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Land Division - Joshua 12-16

The IM only has a short paragraph to cover chapters 12-21 and TB has some lectures, but I started listening to one and I think I’m going to skip those because they mostly go over borders and land disputes and I’m not interested in listening to him go on his Pro-current state of Israel rants, so I’m just going to skip those and cover these chapters in chunks and go over what I think it important. Israel and Joshua have conquered the south and north parts of the land of Canaan and have taken that land to settle, and now they move on to the east and west parts. Chapter 12 is basically summed up by the header which says, “two kings on the east of the Jordan and thirty-one on the west are conquered by Israel.” The whole chapter is just a list of those conquered cities, which just listed out like that makes it seem insignificant, but that’s a lot of warfare and a lot of time and a lot of killing, especially when we’re talking about not only killing combatants but also women and children, i...
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Taking the North - Joshua 11

Chapter 11 is basically just a continuation of chapter 10, where chapter 10 talks about the Israelites conquering the southern part of the promised land and chapter 11 talking about them taking the northern part of the land. The kingdoms of the north did similar to what the southern kingdoms did, which was to try to band together to defeat the Israelites so that they wouldn’t be killed. So all these northern kingdoms banded together and came out to battle against Israel. An interesting point that TB made is that all these cities had very large, impenetrable walls so the safest place for these people would have been inside their heavily fortified cities but they left the safety of their cities and came out against the Israelites to battle. TB asked why they would do that, and answered, “the reason these various Canaanite kings will do this foolhardy act of leaving positions of strength to come out into the open to fight Israel (and thus losing the military advantage of defending nearly ...
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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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