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 to all your enemies against whom ye fight.” Then Joshua took these 5 kings, “smote them, and slew them, and hanged them on give trees.” TB going into quite a bit of detail talking about this isn’t hanging on a tree like we know, but it’s a mixture of impalement then having their body displayed on a tree. Then the bodies were taken down and put back into the cave they were found in and sealed back up.

Next Joshua takes Israel and goes to the 5 cities where their enemy armies came to fight against them and that some of the soldiers made it back to. There isn’t any description of the kind of methods that God used to give the Israelites victory here, just that every single person who lived in those cities were killed and the cities themselves were destroyed. One thing to mention here is that these were some of the cities that God commanded to be destroyed, so this wasn’t done out of revenge, and all the people killed because they came to fight Israel. This was always the plan for them. And just because it doesn’t say the exact strategy that God employed in order to win doesn’t mean that these victories came because Israel was suddenly so strong. They won because God gave them victory just as easily as He could have taken it away. In fact, after all these cities were destroyed, “and all these kings and their land did Joshua take at one time, because the Lord God of Israel fought for Israel.” Then Joshua and the army returned to Gilgal again. It also needs to be noted that while yesterday’s reading seems to have happened all in one day, the finishing off of these other 5 kingdoms took some time, probably several months.