What's JOSHUA about?

The first five books of the Hebrew Bible (the five are called the “Pentateuch”) present the Jewish experiences of God from creation through the people being rescued from Egypt and their experiences of God in the wilderness where they are given laws. Joshua is the first of eleven books that describe how God led the people from their entry into the land God had promised them, and how their society developed and what happened when they abandoned the God of justice.

The book of Joshua begins immediately after Moses dies in the wilderness and describes how Joshua led the people across the Jordan river into the land, in the same way Moses had led the people across the Red Sea into the wilderness. The book then describes how they conquered the people who already lived there, starting with the capture of Jericho and then how they conquered the rest of the land. Finally the book decribes how various regions were assigned to each of the twelve different tribes.

There are three major speeches in the book: God makes one speech at the beginning commanding the people to take the land, Joshua makes another at the end of the book about the necessity of the people keeping God’s commands for justice after they are settled, and a final speech in which Joshua recounts how God has been faithful to them from the ancient time of Abraham.

The book was written long after the events it describes, during the time when the Jews had been conquered by the Assyrians and Babylonians and were being released back to their land. The details of the various battles are not likely to be accurate in detail, but express how God constantly upheld the people as had just happened with their rescue from Babylon.

How Joshua is helpful for us

The book of Joshua was designed to show how powerful God is in God’s commitment to the people and how the people must respond with justice in their own lives and country. The later books in this series, Kings and Chronicles, describe what the disasters that happen when justice and dignity for all is no longer a national priority. The application for our time is obvious, but does not require us to take all the historical details literally—they are a kind of template for us to apply to our own time our experience of God gifting us, and our necessary response in loving care for those with little power.