Joshua Pressed All Israel Between the Poles of the Ark

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The River Reared Back and Stood

The Jordan was over its banks. It was harvest time, when the river came down swollen and brown, tearing at its own edges and dragging whole trees toward the sea. The priests reached the water carrying the Ark of the covenant on their shoulders, and they did not stop at the edge. They walked in.

The moment the soles of their feet touched the flood, the water remembered what it carried past. The current coming down from above rose up and stood in a single heap, far off, and the water running to the sea drained away and was cut off. Between them the riverbed lay bare. The priests walked to the middle of it and stood, and the whole weight of the flood hung above their heads and did not fall.

Two Thousand Cubits and a Place to Pray

Joshua had already told the people how to follow. "Keep a space between yourselves and the Ark," he had said, "two thousand cubits by measure, and no farther, in every direction." He was not only guarding them from the holiness that had killed men who came too close. He was measuring out a life. "You are going to rest in this land and keep the Sabbath in it. On the day of rest a man may not walk far, and a man must still be able to reach the Ark and pray before it. So keep two thousand cubits, and no more, and you will always be near enough to pray." Their fathers had pitched their tents in the wilderness facing the Ark from exactly that distance, every standard turned inward toward the poles.

Come Near, He Said, and the Nation Folded Inward

Then, at the river, he called them the other way. "Come near here," Joshua said, "and hear the words of the LORD your God." And he brought them near. Not near in the way a crowd gathers. He stood the whole nation upright in the space between the two carrying-poles of the Ark, propped them there, pressed them in, until every last Israelite stood in a gap no wider than a man's reach.

It held. Six hundred thousand and their households, packed into the breath of space between two gold-sheathed poles, and the poles held them. "You wanted a sign that the living God is in your midst," Joshua told them. "Here it is. The small has held the many. Look where you are standing."

It was the same wonder that had gathered all the waters under heaven into one place at the beginning, pouring a full world into a full vessel and finding room. It was the wonder that once stood Moses and Aaron and the whole assembly before a rock in a space no bigger than the mouth of a sieve. The riverbed was dry, the flood stood waiting, and the nation stood folded into a handbreadth and was not crushed.

The Lord of All the Earth Uproots and Plants

The Ark they were pressed around had a name that day. "The ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth," the criers called it as it went before them into the river. Wherever that title is spoken, it does one thing. The Lord of all the earth evicts. He tears one people out of a land by the roots and settles another in its place, and this was the day He did it. On the far side, the kings of the Canaanites heard that the Jordan had dried before Israel, and their hearts turned to water and there was no spirit left in them. They felt the eviction before they saw a single sword. The Ark was the deed to their country, and it had just entered the door.

Out of the Water on the Tenth of the Month

The people came up out of the Jordan on the tenth day of the month. It was not an ordinary date. On the tenth of the month, generations before, their fathers in Egypt had been commanded to take a lamb into their houses and keep it for the Passover. That old act of obedience had not expired. The merit of taking the lamb crossed the river with them and stood by them on the bank, so that the same day that once began their redemption now planted them in the land.

They came up weak from the crossing and still uncircumcised, too worn from the road to bear the knife along the way. Even so, uncircumcised, they received the sprinkling of purification, water flicked from hyssop that made an unclean people clean. Then, at Gilgal, on the near edge of their inheritance, they took the flint and circumcised themselves, and immersed, and when the fourteenth came they kept their Passover in purity, clean flesh and clean bodies, in a land that a day before had belonged to someone else.