Jacob's Deathbed Blessings Told Joshua Where Each Tribe Would Live

The tribes were standing in a clearing at Shiloh and the lots were in the box in front of them. Joshua was holding the box. Elazar the High Priest was standing beside him in the breastplate with the Urim and Thummim glowing somewhere inside the twelve stones. The land that had been conquered was about to be divided into portions, and twelve tribes were waiting to find out which mountain range or coastal plain or inland valley had been assigned to them.

Nobody in the clearing thought they were drawing lots the way a farmer draws straws. They were watching a piece of divine theater whose script had been written four hundred years earlier.

Bamidbar Rabbah, the Palestinian midrash on Numbers compiled between the fifth and the ninth centuries, preserves the way the rabbis read the scene. The lots in that box were not ordinary. Elazar, through the Ruach HaKodesh, the divine spirit that rested on him through the Urim and Thummim, already knew which tribe would be chosen before Joshua's hand ever went into the box. Before the lot was drawn, Elazar would call out the name of the tribe and the name of the region. Then Joshua would reach in, and the lot that came out would match. The midrash goes further. When the lot was lifted into the air it would, the rabbis said, cry out. It would announce itself in a voice that everyone in the clearing could hear. I am the lot of such and such tribe, and I have been drawn in such and such place. The verse in (Joshua 19:51) ends with the phrase al pi, at the mouth, which literally means by the speech. Bamidbar Rabbah reads it straight. The lots spoke.

The question the rabbis wanted to answer was not whether the procedure was miraculous. The question was why it had to be miraculous. Why could the land not simply be divided by committee. The answer sits in the opening lines of the same midrashic passage, and it points back two hundred and ten years to Egypt, to a dying patriarch with twelve sons gathered around his bed.

When Jacob blessed his sons in (Genesis 49), he did not just give them generic benedictions. Bamidbar Rabbah reads each blessing as a geographic prophecy. Zebulun shall dwell at the shore of the seas. Issachar will lie down between the sheepfolds. From Asher, his bread shall be rich. Jacob had already told the sons, on his deathbed, where in an unconquered country each of them would end up living centuries later. The prophecy was sealed before the sons went into Egypt. It was sealed before the plagues. It was sealed before the crossing of the sea. It was sealed before Moses was born. And when the tribes stood in the clearing at Shiloh four centuries later, any division that contradicted Jacob's blessing would have been, by definition, wrong.

Which is why the lottery had to be miraculous. A human committee could have gotten the geography wrong. A normal lot, drawn by a man with his eyes closed, could have landed on the wrong region by accident. Neither was acceptable. Jacob had already spoken the answer. The lots at Shiloh existed to confirm, publicly and without possibility of dispute, that what came out of the box matched what the old man in the bed had said. The lot crying out in its own voice was the patriarch's deathbed blessing being read back to his sons in the land he had seen only in visions.

The other rabbinic texts in this cluster stack more of the same kind of weight onto the shoulders of Joshua. Midrash Tehillim, the rabbinic commentary on Psalms whose oldest layers come from fifth-century Palestine, takes up the moment at the Jordan when the river turned back to let the camp cross into Canaan. The midrash asks the river a blunt question. What does it matter to you, Jordan, that you flee. The river answers in the midrash's own voice. I am not fleeing from Joshua. I am not even fleeing from the ark. I am fleeing from the God of Jacob, the rock who transforms a desert into a water spring. The midrash is careful about the name. It could have said the God of Moses. It could have said the God of Abraham. It specifies Jacob. Because the covenant that was about to walk across the dry riverbed into the land had been sealed at Bethel, at Peniel, at Shechem, on the deathbed in Egypt. The river was bowing to the man whose blessings were about to be verified by a box of speaking lots.

The tragedy, of course, is that the generation who watched all of this up close did not stay in awe of it for long. Louis Ginzberg, in the fourth volume of his Legends of the Jews, published in 1913, preserves the short dark epilogue. Joshua led Israel for twenty-eight years after the crossing and then he died. The people buried him and laid the flint knives he had used to circumcise the wilderness generation at the Jordan into the grave beside him. They raised a stone pillar over the tomb in memory of the day the sun stood still at Ajalon. And then they walked away and went back to tilling the fields.

The mourning was shorter than it should have been. The other tribes were busy with their new land, the land whose boundaries had been spoken by Jacob and confirmed by crying lots, and they forgot the man who had handed it to them. Ginzberg, drawing on the older midrashic tradition, says God's response was swift. The high priest Elazar died soon after. The elders of the wilderness generation died soon after. And the mountain where Joshua had been buried began to tremble under their feet, threatening to swallow the people alive, until the tribes finally understood what they had done and turned back to the grave.

Ginzberg also preserves the scene of Joshua's own inauguration, on the morning Moses handed over the leadership in the presence of the camp. Moses insisted on leading Joshua out of the tent and making him walk ahead. Joshua protested. Moses insisted. They walked together to the place of the great, where a golden throne had been prepared, and Moses seated Joshua on the throne over Joshua's objections. The Israelites watching the scene wept. Joshua, overwhelmed, cried out the sentence that the Ginzberg text preserves with its exact phrasing. Why all this greatness and honor to me. It is one of the most human sentences in the whole leadership transfer. A successor staring at the throne of his predecessor and not believing he is the one who has been asked to sit on it.

The Sifrei Devarim, the early legal midrash on Deuteronomy compiled in the school of Rabbi Akiva in the third century, explains what changed between the morning of the inauguration and the morning of the Jordan crossing. The Sifrei says that even after Moses laid hands on Joshua, the people did not yet fear him the way they had feared Moses. Real authority, the midrash teaches, is not only a matter of divine appointment. It is also a matter of the people's perception, a contract that has to be ratified on both sides. The Sifrei reads (Joshua 4:14), on that day the Lord magnified Joshua in the sight of all Israel, as the exact moment the contract was ratified. The day the waters of the Jordan stood up in a heap. The day the river told the rabbis it was not afraid of Joshua but of the God of Jacob. The day the next stage of the patriarch's old deathbed prophecy began to come true.

By the time the lots started speaking in the clearing at Shiloh, the prophecy had become a map. The box Joshua was holding was not making decisions. It was reading aloud from a document written long before any of them had been born.