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Joshua Crossed the River and an Altar Nearly Split the Country

Fifty thousand men crossed the Jordan to fight for land they would never live on. When they went home and built an altar, Israel armed against them.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Priests Stood in the Riverbed
  2. Land Measured by Its Goodness
  3. The River Is Not a Border
  4. The Altar on the Far Bank
  5. Phineas Asked and Waited for the Answer
Joshua Crossed the River and an Altar Nearly Split the Country Click for full size

The Priests Stood in the Riverbed

The priests went in first with the ark, and the water thinned around their ankles until the sand of the riverbed showed through. Behind them came the Levites carrying the tent and the vessels. Behind them came everyone else, tribe by tribe, the children and the wives walking in the middle of each column because the parents were afraid the current would take them.

The priests did not move. They stood in the middle of the channel holding the ark while the whole nation walked past them and up the western bank. Only when the last of them was on dry ground did the priests come out, and the Jordan closed behind them and rose back to its ordinary size.

Fifty thousand of the men who crossed that day owned nothing on that side of the river. Reuben, Gad and half of Manasseh had already been given the Amorite country east of the water. Joshua had called their chiefs together before the crossing and reminded them what they had sworn to Moses, who had worn himself out for them and had not stopped even while he was dying. They armed and came over anyway.

Land Measured by Its Goodness

Years later Joshua was old and the war was not finished. Thirty-one kings had gone down, but the strongest walled towns were still standing, because the Canaanites had spent the whole forty years of the wilderness making their cities harder to take.

He gathered everyone at Shiloh and sent out ten men, one from each tribe and each with a reputation for honesty, and he sent surveyors with them who knew the craft of measuring. His instruction was odd for a general. Do not bring me back the size of it. Bring me back what it is worth. One field near Jericho was worth a thousand acres somewhere in the hills, and he would not hand a tribe a large portion of stone and call it a share.

The ten came back in the seventh month, and Joshua divided the land by lot. Judah took the high country as far as Jerusalem. Benjamin got the narrowest strip of all of them, and got it because the ground was so good, and because Jericho and Jerusalem sat inside it. The Levites were given no country at all, only thirty-eight towns scattered through everyone else's land, and three of those were set aside for anyone who killed a man without meaning to and had to run somewhere.

The River Is Not a Border

Then Joshua dismissed the eastern tribes. He stood in front of fifty thousand men who had fought a war for land they would not live on and told them they could go home.

"Do not imagine, because this river is between us, that you are of a different race and not Hebrews," he said. "We are all the posterity of Abraham, we who live here and you who live there."

He saluted the officers one by one and then the crowd together, and stayed where he was. The rest of the nation walked the eastern tribes to the ford, and they were crying, and nobody seemed to know how to say goodbye.

The Altar on the Far Bank

On the other side, the men of Reuben and Gad and Manasseh built an altar on the bank of the Jordan where anyone crossing would see it.

The report that reached the west was that an altar had gone up. Nothing about why. What the western tribes heard was that the men they had just wept over had crossed the water and immediately started sacrificing to strange gods, and they believed it, and they took up their weapons. They did not care that these were their brothers or that their commanders were men of standing. They cared how God had said He wanted to be worshipped. They formed up along the water to cross and punish them, and the country very nearly split along the line of the river.

Joshua stopped them. Eleazar the high priest and the elders stopped them. Their argument was small and slow: try words first, and if the words prove the worst of it, then go. So they sent Phineas, Eleazar's son, and ten men with him, across the river to ask.

Phineas Asked and Waited for the Answer

An assembly was called on the eastern bank, and Phineas stood up in the middle of it. He did not soften the accusation. The offense was too heavy to be fixed with talk, he said, and the only reason there was talk at all was kinship and the chance that they might still be brought back.

"Do not imagine that because you have got over the river you have got out of the reach of God's power," he told them. "You are everywhere in places that belong to Him." If they wanted to be free of it, he said, the land could be divided all over again and this eastern country left empty for sheep. Then he stopped arguing and begged. By your children. By your wives. Do not make us punish you.

The governors answered that they had never left them and had never built anything new. They worshipped the same God. Their sacrifices went on the bronze altar in front of the tent, the way everyone's did. The thing on the riverbank was not for burning anything. It was a marker, so that a hundred years from now no child born on this side could be told he was not one of them.

Phineas approved of the answer and carried it back across. Joshua heard it and offered a thanksgiving sacrifice, glad he would not have to draw up his own people against his own people, and sent the assembly home. He lived at Shechem after that. Twenty years later he called them in once more, an old man reminding them how low they had started, and then he died at a hundred and ten, and they buried him at Timnah in the hills of Ephraim.

JoshuaCanaanTribesLand Of IsraelConquestAltarPeaceIronResurrectionExodusMosesHoly LandNationsMiraclesPrayerRedemptionTorah
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From the tradition

Sources

2 sources

The texts behind this telling. Some cards carry a translation of the source; others are our own retelling of it, and each card says which. Every card links out to the original.

Antiquities V.2Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Antiquities of the Jews, trans. William Whiston · Public Domain

The moment Joshua and Eleazar the high priest died, Israel began to unravel. Josephus does not soften this. The generation that had conquered Canaan gave way to one that could not hold it together.

Phineas prophesied that the tribe of Judah should take the lead, with Simeon fighting alongside them. They struck first at the city of Bezek, where a Canaanite warlord named Adonibezek had assembled his forces. The Israelites killed over ten thousand soldiers and captured Adonibezek himself. When they cut off his fingers and toes, he made a chilling confession: he had done the same to seventy-two kings. "I was not always hidden from God," he said, "as I now find by what I endure." They carried him alive to Jerusalem, where he died.

The tribes pushed south to Hebron, where they encountered the last of the ancient giants, men whose bodies were so enormous and whose faces were so alien that Josephus says their bones were still being displayed in his own day, unlike anything people could believe. The city went to the Levites. The surrounding land went to Caleb, the old spy who had scouted Canaan decades before under Moses. The descendants of Jethro, Moses's Midianite father-in-law, also received territory, they had abandoned their homeland to follow Israel through the wilderness.

Prosperity bred complacency. The tribes grew rich from Canaanite tribute and stopped fighting. They abandoned the aristocratic government Moses had designed, no senate, no magistrates, just farmers getting wealthy and ignoring the law. God warned them. They ignored the warning.

Then came the horror at Gibeah. A Levite man traveling with his concubine stopped for the night in a Benjamite town. The men of Gibeah surrounded the house and demanded the woman. They took her by force and abused her through the night. She died at the doorstep by dawn. The Levite cut her body into twelve pieces and sent one to each tribe (Judges 19:29). All Israel erupted. Four hundred thousand soldiers marched against the tribe of Benjamin, their own brothers. The Benjamites, outnumbered but defiant, won the first two battles, killing twenty thousand Israelites. Only on the third day, after fasting and prayer at Bethel, did God grant Israel victory. They slaughtered nearly the entire tribe, every city, every woman, every child. Only six hundred Benjamite men survived, fleeing to the rock of Rimmon.

Then came the remorse. Israel had sworn no one would give a daughter to Benjamin in marriage, effectively condemning the tribe to extinction. They found a loophole, four hundred virgins from Jabesh Gilead, whose people had refused to join the war. For the remaining two hundred men, they devised a scheme: let them hide in the vineyards at Shiloh during the festival and seize the dancing women for wives. And so the tribe of Benjamin survived, barely, rebuilt from the wreckage of civil war.

Full source
Antiquities V.1Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Antiquities of the Jews, trans. William Whiston · Public Domain

Joshua inherited an impossible job, replace the greatest prophet in history and lead a nation of former slaves into enemy territory. According to Josephus, he did not hesitate for a single day.

The moment the thirty-day mourning for Moses ended, Joshua ordered the Israelites to mobilize. He dispatched spies to Jericho, the first fortified city standing in their path. These men slipped inside undetected and surveyed every weak point in the walls. When the king of Jericho got word that Hebrew spies were hiding in the inn of a woman named Rahab, he sent soldiers to seize them. But Rahab hid the men under stalks of flax drying on her roof and lied to the king's messengers. In exchange, the spies swore to spare her family when the city fell. She was to hang scarlet threads from her window as a signal.

The Jordan River itself posed the first great obstacle. It ran strong, with no bridges and no ferry boats. But God parted the waters. The priests carrying the Ark entered first, and the river dried up before them, just as the Red Sea had dried up for Moses a generation earlier (Joshua 3:15-17). Josephus notes that the Israelites crossed on the very day that the river was at flood stage, making the miracle unmistakable.

Then came Jericho. Joshua ordered the Ark carried around the city walls for six days, with priests blowing rams' horns. On the seventh day, they circled seven times. The walls collapsed. And the Israelites poured in, destroying everything except Rahab and her household, exactly as promised (Joshua 6:20-25).

What followed was a relentless campaign across Canaan. Joshua defeated thirty-one kings in total. He burned Hazor to the ground. He conquered the hill country, the Negev, and the coastal lowlands. Josephus describes the Gibeonites tricking Joshua into a peace treaty by disguising themselves as travelers from a distant land, wearing worn-out shoes and carrying moldy bread. When Joshua discovered the deception, he honored the treaty anyway but made them servants.

At the end of twenty-five years of leadership, Joshua gathered the people at Shechem and delivered his final warning: everything you have came from God. Forget that, and you will lose it all. He died at 110 years old and was buried at Timnah in the territory of Ephraim. Eleazar the high priest died around the same time, passing the priesthood to his son Phineas.

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