UNDERSTANDING THE BOOK OF JOSHUA.
The Twelve Historical Books (Part 2)
Chapter headings with the background in an epilogue.
JOSHUA: 1.
Joshua prepares to enter the Promised Land of Canaan.
JOSHUA: 2.
The spies enter Jericho; Rahab secretly gives them refuge.
JOSHUA: 3.
Jordan River stops flowing; Joshua crosses on dry ground.
JOSHUA: 4.
Jordan’s waters return to their normal course.
JOSHUA: 5.
Joshua circumcises minors of the Exodus Red Sea crossing.
JOSHUA: 6.
Seven days’ march around Jericho leading to the wall’s collapse.
Rahab’s scarlet thread; Joshua rescues her entire family.
JOSHUA: 7.
The curse of Achan costs many lives.
JOSHUA: 8.
Joshua builds an altar in Canaan inscribing the Law upon it.
JOSHUA: 9.
Canaanite kings prepare against Israel; Gibeonite deception.
JOSHUA: 10.
Five kings attack Gibeon for defecting to Israel;
Joshua guarantees the treaty and defends Gibeon
The sun stands still for Joshua routing the enemy host.
JOSHUA: 11.
Surrounding kings ready their onslaught; all are defeated.
JOSHUA: 12.
The thirty-one kings subdued by Joshua.
JOSHUA: 13.
Aged Joshua exhorts all tribes to fully possess Canaan.
The tribes that failed to expel all the Canaanites;
Joshua surveys the land and plots tribal boundaries.
The occultist, Balaam, failing attempts to curse Israel;
Balaam’s success seducing Israel by Baal-Peor.
JOSHUA: 14.
Caleb, claims Hebron for his own possession by faith.
JOSHUA: 15.
The territory allotted to the tribe of Judah.
JOSHUA: 16.
The territory allotted to children of Ephraim, Joseph’s son.
JOSHUA: 17.
The territory allotted to children of Manasseh, Joseph’s son.
JOSHUA: 18.
Joshua assembles the tabernacle in Shiloh.
The territories allotted to the seven tribes.
The territory allotted to Benjamin.
JOSHUA: 19.
The territory allotted to Simeon.
The territory allotted to Zebulun.
The territory allotted to Issachar.
The territory allotted to Asher.
The territory allotted to Naphtali.
The territory allotted to Dan.
JOSHUA: 20
Six cities of refuge created, three on both east & west banks.
JOSHUA: 21.
Joshua allocates forty-eight cities to the Levites in which to dwell.
JOSHUA: 22.
Joshua releases Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh to return to Gilead.
Joshua tells the three tribes to be faithful to God in Gilead.
Their misunderstood altar sparks threat of civil war.
Gilead’s tribes wisely answer the west bank’s ultimatum & avert war.
JOSHUA: 23.
Aged Joshua warns of dangers that accompany peace.
Joshua commands the twelve tribes to fully oust the Canaanites.
JOSHUA: 24.
Joshua’s farewell address revises Hebrew history.
Joshua warns of idolatry’s dangers.
Dire consequences if a nation presumes upon God’s mercy.
Israel covenants with God to seal its tryst with Joshua.
Joshua gives his final address to Israel at Shiloh.
BACKGROUND IN BRIEF PROLOGUE.
This is the sixth book of the Holy Bible after the five books of Moses, called the Pentateuch. Those are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The Book of Joshua is a record of Israel’s overdue entry into the Promised Land crossing the flooded Jordan River.
Forty years God had sent them wandering into wilderness terrain until all but two of army’s six hundred thousand rebel doubters had died within its barren bounds. Joshua and Caleb were the only two adults in the original ‘exodus’ to enter the ‘Land of milk and honey.
Instead of believing the good report of the two faithful spies the Hebrews chose to believe only the doubts of the remaining ten spies. Thus, they wanted to stone both men of faith and go back to Egypt, the land of their bondage for the food it offered.
Yet, God had provided immeasurably for them in the desert with daily manna for bread and quail for meat, while at the same time always leading them to hidden sources of water. Miraculously, their feet had neither swelled nor had their clothes worn in the abrasive desert conditions.
Despite their frequent, but intermittent murmurs of ingratitude that tested Moses to the point of exasperation, God’s mercy and loving-kindness continued because of His covenant with Abraham and the blood of the Passover Lamb. This was notwithstanding Israel’s chastening ordeals driving them to repentance.
For forty days the twelve had espied the Land of ‘milk and honey’ and its hinterland of vast resources ready for the Hebrew people to possess.
But in the grand national mutiny at Kadesh, after receiving the spies’ report, God deemed that forty days would incur a forty-year entry taboo to the Land: a sentence for Israel’s rebellious disbelief.
Even after thirty-eight years in the wilderness the final stage of the second attempt to enter the Land almost failed because of the Moab-Midian nexus of conspiracy. Devilishly, it employed Balaam, the spiritistic false prophet, to stop Joshua’s host and prevent them from crossing River Jordan into Canaan. However, the Lord intervened to stop Balaam in a most remarkable way. Nevertheless, Balaam worked with the conspiratorial nexus to beguile Israel’s camp with the sexual religion of Baal-Peor’s gods of erotic worship.
Joshua’s mighty host had neared its long-awaited destiny predicted by Abraham when Israel’s invisible arch enemy’s final almost succeeded. He had created an irrevocable anticlimax that would have aborted the saga of Israel’s pilgrimage.
End of Brief Prologue.
BRIEF EPILOGUE: THE BOOK OF JOSHUA: SEQUEL TO THE PENTATEUCH.
The next chapter of Israel’s history begins in the Book of Joshua, the first of the twelve historic books. It is an exciting record of Joshua’s lifelong, unmitigated faith and his robust exploits for his people and the Lord.
The man Joshua had come to know God personally quite early in his life. He had sat alone so often in the tent of the tabernacle with God; he had been Moses’ servant; he had ascended Mount Sinai with his master when the moral Law was written in stone, and finally, he had been divinely nominated to replace Moses leading the seventy elder.
The Book of Joshua reveals the recalcitrant ways of the human heart, which, despite having the best possible conditions for faith, exposed their complete lack of it in the hour of trial. They refused the grace of God and were only interested in ulterior motives of sensual self-gain, dietary, physical or material benefits. In other words, they were normal human beings with incurable heart disease but wearing the mask of conformity to the prevailing religion of the status quo and its social privileges. They were happy to use and exploit that religion for their own ends until the day of truth arrived then their real selves were unmasked.
This book demonstrates to today’s generation that followership and discipleship are two completely separate experiences. The following God’s presence and His prophet was nonetheless a humanist religion of lip service. Disciples, on the other hand, have a different spirit, they did not just walk with the crowd to escape bondage and privation, they walked with God. The followers were the status quo, or the majority of the masses, disciples were a very small remnant.
The followers inevitably rejected the grace of` God, the only medium for faith. The disciples had been wholehearted seekers refusing to trust in the myth of their own faith and sought His gift of grace instead. Off the 600,000 only Joshua and Caleb sought the Lord wholeheartedly, the minimum requirement before the Lord will personally draw near to an individual.
Over a million Hebrew followers had seen the miracles afforded to them both before and after the Exodus journey, but only Moses and two others possessed a different spirit.
What was that spirit in disciples Joshua and Caleb that followers failed to possess? God’s grace had given them His Spirit of faith that Moses and disciples before him had possessed back through time to Abel, Enoch, Noah, and Abraham.
Moses had been a skeptic until he finally believed God’s commission and His promises. It took many decades, however, before he was ready to call on the Lord of his Fathers and humble himself to seek God, spending forty years a fugitive in the Sinai desert.
What was the different spirit dwelling within them? Paul the apostle says that it was the Holy Spirit within them. (1Peter 1:11)
How does that scripture apply? Both Moses and Joshua were disciples, prophets in their own right. Caleb, also a disciple had sought the Lord with all his soul, mind and might until He drew near to impart the spirit of faith.
All of Moses’ followers had seen a constant stream of miracles in the Exodus journey from Egypt’s plagues; the fiery pillar of cloud; the parting of the Red Sea; and the drowning of Pharaoh’s Army etcetera. Yet none of those signs gave them faith, nothing on earth can have changed the leopard’s spots or the wilfulness from endemic heart disease brought by the curse of Adam’s rejection of the tree of eternal life. They remained religious followers of god of reason under the guise of being faithful pilgrims.
The conscience of the follower is evil, the heart is secretly wicked and deceitful from the womb, the mind is agile in its natural propensity to worship since creation, regardless of the religious culture that prevails. The mind’s greatest subtlety is to masquerade itself as nobly righteous and can easily adapt to any cult or sect for self-justification when the Good Shepherd begins to call them to His Kingdom.
Blind to the truth, the pilgrim follower’s persona is demonstrably humanist at best and accurate description of its attributes are listed in the Prophets, Psalms, Gospels, and Epistles. Albeit religious followers are very skilful in discrediting what they read in the sacred writ of the Bible when troubled by truths they read disturbing their comfort zone they create as emergency earplugs or eyeshades for their protection, lest their pretentious mask is punctured.
Over a million of pilgrim followers addictively doubted and compulsively disobeyed Moses’ directions and God’s commandments received on Mount Sinai, all in the face of the God’s manifest power.
The behaviour of these followers was incomprehensible having seen the clearest injunctions of the moral law; hearing the most eminent Patriarch, and observing the most astonishing miracles, but remained stubbornly unmoved. No wonder that Joshua his protégé finally took Moses’ place when in dejection at their immovability he resigned his role with his Lord and Israel thereby making way for Joshua his seventy elders to lead the Hebrews into the Land of Milk and Honey which he at last viewed from Pisgah’s Peak of Mount Nebo.
(End of Brief Epilogue.)
SCRIPTURE REFERENCES.
King James Version: (Public domain.)
Numbers 14:24. But my servant Caleb, because he had another spirit with him, and has followed me fully…
Numbers 27:18. And the Lord said unto Moses, Take thee Joshua the son of Nun, a man in whom is the spirit,
1 Peter 1: 10-11.
Of which salvation the prophets have enquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you: Searching what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify…
Luke 24: 44. And he said unto them, These are the words which I spoke unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me.
ADDITIONAL READING:
1 Peter 1:11; Romans: Chapter 5; Romans: Chapter 7.
CREDITS: John David 2019, biblesimply@gmail.com, Jonacy Press, POB 366603, Bonita Springs FL 34136
Previous publication: PREAMBLE TO BIBLE HISTORICAL BOOKS (Series Part 1.)
