1And Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel at Shechem, and he called to the elders of Israel and to its chieftains and to its judges and to its overseers, and they stood forth before God. 2And Joshua said to all the people: “Thus said the LORD God of Israel: ‘Your forefathers dwelled across the Euphrates long ago—Terah father of Abraham and father of Nahor, and they served other gods. 3And I took your father Abraham from across the Euphrates and led him to the land of Canaan, and I multiplied his seed and gave him Isaac. 4And I gave to Isaac Jacob and Esau, and I gave to Esau the high country of Seir to take hold of, but Jacob and his sons went down to Egypt. 5And I sent Moses and Aaron, and I struck Egypt with plagues that I wrought in its midst, and afterward I brought you out. 6And I brought your forefathers out of Egypt, and you came to the sea, and the Egyptians pursued your forefathers with chariots and horsemen in the Sea of Reeds. 7And they cried out to the LORD, and He put a veil of darkness between you and the Egyptians and brought the sea against them, and it covered them, and your own eyes saw that which I wrought against Egypt, and you dwelled in the wilderness many years. 8And I brought you to the land of the Amorites dwelling across the Jordan, and they did battle against you, and I gave them into your hand, and you took hold of their land, and I destroyed them before you. 9And Balak son of Zippor king of Moab rose up and did battle against Israel, and he sent out and called Balaam son of Beor to curse you. 10And I was unwilling to listen to Balaam, and in fact he blessed you, and I saved you from his hand. 11And you crossed the Jordan and came to Jericho, and the lords of Jericho did battle against you—the Amorite and the Perizzite and the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Girgashite, the Hivvite and the Jebusite. And I gave them into your hand. 12And I sent the hornet before you, and it drove them from before you—the two Amorite kings—not by your sword and not by your bow. 13And I gave you a land in which you had not toiled and towns that you had not built, and you dwelled in them; from vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant you are eating the fruit.’ 14And now, fear the LORD and serve Him in wholeness and truth, and put away the gods that your forefathers served across the Euphrates and in Egypt, and serve the LORD. 15And if it be evil in your eyes to serve the LORD, choose today whom you would serve, whether the gods that your forefathers served across the Euphrates or whether the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell, but I and my household will serve the LORD.” 16And the people answered and said, “Far be it from us to forsake the LORD to serve other gods. 17For the LORD our God, it is He Who brings our forefathers and us up from the land of Egypt, from the house of slaves, and Who has wrought before our eyes these great signs and guarded us on all the way that we have gone and among all the peoples through whose midst we have passed. 18And the LORD drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites, inhabitants of the land. We, too, will serve the LORD, for He is our God.” 19And Joshua said to the people, “You will not be able to serve the LORD, for He is a holy God. He is a jealous God, He will not put up with your crimes and your offenses. 20For should you forsake the LORD and serve alien gods, He shall turn back and do harm to you and put an end to you after having been good to you.” 21And the people said to Joshua, “No! For we will serve the LORD.” 22And Joshua said to the people, “You are witnesses for yourselves that you have chosen the LORD to serve Him.” And they said, “We are witnesses.” 23“And now, put away the alien gods that are in your midst, and bend your hearts to the LORD God of Israel.” 24And the people said to Joshua, “The LORD we will serve and His voice we will heed.” 25And Joshua sealed a pact for the people on that day and set it for them as statute and law at Shechem. 26And Joshua wrote these things in the book of God’s teaching, and he took a great stone and set it under the terebinth that is in God’s sanctuary. 27And Joshua said to all the people, “Look, this stone shall be witness for us because it has heard all the LORD’s sayings that He spoke to us, and it shall be witness to you lest you deny your God.” 28And Joshua sent the people each man to his estate.
29And it happened after these things that Joshua son of Nun servant of the LORD died, a hundred ten years old. 30And they buried him in the territory of his estate in Timnath-Serah, which is in the high country of Ephraim north of Mount Gaash. 31And Israel served the LORD all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua and who had known all the acts of the LORD that He wrought for Israel. 32And the bones of Joseph, which the Israelites had brought up from Egypt, they buried in Shechem in the plot of land that Jacob had bought from the sons of Hamor for a hundred kesitahs, so that it became an estate for the sons of Joseph. 33And Eleazar the son of Aaron died, and they buried him on the hill of Phineas his son, which had been given to him in the high country of Ephraim.
CHAPTER 24 NOTES
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1. And Joshua gathered all the tribes. The book appropriately ends with a renewal of the covenant between Israel and its God, followed by the obituary notices for Joshua and Eleazar.
2. Your forefathers dwelled across the Euphrates . . . and they served other gods. Joshua’s recapitulation of national history begins all the way back with Abraham’s ancestral family in Mesopotamia. (“Euphrates” in the Hebrew, as elsewhere in biblical usage, is “the River”). But he immediately reminds his audience that before Abraham these people were idolators, for the danger of backsliding into idolatry is uppermost in his mind throughout the speech.
4. Jacob and Esau. It is noteworthy that Esau, together with his territorial inheritance, is mentioned with Jacob. There may be a gesture of restitution here for Jacob’s stealing the paternal blessing.
5. I struck Egypt with plagues that I wrought in its midst. The Hebrew text shows what looks like a small glitch: “I struck Egypt with plagues as [or when, kaʾasher] I wrought in its midst.” The Septuagint has a smoother reading: “I struck Egypt with plagues as I wrought signs in its midst.”
7. a veil of darkness. The Hebrew maʾafel, cognate to the more common ʾapheilah, “darkness,” is unique to this verse. The clear reference is to the pillar of cloud in Exodus.
8. the land of the Amorites dwelling across the Jordan. These are the trans-Jordanian kings vanquished by Israel under Moses, as reported in Numbers and in Deuteronomy.
9. Balak . . . did battle against Israel. Because no actual battle is reported in Numbers 22:36–41, some commentators have claimed that a variant tradition is reflected here, but this is an unnecessary inference. Balak clearly saw Israel as his enemy and sought to destroy it using the curses of a professional hexer as his weapon of choice.
11. the Amorite and the Perizzite and the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Girgashite, the Hivvite and the Jebusite. It is odd that all the seven peoples of Canaan are introduced here as though they had fought at Jericho, whereas no mention of a Canaanite alliance appears in the Jericho story. Perhaps Jericho, as the gateway town of Canaan and the first conquered, triggered the invocation of all these peoples, in a kind of synecdoche.
12. the hornet. This is the traditional understanding of tsirʿah, leading some scholars to claim that noxious insects were actually used as weapons. But, on etymological grounds, as I proposed in comments on Exodus 23:28 and Deuteronomy 7:20, the term could mean “the Smasher,” a mythological rather than a zoological entity.
13. you are eating the fruit. “Fruit” is implied by ellipsis. Pointedly, the verb for enjoying the fruit of vineyard and olive grove switches from past to a present participle, emphasizing to the audience that they themselves are benefiting from the conquest.
14. in wholeness and truth. Many construe these two Hebrew nouns as a hendiadys, having the sense of “in absolute truth.”
15. whether the gods that your forefathers served . . . or . . . the gods of the Amorites. There is surely a note of sarcasm here: if you really want to serve foreign gods, just take your pick between Mesopotamian and Canaanite deities.
18. all the peoples, the Amorites. “Amorites” is sometimes a particular people and sometimes a general rubric for the sundry peoples of Canaan.
19. You will not be able to serve the LORD, for He is a holy God. In the face of the people’s solemn declaration to remain faithful to the God of Israel, Joshua expresses grave doubt: YHWH is a holy God, making severe demands of exclusive loyalty, and I don’t believe you will be able to meet these demands. This view sets the stage for the series of idolatrous backslidings in Judges.
25. set it for them as statute and law. The same phrase is used in Exodus 15:25.
26. the book of God’s teaching. This is a new designation, on the model of “the book of Moses’s teaching” and so can refer either to Deuteronomy or to the Five Books of Moses, unless what Joshua writes is an appendix to them.
27. this stone shall be witness. Commemorative stone markers confirming treaties appear a number of times in the Hebrew Bible and were common in much of the ancient Near East.
29. servant of the LORD. Here at the end Joshua is given the same epithet as Moses.
a hundred ten years old. The narrative pointedly allots Joshua ten years fewer than Moses, using instead the Egyptian number for a very full life span.
33. The received text of Joshua ends on a relatively harmonious note of renewal of the covenant and the death in ripe old age of the military leader Joshua and the priestly leader Eleazar. But the ancient Greek translator used a Hebrew text that concludes more discordantly with the following verse, which confirms Joshua’s doubts and looks forward to Judges: “And the Israelites went each man to his place and to the town, and the Israelites served Ashtoreth and the Ashtaroth and the gods of the peoples round about them, and the LORD gave them into the hand of Eglon king of Moab, and he ruled over them eighteen years.” Though a variant manuscript might have added this report in order to create a bridge with the beginning of Judges, it seems more likely that a scribe or an editor deleted it out of motives of national piety, so as not to conclude the book with an image of Israel’s shame.