Lecture 27: Joshua: The Land Taken, Given, and Waiting to Be Possessed

The lecture, section by section

1. The name that became Jesus

   Hebrew tradition titles this book by its main human character, and the name preaches: Yehoshua, Yahweh is salvation, which the Greek renders with the very word the Gospel writers use for Jesus. Early Christian interpretation seized on it, reading Joshua the conqueror and deliverer almost entirely as a type of Christ, and when that typological fashion faded the book faded with it, retired to Sunday school history and rarely preached. The course aims to recover it on its own canonical terms.

2. Dating one generation

   The narrative slows again: twenty-four chapters for a single generation, from Moses' death in 1406 BC to the death of the elders who outlived Joshua, the marker Joshua 24:31 and Judges 2 both use. Joshua himself is a first-generation leftover, he and Caleb the only survivors of the wilderness, a generation older than his own elders; he dies at a hundred and ten, around 1390. Essex reckons the elders, forty to sixty at the conquest, mostly gone by about 1375 BC, and cheerfully labels the date an Essex assumption, since no verse fixes it.

3. To this day

   Joshua 15:63 notes that the Jebusites live with the sons of Judah in Jerusalem to this day, and phrases like it recur through all four books. They might date an author before David took the city, or they might be carried forward from older sources, since Kings has such notices from beyond its own final events. What they certainly witness is that the material rests on eyewitness testimony, gathered and shaped under the Spirit's direction.

4. The land, 106 times

   The book's first theme is unavoidable: the word land occurs 106 times, and every chapter breathes it. And the text speaks of the land in two strikingly different ways. Three summaries declare total success: Joshua took all the land, 11:16; Joshua took the whole land and the land had rest from war, 11:23; and 21:43 to 45, the Lord gave Israel all the land he swore to their fathers, rest on every side, not one good promise failed. Yet 13:1 says very much of the land remains to be possessed, and 15:63, 16:10, and 17:12 repeat the refrain: they did not drive them out. Conquered, yes; possessed, not fully. Holding those together is the book's central interpretive question.

5. Seven years, four battles

   The conquest took about seven years, as Caleb's ages in chapter 14 show, and the narrative is fiercely selective: three movements told through four key battles. Jericho and Ai secure the central corridor from the base at Gilgal, after which Israel walks north to Shechem for the covenant ceremony Moses commanded in Deuteronomy 27. The southern coalition, provoked by Gibeon's defection, is crushed in open battle in chapter 10; the northern coalition under Jabin of Hazor falls in chapter 11. Only three cities are destroyed in the whole book: Jericho, Ai, and Hazor.

6. Thirty-one kings, and battles unrecorded

   Chapter 12's summary lists thirty-one defeated kings, and from verse 13 onward names appear, Geder, Hormah, and nine more, that occur in no conquest narrative anywhere in the book. When were they defeated? Essex's answer: more battles were fought than were recorded. The four campaigns preserved are the four that mattered strategically, the victories that laid the rest of the land open, which makes the tribes' later failure to move in and possess it the more culpable.

7. The city left standing

   One king in the lists repays attention. The king of Jerusalem led the southern coalition and died for it, but his city was never destroyed; the Jebusites stayed on until David took Jerusalem, and took it intact, through the water shaft, with no destruction ever recorded in the Old Testament. Essex wonders aloud whether that is why: the city God had determined to choose for his name, per Deuteronomy 12, was preserved whole for the king who would make it his capital.

8. Possess, and dispossess

   The verb to possess dominates the book, and possession has a shape given in Deuteronomy 7. Everything Canaanite was to become Israel's, towns, houses, walls, planted fields, standing crops, except two things: the people, who were to be devoted to complete destruction with no covenant and no mercy, and their religious paraphernalia, altars torn down, pillars smashed, Asherim cut, images burned. God knew that spared worshipers and spared worship equipment would become a snare. Israel's military disobedience, the failure to finish dispossessing, became the doorway to the religious failure of idolatry, and the book of Judges stands ready to prove it.

9. A more obedient generation, and its failures

   The second generation genuinely outdoes its fathers: just as we obeyed Moses, we will obey you, they tell Joshua, and largely they do, crossing the Jordan, submitting the whole army to circumcision in chapter 5, marching silently around Jericho on a strategy no general would choose. But the failures are recorded without flinching: Achan's sin, charged to all Israel, in chapter 7; the Gibeonite fiasco of chapter 9, where the men took some of their provisions and did not ask counsel of the Lord; the repeated failure to drive out; the altar scare of chapter 22. Obedience is the book's strong note, but the blend is honest.

10. Shechem: another covenant, another witness

    At the end Joshua gathers all the tribes and demands, put away the gods your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, implying the idols had crossed the Jordan hidden in the tents. The people vow, we will serve the Lord; Joshua answers, you will not be able to, for he is a holy and jealous God; they insist, and he replies, you are witnesses against yourselves. He writes the words in the book of the law and raises a great stone as witness, a second Moses to the end. So the second generation, which never answered the covenant offered at Moab, binds itself by covenant at Shechem, and the rest of the Former Prophets records how the vow fared.

11. The second Moses

    The author will not let the reader forget Moses. Exodus 3 commissioned Moses to bring Israel out of Egypt and up into the land; his own sin barred the second half, and Joshua, designated in Numbers 27 and Deuteronomy 31, completes the task. The echoes are deliberate: sandals off on holy ground before the captain of the Lord's host, as at the burning bush; the Jordan heaped up like the sea; both interceding for a sinning people; both writing the law on stones; both exalted before the people; the enemies' hearts hardened in both stories so that judgment would be complete. Joshua is Israel's deliverer and conqueror precisely as the divinely designated finisher of Moses' work.

12. Purpose and shape

    The purpose draws little debate: Yahweh gives the land of Canaan to the seed of Israel, the Abrahamic promise echoing throughout, and Israel dwells in it according to their faithful obedience. For structure Essex keeps the traditional twofold reading, with 11:23 as the divine outline: taking the land, chapters 1 to 12, and distributing it, 13 to 21, followed by three closing chapters on retaining it, which end with three burials in the land, Joshua, Eleazar, and between them the bones of Joseph, carried from Egypt as Genesis 50 asked. Rooker's newer outline works from four key Hebrew verbs, cross, take, divide, serve, two rhyming pairs, yielding entrance, conquest, division, and service; the two schemes nearly coincide. The appendix ending, narrative then appendices, will prove a hallmark of all the Former Prophets.

13. Covenants kept, and a war without casualties

    The questions at the end sharpen two points. Deuteronomy 20 did permit covenants with distant, non-Canaanite cities, which is exactly the loophole the Gibeonites played, the first Hollywood actors, Essex calls them, and once Israel had sworn, covenant loyalty bound them to keep even a covenant obtained by fraud, a fidelity the prophets later hold up, from the Rechabites' loyalty to their father's charge to Malachi's rebuke of treachery against the wife of one's covenant. Faithfulness in small covenants mirrors faithfulness to Yahweh himself. And a student notices what the text quietly implies: apart from Ai, the record contains no Israelite casualties at all, Deuteronomy 28's blessing in action, enemies who come out one way and flee seven.

1. The land was conquered, given, and still waiting to be possessed, and Israel's excuses sounded practical: iron chariots, useful servants. Where has God already given you ground that you have not moved in to possess, and what does your version of the excuses sound like?

2. Israel kept the Gibeonite covenant even though it was obtained by deception, because loyalty in small covenants mirrors loyalty to Yahweh. What covenants, promises, vows, commitments, is God calling you to keep at a cost this season?

3. One defeat in the whole conquest, and it traced to sin in the camp and counsel not sought. When did you last make a Gibeonite decision, plausible on its face, taken without asking the Lord, and what came of it?