The Priests Who Stepped Into the Jordan at Flood Stage

The River Came Up to Meet Them

The water was loud before they could see it. All morning the people had marched east of the camp toward a sound like wind trapped in a canyon, and when the ground opened and the valley fell away beneath them, there it was, the Jordan swollen brown and white, throwing itself against its own banks. It was the season when the river forgets its size. Snowmelt poured down from the far mountains, the barley stood ready in the fields, and the current had climbed over the willows and out across the flats, so that there was no shore left to stand on, only mud sucking at the heels and then the water, fast, cold, and rising.

No one had crossed here in living memory at this time of year. A man who waded in would be off his feet in three steps and gone in ten, rolled under and carried south to the dead salt sea where nothing comes back. The whole nation stood on the high lip of the valley and looked down at the thing that lay between them and the land they had been promised, and the land looked very far away.

An Order Turned Upside Down

Every other day of the march the fighting men went first. Spears at the front, the banners, the young and the strong, and the holy things carried safe in the middle of the column where no enemy could reach them. That was the order, and the order made sense.

This day the order was overturned. Joshua sent the priests forward, and on their shoulders they bore the Ark, the gold-covered chest that held the tablets, the most guarded object the people owned, carried now ahead of everyone, straight at the flood. The instruction was strange enough that men repeated it to one another to be sure they had heard it. "The Ark goes first. The priests go first." And they were told the manner of it exactly, that the water would not move while they stood watching it. It would move only when the soles of their feet had already gone in.

So the priests walked down the bank with the poles cutting into their shoulders, and behind them the whole nation held its breath, and the river kept its noise and gave no sign of yielding. The men were to step into a current that drowns, carrying the one thing that must never be lost, and they were to do it on the promise that the water would stop only after they were already wet. There was no proof until there was no turning back.

The Soles of Their Feet

The lead priests reached the edge where the brown water tore past. They did not stop. They put their feet down into it.

The instant the water closed over their sandals, the river heard them. Far upstream the current reared backward like a horse hauled up by the bit. The flood that had been racing south stopped, then turned, then began to climb. It did not spread into a shallow puddle that would slump and collapse and drown the men standing under it. It heaped. It went up. One wall of water rose and a second wall rose behind it and a third behind that, arch stacked on arch, packed and braced against itself the way stone is braced in a gate, climbing higher than any tower, higher than any hill, a green-and-white cliff of standing water that threw its shadow miles across the valley.

Men who knew measurements argued about the height of it for the rest of their lives. Some said the wall stood as high as a hard day's walk laid on its end. Others swore it rose higher still, so tall that every king east and west of the river, sitting in his far palace, looked up from his throne and saw the wall of the Jordan hanging in the sky and went cold, knowing whose nation was crossing.

What Joshua Said in the Middle of the River

The riverbed lay open, packed gravel and stones still wet, and the people poured down onto it. The priests carried the Ark to the middle and there they stopped and stood, the wall towering on the upstream side, the empty channel running dry below, and the nation walking across between them.

Joshua spoke while they crossed, and his words were a condition, not a comfort. "You go over on these terms," he told them. "You cross to clear that land of its idols, its carved stones and its high places and the names men whisper to wood. Cross for that, or the water that stands above you comes down." The wall was not a gift handed over without cost. It was held up like a held breath, and what held it was the thing they had sworn to do on the other side.

So they walked faster, every family, the children carried, the herds driven, all of them passing under a cliff of water that could fall, kept up only by a promise about the country ahead.

The Word That Named a Grandfather

There was something in the way the rescue was described that older men caught and held onto. The upstream waters, it was said, rose in one heap far off, near a town called Adam, and the same letters that spell that town's name also spell the plain word for a man. Those who listened closely heard a second meaning folded inside the first. The river did not climb for nothing and for no one. It climbed on an old debt.

Long before, a lone man had crossed this same Jordan running the other way, fleeing for his life with nothing in his hands. Jacob, going out into exile, had said of himself that with only his staff he crossed this Jordan. One man, one stick, one frightened night at the water's edge. Now his children came back across the same river in their thousands, dry-shod, under a standing wall, and the merit of that grandfather and his single staff was the coin the crossing was paid with. The water remembered him. It rose for the staff he once carried over alone.

The Land Cast Out Before Them

When the last of the people had reached the far bank, the priests carried the Ark up out of the channel, and the moment the soles of their feet lifted clear of the riverbed and touched dry ground, the walls let go. The heaped water came down in one falling roar and the Jordan filled its banks and ran south again at flood stage as though it had never paused, as though no nation had ever walked through it.

The hill country lay open before them now, and they took it, and the people already living in those hills were driven out ahead of them. As long as the nation kept faith with the God who had stopped the river, they held the high ground and prospered, and the land stayed theirs.