Joshua Inherits the Land After Forty Years of Waiting

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The Night the Whole Camp Wept

Twelve men went north into Canaan and came back forty days later carrying a single cluster of grapes on a pole between two of them, and that should have settled it.

Ten of them talked instead.

The land eats its inhabitants, they said. The cities are walled up to the sky. There are men there beside whom we looked like grasshoppers, and that is how we looked to them too.

The camp did not argue. It broke. Six hundred thousand fighting men and their families wept all night, and by morning the weeping had turned into a plan: appoint a captain, turn the column around, walk back to Egypt. They said it out loud, in front of the tent, where everyone could hear.

Two Men Tore Their Clothes and Almost Died for It

Joshua and Caleb had walked the same forty days and seen the same walls.

They tore their garments open down the front and stood where the crowd could see them.

The land is good, they said. It is exceedingly good. Only do not rebel, and do not be afraid of the people of the land, because their shade has left them.

The congregation bent down and picked up stones.

That is the moment worth standing still in. Two men with their shirts torn, facing a nation that has already decided, and the front row is already weighing rocks in its hands. Nothing about the arithmetic favored them. They were two against six hundred thousand, and the six hundred thousand were right about the walls. The walls were real. The giants were real. The report was accurate in every measurable respect and wrong about the only thing that mattered.

The stones never flew. The glory came down over the tent first, and after that nobody was throwing anything.

Forty Years of Funerals

The sentence was arithmetic too. One year in the wilderness for each day the spies had spent in the land. Forty days walking, forty years walking.

The ten men who had brought back the report died first, by plague, before the year turned. The rest of that generation died slowly, over four decades, in a country with no cities and no rivers. Every camp left graves behind it. A boy who had wept that night grew into a man, married, raised children who had never seen the Nile, and was buried in sand by sons who would cross without him.

Two men out of six hundred thousand walked the whole forty years and were still standing at the end of them. They had turned away the anger and shut down the evil report, and the wage for that was the long unbearable privilege of outliving everyone who had wanted to stone them.

What Joshua Was Walking Into

The Jordan was in flood at the barley harvest when the column finally came down to it.

What waited on the far bank was not a possession. Three things in Israel's history were handed over on terms: the land, the Temple, and the kingdom of the house of David. Two things were handed over free and clear, the scroll of the Torah and the covenant of Aaron, and those could not be taken back. The land could. Take heed to yourselves, the warning ran, lest your heart be enticed, and the anger of the Lord burn against you, and He shut up the heavens. Sanctuary and dynasty carried the same clause.

Joshua knew the terms. Before he died he gathered the tribes at Shechem and made them say it back to him in their own mouths, choose this day, and when they chose he set up a stone under an oak and told them the stone had heard every word.

The Field Narrows to One Crossing

It had not always been this specific.

Before God chose this land, prophecy could land anywhere on earth. Any country was fit ground for a voice. Once the choice was made, every other country was shut out. Before Jerusalem was chosen, a man could raise an altar anywhere in the land and it counted. Once the city was chosen, everywhere else stopped counting.

By the time Joshua was arriving at the water, four centuries after Abraham had walked the length and breadth of the place, the field had narrowed to one people, one river, one crossing. Whoever was still walking when the column reached the water inherits. That was the entire test, and it had taken forty years to administer.

Caleb was eighty-five when the fighting slowed, and he came to Joshua and asked for the hill country, the worst of it, the part with the walled towns and the giants still in them. He said his strength was the same as the day Moses sent him out. The wisdom he had been given at forty had stayed with him the whole way and it had not made him careful. He took the mountain, and his sons took a portion after him, and the men who had picked up stones were forty years in the ground.