaanites, their wives and children were devoted to destruction. (Deut. 20:16.)” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. Barrows, 244-45. ↩

  8. Barrows, 241-42. ↩ ↩2

  9. Barrows, 242. ↩ ↩2

  10. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 296. ↩

  11. Pictet, Christian Theology, bk. 6. ↩

  12. Oren Rhea Martin, “The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan: Part 2, The New Testament,” in “Bound for the Kingdom: The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 257-58. ↩