Joshua Raised His Javelin but Wrote the Letter First

The image everyone knows: Joshua standing before the walls of Jericho, the trumpets sounding, the walls falling. What almost no one knows is that before the first city fell, Joshua sat down and wrote a letter.

Not to God. To the nations already living in the land.

The tradition is preserved in Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, the monumental compilation Rabbi Louis Ginzberg assembled between 1909 and 1938 from rabbinic and apocryphal sources stretching back centuries. According to Ginzberg's account, Joshua sent a letter ahead to every people whose territory Israel was about to enter. The letter was not a threat. It was a declaration of history, a recounting of everything God had done for Israel since Egypt, the plagues, the sea, the manna, the water from the rock. Joshua was telling the nations who they were dealing with, not just militarily but theologically. He was making a case that what was coming was not merely conquest. It was the fulfillment of something older than any of the nations currently occupying the land could claim.

The letter ended with an offer. Three choices. Leave peacefully. Stay and make peace. Or fight.

Some left. The Girgashite nation, according to rabbinic tradition, accepted the first option and departed quietly. Some made peace. Some chose to fight. It was only after the letter had been sent and answered, or ignored, that the army moved.

What Joshua was doing, the tradition implies, was distinguishing between conquest as a political act and conquest as a moral one. He was not taking land because Israel was powerful enough to take it. He was completing a covenant arrangement that had been set in motion centuries earlier, and he was giving the people already there the chance to understand that before the conflict began. The diplomacy was real. The letter was genuine. The God he was invoking was the same God who had given the Noahide laws to all nations, the minimal covenant available to every human being. Joshua was not offering Israel's Torah to Canaan. He was offering the nations a chance to recognize what was already at work in the world.

Then, when diplomacy ran out, he raised his javelin.

Ben Sira, writing in Hebrew around 180 BCE in Jerusalem, captures the moment in chapter 46 of his wisdom text with a line that has the force of a visual: "How admirable when he stretched out his hand, when he waved his javelin at a city." Ben Sira frames what follows not as military strategy but as the wars of God, fought through Joshua, but not belonging to Joshua. "Who is it who could stand against him? For the wars of Adonai were fought." The javelin is Joshua's arm. The outcome is not.

Ben Sira also records the moment when Joshua commanded the sun to stand still during the battle at Gibeon (Joshua 10:12-13). The sun stopped. The battle continued. Ben Sira's comment on this is theological rather than astronomical: God heard the voice of a human being and altered the movement of creation to match it. That is a different kind of power than military strength. It is the power of a person whose requests have become aligned enough with divine will that the universe reorganizes itself to accommodate them.

The holy land in these traditions is not simply territory. It is a place charged with names, the names God has established over centuries of covenant, the names that make the land's boundaries mean something beyond geography. Joshua's letter was an acknowledgment of that. His javelin was an enforcement of it. He understood both, which is perhaps why the tradition in Ginzberg gives him the diplomatic gesture before the military one, and why Ben Sira gives him the cosmic gesture, the stopped sun, as the seal on everything that followed.

The letter came first. It always came first. Only after every other option had been offered and refused did the walls come down.

Ben Sira's account of Joshua is remarkable for what it chooses to highlight. Most of the conquest narrative in Joshua itself is military: cities taken, peoples destroyed, land allocated. Ben Sira is a wisdom text, written around 180 BCE by a Jerusalem scribe named Yeshua ben Sira, and it is interested in what made Joshua worthy of the role he occupied. The outstretched hand and the javelin are not signs of aggression in Ben Sira's reading. They are signs of alignment. a human being acting in such perfect accord with divine purpose that even the sky reorganized itself to extend the battle until it could be concluded. The sun standing still is not a special effect. It is the world acknowledging that something it was ordered around was happening.

The letter and the javelin together define Joshua's character in these traditions. He was not a man who wanted war. The Ginzberg account makes clear that he would have preferred the nations to accept his terms and leave. Three options were offered. The Girgashites left. Some others made peace. Only when the diplomatic path had been genuinely exhausted did the army advance. This is a Joshua the military chapters of the Torah do not foreground, but which the rabbinic and wisdom traditions preserved because they understood something important: the conquest of the Land was supposed to be a last resort, not a first impulse. Ginzberg's sources preserved that detail because it mattered for how Israel was supposed to understand what had been done in its name.