Joshua Crossed a River and Had to Divide a Country

The river parted cleanly. The priests carried the ark into the current and the Jordan stopped. The stones of the riverbed appeared. Two million people crossed on dry ground while the priests stood in the middle, holding the ark steady, the water piled up somewhere upstream. When the last Israelite stepped onto the western bank, the priests came out, and the river came back. Simple. Miraculous. Done.

Then the real work started.

Josephus, writing his Antiquities of the Jews in Rome around 93 CE, narrates the crossing of the Jordan with the attention to military logistics that characterizes his entire account. Fifty thousand soldiers from the eastern tribes crossed with Joshua, men who already had their land, who were fulfilling a promise made to Moses that they would help until the western tribes were settled. The camp went up ten furlongs from Jericho. The spies reported back from their reconnaissance inside the city. Rahab had hidden them under stalks of flax on her roof and had sent the king's soldiers in the wrong direction, and she had extracted a promise from them: a scarlet thread in the window, and her family would be spared.

Jericho fell on the seventh circuit of the seventh day, the walls collapsing without siege weapons, without rams, without any instrument of human engineering. The army of Canaan, which had been watching through the walls for six days as Israel marched in circles, found itself inside an open city with nowhere to stand. Only Rahab's house at the wall survived, marked by the scarlet thread, because an oath had been sworn and was kept.

Ai came next, and nearly broke them. The first assault failed, thirty-six men dead, the army retreating in confusion. Joshua threw himself on the ground before the ark and cried out that this was not supposed to happen, that God had promised victory, and what was the meaning of this? God's answer was blunt: someone had taken what was consecrated. A man named Achar, from the tribe of Judah, had hidden a royal robe woven in gold and two hundred shekels under his tent floor. The lot identified him. He confessed. The city fell on the second attempt, by ambush, by the stratagem of a feigned retreat. Then Ai burned.

After that, the campaigns blur together in Josephus's telling into a succession of cities taken, armies scattered, kings captured in caves and executed. Five years of war. Thirty-one kings defeated. The coalition of northern Canaanite kings, three hundred thousand infantry and twenty thousand chariots and ten thousand horsemen gathered at Beroth, was destroyed in five days. The tabernacle was set up at Shiloh because it was beautiful and central and because the Temple had not yet been built and would not be for centuries.

Then came the task for which no military campaign had prepared anyone. The land had to be divided.

Joshua sent ten men, geometricians skilled in measurement, to travel the entire country. They were gone for months, estimating not just size but quality, because one acre of land near Jericho or Jerusalem was not equivalent to one acre in the hill country, and the tribes were entitled to shares of comparable value, not just comparable acreage. When they returned to Shiloh in the seventh month, Joshua gathered Eleazar the high priest and the senate and the tribal leaders, and they cast lots.

The results of this division, recorded in the account that Josephus draws from the Book of Joshua, read like a cartographer's inventory: Judah received the upper part of the country reaching to Jerusalem and south to the Salt Sea; Simeon got the part bordering Egypt and Arabia; Benjamin's lot was narrow but extraordinarily rich, containing both Jericho and Jerusalem; Ephraim stretched from the Jordan to Gezer; Issachar ran from Mount Carmel to Mount Tabor; the Danites received the valley facing westward. The Levites got no territorial inheritance but received thirty-eight cities distributed throughout all the tribes, with three of those cities designated as refuge cities for those who had killed unintentionally and needed protection from blood vengeance.

Caleb, who had been one of the original spies sent by Moses and who alone among the men of his generation had trusted God's promise about the land, received Hebron as a personal inheritance. It was his by right and by memory. He had waited forty years in the wilderness for this. The division of the land was not only military arithmetic. It was also the fulfillment of commitments that stretched back a generation.

The eastern tribes, having fought alongside their western brothers for five years, were dismissed with ceremony and genuine warmth. Joshua addressed them at length, thanking them for honoring Moses's command even after Moses was dead, reminding them that God's covenant extended across the Jordan, warning them that the security of their own land in Gilead and the Amorite country depended entirely on their faithfulness to the laws that governed all twelve tribes together. They built an altar at the Jordan's bank on the way home, not for sacrifice but as a monument, a visible sign that they were still part of Israel even separated by the river. Their brothers nearly went to war over it before the misunderstanding was resolved.

What the two accounts taken together reveal, the crossing and the conquest and the division that followed, is that the miracle at the Jordan was only the beginning of the difficulty. Crossing over was the easy part. The hard part was making a home on the other side that was genuinely shared, that honored the different needs of twelve different peoples, that remembered its commitments to individuals like Rahab and Caleb and the geometricians who measured fairly so no tribe could complain it had been cheated.

Joshua was old by the time the lots were cast. He knew the remaining Canaanite cities would not fall quickly, that their walls were strong and their positions were defensible, that what his army had accomplished was a beginning, not a completion. He said this plainly to the assembly at Shiloh. The work of living in the land would be harder than the work of taking it. The land would test them in ways that armies could not.

He was right about that too.