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Finishing the 5 Kingdoms - Joshua 10:15-43

After that incredible day of miracles and victory where Israel fought and beat much of the 5 armies that came to fight against Gibeon, Joshua and “all Israel” went back to their base camp at Gilgal. But the kings of the beaten 5 armies fled and “hid themselves in a cave.” When Joshua found out that the kings were hiding in a cave, he said to block them in the cave with stones and he’ll deal with them later. Joshua and the army pursued the fleeing 5 armies and kill most of them but some still make it back to their walled cities and are going to be a bit harder to get out. Now it’s time to deal with these walled in kings. Joshua has them pulled out of the cave, laid them on the ground and had his new officers come and put their feet on the necks of the kings. This isn’t like they stomped on them or anything but it was a symbolic humiliation demonstrating Israel’s complete victory over these kings. Joshua puts an added message to these young officers saying, “for thus shall the Lord do t...
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What A Day - Joshua 10:1-14

By making that pact with Gibeon, Israel is finding itself in a bit of a pickle. First, I think it’s important to note that verse 2 describes Gibeon as “a great city, as one of the royal cities, and because it was greater than Ai, and all the men thereof were mighty.” This wasn’t some Podunk town that was certainly going to be slaughtered by Israel, but it was a large city with a strong, formidable army so the fact that it had made a peace treaty with Israel, even though done deceptively, was very off putting to the surrounding kingdoms, specifically to the king od Jerusalem “Adoni-zedek.” TB gives a lengthy explanation of how Jerusalem came to be and the name of this Adoni-zedek being a mix of Melchizedek and some pagan thing, but the IM doesn’t say anything about it, so I’m not going to recount it here. This Adoni-zedek sends word to 4 other kings who surround him and they decide to go to war against Gibeon because they are angry that Gibeon is now in cahoots with Israel. I don’t know...
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Gibeon's Deception - Joshua 9

Israel has defeated a couple of the Canaanite settlements, and the rest of the towns are getting pretty nervous. One town, Gibeon, makes a plan to try to save themselves, and honestly I can’t blame them for that, I will never fault someone for working in their own best interest, even if it is contrary to mine. Gibeon makes a plan to go to Joshua and pretend to be from a far away place and ask for a truce. They go all in on it too, they get their oldest, rattiest clothes, moldy bread “old sacks,” spent wine bottles. They go to Joshua and say “We be come from a far country: how therefore make ye a league with us.” They say they are coming “because of the name of the Lord thy God,” because they heard what God did for them in Egypt and the other Canaanite kingdoms. They say that they are obviously from somewhere far away because their provisions are so old. Ad far as I’m aware, Joshua was commanded to only destroy those specific seven kingdoms and the rest were to be given the option to j...
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Victory at Ai - Joshua 8

The evil that Achan had done in taking the loot consecrated for God had been eradicated, so it was time for Israel to go back and try again to take the city of Ai. The planning of this campaign is different this time because instead of sending out scouts and strategizing, God just tells Joshua what to do. The scouts last time said that Israel only needed to take 3,000 soldiers to take the city, I misread that as 300 yesterday, 3,000 makes more sense. This time God says “take all the people of war with thee,” so they weren’t taking minimalist stuff here. Instead of Joshua coming up with a plan like the last time, God tells him to “lay thee an ambush for the city behind it.” Interesting that God gave the battle plans for Jericho, marching around for a week, and gave the plan for this battle but didn’t give the plan for the first time Israel tried to take Ai and that time failed, for other reasons but I wonder if the lack of God giving Joshua a plan was the indication that God wasn’t goin...
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Defeat at Ai - Joshua 7

For the study of chapter 7, I listened to the lecture for the last half without realizing that the first half had been covered in a previous lecture, so my first assumption was that God went to Joshua and told him that someone had sinned against Him and taken some of the sacred treasure and had to be dealt with. Imagine my surprise when I read it and realized that I had missed the critical first part of that event. Only knowing the last half, I thought that the punishment for the thief was extreme but once I learned the whole story, I was like “oh yeah that makes sense.” Let’s remember the miraculous defeat against Jericho and that the soldiers were told to go take all the precious metals (gold, silver, brass, etc) and give it to the priests because it was to consecrated to God. This was the extreme opposite end of the spectrum of what was normal for victors at this time, and really since the dawn of human history. The victors get to loot and abuse the defeated enemy and keep any good...
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Walls of Jericho - Joshua 6

The people of Jericho knew that the soldiers of Israel were headed right for them, and like we discussed yesterday, the people were terrified, so they shut their gates so that “none went out, and none came in.” It was really all they could do because they knew that Israel was protected by God and even more than that, knew that God fought their battles for them, and they knew their city wasn’t a match for God. Presumably in the same conversation that Joshua was having with God at the end of chapter 5 when He appeared to him, He tells Joshua to have all the soldiers march around the city once a day for six days and while marching have “seven priests shall bear before the ark seven trumpets of rams horns, and the seventh day ye shall compass the city seven times, and the priests shall blow with the trumpets. And it shall come to pass, that when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, and when ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout, and the wall...
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A Lot & A Little - Joshua 5

Chapter 5 is very short, only 15 verses, but there is a lot that happens and when reading it, it seems like it occurs over several months, but I think the chronology is not what imagine that it is. The IM reminds us that the land of Canaan that the Israelites were now in after crossing the Jordan, was not uninhabited land that no one had ever been to before. The land had been peopled for thousands of years at that point, so several civilizations had been established. Now just how established that land was, I’m not sure. Where they able to just walk to up plants and pluck the food right off? Was it flowing with milk and honey that could just be taken and used to feed all the millions of people? I’m not sure, but it plays into it later. When the scouts went to Jericho previously, Rahab had already told them that all the people were terrified of the Israelites because they knew that they had been blessed by God, both by the miracles used to free the from Egypt and also the parting of t...
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