Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 63 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Two passages in Joshua stop every congregation: the harlot who lied to save the spies, and the sun that stood still. Dr. Essex takes both head on. He weighs three explanations of Rahab's lie and lands, with honest tentativeness, on the church's old answer, then defends the long day of Joshua 10 as history against his own starred commentator. Listen for the knock at Corrie ten Boom's door, and for why a preacher must never rush the chapters that read like a telephone book.
Rahab's declaration in Joshua 2 is the reverse image of the spy report of Numbers 13. Forty years earlier Israel's spies saw walls, giants, and armaments and concluded, we are defeated. Rahab reveals what the spies could not see: I know Yahweh has given you the land; we heard of the sea dried up and the two Amorite kings, and our hearts melted; no courage remains, for Yahweh your God, he is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath. Outwardly invincible, the Canaanites were inwardly already beaten, and of them all, only Rahab and her family are recorded as turning that knowledge into living faith and an appeal for mercy.
Joshua sends the two spies on his own initiative, another echo of Moses, but with the lesson of Numbers 14 learned: they go secretly and report to him alone, not to a nation that once wept all night over a public report. He is not a prophet; he cannot know that within days Yahweh himself will hand him the strategy for Jericho, and the reconnaissance will scarcely matter. God will knock the walls down, and preserve exactly the stretch of wall that held Rahab's house.
The interpretive problem is not her faith but her words to the king of Jericho. The narrator states she had hidden the men; she says, they came, but I did not know where they were from, and they left, and I do not know where they went. If a lie is words that do not conform to reality, Rahab told one, knowingly. Simply declaring it not a lie, as one respected commentary does, answers nothing; and Davis's observation that the narrative's emphasis falls on her testimony rather than her lie is true, Essex grants, but an emphasis is not a resolution. The Spirit led the author to record her exact words, so every reader in every culture feels the disconnect.
The majority answer across the Jewish and Christian traditions: Scripture commends Rahab's faith and never condones her lie. The lie itself sprang from her new allegiance, she deceived Jericho's king precisely because she had transferred her loyalty to Yahweh, and some add that this barely-converted Canaanite was still living by Canaanite ethics, her incorporation into Israel not complete until chapter 6. Essex holds this position, but with deliberate tentativeness: it is not the slam dunk its confident exponents suggest, and historical narrative tells what happened, not what should have happened.
Kaiser's approach in Toward Old Testament Ethics works from the law's own distinctions: sins of a high hand and sins of ignorance, greater sins and lesser, with unequal temporal consequences. On this reading Rahab was forced into a lesser sin by the greater sin of the king of Jericho, who had heard the same reports she had and, instead of submitting to the greater God, hunted his messengers. Essex notes it is essentially the rabbis' answer to the same text, and it genuinely adds a dimension, though he does not rest on it.
The third view treats deceit as a recognized instrument of war: Yahweh's own strategy at Ai in chapter 8 turned on a feigned retreat, and stolen signs are part of every contest. The trouble, Essex answers, is that narrative must be judged by Torah, and Torah nowhere establishes one ethic for peacetime and another for war. The observation about wartime deceit is true as description; it is not a warrant.
Essex refuses to leave the question academic. The ten Boom family hid Jews from the Nazis, having rightly concluded, as Acts 5 concludes against a misapplied Romans 13, that God must be obeyed rather than men. But that decision leads inevitably to the knock at the door: are you hiding Jews? Essex is candid: his answer would be no, without a thought, and before God he would call it what it was, a lie, a sin perhaps lesser, committed inside an act of faith in an intensely rebellious world. Pray you are never forced there; do not pretend the dilemma cannot come.
How can everyone agree Rahab's lie was better than Abraham's in Genesis 20? Not because either ceased to be a lie, but because wisdom weighs motivation, as Proverbs 6:30 weighs the thief who steals because he is starving: still wrong, differently judged. Abraham lied out of unbelieving self-preservation; Rahab lied out of newborn fear of God. The ninth commandment's home is judicial false testimony, and its principle reaches every word that does not conform to what happened; but the law comes with wisdom, and wisdom refuses to flatten every falsehood into one weight.
Joshua 10 sets the stage for the Bible's most famous astronomical text. Bound by covenant oath to Gibeon, Israel marches all night from Gilgal to rescue its new vassals from the southern coalition. Yahweh does the fighting: he confounds the armies, and hailstones from heaven kill more of them than Israel's swords. Then, in the cool of early morning, moon still hanging in the west, sun rising behind the army, Joshua speaks in Israel's sight: sun, stand still at Gibeon; moon, in the valley of Aijalon.
Verses 12 and 13 preserve what is likely an epic poem from the book of Jashar, a non-canonical record of Israel's battles, and Howard, the course's starred commentator, reads the whole event figuratively on that basis. Essex disagrees: after the poetry the author adds a plain narrative statement, the sun stopped in the middle of the sky and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day, and there was no day like it before or after, when Yahweh listened to the voice of a man. The language is phenomenological; what likely stopped was the earth itself, freezing sun and moon in their places so the pursuit could finish before the heat came. How God did it the text does not say, and the God who throws hailstones does not owe an explanation. Decide before you preach it; the people in the pew already assume it happened.
A closing confession about preaching. Expositors commonly give a dozen sermons to Joshua 1 to 12 and one to the allotments of 13 to 21, and Essex admits he once did nearly that. But the lists were a tribe's marching orders, the boundaries and towns each tribe was accountable to possess, and skimming them teaches a congregation that half the book matters less. Preach the allotments slowly: they carry God's grace in giving, Caleb's faithfulness claiming his mountain, and the first shadows of Judah, Ephraim, and Manasseh's disobedience, the very failures that will crescendo in Judges.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all thirteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. How does Rahab's report differ from the spies' report in Numbers 13?
2. What lesson from Numbers 14 shows in how Joshua sends the spies?
3. Why can the lie not simply be explained away?
4. What is the majority position on Rahab's lie?
5. What does Kaiser's approach add?
6. Why does Essex reject a separate ethic for wartime?
7. What does Essex say he would do at the ten Boom door, asked if he were hiding Jews?
8. On what basis is Rahab's lie judged better than Abraham's in Genesis 20?
9. Who did the fighting in the battle for Gibeon?
10. Why does Essex take the long day literally against Howard?
11. What does Essex think physically stood still?
12. What was Joshua practically asking for?
13. What does hurrying past Joshua 13 to 21 teach a congregation?
All thirteen correct. Lecture 29 is complete.
Essex admits position A is not the slam dunk it is sometimes preached as, and refuses to make the dilemma merely academic. Why is honest tentativeness on a hard text sometimes more pastorally faithful than confident simplicity?
Rahab's protection of the spies was the first act of her new allegiance, and it immediately cost her a moral dilemma. When has following God put you on the horns of a choice where no option felt clean, and what did you learn there?
There was no day like it, when Yahweh listened to the voice of a man. What does the long day teach about bold prayer in the middle of obedience already under way, and what keeps such boldness from presumption?
Rahab's confession in Joshua 2, the faith the whole chapter turns on: Yahweh your God, he is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath.
The lecture's own trail: Walter Kaiser's Toward Old Testament Ethics on greater and lesser sins; Dale Ralph Davis's No Falling Words for the exposition that at least names the dilemma; David Howard Jr.'s NAC commentary for the figurative case on the long day that Essex reads and rejects; and, for those who want the full debate, the seminary's own semester course on biblical ethics, where Joshua 2 is a set text.