Joshua
Joshua planted two ideas that have echoed through Western history and gotten fiercely argued over: holy war and a divine grant of land.
Read this if you…
- want the conquest narrative — Jericho's walls falling at the sound of trumpets, the sun standing still over Gibeon
- like military history with a theological frame: a tribal coalition taking a fortified land, city by city
- care about the most morally uncomfortable book in the Hebrew Bible — the herem (devotion to destruction) passages that have troubled readers for centuries
Skip this if you…
- don't want to read explicitly religious/Christian texts
Why It Matters
Joshua planted two ideas that have echoed through Western history and gotten fiercely argued over: holy war and a divine grant of land. The fall of Jericho became one of the most recognizable battle stories in the Bible.
Depicted in Art
A tiny Joshua raises his arms on a precipice as vast storm clouds, hail, and lightning rake the Amorite army across a sweeping panoramic landscape; the sun hangs frozen above Gibeon.
John Martin, 1816
Joshua, sword raised, stands above the slain on a rocky outcrop, his face turned toward a sun bursting through cloud over a battle-strewn valley.
Gustave Doré, 1866
Priests bear the Ark of the Covenant into the riverbed while a vast file of Israelites streams across the dry channel, the waters piled in a wall upstream.
Gustave Doré, 1866
Israelite priests with rams' horn trumpets and the Ark process at the foot of Jericho's massive walls as the masonry visibly cracks and topples behind them.
Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, 1860
Upper register: priests bear the Ark across the dry Jordan as the Israelites follow. Lower register: Joshua, dressed as a Roman general, dispatches two spies toward Jericho.
432
Joshua kneels at the head of his troops, arm extended toward the heavens, while the Israelite army below presses an Amorite rout across an open plain.
Joseph-Marie Vien, 1743
Israelite priests with seven trumpets and the Ark of the Covenant complete their seventh circuit as the walls of Jericho collapse in a single dramatic moment around the procession.
Jean Fouquet, 1470
Recommended Editions
King James Version
Cambridge University Press · 1611
The most influential and commonly quoted translation in English. The prose rhythm everyone else is responding to, even modern translations.
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Deep Dive
What It's About
This summary gives away plot details.
Notable Quotes
“And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”
“Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.”