Crossing Over

Joshua 1 to 5 is a river crossing told as if it were a liturgy. Nobody hurries. The ark goes first, carried by priests, and the people are told to keep two thousand cubits back from it so that they can see where they are going, since they have never travelled this way before. The priests' feet touch the water, the flow is cut off, and the nation walks over on dry ground while the ark stands in the middle of the riverbed. Then twelve men take twelve stones out of the place where the priests' feet stood, and the stones are set up at Gilgal so that children will ask what they mean.

The narrator will not let you miss the echo. Joshua 4:23 says the LORD dried up the Jordan as he dried up the Red Sea, and 3:15 notes that the Jordan was in flood, at harvest, which is when it is widest and least crossable. Joshua himself is told in 3:7 that this is so Israel will know the LORD is with him as he was with Moses. The sea event made a people out of slaves. The river event makes the next generation, the ones who were children in the wilderness, into the same people. Same God, same water, same walking.

Chapter 5 then does three things that would look like delays if you thought the point was military. The men born in the wilderness are circumcised, which leaves the whole army incapacitated inside enemy territory. Passover is kept at Gilgal. And the manna stops, because they eat the produce of the land. Israel arrives in the land unfit to fight, eating a meal about Egypt, and putting away the food of the desert. Whatever this book is arguing, it is not arguing that Israel was formidable.

Then Joshua meets a man with a drawn sword and asks the only question a commander would ask: are you for us or for our enemies? The answer in 5:14 is, in Hebrew, a flat negative, which the BSB renders 'Neither' and other translations render 'No'. He identifies himself as Commander of the LORD's army, and Joshua is told to take off his sandals because the place is holy, which is Exodus 3:5 almost word for word. One note on the BSB's typography here: it prints the man's pronouns, his title and Joshua's "my Lord" with capitals ("in His hand", "asked Him", "Commander"), which treats him as God himself. The Hebrew behind "my Lord" is adoni, the ordinary word for "my lord". The Hebrew has no capitals, so that is the translators' reading. Many take him to be the LORD appearing in person, the sandals echoing the burning bush; others take him to be an angelic commander, since the text calls him a man and a commander and never gives him the divine name. The lesson does not need that settled, and you should hold it open. Read that exchange slowly before the next lesson. The one figure in the book who could settle whose side God is on refuses the question and changes the subject to holy ground.

There is a geographical note worth keeping. Joshua 3:16 says the water backed up a long way upstream, as far as Adam, a city in the area of Zarethan. Travellers and geologists have recorded occasional blockages of the Jordan north of Jericho caused by earthquakes collapsing the marl cliffs, including a stoppage in 1927, reported by John Garstang and since questioned, said to have held the river for around twenty-one hours. Some readers find that a plausible mechanism, others think reaching for one misses the text's interest. Both should be said out loud. The narrator's claim is about who timed it, not about what geology could or could not do.

Joshua 2 puts two spies in the house of a woman the Hebrew calls a zonah, a prostitute. Later tradition sometimes softened this. Josephus describes her establishment as an inn, and some rabbinic reading connected the word to a root for feeding. The Hebrew term is the ordinary word for a prostitute, and both the New Testament references keep it (Hebrews 11:31, James 2:25). The book is not embarrassed, and a teacher should not be more delicate than the text.

What she says is the surprise. In 2:9 to 11 she gives a confession longer and more orthodox than anything any Israelite says in the first five chapters. She knows the LORD has given them the land. She knows about the Red Sea and about Sihon and Og. In 2:9 she says that 'all who dwell in the land are melting in fear of you', which is the verb of the Song of the Sea, where 'those who dwell in Canaan will melt away' (Exodus 15:15), now spoken by one of them. In 2:11 she adds that 'our hearts melted'. And she ends with a creedal formula: 'the LORD your God is God in the heavens above and on the earth below.' The one person in Jericho who has drawn the right conclusion from Israel's history is a Canaanite woman with no standing in her own city.

She bargains for her family, asks for chesed, the word for loyalty we will spend a whole lesson on in Ruth, and hangs a scarlet cord in her window. When Jericho falls she and her household are brought out, and 6:25 says she has lived among the Israelites 'to this day'. Note what that sentence quietly does. The chapter that first uses the vocabulary of total destruction ends with a Canaanite family living inside Israel permanently, by an oath Israel is bound to keep.

Matthew 1:5 names Rachab in the genealogy of Jesus as the mother of Boaz, which puts her four generations above David and in the human ancestry of the Messiah. Be precise about one thing here. Matthew does not say she is the woman from Jericho, and the Greek spelling he uses differs slightly from the spelling in Hebrews 11 and the Septuagint (English Bibles, the BSB included, print 'Rahab' in all of these places, so the difference shows only in the Greek). The identification is the standard reading and almost certainly correct, given that the other women Matthew includes are all outsiders or touched by scandal, but it is an inference and worth labelling as one. What is not an inference is that the New Testament twice holds her up as an example of faith, and that the church has never had a Bible in which the conquest is not bracketed by a spared Canaanite.

Keep her in mind for the next lesson. Any account of Joshua that says the book teaches the extermination of Canaanites has to explain why the book's own first named Canaanite is saved by name, blessed, and remembered. Any account that says the book is therefore gentle has to explain the rest of chapter 6.

Joshua 7 opens with a sentence that will make some students uncomfortable before any details arrive: 'The Israelites, however, acted unfaithfully regarding the things devoted to destruction.' The Israelites, plural, for what one man did. Then the small force sent against Ai is routed, about thirty-six men die, and Joshua tears his clothes and asks God why he brought them over the Jordan at all. God's answer is not comfort: 'Stand up! Why have you fallen on your face?' And then, in the next verse, 'Israel has sinned; they have transgressed My covenant that I commanded them.'

Achan's confession in 7:21 is a study in sequence: I saw, I coveted, I took, I hid. It is the shape of Genesis 3 and of the tenth word at Sinai, and it is one man doing it privately in a tent. The goods are a cloak from Shinar, two hundred shekels of silver and a bar of gold, which is to say he took the treasury of a city he had been told belonged to God and hid it in the ground inside his tent, with the silver underneath. Then he stood in the assembly through a lottery that narrowed from tribe to clan to household to him and said nothing until the last step.

The execution is the hard part and the text does not hide it. Achan is taken to a valley with his sons, his daughters, his livestock, his tent and everything he had, and stoned, and burned, and a heap of stones raised over him. In verse 25 the Hebrew moves from a singular object ('him') to a plural one ('them') in a way translations handle differently, and honest commentators disagree over whether the children are executed or brought out as witnesses to the destruction of the household. The BSB settles it in its English: 'And all Israel stoned him to death. Then they stoned the others and burned their bodies.' 'The others' is the translators' reading; the Hebrew says only 'them', which could mean the household, or the goods and animals listed in verse 24. The plain reading of verse 24, which lists them among what was taken up to the valley, is not favourable to the gentler option. Say that plainly rather than leaning on the ambiguity.

Corporate liability is the doctrine under the story, and the Old Testament itself is in tension about it. Deuteronomy 24:16 says fathers shall not be put to death for their children nor children for their fathers. Ezekiel 18 argues at length against the proverb about children's teeth being set on edge, and Jeremiah 31:29 to 30 says the same. Those texts are not later corrections that make Joshua 7 disappear; they sit in the same canon, and the tension between a household treated as one legal person and an individual treated as one is a real feature of scripture rather than a translation problem. What can be said is that the Old Testament's trajectory runs toward individual accountability, and that Joshua 7 represents the older solidarity at its harshest.

The valley is named Achor, 'trouble', punning on Achan's name and on the verb for bringing trouble that Joshua uses in verse 25. One more thing: Hosea 2:15 promises that God will make the Valley of Achor a gateway of hope. The prophet went looking for the worst place name in Israel's memory and chose this one to reverse. That is not a resolution of chapter 7. It is a later writer refusing to let chapter 7 be the last word.

Joshua 6:17 says the city and everything in it are herem to the LORD. The word runs through this book and the next module, and getting it wrong at the start makes everything downstream unreadable. Herem means set apart in a way that removes something permanently from ordinary use. In some texts that means destroyed. In others it means transferred to the sanctuary: Leviticus 27:28 describes a devoted thing as most holy to the LORD and says it cannot be redeemed or sold, and Numbers 18:14 assigns devoted things to the priests. So herem is not simply a synonym for massacre. It is a category of irrevocable transfer of ownership, and death is one form it takes.

That is why Achan's theft is treated as sacrilege rather than looting. The silver was not Israel's to keep or to steal; it had already changed hands. It also explains the odd detail that Jericho's metal goes into the treasury of the LORD's house while everything breathing is destroyed. Whether you find that coherent or monstrous, it is at least not random, and reading it as random guarantees you will misread the argument on both sides next lesson.

The commands themselves are in Deuteronomy 7:1 to 2 and Deuteronomy 20:16 to 18, and they are unambiguous in their wording: the nations of Canaan (seven in Deuteronomy 7:1, six named in 20:17) are to be devoted to destruction, nothing that breathes left alive. Joshua then reports carrying this out at Jericho in 6:21 and describes wider campaigns in the same terms. The stated reason in Deuteronomy 20:18 is that otherwise Israel will learn the practices of the land, and in Deuteronomy 9:4 to 5 the reason is explicitly not Israel's righteousness.

We are stopping here deliberately. You now have the vocabulary, the two passages that give the command, and one chapter of it carried out. You also have Rahab, who was inside the walls and was not killed, and Achan, who was inside the covenant and was. The next lesson is about nothing else: what the ground at these sites actually shows, and what serious Christians have said about a God who is reported to have given this order. Do not settle your mind on an answer tonight. Come in with the question still open.