Torah for Christians: Joshua
TORAH FOR CHRISTIANS
SEASON 5 EPISODE FOUR
JOSHUA
One of the most interesting and yet misunderstood characters in the entire Bible is Joshua. We know him as the one who brought down the walls of Jericho, but there is so much more to him. Let’s take a look.
I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and this is Torah for Christians.
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Welcome to Torah for Christians. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr
Joshua is a fascinating character in the Bible. Not only is a book named after him, but he is the consummate warrior of early Israelite history. He was Moses’ field general when the Israelites battled Amalek, was the one who warned Moses about the Golden Calf, who refused to accept the gloom and doom report of the spies, and engineered the conquest of part of the Land of Israel after Moses’ death. He even made the sun stand still when fighting his enemies!
Even with this quite impressive resume, we still don’t know much about him. We first meet Joshua ben Nun in Exodus, specifically Chapter 17.8-16, when he is the general fighting the Amalekites, Israel’s paradigmatic enemy. At the oasis of Rephidim, Joshua led an army against Amalekites. Famously, whenever Moses raised his arms, Israel prevailed; when he dropped his arms, Amalek prevailed. Aaron and Hur built stone pillars upon which Moses rested his arms so that Israel would prevail. Here as well is the first mention of God proscribing the Amalekites, commanding their utter destruction.
Numbers 13.1-14.45 is the story of the 12 spies, whom Moses sent to scout the Land of Israel prior to its invasion. When the spies returned from their 40-day mission, only Joshua and Caleb urged the people to enter the land and conquer it. Because the spies stoked such fear and rebellion, God decreed that this slave generation would wander the desert for 40 years and die out; their children, a generation raised in the harsh desert environs as a free people, would then conquer and occupy the land. Only Caleb and Joshua from the slave generation would be allowed to enter. Caleb drops out of the story, but we know that Joshua becomes the leader of the people upon Moses’ death.
In the Book of Numbers, and confirmed at the end of Deuteronomy, Moses bestows the mantle of leadership upon him. Literally, it’s a mantle. In Numbers 23.8-23, the High Priest Elazar elevates Joshua in front of the entire people.
Of course, Joshua does not actually become the leader until the end of Deuteronomy, in Chapter 31.1-29. Here, Moses tells the people that he is finally about to die. He assures them that Joshua will be a great leader who will both worship the one, true God and lead the people into the Promised Land. After reciting a rather long poem, Moses climbs Mount Nebo and actually dies.
To prepare us for what happens next, let’s first step back and examine an important aspect of leadership: handing over the reins to somebody else. It’s not always an easy task.
Perhaps the hardest part of being a leader is giving up leadership at the proper time. Obviously, we can’t be leaders forever; if nothing else, death will take that job from us. The trick is to know when to step back and let someone else lead.
Moses was a master in this. He was 120 years old; God had told him that he would not be able to enter the Land of Israel and here were the Israelites, standing on the shores of the Jordan River, about to enter the land. Moses knew his time was up; he publicly blessed Joshua and endowed him with the ascribed authority that a leader needs, specifically the title of leader.
But as we know, leadership is so much more. Joshua had to earn ascribed authority. While Israel knew him as a loyal servant of Moses and a brilliant field general, they did not know him as a leader. Even though Moses gave Joshua his mantle, Joshua could have lost his authority had he mismanaged the upcoming invasion.
With this in mind, we’ll look at the Book of Joshua itself in just a moment. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and this is Torah for Christians.
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Welcome back to Torah for Christians. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr. Before we return to our discussion of Joshua, I want to thank you for listening to this podcast. Please remember to review and rate this episode on Apple, Spotify, or whatever service you are using. Also, please go back and listen to previous episodes if you have not done so already. A transcript is also available on our website, www.torahforchristians.net . And if you would like to read my weekly Torah Study, please go to Bible Stories They (Never) Taught You in Religious School, available for free on www.Substack.com or through our website. I have also started another Substack page called Wednesday Torah, where I share random thoughts on the Jewish experience. Please subscribe to both.
We all know about the battles that Joshua led in the Land of Israel: Jericho, Ai, Beth El and elsewhere. Were we to look at a map of ancient Israel, we would see that Joshua did not conquer the entire land; instead, the Israelites conquered a swath of the central Israel highlands. Over time, the Israelite tribes infiltrated and took over the rest of the land, even though the Book of Joshua might lead us to a different conclusion. We know this to be true because in the Book of Judges, we learn of further wars and conquests; the land was definitely not fully settled until the time of David, whose stories we find in Samuel.
But before the battles, we read that Joshua mimicked Moses in several ways prior to leading the invasion. For example, Moses split the waters of the Sea of Reeds; Joshua split the Jordan River. Moses’ wife circumcised their children; Joshua circumcised the Israelite men. And just as Moses sent spies into the land, so Joshua sent spies into Jericho.
Since Jericho, though, is the best-known story of the entire Book, if not of the entire Bible. Let’s take a closer look at it.
The story of Jericho begins in Joshua, Chapter 6. Jericho is considered one of the oldest, continuously inhabited cities in the world. Palestinians still live in Jericho, although not on top of the ruins of the ancient city. Sadly, archeologists botched the excavation of Jericho 100 years ago so much of the story is lost to history. But we still know a lot.
First, Jericho was a walled city. The Bible tells us that Jericho was shut up because of the pending Israelite invasion; the rural population probably relocated to the city and then they closed the gates so that the armies could not enter. It would be very hard for the Israelites to conquer a walled city; they needed a miracle. Literally, they needed a miracle.
For six days, the Israelite army marched one lap around Jericho in silence. On the seventh day, they marched seven laps in silence. Then, the priests sounded the shofar, and the walls came tumbling down. Every resident of Jericho, except for Rahav and her family, who had assisted the spies in their reconnaissance mission, was killed and the Israelites came into control of their first conquest in the land.
Why were all the inhabitants killed? Throughout the Tanach, the overriding fear of God, of the authors of the Torah and especially of the Prophets was that the Israelites would fall to the temptations of Canaanite worship and so stop worshipping YHVH, the God of the Israelites. Indeed, whenever the Israelites spared the residents of a town in the Book of Jericho, they lost the battle.
There is one question that we rarely ask but it’s an important tone: Why is the Book of Joshua excluded from the Torah? If we think about it, Joshua flows naturally from the end of Numbers: the Israelites are at the shores of the Jordan River, Moses makes Joshua the leader of the people, and then, Joshua leads the people into the Land of Israel. Makes sense, to be sure.
Bur first, Deuteronomy gets in the way. We Jews would have been fine if our ancestors had decreed that there were six books of the Torah, not five. That’s not the question.
I think that the reason for exclusion is connected instead to Deuteronomy. Those who follow the Documentary Hypothesis see Joshua as a logical continuation of Deuteronomy, not Numbers. The language and theology are more Deuteronomistic than of Numbers.
But I think there are other reasons. First, let’s go back to the end of Deuteronomy. Curiously, nobody knows where Moses died or where God buried him. Moses’ grave, unlike that of Joseph in Egypt or the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, is not a shrine. We have no place to visit when we want to remember Moses; we only have the Torah and our own memories.
Next, including Joshua in the Torah canon would be anti-climactic. Moses is such a towering figure, ending the Torah with Joshua seems like a step down.
Finally, the Torah ends with a sense of loss, mixed with anticipation. It’s a natural ending for the saga. Joshua would have been like the TV show that continued for one season too many; in colloquial terms, it would have “jumped the shark.” Think of the Book of Joshua, then, as a spin-off, not a sequel, of the Torah story. We introduced the main character in the original show; now that character has a show of his own. And it was a very successful sequel, to be sure.
Next week, we will talk about the Judges of early Israel. We will see that the land was not truly settled and that the young nation was more an amalgamation of Tribes than a unified whole.
I want to thank you for listening to Torah for Christians. Please be sure to check out our website, www.torahforchristians.net, for a full list of podcast episodes; I’m sure that you will enjoy listening to all of them. In addition, you can subscribe to my Substack columns, Wednesday Torah – an occasional weekday musing about the world around us, based on the principles of the Torah – as well as Bible Stories They (Never) Taught You in Religious School, a weekly Torah Study, which is published every Friday morning. I’m sure that you will enjoy all these offerings.
Have a wonderful week and remember; Hinei Mah Tov … L’hitra’ot, till we meet again. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and this is Torah for Christians.
