Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book
Deuteronomy left Moses on Mount Nebo, looking out over a land he was not permitted to enter, the covenant handed on and the leadership laid upon a younger man. Joshua opens right there, in the silence after that great death, with the people still camped on the plains of Moab and the Jordan River between them and everything the LORD had promised. The first words of the book are the LORD’s own words to Joshua: Moses My servant is dead, now therefore arise, cross this Jordan, into the land I am giving them. And so the long waiting ends and the walking begins. This is the book of the crossing over, the story of a God who swore an oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and now, generations later, keeps it in full, bringing their children into the land at last and calling them, through every step of it, to be strong and very courageous because He is with them wherever they go.
As you read, hold this: The LORD keeps His promise and gives His people the inheritance He swore, calling them to be strong and courageous because He Himself goes with them.
The book carries the name of its central figure, the man who takes up what Moses laid down. His Hebrew name is יְהוֹשֻׁעַ (Yehoshua, yeh-hoh-SHOO-ah), and it means “the LORD saves.” It is a name to notice, for it is the very same name that in its later, shortened form would be given to a child in Bethlehem, the name we know as Jesus. The man who leads Israel across the Jordan and into their inheritance bears, in his own name, the promise of the greater Deliverer who would one day lead His people into a rest that Joshua’s conquest could only foreshadow.
The name and what it means
Joshua is the first of the books that follow the five books of Moses, and it stands like a threshold crossed. Behind it lie the wilderness and the law; before it lies the land and the life to be lived in it. Its register is not the register of a farewell sermon, as Deuteronomy was, nor of a marching camp learning to trust. It is the register of fulfillment, of a promise long deferred now coming true in real hills and real cities and real fields handed to real families, tribe by tribe.
The name “the LORD saves” tells you where the weight of the book truly rests. For all its accounts of armies and battles and walls, this is not finally a book about the strength of Israel. It is a book about the faithfulness of God. Joshua leads, and Joshua is brave, but the land is never won by Joshua’s sword. It is given by the LORD’s hand, exactly as He swore it would be, and the book takes care to say so again and again.
The world of the book
The book moves from the banks of the Jordan into the whole land of Canaan, a country of walled towns and fortified cities, of kings who each ruled a city and its fields, of Canaanite peoples long settled in the good places of the land. Israel comes to it as a people who have never had a home of their own, who were slaves in Egypt and pilgrims in the desert, and who now stand on the edge of a country they did not build, about to receive it as a gift and a trust.
It is a world of great crossings and great stones set up to remember them, of a river that heaps up so the people can pass over on dry ground, of trumpets and shouts and falling walls, of long campaigns and hard fighting, and then, when the fighting is done, of surveyors and lots and boundary lines as the land is measured out among the tribes. Through all of it the LORD goes before His people, fights for them, and keeps the word He gave to their fathers.
The shape of the book
Joshua moves in three great parts, and you can feel the story turn as it passes from one to the next, before it comes to rest in a solemn farewell.
- Joshua 1–5. Entering the land. The LORD commissions Joshua and charges him to be strong and courageous. Spies are sent to Jericho and sheltered by Rahab. The people cross the Jordan on dry ground, set up memorial stones, are consecrated, and keep the Passover at the border of the promise.
- Joshua 6–12. Taking the land. Jericho falls, and after the failure and repentance at Ai, the campaigns unfold across the south and the north until the land is subdued. These are the hardest chapters of the book, the wars of the conquest, and we will not pass over them lightly.
- Joshua 13–21. Dividing the land. With the fighting largely done, the land is apportioned among the tribes by lot, each family given its inheritance, the cities of refuge appointed, and the Levites settled among the rest.
- Joshua 22–24. The covenant renewed. The eastern tribes return home, and Joshua, now old, gathers all Israel at Shechem for his farewell, setting the choice plainly before them: choose this day whom you will serve.
Our walk begins at the beginning, with the LORD’s charge to Joshua at the water’s edge. You are welcome to sit with more than one chapter at a time. Only keep them in order, because the joy of the inheritance in the later chapters lands rightly only after you have crossed the river and walked the hard road of the conquest that wins it.
A word about the hard question of the conquest
There is no honest way to read this book without meeting its wars, and faithful readers have long wrestled with them. It will not do to look away. So let us say plainly what these chapters are, and what they are not.
The conquest of Canaan was a specific, once-for-all act of God’s judgment upon nations whose wickedness had ripened over centuries, a wickedness the Scriptures name without flinching: entrenched idolatry, and the burning of their own children in sacrifice to their gods. The LORD had waited long, generations long, before the cup of that iniquity was full. And when He acted, He acted by His own explicit command, in a unique moment of redemptive history, using Israel as the instrument of a judgment that was His and not theirs to invent.
These wars are not a template. They are not a warrant for war or violence in any age since, and they were never meant to be. No people today may take up Joshua as license for the sword. The New Testament sends the people of God out to the nations not with armies but with the good news, in love, and the only warfare the church is given is a spiritual one, fought with truth and prayer and the word of God, never with the blood of our neighbors. Read rightly, these chapters drive us not to conquest but to the fear of God and the wonder of His patience.
And even here, in the hardest part of the book, the threads of mercy are woven all through. Rahab, a Canaanite of Jericho, is spared because she believed, and she is drawn so far into the mercy of God that she stands in the family line of the Messiah Himself. The Gibeonites, another Canaanite people, are spared through a treaty and kept alive within Israel. The door was never shut against any who would turn to the LORD. That door, held open in the middle of judgment, tells you what God is truly after, and it points ahead to the day when people of every nation would be welcomed in.
The one thread to carry
If you take one thing from this book, take the charge the LORD spoke to Joshua at the very start, the word that sounds like a keynote through everything that follows. It is repeated so that it cannot be missed, and it rests not on Joshua’s courage but on God’s presence.
Joshua 1:9 (BSB) — “Have I not commanded you to be strong and courageous? Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.””
The strength Israel is called to is never a strength drawn from within. It is the calm of a people who know Whose hand goes before them. And when the land is at last given and the fighting is done, the book stops to declare, in words worth carrying with you to the end, that not one of God’s promises had failed.
Joshua 21:45 (BSB) — “Not one of all the LORD’s good promises to the house of Israel had failed; everything was fulfilled.”
Then, at the close, the old leader sets the choice before the people he has led, and lays his own house down on the side of the LORD.
Joshua 24:15 (BSB) — “But if it is unpleasing in your sight to serve the LORD, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living. As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD!””
A promise kept in full, an inheritance received, and a people called to serve the God who gave it. That is Joshua, and that is why we start here. The LORD keeps His promise and gives His people the land He swore, calling them to be strong and courageous because He Himself goes with them.