Joshua: The Man Who Had My Name

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Unknown. It is the first part of a long history running from Joshua to Kings, which scholars call the Deuteronomistic History. It was written by people steeped in Deuteronomy.

When: It is set around 1200 BC. It was written and edited in the 600s and 500s BC, from older traditions.

Where it fits: Israel’s entry into Canaan, right after the death of Moses (Deuteronomy 34; Joshua 1:1–2). The tribes cross the Jordan, fight for the land and divide it, long before Israel has a king.

Where I quote it: Never. The gospels do not have me mention Joshua once. Matthew lists Rahab of Jericho among my ancestors (Matthew 1:5).

If you only read three chapters: Joshua 2, Joshua 6 and Joshua 24.

Words to Know

Canaanites — the peoples who lived in the land before Israel, and among whom Israel emerged.

The ban — the command to destroy a conquered town and everything in it as an offering to God. The Hebrew word is herem.

Deuteronomistic History — the name scholars give to Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, read as one long history written in the spirit of Deuteronomy.

Book of Jashar — a lost book of old poems that Joshua quotes.

The Book in Brief

Joshua has three parts.

Chapters 1 to 12 tell how Israel took the land. Moses is dead, and God tells Joshua to lead the people across the Jordan. Joshua sends two spies to Jericho, where a woman named Rahab hides them. The priests carry the ark of the covenant into the river, the water stops flowing, and the people cross on dry ground. At Jericho the army marches around the city once a day for six days and seven times on the seventh. The priests blow their trumpets, the people shout, and the walls fall. Everyone in the city is killed except Rahab and her family.

The first attack on Ai fails, because a man named Achan has kept some of the plunder from Jericho. He is found out and stoned, and Ai is taken. The people of Gibeon trick Joshua into a peace treaty by pretending to come from far away. When five kings attack Gibeon, Joshua defeats them, and the sun stands still. Campaigns follow in the south and the north, and this part ends with a list of thirty-one defeated kings.

Chapters 13 to 21 divide the land. God tells Joshua that much land is still to be taken. Each tribe receives its territory, set out in long lists of borders and towns. Caleb is given Hebron. Six towns are set aside as places of refuge for anyone who kills a person by accident, and the Levites, the priestly tribe, are given towns to live in instead of a territory.

Chapters 22 to 24 close the book. The tribes who settled east of the Jordan build an altar that nearly starts a civil war, until they explain that it is only a witness. Joshua, now old, warns Israel’s leaders not to turn to the gods of the land. Then he gathers the tribes at Shechem, retells their history and makes a covenant with them, and they promise to serve the LORD. Joshua dies at a hundred and ten, and the bones of Joseph, carried up from Egypt, are buried at Shechem.

The hero of this book is called Yehoshua, which means the LORD saves. In the shorter form people used in my day, it was Yeshua. That was my name too. Translate it into Greek and it becomes Iēsous, which became Jesus.¹

In the Greek Bible my followers read, this book is simply called Jesus. In two places in the King James Version of the New Testament, where Joshua is meant, the English actually says Jesus (Acts 7:45; Hebrews 4:8).

So I grew up with a famous name. It belonged to the man who conquered Canaan.

And the gospels never have me mention him once.

Rahab

The first person you meet in Jericho is a prostitute named Rahab. She hides two Israelite spies on her roof, lies to the king’s men to protect them, and lets them down the city wall on a rope. In return, they promise to spare her family when the city falls. She hangs a red cord from her window as a sign (Joshua 2).

When the city falls, Rahab and her family are the only ones saved (Joshua 6:25).

Matthew begins his gospel with my family tree, and he includes only four women before my mother. One of them is Rahab (Matthew 1:5). Another is Ruth, a Moabite. Another is Tamar, who disguised herself as a prostitute. Another is the one Matthew calls her who had been Uriah’s wife, a woman the king took.²

Matthew wanted you to know that my family tree had a Canaanite prostitute in it. I was not ashamed of her. Neither should you be.

The walls of Jericho

Everyone knows the story. The Israelites march around Jericho for seven days, the priests blow their trumpets, the people shout, and the walls fall down flat (Joshua 6:20).

Then comes the part the children’s songs leave out. They utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, both young and old, and ox, sheep, and donkey, with the edge of the sword (Joshua 6:21).

That is the ban, the herem. Deuteronomy commanded it, and Joshua describes it carried out, town after town. He left no one remaining, but he utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD, the God of Israel, commanded (Joshua 10:40).

What the ground says

You should know what archaeologists have found, because it changes how this book should be read.

Jericho was excavated in the 1950s. Its great walls had been destroyed around 1550 BC, centuries before Joshua is usually placed, and in the time Joshua is set, the city was little more than a ruin. The town of Ai, which Joshua also destroys, had been abandoned for more than a thousand years. Its name in Hebrew means the ruin.³

Most archaeologists now think that Israel did not arrive from outside in one sweeping invasion. Around 1200 BC, hundreds of small new villages appear in the hill country, built by people whose pottery and houses look a great deal like their Canaanite neighbors’. Many scholars think Israel largely grew up inside Canaan.

Some scholars still defend a real conquest at an earlier date. But the evidence for a total destruction of the land is not there.

Go deeperWhat Egypt’s records say about Canaan

From the 1400s BC until the 1100s BC, Canaan was part of the empire of Egypt, and Egypt kept records.

In 1887 local people digging at Amarna, in Egypt, found what was left of a royal archive: about three hundred and fifty clay letters from the middle of the 1300s BC, written in Akkadian, the international language of the day. Many came from the kings of Canaanite cities, writing to Pharaoh as his servants. The king of Jerusalem, a man named Abdi-Heba, begs again and again for Egyptian archers, because bands he calls the Habiru are taking Pharaoh’s land. The word did not name a nation. It meant people who lived outside the control of the cities: runaways, outlaws and fighters for hire.⁴ The Canaan of these letters is a patchwork of small city-states under Egypt, quarreling with each other.

Around 1208 BC, Pharaoh Merneptah set up a stone monument boasting of a campaign in Canaan. Near the end it says, “Israel is laid waste; its seed is no more.” It is the oldest mention of Israel outside the Bible. The scribe wrote the names Ashkelon, Gezer and Yanoam with the sign for a place, but he wrote Israel with the sign for a people.⁵ So by about 1200 BC the Egyptians knew of a people called Israel in Canaan, one they did not treat as a city-state like Ashkelon or Gezer.

After 1200 BC Egypt’s grip weakened, but not all at once. Egyptian soldiers held a fortress at Jaffa, on the coast, until it was burned around 1125 BC.⁶ The book of Joshua never mentions Egypt’s soldiers or governors in Canaan at all.

The book argues with itself

You do not even need archaeology. Read the book closely.

In one place, Joshua took the whole land (Joshua 11:23). Two chapters later, God tells Joshua that there remains yet very much land to be possessed (Joshua 13:1). As for the people of Jerusalem, the people of Judah couldn’t drive them out (Joshua 15:63). The book of Judges, which comes next, opens with a long list of towns that were never taken at all (Judges 1:19–36).⁷

The people who put these scrolls together kept both pictures side by side. One is a sweeping victory written to give a small, frightened kingdom courage. The other is the slower, messier truth.

How this book has been used

Books like Joshua have been used for terrible things.

In 1637, English colonists in New England burned a Pequot village at Mystic, with its women and children inside. One of their captains defended it in print, pointing to the wars of David. Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents, he wrote.⁸ Settlers in other lands have called the people they were taking land from Canaanites, and called their own wars Joshua’s.

That is what happens when a story written to give a small people courage is picked up by a powerful people to justify taking what they want.

When I spoke about enemies, I did not reach for Joshua. I said, Love your enemies … and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you (Matthew 5:44).

Go deeperOther ways people have read the conquest

Joshua’s wars troubled readers long before modern times, and they found more than one way to read them.

Some Jewish teachers softened the story. The Jerusalem Talmud says that before Israel entered the land, Joshua sent three messages to the people of Canaan: whoever wants to leave, let him leave; whoever wants to make peace, let him make peace; whoever wants to fight, let him fight. The Girgashites left, the Gibeonites made peace, and the thirty-one kings who chose to fight were defeated.⁹ That is not in the book of Joshua. It shows teachers who could not accept that the people of the land were never given a choice.

Christian teachers did something else. Around the middle of the 200s, the scholar Origen preached a series of sermons on Joshua, probably at Caesarea on the coast of my country. To him, the man named Jesus who led the people into the promised land was a picture of me, and the wars were pictures of the war a believer fights against sin. He reminded his hearers of Paul’s words, our wrestling is not against flesh and blood (Ephesians 6:12). Readings like his shaped Christian preaching on Joshua for centuries.¹⁰

In 1989 an Osage writer, Robert Allen Warrior, asked a harder question. People who have been oppressed love the Exodus, the story of slaves set free. But the God who leads Israel out of Egypt then leads it into a land where other people already live. Native Americans, Warrior wrote, would see themselves in the Canaanites, and he asked Christians to put the Canaanites at the center of their thinking.¹¹

The sun stood still

In Joshua 10, during a battle, Joshua says, Sun, stand still on Gibeon! and the sun stops in the sky for about a day. The book adds, Isn’t this written in the book of Jashar? (Joshua 10:12–13).

So the writer was quoting an older book of war poems, now lost. It was a victory song, and the writer said so.

Two thousand years later, people used this verse to argue that the sun goes around the earth. Martin Luther is reported to have mocked Copernicus at his dinner table with it. Galileo had to write a long letter explaining how to read it.¹² A poem had been turned into astronomy.

Go deeperThe lost book of Jashar

The book of Jashar is quoted twice in the Bible. The second time is in 2 Samuel, where David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan comes with the note, behold, it is written in the book of Jashar (2 Samuel 1:18). Jashar means the upright one. It seems to have been a collection of old poems about Israel’s heroes and battles, and the writers of Joshua and Samuel copied lines from it.¹³

There may be a third quotation. In the Greek translation of 1 Kings, the short poem Solomon speaks when he dedicates the Temple is followed by a note that it is written in the book of the song. In Hebrew, the song and the upright are spelled with the same three letters, two of them swapped, and scholars have suggested that a copyist slipped.¹³

Jashar is not the only lost book my scriptures name. Numbers quotes the book of the Wars of the LORD (Numbers 21:14), and Kings sends you again and again to the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel (1 Kings 14:19). None of them survives.

If you look for the book of Jashar today, you will find books for sale under that name. Neither is the lost book. One was printed in London with the date 1751 by a printer named Jacob Ilive, who claimed it had been found in Persia and translated by Alcuin, a scholar of the 700s. It was called a hoax as soon as it appeared. The other is a real Jewish book, a Hebrew retelling of the stories from Adam to the judges, first printed in Venice in 1625 and translated into English in New York in 1840. But it is not ancient. It was written in the Middle Ages or soon after, and one leading scholar dates it to the early 1500s.¹⁴

Choose today

Joshua ends with a speech. Joshua gathers the tribes at Shechem and tells them their own history honestly: Your fathers lived of old time beyond the River, even Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nahor. They served other gods (Joshua 24:2).

Then he gives them a choice. Choose today whom you will serve … but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD (Joshua 24:15).

You have probably seen that last line painted over a doorway. It is a good line. Notice that it comes right after an admission that the founders of the nation once worshiped other gods. The book does not pretend that Israel was always pure. Faith was something each generation had to choose.

The two who had the name

The first Yeshua crossed the Jordan with an army.

I was baptized in that same river, and I went out into the desert alone. When a crowd wanted to take me by force and make me king, I went up the mountain by myself (John 6:15). When one of my friends drew a sword to defend me, I told him to put it away (Matthew 26:52).

Same name. Same river. A different kind of leader.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Joshua 11:23, then Joshua 13:1 and Joshua 15:63.

You will find: that the book itself says both that the whole land was taken and that much of it was not.

Then read Matthew 1:1–6. Find Rahab in my family tree.

The Short Version

• Joshua shares my name. In Greek, this book is simply called Jesus. I never quote it.
• Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute who saved the spies, is in my family tree in Matthew.
• The book describes total destruction of towns, but archaeology does not support a sweeping conquest, and the book itself admits much of the land was never taken.
• Its stories have been used to justify taking other people’s land.
• It ends with “choose today whom you will serve,” right after admitting Israel’s ancestors served other gods.