5 min read

Joshua Crossed a River and Had to Divide a Country

The Jordan parted cleanly. The harder task came after: dividing conquered land fairly among twelve tribes who each had different needs and memories.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Crossing That Looked Simple
  2. Jericho, Ai, and the Years That Followed
  3. Dividing Land Among Twelve Tribes Who Were Not Equal
  4. The Allotment by Lot
  5. What the Division Revealed

The Crossing That Looked Simple

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 held the ark steady and the water piled up somewhere upstream. When the last Israelite stepped onto the western bank, the priests came out, the river came back, and the miracle was complete. Simple. Done.

Then the real work started.

Josephus, writing his Antiquities of the Jews in Rome around 93 CE, narrates the crossing with the attention to military logistics that marks his entire account. Fifty thousand soldiers from the eastern tribes crossed with Joshua, men who already held their land east of the Jordan, fulfilling the promise they had made to Moses that they would fight alongside their brothers until the western tribes were settled. The camp went up ten furlongs from Jericho. Rahab had hidden the spies under stalks of flax and sent the king's soldiers in the wrong direction. The scarlet thread was in the window. Her family would be spared.

Jericho, Ai, and the Years That Followed

Jericho fell on the seventh circuit of the seventh day, the walls collapsing without siege weapons, without any instrument of human engineering. The army of Canaan had been watching for six days as Israel marched silently in circles. On the seventh day, the walls fell. Rahab's thread held. The city burned. Israel moved on.

Ai was harder. The first assault failed. Achan had taken devoted items from Jericho's ruins against the explicit prohibition, and the defeat at Ai was traced directly to his action. He confessed, was stoned, and the army tried again. Ai fell. Then the long campaign through the central highlands and the south and the north. Josephus lists the kings, the battles, the alliances, the territories. Thirty-one kingdoms defeated. The land theoretically available for division.

Dividing Land Among Twelve Tribes Who Were Not Equal

The division was not an administrative exercise. Josephus narrates it as a political challenge of the first order. Twelve tribes with different strengths, different needs, different memories, and different claims needed to receive portions of land that had just been taken by force from people who had not agreed to leave. The priests and Levites received no territorial portion, only cities within the other tribes' territories. The eastern tribes already had their land but sent soldiers across and expected acknowledgment. Caleb, who had been one of the original spies forty-five years earlier and had waited through the wilderness for the promise made to him, came forward to claim Hebron as his portion.

Caleb was eighty-five years old. He said he was as strong as he had been at forty. He said he could still fight. He asked for the hill country where the Anakim still lived, the descendants of the giant peoples who had terrified the other spies four decades before. He was given it. He drove out the Anakim himself.

The Allotment by Lot

The remaining territories were divided by lot before the Tent of Meeting at Shiloh. Seven tribes had not yet received their portions. Joshua sent three men from each of those seven tribes to survey the land, divide it into seven portions, and bring back a written record. The lot was then cast before God. The allocation was understood as divine confirmation of what human surveying had proposed.

The tradition preserves the tension in the process. Some tribes complained that their portions were too small. Others that they had received land still occupied by Canaanites they had not yet displaced. Joshua told the tribes that complained about insufficient territory to cut down the forest in their hills and expand their settlements. He told the tribes that feared the remaining Canaanites that Israel was stronger than what it feared, if it acted.

What the Division Revealed

Josephus reads the distribution as proof of Joshua's fairness and divine guidance. The lot removed the possibility of favoritism. No tribe could accuse Joshua of having arranged the outcome to benefit his own connections. The same method that had assigned tribal camps in the wilderness now assigned the permanent territories of the nation. And the cities of refuge, where a person who killed accidentally could flee from blood vengeance, were distributed throughout all the territories so that no corner of the land was without access to protection.

JoshuaCanaanTribesLand Of IsraelConquest
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From the tradition

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Antiquities V.2Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

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.

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Antiquities V.1Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

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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