Joshua (Baker Commentary on the Old Testament: Historical Books)

By John Goldingay

John Goldingay is one of the most prolific and creative Old Testament scholars working today. In this book he draws on the best of biblical scholarship as well as the Christian tradition to offer a substantive and useful commentary on Joshua. The commentary is both critically engaged and sensitive to the theological contributions of the text.

Goldingay treats Joshua as an ancient Israelite document that speaks to twenty-first-century Christians. He examines the text section by section--offering a fresh translation, textual notes, paragraph-level commentary, and theological reflection--and addresses important issues and problems that flow from the text and its discussion.

This volume, the first in a new series on the Historical Books, complements other Baker Commentary on the Old Testament series: Pentateuch, Wisdom and Psalms, and Prophets. Each series volume is grounded in rigorous scholarship but is useful for those who preach and teach. The series editors are David G. Firth (Trinity College, Bristol) and Lissa M. Wray Beal (Wycliffe College, University of Toronto).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781493440054

John Goldingay

John Goldingay is David Allan Hubbard Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at Fuller Seminary.  

Book preview

HistoricalBooksSeriesLogo

BAKER COMMENTARY on the OLD TESTAMENT HISTORICAL BOOKS

David G. Firth and Lissa M. Wray Beal, EDITORS

Volumes now available

Joshua, John Goldingay

© 2023 by John Goldingay

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

Grand Rapids, Michigan

www.bakeracademic.com

Ebook edition created 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-4005-4

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture and other quotations are the author’s translation.

Baker Publishing Group publications use paper produced from sustainable forestry practices and post-consumer waste whenever possible.

Contents

Cover

Half Title Page    i

Series Page    ii

Title Page    iii

Copyright Page    iv

Series Preface    vii

Author’s Preface    x

Abbreviations    xiii

Maps    xviii

Introduction    1

Part One: The Israelites Gain Control of Canaan (1:1–12:28)    49

1. Introduction: How Yahweh Issued an Exhortation to Joshua and Joshua Issued One to Israel (1:1–18)    59

2. How Joshua Checked Out the Land (2:1–24)    80

3. How the Israelites Crossed the Jordan (3:1–5:1)    106

4. How the Israelites Arrived in Canaan (5:2–12)    128

5. How Yahweh Gave Over Jericho (5:13–6:27)    136

6. How the Israelites Got into Trouble at The Ai (7:1–26)    159

7. How the Israelites Succeeded at The Ai (8:1–29)    178

8. How Joshua Built an Altar and Read the Torah (8:30–35)    190

9. How Joshua Fell for a Trick (9:1–27)    198

10. How Joshua Kept His Word (10:1–43)    218

11. How Joshua Repeated a Ploy (11:1–23)    240

12. How Joshua Dealt with the Kings of Canaan (12:1–24)    254

Part Two: Joshua and Eleazar Distribute the Land (13:1–24:33)    263

13. Introduction: How Yahweh Commissioned Joshua to Allocate the Land (13:1–7)    271

14. How Moses Had Started the Process (13:8–33)    280

15. How Eleazar and Joshua Are to Set About Allocating the Land, and How Joshua Started (14:1–15)    290

16. The Lot for Judah, with a Story about Caleb, Aksah, and Othniel (15:1–63)    302

17. The Lot for Joseph, with a Story about Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milkah, and Tirzah (16:1–17:18)    318

18. How Eleazar and Joshua Set About Determining the Allocations for the Other Clans (18:1–10)    332

19. The Endowments for the Seven Clans (18:11–19:51)    341

20. Asylum Towns and Levitical Towns (20:1–21:45)    359

21. Conclusion (1): How the Israelites Are to Get By When the Clans Are Separated (22:1–34)    378

22. Conclusion (2): Joshua Says Farewell (23:1–16)    399

23. Conclusion (3): Witnesses! (24:1–33)    412

Bibliography    433

Subject Index    480

Author Index    489

Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Writings    495

Cover Flaps    508

Back Cover    509

Series Preface

Books fall open, you fall in.

David McCord

We will not hide them from their descendants;

we will tell the next generation

the praiseworthy deeds of the LORD,

his power, and the wonders he has done.

Psalm 78:4 NIV

A good story well told draws you in. When that story engages historical realities and a covenantal deity, it intrigues and compels. When it further speaks as Word of God, it calls its readers to responsive formation. Such are the considerations that underlie the offerings in the Baker Commentary on the Old Testament (BCOT) Historical Books series.

Following the order of the Protestant Christian canon, this corpus of the BCOT series includes volumes on Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1–2 Samuel, 1–2 Kings, 1–2 Chronicles, Ezra–Nehemiah, and Esther. These books trace the story of Israel’s life in the land, the people’s exile and return, and the ways Israel’s covenant God relates to his people. It is an account that begins in high hope tempered by caution and extends through long years of God’s faithfulness and Israel’s disobedience. While the account seemingly ends in exilic disaster and Israel’s apparent loss of covenant identifiers, the story continues with covenant renewal and return to the land. Throughout the Historical Books, one views Israel wrestling with its God of powerful works and covenant loyalty.

The BCOT series takes a unique approach to commentaries on the Old Testament, dividing the whole into canonical units: Pentateuch, Historical Books, Wisdom and Psalms, and Prophets. This enables the shaping of editorial oversight and authorial commentary suggested by the requirements of the literature itself. Thus the volumes on the Historical Books give focused attention to their shared literary, historical, and theological character.

The shared character of the Historical Books guides the treatment of these volumes. First, the books are acknowledged as good stories well told. Although they contain a wide range of genres (including reports, poems, prayers, and parables), attention is given to how these various genres are integrated into a final narrative whole. It is to this final form of the text that these commentaries attend, and to the artful way this narrative form invites the reader to imaginatively inhabit the text’s represented world.

Second, it is recognized that much of the material has a clear historical reference that is interpreted and presented in narrative form. Although the series focuses on the ancient author’s interpretation, each commentary engages the interface between the text’s narrative form and its historical reference. Thus, where helpful for unfolding the text’s message, discussion may include realities such as ancient social contexts, geography, language, and archaeology.

Finally, each volume brings out the text’s theological dimensions, revealing the message that God has for God’s people. Psalm 78:4, quoted above, models this perspective. Attention is given both to the text’s narrative form and to its historical referentiality. Understanding that each book has a place within revelatory and redemptive history, theological reflection focuses primarily on the book’s unique contribution to the canon. At times, theological reflection addresses the book’s relationship to other passages in the Old Testament and the New Testament.

The Historical Books present their message in an ancient context and through the techniques appropriate to that context, yet they continue to address a contemporary audience. The series recognizes that the texts often raise important theological and ethical issues for today’s readers, and each volume seeks to explore these matters while avoiding facile connections or attempts at delineating applications. Rather, theological exploration suggests potential avenues of contemporary relevance.

The volumes in this series address a particular audience. While valuable to scholars and researchers, they are designed for serious students of the Bible rather than for laity or for light pastoral preparation. Because the series seeks to provide a resource that is substantive but not overwhelming, technical discussions and textual issues are kept to a minimum and restricted to footnotes whenever possible, allowing the reader to engage the commentary and message of each book without undue interruption.

The contributors to the BCOT Historical Books series all share an evangelical commitment to the Bible as God’s Word, which addresses God’s people. Within this shared hermeneutical foundation, contributors develop the message of each book according to their own hermeneutical principles and exegetical conclusions. Each volume provides an introduction to typical background issues pertinent to the biblical book. At the rhetorical junctures of major sections, an overview is provided, exploring elements such as overarching themes, structural markers, and literary features found in the section. Within each major section, the authors provide a fresh translation for each narrative pericope, followed by section-by-section (rather than verse-by-verse) interpretive comments on the text’s literary, historical, and theological dimensions. Where helpful, throughout the commentary, additional reflections take up theological issues raised by the text.

If books fall open, and you fall in, it is our hope as the series editors that the BCOT Historical Books will provide lively assistance to readers, enabling them to enter into and understand a distant, ancient world and therein see the wonder of Israel’s relationship with its covenant God. Through this, it is our prayer that the lives of readers and the churches they serve will encounter in their own context the living God revealed in the pages of Scripture.

David G. Firth

Lissa M. Wray Beal

Author’s Preface

There is hardly a book in the Scriptures that would leave a bigger hole than Joshua if it were missing. Only Joshua tells of God fulfilling his promise to give Israel its land, and only Joshua relates the beginning of the story of Israel’s life in the land. Only Joshua tells of how the walls of Jericho fell by faith and how Rahab received the Israelite spies in peace (Heb. 11:30–31). So I was demonstrating my unwisdom when I responded with something short of enthusiasm to a suggestion from David Firth and Lissa Wray Beal that I write this commentary (there was another book in the series that I hankered after writing on), and I am so grateful to them for urging me to do it. Because Joshua, after all, not only occupies a vital place in the Scriptures. It tells its story with such verve, and it is so provocative of reflection. It so challenges modern Western Christian thinking and attitudes. Here God spoke to our ancestors (Heb. 1:1) in a way that continues to contribute to its readers’ maturity (2 Tim. 3:16–17). I am also grateful to Lissa Wray Beal and David Firth for their editorial feedback, which generated much improvement and saved me from embarrassing mistakes. And I am grateful to Jim Kinney for the chance to contribute to the Baker Academic commentary series, to Wells Turner for his editing work on the series, and to Tim West, Kathy Noftsinger, and Ryan Davis for their editing work on this volume.

I wrote the commentary during the COVID-19 lockdown, and I am therefore especially appreciative of the effort that the Fuller Theological Seminary library in Pasadena and the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford (and the publishers of books and journals) have put into making resources available online during this time (now it can be told: you could sit on the Bodleian steps when it was closed and access online resources).

All scriptural and other translations in this volume are my own. References printed in the form 18:1 [2] normally give the chapter and verse reference as it appears in most English Bibles, then the reference as it appears in printed Hebrew Bibles such as BHS and NJPS where their numbering differs. There is a different rationale behind references to Josh. 21:43–45 [41–43]; see the translation note on 21:36–37. And different editions and translations have varying versifications of the Ten Commandments and thus varying versifications of Exod. 20 and Deut. 5, also indicated by references such as Exod. 20:25 [22] or Deut. 5:31 [28].

One other quirk you will notice is the following. The Jewish name for the collection of scriptural works beginning with Genesis is the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. The New Testament name for them is the Scriptures. Two or three centuries after Jesus’s day, Christians started calling them the Old Testament. I think it’s rather a misleading name; it suggests that they are antiquated and out of date. So I usually refer to them as the First Testament.

divider

The main scope of the Holy Ghost in this Book of Joshua, is to glorifie God, by the manifestation of his Truth in his Promises, and his Power and All-sufficiency in performance.

Downame, ed., Annotations, Introduction to Joshua

"A basic tool for interpreting the Bible is the concept of the life setting of the passage (Sitz im Lieben)." The irony is in the naive spelling error in the German. Sitz im Lieben means setting in love, instead of the usual phrase Sitz im Leben, which means setting in life. This unintended intersection of life/love suggests that reading in conversation means that the text . . . comes to us as participants in a conversation in a community that bridges time and space. If that conversation is grounded in a setting in love, then interpretation will not be driven merely by a competitive drive to get it right, but by the transformative possibilities that are part of any healthy conversation.

Matties, Joshua, 210

We plead with you, O hearers of the sacred scrolls, not to hear with disgust or distaste those things that are read because the narration of them seems to be less pleasant. For you ought to know that those things that are read are indeed worthy of the utterance of the Holy Spirit, but in order to explain them we need the grace of the Holy Spirit.

Origen, Homilies on Joshua, 85

The Septuagint call him Jesus, . . . the providence of God being singular herein, that a Jesus, a figure of our Jesus and Saviour should bring the people of Israel into the land of promise.

Mayer, Commentaries, 2

If, when thou hast read this Sermon, thou shalt say, there’s nothing in it but what thou knowest before, I do desire thee to know that I have both preacht and printed it, not so much to teach men what they know not, as to put them in minde as to what they do know, and to persuade them to practise what they know.

Tuke, The Israelites Promise or Profession to Joshua, A3

She assured them that she would be guarding them all and that not one of them would be lost, except the one who was destined to be lost. . . . He told his mother what Miss Rita had said about the one who was destined to be lost. That happens to be from the Bible, his mother said. When people take words from the Bible and repeat them to young children, or to anyone, for that matter, they’re nuts. Don’t pay any attention to her.

Williams, Nettle, 53 (the allusion is to John 17:12)

Abbreviations

Bibliographic and General

First (Old) Testament / Hebrew Bible

New Testament

Old Testament Apocrypha / Deuterocanonical Books and Other Jewish and Christian Writings

fig001fig002

Map based on that of Aharoni, Province-List of Judah, 233.

Introduction

The Joshua Story

The Joshua story recounts how Yahweh enabled the Israelites to take control of Canaan under Joshua’s leadership, and how Joshua and Eleazar distributed the land among the Israelite clans.1 The Israelites had already taken possession of land across the Jordan that is now part of the State of Jordan or of Syria. Canaan, then, denotes the area west of the River Jordan occupied by a number of peoples, approximately the area covered by Israel and Palestine today.

The Double Question and the Double Answer

Joshua answers questions that any subsequent generation of the Israelites might ask, in a story that Israel therefore told and retold over the centuries. To judge from the story itself, two key questions that Israelites might ask are:

How did we come to be in this country and to be in control of it?

How did the different clans come to live where they do?

The story gives two levels of answer to those questions. One is, Yahweh directed us to come here and made it possible. The other is, We came here by the same sort of process as many peoples come to live where they do. Both levels of answer are implied when Yahweh says, I enabled Israel to come up from the country of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor, and Aram from Qir (Amos 9:7).

The first level of answer speaks of Yahweh acting, and it links with the broader context of Joshua in the First Testament. Yahweh had made a promise to Israel’s ancestors about this land (e.g., Gen. 12:1–3; 13:14–18), a promise that related to an intention that the nations should come to acknowledge Yahweh (cf. Josh. 4:24). The NT builds on that understanding of the events. Jesus was born from the people whose story the Joshua scroll tells; he would not have been born without it. The first page of the NT presents the First Testament story as dividing into three acts leading up to Jesus (Matt. 1:1–17). The three acts run from Abraham to David, from David to the exile, and from the exile onward, and relate how Israel settled the land, lost the land, and thenceforth lived in a semi-settled state. The Joshua story stands at the heart of Act One in Matthew’s scheme. Against the background of the opening chapters of Genesis, Joshua thus relates an episode in God’s fulfilling his intention to create a good world, to deliver the world from the waywardness that threatened to derail that intention, to fulfill his promises to Israel’s ancestors, and to complete the stage in that fulfillment that he began by delivering the Israelites from Egypt and enabling them to get as far as the edge of Canaan.

In connection with the second level of answer, the comment in Amos links with the way the Israelites, Philistines, and Aramaeans (Syrians) all came to their new lands by a similar process of movement from one country and settlement in another. The process also compares with migrations such as those of Anglo-Saxons from mainland Europe to Britain, of Europeans to the Americas, and of Jews to Palestine over the past century or so. Within the Scriptures, the process of migration started before the story that begins with Abraham. It began with Noah and the migration and settlement that constituted a working out of the blessing on Noah (Gen. 9–11).

Part of the background to subsequent migrations is commonly that things are tough where the settlers come from. And migration and settlement have commonly involved a combination of invasion, killing, displacement, assimilation, and cultural change, though the balance of the combination varies. There was more assimilation with the Israelites and the Anglo-Saxons than there was with the Europeans and the Jews, but in due course there was more cultural and religious change with the Israelites and the Europeans. Displacement was a bigger factor with the Europeans and the Jews, though it was also involved in the Anglo-Saxon settlement (so the Celts ended up on the fringes of Britain) and in the Israelite settlement (so some Canaanites ended up in what became Phoenicia). The numbers of British settlers in Jamestown, of kibbutzniks draining swamps in Jezreel, and of Josephites cutting down woodland in Ephraim (Josh. 17:14–18) would be in the same ballpark.

Migration, Settlement, Colonialism

We don’t know whether the Angles and the Saxons had always lived in the area of Germany that their names suggest, nor how far the Palestinians are descended from people who had always lived in Palestine. It does seem that many of the Canaanites had not always lived in Canaan,2 the Celts whom the Anglo-Saxons displaced had themselves immigrated earlier from Europe, and the Indigenous Americans whom the settlers from Europe displaced had immigrated earlier from Russia. All are examples of the time-wide and worldwide phenomenon of groups of people moving from their homeland to someone else’s homeland.3 At least three forms of such movement can be differentiated, though any one instance may involve all three for different people or may move from being one to being another. There is migration, when groups of people move somewhere and expect to stay for quite a while but aren’t aiming to take over their new country. There is settler colonization, when groups of people looking for a new place to live come and expect to stay and do end up taking over the country. And there is settler colonialism, when the incomers are the agents of an imperial power back home and are consciously set on extending the home country’s power and wealth.

If we want to understand the way the Israelites came to be the people of Canaan, then, it is profitable to ask the question in light of models about which we know more, such as the arrival of British settlers in New England.4 Sometimes the local people welcomed the settlers or simply accepted the fact that they had come. Sometimes they resisted their arrival and their taking over land and there was fighting. In due course the settlers mostly killed the local people or removed them elsewhere. In Joshua, Rahab and the Gibeonites fit the first picture of local people welcoming settlers.5 A sequence of stories indicates conflicts as the Israelites attack the local people or the local people attack the settlers. Taking over the land is the heart of Yahweh’s and Joshua’s aim (e.g., 1:11, 15; 3:10), as taking over the land was the result of the settlers’ arrival in North America. And the process continued over some centuries into the time of David, as it would continue over some centuries in North America.6

In twenty-first-century parlance, any expressions involving the word colonial are pejorative, but the Israelites were not an imperial power engaged in colonizing.7 If anything, the Canaanites were closer to being a people with power, though they were in decline. And given that scarcely any people has always lived where it is now, hardly any nation can cast the first stone in discussions of migration, settlement, conquest, and displacement. They are a universal phenomenon.8 They are how we all got to be where we are. Full disclosure: as most of my readers likely live in areas where settlers displaced Indigenous Americans (who had displaced the peoples who lived there before them), my DNA suggests descent from someone who had come to Britain among the Roman forces that imposed imperial authority in Britain but then stayed behind when the Romans left in the fifth century. But more people in England are likely descended from those Anglo-Saxons who subsequently came to find somewhere better than their marshy, boggy land in Germany and displaced the Celts. Settlers come as people looking for a new place to live, though ultimately they may take the country over.

So Yahweh took the Israelites into Canaan via the kind of process whereby one people commonly migrates into another land, as he took the Philistines and Syrians into their lands by this process.

The Course of Events

Understandings of the course of settlement such as the ones just mentioned are commonly contested. In connection with the Joshua scroll’s account of Israel’s settlement, the song Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho encourages people to put the emphasis on invasion, and summaries in Joshua encourage readers to think in terms of genocide, but the narrative suggests a more complex and nuanced picture:

Yahweh encouraged the Israelites to get going; they reconnoitered the land, crossed the Jordan, and set up a base camp at The Gilgal (1:1–5:12).

As the song goes on to recognize, there was no battle of Jericho—at least, not one fought by Joshua (5:13–6:27).

Joshua made one unprovoked attack on a city (7:1–8:36), though we will see that this story of a battle also raises questions.

He was inveigled into an alliance with a group of cities in the highland above The Gilgal (9:1–27).

That commitment led to his undertaking one substantive battle campaign in defense of his allies when they were under attack by a coalition of city-states (10:1–43).

At some point he moved his base camp to Shiloh in the northern highland (18:1); the scroll is generally thin on chronological information and only says that things took a long time (11:18).

Joshua eventually fought another defensive operation, against a coalition of city-states in the Galilee highland (11:1–23); their attack suggests that Israelites had begun to settle in the Galilee.

He did not destroy any big Canaanite cities except Hazor (11:13), and there is no mention of Israelites going to live in cities they defeated.

He struck down the kings of thirty-one cities (12:7–24), but the Israelites did not take control of places on the list such as Jerusalem, Gezer, Dor, Taanak, and Megiddo (15:63; 16:10; 17:11–12).

They thus initially settled in highland areas, which would be little-populated, and they gradually assimilated with the indigenous people (15:63; 16:10; 17:11–18).

They did not enter into possession of much of the country, though Joshua nevertheless notionally allocated it all to the clans (13:1–7).

At the end of his life Joshua urged the Israelites to look to Yahweh to complete their entering into possession of the land but to avoid religious assimilation to the Canaanites (23:1–24:33).

On one hand, the narrative tells concrete stories about victories and accompanies them by assertions that Joshua took everything, destroyed everything, and killed everybody. On the other, it declares that there was much land still to be possessed and that the Canaanites were still in the land. It is one of the two major tensions in the narrative as a whole.9 The contrast between the two sets of statements reflects several pieces of background. Hyperbole is a common feature of battle reports in the ancient world, as it is today (Mission Accomplished declared a banner at the backdrop of a speech by George W. Bush after the invasion of Iraq in 2003). It is common in the NT: The gospel has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven (Col. 1:23); If someone is in Christ, there is a new creation, old things have passed away (2 Cor. 5:17). Such statements are expressions of pride, praise, faith, and hope. In Joshua the declarations dramatically telescope the two-hundred-year process whereby the Israelites gained control of Canaan, which reached its high point in the time of David and Solomon.

Contrary to the impression conveyed by some passages taken in isolation, the Joshua narrative as a whole does not describe Israel gaining control of Canaan by blitzkrieg or annihilating the Indigenous peoples, as the wider First Testament narrative confirms, and it indicates that some local people accepted the Israelites and joined them. Thus the book of Joshua itself deconstructs the notion of a violent people performing mass evictions and genocide.10 It makes clear that there was no genocide and no ethnic cleansing.11 And readers in First Testament times could know that they were not to take too literally apparent references to mass evictions and genocide, because they had Canaanite neighbors down the street or across the valley (see, e.g., 15:63).

Authorship: Individuals and Groups

Given that Joshua is the key human figure in the story, the title the book of Joshua or the Joshua scroll is quite appropriate for this work (I generally talk in terms of a scroll because the word book gives a rather modern impression). Joshua becomes Israel’s leader on the first page and he dies on the last page. Admittedly, the name may reflect the assumption that Joshua was its author (so b. Baba Batra 14b), but the scroll speaks about Joshua (Joshua is he, not I), and it does cover his death and burial (24:29–30) and some later events. Like Judges or Mark, the scroll gives no information on its authorship or its date, unlike works such as Jeremiah or Romans. As to the author of this Book, it is better to suspend our judgment than to make random assertions.12

The combination of declarations that Israel entered into possession of the entire country and that there remained much land to be possessed might seem to raise the question of whether authors with the two different views have contributed to the scroll.13 But one author could recognize two truths despite their being in tension, and anyway if the scroll’s final editors could live with both kinds of statements, then an individual author could also have done so. Other differences of perspective and background do suggest that the scroll comprises material from a series of contexts. Elsewhere in the Scriptures, there are two versions of the David story, in Samuel–Kings and Chronicles, and there are four Gospels. While there is only one Joshua scroll, its diversity does indicate that it resulted from a process whereby its story was told and retold; with Joshua (as with the Pentateuch), the one scroll combines different versions. Calling it the Joshua scroll also avoids giving the impression that it is like a book that was written by one individual.

Whereas some television shows are scripted by one person, Joshua is more like a script that issues from work in a writers room, or a movie crediting several scriptwriters. To complicate the picture, a series of writers rooms worked on Joshua over the centuries, or the movie is a remake. As happens with a television script, somebody did play a key role in shaping it. It has an introduction and a conclusion; the first half then relates how Israel got into Canaan and got control there, and the second half describes the land’s distribution; and its stories work in pairs. This coherent arrangement was not the first stage in the scroll’s development, nor the last, but Joshua as a whole is a piece of rhetoric14 that is cogently structured, carefully organized, engagingly expressed, and compellingly argued.15 It has rough edges, and disassembling it may tell us about historical processes and events that lie behind it, but disassembling it is not necessary in order to understand the scroll itself—indeed, it makes understanding impossible.

The people who frame a society’s story shape its self-understanding, and one could thus ask whose power Joshua undergirds. Yet the story it tells does not support the power of a particular group such as kings, priests, prophets, or theologians (scribes). Significant aspects of the scroll could buttress the position of the northern kingdom.16 Others could buttress the position of Judah; the latter are less substantial, but Judah is presumably where the writers room was located. The story does undergird Israel’s significance over against other peoples such as Canaanites and thus subsequent equivalents of Canaanites such as Ammonites, Ashdodites, and Samarians (see Ezra 9). Yet it does not shape identity by contrasting Israelites with Canaanites, as Deuteronomy occasionally does, but simply by telling the Israelites the story of their own origins. It is a centrist document.17

The Joshua scroll is a self-contained narrative work, but it relates to the Torah on one side and to Judges through Kings on the other. Following the Torah and initiating the Former Prophets, Joshua faces both ways narratively and theologically; it occupies a pivotal place in the sequence of works from Genesis through Kings.18 In its first half it especially relates how the theology, spirituality, and expectations of Deuteronomy accompany Israel into Canaan. In its second half it links more with Numbers as it describes how Joshua and Eleazar implement the allocation of the land prescribed there.

The Israelites’ arrival in Canaan brings to a happy end the story that began with God’s commission and promise to Abraham in Genesis. It also begins the story of the Israelites’ life in Canaan that continues until it comes to an unhappy end in 2 Kings. Genesis through Kings thus resembles a boxed set of the nine series of a television drama. Each such series is semi-complete in its own right, though it will leave some ends untied that the next series will deal with. The sequence’s outlook will be consistent, but the different series may have different writers as well as different characters and locations. Eventually the sequence will come to an end that may tie things up. Joshua constitutes Series Six in its ongoing drama.

Timeliness and Timelessness

What sort of people were in the writers rooms, and when did they meet? What information does the scroll give us?

It has some knowledge of matters from Joshua’s time. It knows that there once were Canaanite city-states, an awareness that could hardly have been invented much later.19

It refers to the time of the elders who outlived Joshua (24:31), and its purview includes the Danites’ inability to take control of the area allocated to them and their later migration to the far north where Dan is (19:40–48; cf. Judg. 18). But it makes no other concrete reference to events beyond Joshua’s time, and it has no terms that explicitly indicate reference to things beyond Joshua’s own day comparable to the references to Chaldeans or kings in Genesis.

It speaks as if it knows nothing about Jerusalem being Israel’s capital or about there being Israelite kings reigning there, which suggests a time before David.

In contrast, it includes information such as town lists and information about the situation of Jerusalem (15:63) that suggests a background in the time of David and Solomon.20

Some of its references to things being in place until this day (e.g., 13:13) look as if they reflect the later period when there are the two nations, Judah and (northern) Israel, or just Judah.21

If writing literary works began in Israel in the eighth century BCE, then that is the earliest time when a version of the story as a whole could have been put into writing.22

The midrash on verses from Deuteronomy in Josh. 1 indicates that the scroll postdates Deuteronomy.

The scroll is one part of the semicontinuous story that runs from Deuteronomy to Kings, which also implies a time after the 620s BCE (if that work saw a first edition in Josiah’s time), or after 587, or even after 562.

Its building on and referring back to material in Numbers that has a Priestly background23 suggests a similar time or a time in the Persian period when the Torah had reached more or less the form we know.

It exists in three forms—MT, LXX, and a Qumran version—so it was still on the way to its final form in the Hellenistic or Hasmonean period.24

Its language is Classical Biblical Hebrew rather than the Late Biblical Hebrew of works such as Chronicles. Its use of a Philistine loanword for ruler (seren; 13:3) fits a First Temple context, but it also has a Late Biblical Hebrew word for wealth (nǝkāsîm; 22:8), so these cancel each other out, or they fit with other indications that the scroll developed over centuries; and anyway, a Second Temple author might write in Classical Hebrew, especially if working further on something written in Classical Hebrew.25

That last comment links with the further possibility that some of the features noted above might not ask to be taken literally. A creative writer might add until this day as a dramatic way of giving an impression of actuality, or might draw up imaginary town lists to make the narrative more vivid. But we have noted that some material in the scroll seems rather accurate to have been generated by imagination.

Memory

A people’s story articulates and shapes its memory of itself and thus its self-understanding or its myth.26 And the Joshua scroll notes a series of means whereby Israel’s memory will be sustained over time:

Moses’s instruction document is not to leave Joshua’s mouth (1:8); speech is important in the construction of a common memory.27

Two sets of rocks constitute a commemoration of the people’s crossing the Jordan and encourage the passing of memory from one generation to another (4:7). The Gilgal could thus become a place of pilgrimage where this commemoration happened (cf. Amos 4:4; 5:5).

The series of notes about things that are realities until this day (5:9; 6:25; 7:26a, 26b; 8:28, 29; 9:27; 10:27; 13:13; 14:14; 15:63; 16:10) draw attention to features of Israelite life that would stimulate the memory of Israelites who lived in this day.28

Joshua builds an altar at Mount Ebal and writes Moses’s instruction on rocks there (8:30–35).

Israel possesses the Document of the Upright One (10:13) recording some events in its story.

The lists of clan allocations and towns (13:1–21:45) suggest the continuing existence of written records of these allocations.

Joshua adds to God’s instruction document (presumably the document mentioned in 1:8) some record of the people’s covenant commitment at Shechem (24:26).

He sets up another rock commemorating the Shechem event, a mute but visible and articulate witness to that commitment (24:26–27).

Now, memory may invent things. Individuals can imagine wrong that has been done to them, and peoples often tell stories about how their ancestors came from somewhere else.29 Israel and other emergent peoples considered themselves as young peoples in an old world.30 Israel’s self-awareness compares with that of the United States rather than that of Britain, where having come from elsewhere is not part of our national self-consciousness (even though we had). So Israel’s memory might be false when it recalls having come from Egypt to Canaan. There is little sign of a cultural break between the people living in Canaan in the Late Bronze Age and living there in the Iron Age, which now dawns. Was Israel’s emergence in Canaan an inside job? If that were so, the Israelites were people who had withdrawn from the Egypt-dominated society of Canaan and developed a new society in the Canaanite highlands, who then created a new memory of that process as involving settlement from outside.31

As an interpretation of the Joshua scroll, that seems a stretch. Given the widespread phenomenon of migration and settlement, it is easier to believe that Israelites snuck into Canaan from outside, settled in sparsely populated areas, got into fights with Canaanites, gradually got political control of the country, and absorbed or merged with the local people. The Joshua scroll is then the deposit of the corporate memory of the people who won in that process and who knew that it was Yahweh who had enabled that victory.32

Commonly, memory is indeed more selective than inventive. Rather than losing touch with the facts of their story, cultures combine recollection of events with reformulations that develop over the centuries. The particular profile of Israel’s selectivity in Joshua is that it has understated the factor of assimilation, whose significance the inattentive reader can miss; it has understated the factor of displacement (but see 23:5; 24:12, 18); and it has beguiled inattentive readers into overestimating the factor of speedy military conquest. Judges complicates (or in another sense simplifies) the picture further. After Joshua’s death (Judg. 1:1) the clans went about settling different areas, which retrospectively confirms that the Joshua scroll telescopes the process, in the way a movie based on fact may telescope events.

Why does Israel’s selectivity work as it does? Rahab hints at its possible theological significance (Josh. 2:9–11). Key to First Testament faith is what Israel did bring from outside. In his power and compassion Yahweh rescued some Israelites from serfdom in Egypt, defeated that imperial power, thereby fulfilled promises to the Israelites, and sealed a relationship of mutual commitment with them. They brought this new reality into Canaan, and the distinctiveness and profundity of what they brought was more important than what they had in common with the people who were there already (who they were maybe distantly related to).

A Story Read and Reread, Told and Retold

The Joshua scroll reflects how groups of scriptwriters, over more or less a millennium, initially orally and then in writing, encouraged Israel to remember its story. To return to Matthew’s three acts running from Abraham to David, from David to the exile, and from the exile onward, the Joshua scroll directly speaks of events in Act One, but it also reflects and speaks to the realities of Acts Two and Three. Yet its story does not overtly address any of those later contexts, and we cannot know which period a particular section reflects; scholars disagree about such questions. And readers have to shrug their shoulders about that fact, though they have two consolations.

First, the scroll was produced for people to read in its entirety in whatever form it had in a particular edition, and in its final form it existed for people to read in its entirety no matter what period a specific part came from. Knowing the direct addressees of individual sections would make for a fuller understanding. But not knowing means that readers simply resemble people watching a Shakespeare play without much awareness of Elizabethan England. They will miss some of the play’s nuances, but not too many. The scroll incorporates stories that might entertain and explain aspects of Israel’s life in any century.

The other consideration is that readers can ask of a particular section, How would this come home to people in the time of David, or Josiah, or Ezra, or Antiochus Epiphanes? Biblical studies has followed other disciplines in asking what its texts have signified for readers in different centuries, which can help readers see why texts matter and see further aspects of their significance. In a sense, Joshua’s reception history starts while the scroll is still coming into being.33 And one can ask how the material might function in a context without assuming that it had its origin then. For instance:

The stories of successful victories and of the visionary distribution of land might be an encouragement in the period between Joshua and Saul, the period of which Judges speaks.

The account of the rule Joshua exercised might have implications for the kings in the time of David and Solomon.

The narrative might encourage people in general to be grateful to Yahweh for the wonder of their gaining control of the land and not to feel too proud of it.

In later monarchic times the narrative might encourage people to live in hope of Yahweh’s capacity to restore control to them when they have lost it.

The story of a leader who faces Joshua’s challenges and manifests Joshua’s commitments might have compelling importance in Hezekiah’s day or Josiah’s day.

The account of Israel’s gaining control of Canaan might seem significant after the fall of Samaria and the fall of Jerusalem and in the Second Temple period, when the question is whether Israel will control the land again.

The account of the land’s allocation to the clans might have similar significance for forced migrants from (northern) Israel and Judah, as an encouragement to hope that one day Yahweh would restore things.

The Caleb story could have implications for Judahites in Hebron in the fifth century.

In the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, the scroll’s stories might encourage people to welcome into the community outsiders who recognize Yahweh, and to pay heed to Moses’s teaching.

The theme of enemies and rest might resonate for people reading the Esther story.34

The stories in which priests play an important role might speak to the situation in the Second Temple period reflected in Chronicles, with its stress on the position of priests.

The emphasis on heeding Moses’s teaching might also come home in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes with its pressures.

Asking about how the story might come home in different contexts is thus illuminating, though it would be unwise to make the answer a basis for hypotheses about when it was written and why.

Story and History

Joshua as a whole tells the story of Israel’s beginnings in Canaan, and it incorporates a series of short stories. Short stories does not imply a judgment regarding whether they are fact or fiction; it simply means they are stories that can be read in minutes rather than hours or days.

The differences between Kings and Chronicles or between Matthew, Mark, and Luke show that narratives telling a basically factual story may adapt it so that it expresses a viewpoint and so that its hearers understand its significance. In a loose sense, stories are always based on things that happened: Paul Ricoeur deconstructed the distinction between history and fiction by noting that the raw material for fiction has to come from things that happened to the authors, from their experience; it is the only resource they have.35 And fictional narratives can seek to be history-like, not in order to deceive but to make clear that they are talking about the real world. Conversely, even if every detail in a story is factual, the narrator chooses what to include and what to exclude and uses the techniques of fictional narrative such as plot, character portrayal, and changes in viewpoint that make the story something other than chronicle; these, too, are the only techniques we have.36 Consequently, discerning whether or how far a narrative aims to be fact or fiction is the most difficult of interpretive operations.

A journalist, a scriptwriter, or a novelist might all write about a people’s arrival in a country. A journalist embedded with the people could listen to their conversations, transcribe them or commit them to memory, and eventually turn them into a book; but it is hard to see Joshua as something like journalism or pure history. A novelist would creatively dream up a story; but as a piece of creative writing with a fictional answer to the question of how Yahweh and Joshua actually got Israel into the land, the scroll would deconstruct, because it would be giving a nonfactual answer to a question that asked about something factual. A scriptwriter could have the basic facts about the events and could then imagine what people might have done and said, in order to convey the reality of these events. That provides the most plausible model for the Joshua scroll.

Indeed, within the First Testament, the characteristic form of narrative is fictionalized history, something with which Western culture is also familiar in television and in books. Joshua is a narrative based on fact but creatively elaborated, somewhere in between Kings and Jonah in its relation to history. It is one embodiment of the fact that God likes history and likes works of the imagination but also (maybe especially) likes works that use imagination in the way they tell a basically historical story.

Reading Contexts

One can thus imagine that the Israelites would have kept alive an outline account of their coming into the land and celebrated this story at festivals. One can imagine that people involved in campaigns such as the one in Josh. 10 would have told the story to their families, and it would have remained alive among them, possibly with its garishness enhanced. And one can imagine the writers room pooling these memories and turning them into a coherent drama that built up the big picture of Yahweh’s activity, power, and faithfulness to his promises. The scroll then shaped and preserved the people’s memory, and came to be part of the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings.

But for many Jews and Christians in the context of modernity, Joshua has come to be problematic. How normative is the Joshua scroll?

Assumptions and Expectations

The Joshua scroll articulates Israel’s memory of its story. With most of these parallels and allusions, the Joshua scroll and the Gospel narratives about another Joshua focus on what God did for his people, not on what his people were to do for God. While Jesus tells his followers to go and raise the dead and expel demons, most readers don’t assume he is talking to them; and the Joshua scroll incorporates no indication that it encourages readers to expel Canaanites or kill them. Like the Gospels, Joshua is more a mirror for identity than a model for morality.37 It tells the Israelites who they are, by telling them what God did and what their ancestors did to make them who they are.

Like people in NT times, when reading the Scriptures (or anything else) we bring with us convictions concerning what we believe is true and really important, and consciously or unconsciously we read the Scriptures in light of them. These convictions enable us to see things that are there, and if we did not have something in common with the Scriptures in this way, we might not be able to understand them at all. They also mean we misread them, don’t see the point in things that don’t mesh with our assumptions about what is really important, and are offended by things that directly clash with our convictions. Our understanding of texts is made possible, influenced, aided, and hindered by our bringing things to the text.

There is no part of the Scriptures where our convictions, interests, and social context as readers more affect our reading than they do with Joshua. When Origen read Joshua, he did so out of a concern to have something devotionally edifying to say to his congregation in third-century Alexandria; this is also the focus for Matthew Henry in the eighteenth century. When Calvin read Joshua, he did so in the context of theological discussions and political developments in sixteenth-century Geneva. When Wellhausen read Joshua, he did so with the historical-critical interests of nineteenth-century Germany, and these interests continue to be a focus of scholarly study. When other twentieth- and twenty-first-century Western readers come to Joshua, they often focus on its accounts of war-making and its androcentricity, which contrast with modern and postmodern attitudes. Socio-critical, feminist, missional, interreligious, and postcolonial interests have proved both fruitful and controversial in approaching Joshua.38

Christian readers are inclined to associate a contrast over attitudes to war-making with a difference between the First Testament and the NT, but Jews (and atheistic or agnostic gentiles) can also be scandalized by Joshua in this connection, as in others.39 Christian unease is mostly a recent phenomenon, and it arises because the Christian readers are modern people, not because they are Christian. But it is easier for twenty-first-century readers to see how Origen’s agenda works against his reading Joshua in its own right than to see how the same problem affects us.

There is then a quadruple irony in the way questionable ideas have come together in approaching Joshua: the idea that the Joshua story links with Josiah,40 that it thus encouraged later Israelite violence, that it stands in conflict with the NT story of the Prince of Peace, and that it has encouraged modern violence.41 There is little evidence for any of these assumptions. There are those positive links between Jesus and the NT and Joshua, and no indication of NT unease about Joshua. There is no concrete reason to link the Joshua story specifically with Josiah. While David did aggressively seek and gain control of Canaan as a whole, the Joshua scroll more likely reflects that than stimulated it, and once the empires arrived as Israel’s overlords, the First Testament includes little indication that Israel ever thought of seeking to emulate Joshua or that Yahweh promised that it would.42 Nor does Joshua seem to have been a factor in encouraging the Maccabeans to fight for their independence.43

While the application to subsequent warfare texts that speak of annihilating Canaanites is the area of the most pressing contemporary concern, it is comparatively rare in the texts’ affective history.44 It is thus not evident that the Joshua stories have a toxic afterlife.45 While it would not have been surprising if they had been used to justify the actions of the Crusaders, who in 1099 CE processed around the walls of Jerusalem without the walls falling, eventually besieged the city directly, and massacred its population,46 there is little evidence that the Crusaders were influenced in this connection by Joshua.47 And contrary to what one might have expected, references to Joshua are virtually absent from America’s religious and civic discourse from the colonial period to the present.48 John Wesley was evenhanded in critiquing the savagery of Indigenous Americans and of their Christian invaders.49 And Joshua is actually a more ambiguous and subversive work than is often recognized. Anyone who reads Joshua as a warrant for genocide . . . has seriously misread this text.50 But nobody really seems to have read it as such a warrant. Might a semifictional story have misled people in this direction? It doesn’t seem to have done so. The puzzling question is then why modern, otherwise sophisticated readers read it so simplistically, as if it did talk about genocide or ethnic cleansing.

Canonicity and the New Testament

To say that Joshua was designed to give Israel a definitive understanding of its identity, its origins, and its destiny is to say that the narrative was designed to be canonical. A canon is a rule for people’s thinking and life. If the scroll reflects a number of historical contexts, it kept seeking to shape Israel and it kept being shaped by Israel in changing contexts. Within the First Testament, its story lies in the background of psalms that celebrate Yahweh’s bringing Israel into Canaan and that link this event with the nations’ recognition of Yahweh (Ps. 47), that associate the Red Sea deliverance and the Jordan crossing (Ps. 114), that protest at Yahweh’s not operating this way nowadays (Ps. 44), and that lament over the Israelites themselves not being ruthless enough when they arrived in Canaan (Ps. 106).51

We have no knowledge of a canon-making authority in Israel that could require the attaching of authority to this story. Genesis to Kings as a whole had to fend for itself, or rather, its constituent parts had to fend for the whole.52 Literary, artistic, or religious works commonly become canonical as a number of factors come together: they have inherent value, influencers advocate them and propagate them, people respond to them, and official authorities confirm their status. We have no information on how that happened with Joshua. We do know from the prologue to Sirach that by Sirach’s time, around 200 BCE, his grandson can assume that the Torah and the Prophets had special status. And Joshua was presumably part of the Former Prophets (Sir. 46 reflects the Joshua story). It kept that status within Judaism and thus among people who came to believe in Jesus. The NT puts the matter in these terms that would apply to Joshua:

The sacred writings . . . are able to make you smart with a view to salvation through faith in Anointed Jesus. Every scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, for testing, for correcting, for