Bible Reading Challenge Blog

You can’t read this chapter without highlighting vs.15, and especially the last  part of that verse: “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”  These are the words of Joshua as he sets up a juxtaposition between what God had done and the requirement that God has which is that the people will serve Him and only Him, as opposed to the other gods which are present in the lands that they overtook.  Joshua tells them, you  have a choice, you can serve the God that I serve, or serve the gods that the people in the land serve.  I’m going to serve the Lord God, and so is my family.

So Joshua goes over all the historical background from the time of Abraham to the current day which took them into and out of Egypt and then into the promised land.  Remember that throughout this time the underlying theme  is that God is one, God is jealous, you are to have no other gods before me, if you do have other gods before me then I am not going to be on your side, and by the way, you want me on your side, trust me.

Joshua dies and so ends our chapter and our book of the Bible of Joshua.  This ends the whole series of promises that God made to the people of Israel that they would inherit the promised land.  They have inherited it, now they just have to rule it.  That comes next.

So it is pretty important that we only serve one Lord and God and that God be the God of Israel.  Joshua is in the sunset of his life and he wants to be sure that he leaves behind the nation in a healthy state and he can think of no other way to leave the nation in a healthy state than if they understand that they have to set up parameters to ensure that their progeny will only serve the Lord God.  

This has been,  and will continue to be, the one theme throughout all of Scripture, including when Jesus walks upon the earth.  Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.  In an age of relativism where we often hear that it doesn’t matter what we worship or who we worship, as long as we are good people, this message of Scripture comes to us very directly and says: Well, no, actually it does matter.  It matters quite a bit.  But this message that Joshua gives: do not marry people who do not believe fundamentally the way that you believe, just might be seen as being narrow minded and not something we ought to pursue. 

I am going to embrace this command in a way that might be somewhat contradictory.  I would participate in a service where people of different religions are getting married.  And by different religions I don’t mean a Baptist and a Presbyterian.  We are the same religion, we are Christians.  But I mean a Jew and a Christian, or a Muslim and a Christian, I would take part in this service.  But, I would take part only if I could proclaim the good news of the Gospel in that service.  

The tribes are getting settled and being sent out to their lands by Joshua when an “event” happens.  Isn’t it interesting when events  happen in families?  Over the generations those events become much larger than they ever were.  We have two and a half of the tribes who were accused of building an altar, with the assumption that this altar was in order to worship and sacrifice to false gods.  The other tribes sent representatives because the last “event” which took place at Peor was a really bad memory for everyone involved.   If you want to remember that event yourself you can go to Numbers 25:3-5.   Yeah, not good memories.  People being impaled and the Lord not really happy.

Sooo…, in order to avoid all that impaling and the rest of the Israelites being punished for these few wayward tribes it would be best if we send representatives and try to convince them to turn from their ways.  They do, they send their representatives.  The response they get is fascinating.  So, the concern was that these few tribes were already beginning to worship false gods.  But their response, however, is that they built this altar as a witness or a reminder that they were people of the Lord.  If in the generations to come the other Israelite families might accuse them of not being true believers they could point to this altar and say, no, that is not correct.  Our ancestors built this altar as a memory of our faith in the one true God.

So basically this was built in order to stave off any future naysayers on the other side of the Jordan.  Nothing like starting off with just a touch of conspiracy theory.  All ends well.  

So in this chapter we find the families of the priestly class who were kind of assigned to towns within the land that the Lord had given to the other families.  They were not given land, which we saw underlined a number of times that the family of Levi, the priestly class, would not receive land, but rather towns in which they were supposed to dwell.  The assumption is that in these towns that they were given they were to establish the temples, the places of worship, a place where God would be glorified.  Remember, we do not have the temple just yet, that is going to come later, so regionally they had to worship God in some place.  Those places would have been the towns where the priests resided, at least logically it makes sense.

Notice also that all of the towns of refuge, where people were allowed to go in order to be protected by the law, were given to the Levitical, the priestly families as described in this chapter.  So it means that wherever people had to flee there would definitely be a pastor, or a rabbi, in that town that they would be able to visit and see.  This is very, very significant and forward thinking.  It wasn’t like these sanctuary cities were set up randomly.  They were set up with the thinking that the people who are going to be using the sanctuary cities would need spiritual and emotional support.  

This is a very civil chapter.  You wouldn’t think that there would be a deliberate establishment of refugee cities in the Old Testament, but here we find the establishment of them.  These were cities where if you killed someone by mistake you could flee there before the family took out their vengeance on you.  Notice that these cities were established not just in one location which would have made it difficult for all people to go to that spot.  But in this scenario there would always be one that was close enough to flee without any problems.  It seems like there were five cities spread out, even one in the wilderness.

Notice that the cities are not established as permanent bases almost as if the person is playing hide and go seek, that whenever they are in those cities they are forever safe.  No, they have to wait there until basically the trial rolls around.  These cities keep the person safe until the trial happens.  They cannot have the death of someone avenged because they are in those cities.

Once again we find ourselves in a setting where Joshua and the high priest were responsible for dividing the land for the Israelite tribes.  It is really helpful to have  the map in front of you that I provided a few chapters back.  If nothing else it provides you with an opportunity to see how each of the tribes received their land.

Did you notice that Joshua received his own land irrespective of what his tribe received?  That was nice.  Kind of a reward for all of his hard work.  The chapter ends with the statement that the division of the land had been accomplished, it had been finished.  So it leaves us with the question of what is next?  I guess there will probably be more conquests since the division of the land is complete.  Let’s see.

Did I mention that Levi does not get a land inheritance?  This is mentioned once again.  We find this chapter once again going over the inheritance of the land to the tribes, but we find a frustrated Joshua because the people of Israel had not started to claim the land that they were given by the Lord.  Joshua says to them: “How long will you be slack about going in and taking possession of the land that the Lord…has given you?”  You must hear some frustration in that comment.  As a result we find that the people of Israel are charged by Joshua to get up and go and claim the land.  We find in vs.8 that this actually happens.  I do notice that the people seem to listen to Joshua much more than they did to Moses, and the complaints seem to be kept to a minimum, nothing at all like what Moses experienced.

Hopefully that weeding out process actually did what it was supposed to do.  You know, that process whereby all of their parents had to die off before they were allowed to enter the promised land.  That should have been remembered by the current residents.  Not something you would ever forget.

It is not often that you read about daughters who approach the leader at the time, that would be Joshua, and demand that they receive what was promised to them from their father.  We find that the daughters of Machir, who was the son of Manasseh, approached both the chief priest and Joshua and said that they were promised by Moses himself an inheritance along with their brothers.  They went all the way back to Moses to draw from his authority, and not from Joshua.  I wonder if there was a bit of bad blood between Joshua and this family.  We find them coming to him again because they were so numerous and the land that they were given was so small compared to the number of people that they were.  But if you look at the map you will see that they are on either side of the Jordan and their territory extended all the way to the Mediterranean Sea.  

But Joshua agrees to give them the forest that they could clear and settle in that area.  I love that detail of the daughters.  Being a father of daughters I would want my children to stand up and speak up if they felt that it was called for.  Strong Scripture here, not a normal one, but a strong one.  The heroes of Joshua in this chapter are Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah.  

This is the second time in a row that we find that one of the tribes doesn’t drive out the residents of the land.  They conquer the land, but they allow the residents to live there.  We saw that with the Jebusites and Jerusalem, and now we see it with the Canaanites in Gezer.  Notice how previously we had the Gibeonites who tricked the Israelites and as a result were allowed to stay in the land, but they had to do menial tasks.  We don’t hear what kind of work the Jebusites were allowed to do, and here the Canaanites were enslaved, or as Scripture states, they were made to do forced labor.  So if you manage to get over on the Israelites in the OT you future is a bit sketchy.

Notice that there is some confusion with the tribe of Joseph (please, don’t read this as the father of Jesus, we are talking Old Testament here people).  The confusion lies in that each tribe was allotted one allotment, but Joseph’s tribe seems to be divided into two between Manasseh and Ephraim.  Look at the map below and you will find the division visually among all the families.  Hopefully this helps as you read through it all.

In the midst of the battles we find a love story and a story of sheer determination.  Achsah was the daughter of Caleb who was promised as the first trophy wife for anyone who might defeat Kiriath-sepher.  So, Caleb’s brother won the battle and claimed his niece as his trophy wife.  But she also had an agenda and that was that she would be able to live in much more comfort than she did before and so demanded of her father a land with springs for her now husband, Othniel.  So the story ends with Achsah being given in marriage as a trophy wife but she gets the last laugh with her choice of spas.

Sheer determination comes in the form of Jebusites who did not back down and so the people of Judah had to live with them in the territory that Joshua had given them.  We find that it isn’t until later, when David comes around, that Israel is able to take that land.  See, it isn’t all blood and gore in this chapter.