The Ark Moved on Its Own Across the Jordan

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The River Stood Up

The priests came down the eastern bank with the Ark on their shoulders, and the Jordan was at flood. It was harvest season. The water had climbed over its banks and was running fast enough to take a grown man off his feet and roll him south. Behind the priests the whole nation stood packed along the shore, watching the poles and the gold chest swaying between them.

The first priest put his foot in the water.

The river stopped. Then it began to climb. The current folded back against itself and rose and kept rising, three hundred miles into the sky, until the water stood over the valley like a cliff nobody had built. South of the priests the channel drained. Mud, then stones, then dry ground running off toward the horizon. Every road in that country had a witness on it by evening, and the news of the wall of water reached the kings of the west before the last Israelite crossed.

The wonders at the river were meant to put authority on Joshua where the whole nation could see it. Moses had taken them out through a sea. A shallow crossing would have said nothing about the man who came after him.

He Walked Them Down Into It

Joshua did not send them across. He brought them down.

All Israel came off the bank and onto the floor of the Jordan, and he gathered them in around the Ark. The chest is two and a half cubits long. The gap between its two carrying staves is narrow enough that the men bearing it walk shoulder to shoulder. Every one of them fit inside that gap. The crowd did not spread out along the channel and the ground under them did not stretch. The space between the poles simply held a nation, and no one standing in it could say how.

Over their heads, on both sides, the water hung and did not fall.

The Terms He Read in the Riverbed

Then Joshua told them what God required of them in the country they were about to walk into. He set out the conditions one at a time while the wall stood above them, and when he had finished he told them what would happen if they refused. The water would come down. Not in a later generation, not at some judgment after their deaths. There, on that floor, on all of them, that afternoon.

Nobody argued. There was nowhere to stand and argue from.

They took the terms, and they marched.

Reuben Crossed Ahead of His Brothers

The armed men of Reuben went over first, ahead of the tribes who still had no land at all. Their portion was already behind them on the eastern side, already fenced and grazed, and their grandfather had told them it would be. On his deathbed in Egypt, Jacob had gone down the line of his sons and stopped at his eldest to take away the birthright, the priesthood and the crown, and then gave him one thing back: your tribe will be first to take hold of its portion in the land. First in. First to have a city of refuge standing on its ground. First, also, to be stripped by an enemy and carried off into exile.

Reuben's men walked across the dry Jordan into a promise that had already been cut in half.

The Ark Came Out by Itself

The priests stayed where they were. They had been standing in the middle of the channel since the first step, and they went on standing there while hundreds of thousands of people walked past them, and while twelve men bent at their feet and pulled twelve stones out of the riverbed to carry up to Gilgal.

When the last of Israel reached the western shore, the weight went off the priests' shoulders.

The poles lifted. The chest they had carried through forty years of wilderness, set down and raised again at every camp, draped and guarded and never once moving on its own, started forward up the dry channel. Their hands were still on the staves. Their feet came off the stones. It pulled them out of the riverbed and up the bank and past the whole nation standing there, and set them down at the head of the line, in front, where it had always travelled.

Behind them the wall let go, and the Jordan came down into its bed at flood, exactly as it had been.