Joshua Wrote a Letter Before He Raised His Spear

Joshua did not send the army first. He sent a letter.

Before a single trumpet sounded at Jericho, before the first sandal crossed the Jordan in force, Joshua sat and composed a message addressed to every people whose land Israel was about to enter. The letter was not a threat. It was a recounting, the plagues in Egypt laid out in plain language, the sea that split open, the manna that fell each morning in the wilderness, the water struck from rock. Forty years of impossible history, and at the end of it an army camped on the bank of the Jordan, waiting. He was telling the nations who they were dealing with, and he was giving them a choice before the spear was ever lifted.

Three options. Leave, and go in peace. Stay, and make peace. Or stay, and fight.

The Nation That Read the Letter and Believed It

The Girgashites read it and left.

There is almost no drama in that sentence, which is exactly the heart of it. A whole people, with houses and fields and the weight of generations in the soil, looked at the record of what God had done for Israel and made the simplest calculation available to them. They packed. They went. The letter declared that if the hero Japheth is with you, we have in our midst the Hero of heroes, the Highest above all the high. The Girgashites took that seriously. They became, in the tradition, a kind of negative proof: the war that never happened because one nation chose to read carefully.

The others did not read it that way. Some negotiated, some stalled, some reached for weapons. The army moved (Joshua 2:1).

The Fall of Jericho and What Came After

Jericho required no javelin and no conventional siege. The walls came down under a seven-day ritual of trumpets and silence and marching, and the city was devoted to destruction in a single afternoon (Joshua 6:20). No human commander could claim that victory as the result of skill or strategy. The signal it sent to every remaining city in Canaan was not that Israel had a good general. It was something colder and harder to answer.

But the next battle, at Ai, nearly broke the campaign.

The first assault on Ai failed. Thirty-six men died, and the rest fled, and Joshua tore his garments and fell on his face before the ark until evening (Joshua 7:6). The defeat came from a concealed violation inside the camp, a man named Achan who had taken from the devoted things at Jericho. Once the source of the rupture was found and dealt with, God spoke to Joshua again. Go up to Ai. I have given it into your hand. Take all the people of war.

The Arm That Could Not Come Down

The strategy for Ai was an ambush. Joshua positioned a large force in hiding to the west of the city while he approached from the north with the main army, drew the garrison out by feigning retreat, and waited for the hidden force to move.

The signal was his arm.

God told him to stretch out the spear he held toward the city, and God would deliver it (Joshua 8:18). Joshua raised his arm. The ambush force saw the signal and rose from their positions and entered Ai and set it on fire. The garrison of Ai, caught between two forces with their own city burning behind them, had nowhere to turn.

Joshua did not lower his arm.

All morning, all afternoon, with the smoke going up from Ai, with the fighting continuing in the valley below, he held the spear extended (Joshua 8:26). This was not a detail about endurance, a fact noted to illustrate his strength. Something else was happening. The spear arm was not a signal given and then withdrawn. It was continuous. The battle would continue while the arm was up. The city would fall while the arm was up. He would hold it until there was nothing left to hold it for.

He drew it back when Ai was gone.

The Day the Sun Stopped Over Gibeon

Ai was not the last time Joshua's arm would govern what happened around him. When the five Amorite kings attacked Gibeon, a city that had made peace with Israel, Joshua marched his army through the night from Gilgal and struck the coalition at dawn. God threw down great hailstones from the sky on the retreating kings, and more died from the hailstones than from swords (Joshua 10:11).

But there was still not enough day left to finish what needed finishing.

Joshua spoke to the Lord, and then he spoke in the hearing of all Israel. He commanded the sun to stand still over Gibeon, and the moon to halt in the valley of Ajalon (Joshua 10:12). The sun stood still. The moon did not move. A full day stretched where only an afternoon had been. Ben Sira, in the second century BCE, set the image plainly: Joshua stretched out his hand and waved his javelin at a city, and who could stand against him, for the wars of Adonai were fought (Ben Sira 46:6).

That question was not rhetorical. It had a demonstrated answer. No one could stand against him. Not because Joshua was the greatest soldier in the world. Because when Joshua raised his arm, the sun waited.

What the Letter and the Spear Have in Common

The letter Joshua sent before the campaign and the spear Joshua held over Ai are not opposite things. They are the same posture from two different directions. The letter asked the nations to reckon honestly with who they were dealing with. The spear demonstrated it for the ones who would not reckon. In both cases, the human action, writing, raising an arm, was the frame through which something larger operated. Joshua did the part that was his to do. The rest was not withheld.

The Girgashites understood the letter. The garrison of Ai understood the spear. The kings at Gibeon understood the sky going dark as the sun refused to set. Every one of them received the same information. It was only the form of delivery that changed.