Reading: Joshua 13-21, Psalm 68
You get up in the morning, make your morning coffee, and sit down to read the Bible as you do each morning. It’s a quiet, pleasant moment in the midst of an otherwise busy day. You open the Bible, look at the daily reading, and your pleasant morning is brought to a screeching halt when you realize you are reading eight chapters of property lines. You successfully read through Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy… why? Why are you spending your time reading the property delineations of people who died over 3000 years ago?
I don’t blame anyone for this reaction, because this was me. Along with some of the genealogies, this part of Joshua was the most frustrating part of the Bible for me to read for many years. It just seemed totally unnecessary. Even the little narrative bits- Caleb and Othniel, The destruction of Beor and the death of Balaam- appear elsewhere. The cities of refuge we have already read about. What is the deal with all of this?
I don’t promise to make this easy reading, or hope to make the tribal divisions deeply meaning to you. However, I do want to point out a few things that may help explain why this is here.
First of all, a quick reminder about the era we are reading from. There were no books- when you see the word “book” in the text it is the Hebrew word סֵ֖פֶר which means “inscription” or “scroll.” These inscribed records could have been written in a number of forms, but the book as we think of it wasn’t known until at least the 2nd century after Jesus, more than 2000 years hence. Most likely this record was a series of scrolls.
Israel has now entered the promised land and begun the conquest, but it isn’t done yet, as they knew would be the case from Exodus 23 and Deuteronomy 7. But Joshua is getting old, and the tribes need to know who is responsible for where, and so Joshua has them scout out the whole country and outline the areas belonging to each tribe. Once this is done, he writes it down. Now, imagine you are a descendant of the tribe of Dan and you need to know what you are responsible for in the land. These chapters are a single place you can go, probably on a scroll, to reference. As we will see, the people very quickly forget to do this, but the point from Joshua’s perspective is to give the people one place to look so they can know how the division of the land is supposed to go.
Buried within these long lists of cities and land divisions are a few statements that foreshadow the coming era of the Judges. I won’t spoil the stories, but there are a number of references to the failure of the tribes to wholly push out the Canaanite people. And it is not just that they couldn’t do it, it is that they did something else: they subject them to forced labor. Unlike the story of the Gibeonites, there is no indication here that these Canaanites gave up their native culture in recognition of the dominance of the God of Israel. As we shall see, it is quite the opposite, and the people of Israel will suffer dire consequences for their decision to act like any other conquering people by enslaving the natives.
Aside from this foreshadowing, most of Joshua’s stories are about successful conquest. The reason for the recounting of Israel’s successful conquests is told to us at the very end of the day’s reading. God has been faithful to Israel. Everything God said he would do he did. In a time and place without constant exposure to information, the repetition of God’s faithful actions for Israel was extremely important. We are used to being able to look up information whenever we want to, on whatever subject we want. For most of history, humans could not do this. Stories from a people’s history were important, privileged, and precious. That is the story of Joshua. These boring property lines and stories of conquest were anything but dull to the people of Israel for thousands of years. These are their epics, their highest points and their lowest.
Tomorrow we wrap up the book of Joshua, and will hear his final challenge to the people of Israel to carry on the story. Joshua has at this point carried the story as far as he could, and given the people a record of God’s faithfulness to read along with the promises from the books of Moses.