Blogging Through the Book of Mormon

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...

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...

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...

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...

Chapters 3 and 4 of Joshua are part of the same story of Israel crossing the Jordan river to get into the promised land. I was wondering how they were going to cross over the river, so it was enlightening for me to hear how it was done. Israel went to the river bank and was told by the leadership, “When ye see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, and the priests of Levites bearing it, when ye shall remove from your place, and go after it.” The tribes were organized into a certain order and they were to follow the tribe in front of them, with the first tribe following the ark of the covenant. It’s also important to note that the people were commanded to follow behind the ark “about two thousand sand cubits.” Google says that 2000 sand cubits is able half a mile or 1,000 yards. So the people were to follow behind the ark for a pretty significant distance. Joshua tells the people to sanctify themselves “for to morrow the Lord will do wonders among you.” The IM notes that Israel c...