1And it happened many years after the LORD had granted rest to Israel from all their enemies round about that Joshua grew old, advanced in years. 2And Joshua called to all Israel, to its elders and to its chieftains and to its judges and to its overseers. And he said to them, “I have grown old, advanced in years. 3As for you, you have seen all that the LORD your God has done to all these nations before you, for the LORD your God, it is He who did battle for you. 4See, I have made all these remaining nations fall to you in estate according to your tribes, and all the nations that I cut off, from the Jordan to the Great Sea where the sun goes down. 5And the LORD your God, it is He Who will drive them back before you and dispossess them before you, and you will take hold of their land as the LORD your God has spoken to you. 6And you must be very strong to keep and to do all that is written in the book of Moses’s teaching, not to swerve from it to the right or to the left, 7not to come among these nations that remain alongside you, nor to invoke the name of their gods nor swear by them nor worship them and bow to them. 8But to the LORD your God you shall cling as you have done till this day. 9And the LORD has dispossessed before you great and mighty nations, and you—no man has stood before you till this day. 10One man of you pursues a thousand, for the LORD your God, it is He Who does battle for you as He spoke to you. 11And you must be very careful for your own sake to love the LORD your God. 12For should you indeed turn back and cling to the rest of these remaining nations alongside you and intermarry with them and come among them, and they among you, 13you must surely know that the LORD your God will no longer dispossess these nations before you, and they will become a trap and a snare for you and a whip against your side and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from this good country that the LORD your God has given you. 14And, look, I am about to go today on the way of all the earth, and you know with all your heart and with all your being that not a single thing has failed of all the good things that the LORD your God has spoken about you. Everything has befallen you, not a single thing of it has failed. 15And it shall be, just as every good thing that the LORD your God has spoken of you has befallen you, so shall the LORD bring upon you every evil thing until He destroys you from this good country that the LORD your God has given you. 16When you overturn the pact of the LORD your God that He charged you and you go and worship other gods and bow to them, the wrath of the LORD will flare against you, and you will perish swiftly from the good land that He has given you.
CHAPTER 23 NOTES
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1. after the LORD had granted rest to Israel from all their enemies. This ringing declaration is subverted by the threat of exile that hovers over the end of the chapter. This is a tension that runs through both Joshua and Judges: God has enabled Israel to conquer all its enemies, yet the land is not completely conquered, and enemies threaten both within it and from surrounding nations. Even in this passage, the conquest of the Canaanite peoples alternates between being a completed process, as here, or a future activity, as in verse 5.
2. I have grown old, advanced in years. As several commentators have noted, Joshua’s valedictory address stands in a line with those of Moses, Samuel, and David.
4. all the nations that I cut off. The Hebrew of this verse seems a little scrambled, with this clause appearing after “from the Jordan.” In addition, “the Great Sea” lacks “to” in the Hebrew, and the preposition has been supplied in the translation.
6. you must be very strong to keep and to do all that is written in the book of Moses’s teaching. Here, as in much of the speech, the phraseology is strongly reminiscent of Deuteronomy. In the book as a whole, the presence of the Deuteronomist is palpable but intermittent. As editor, he appears to have wanted to put his strong imprint on the conclusion.
13. a whip against your side. The Masoretic Text reads leshotet, which would mean, implausibly, “to roam.” The assumption of this translation is that the second tet is a dittography and hence the Hebrew originally read leshot, “as a whip.”
14. I am about to go . . . on the way of all the earth. David on his deathbed, 1 Kings 2:2, uses the same language.
not a single thing. This could also be construed as “not a single word.”
15. until He destroys you from this good country. The term for “country,” ʾadamah, often means “soil,” and its use here might reflect a desire to introduce a connotation of the land’s fruitfulness. The notion that Israel will be driven from its land if it betrays its pact with God is preeminently Deuteronomistic. The years after 621 B.C.E., with the Assyrian and then the Babylonian threat uppermost in the minds of the Judahites as well as the memory of the uprooting of the northern kingdom of Israel a century earlier, were a time when, with good reason, national existence in the Land of Israel had come to seem painfully precarious.