Joshua

His birth name was Hoshea, which means salvation. Moses changed it to Joshua, which puts the divine name in front and means the LORD saves (Numbers 13:16). In Greek that name is Iesous, the name given to Jesus at Matthew 1:21 for the same stated reason, that He will save His people.

Hebrews 4:8 builds an argument on the two men sharing it, and the older English versions print Jesus in that verse because the Greek word is the same. Matthew Henry read the change as a prayer turned into a promise. Hoshea asks God to save; Joshua says He will.

He identified Himself as Commander of the army of the LORD, accepted Joshua's prostration, and told him to take off his sandals because the ground was holy, which is what Moses heard at the burning bush (Joshua 5:13-15; Exodus 3:5). Two things in the text carry the weight: He receives worship, and He calls the ground holy in the words spoken at the bush.

Justin Martyr in the second century, Origen in the third, Eusebius in the early fourth and Ambrose late in the fourth all read Him as the pre-incarnate Christ, and Adam Clarke, John Wesley and others followed them. Albert Barnes read Him as the prince of the angelic host. This site teaches the Christophany reading and names the other without setting the teachers against each other.

The text says Joshua spoke, the sun stood still, and that there has been no day like it before or since, because the LORD listened to the voice of a man (Joshua 10:12-14). Joshua asked for it. The passage presents an answered prayer rather than a power he held.

Readers have taken the event in more than one way for a long time. Adam Clarke read a real astronomical miracle and explained the military reason behind the request. Albert Barnes reports that the older Jewish authorities, the Christian fathers and many commentators ancient and modern read it literally, notes that the passage quotes the poetic Book of Jashar, and sets out the reading that takes the language as poetry. Ben Sira, writing in the second century BC, already read it as a real solar event.

This site names the positions and settles nothing. The fuller treatment is on the Joshua study guide.

Joshua 8:30-31 says Joshua built an altar of uncut stones on Mount Ebal, offered on it, wrote a copy of the law on stones, and read every word aloud. That is what the text says, and it is the starting point.

Adam Zertal of the University of Haifa located a site on the mountain during his Manasseh Hill Country Survey in 1980 and excavated it from 1982 to 1989. The central structure is a rectangular installation of unhewn field stones with a ramp, filled with ash, animal bone and Iron Age I pottery, and Zertal identified it as Joshua's altar. Aharon Kempinski answered in Biblical Archaeology Review in 1986, reading the structure as a filled-in house serving as the base of a watchtower, and Zertal replied in the same issue. The identification never won broad acceptance among archaeologists, and many who reject it still accept that the site was used for early Israelite worship of some kind.

In 2022 Scott Stripling and his team announced a small folded lead object recovered by wet-sifting Zertal's discarded dump material, and read it as a Late Bronze proto-alphabetic curse text carrying the divine name. Aren Maeir and Christopher Rollston answered in the Israel Exploration Journal that the high-resolution images show no discernible letters and that the object is most reasonably an uninscribed lead weight. Stripling has replied. The dispute is live and this page reports it as a dispute.

He should never have made it. Joshua 9:14 says the men of Israel sampled the provisions and did not seek the counsel of the LORD, and the instrument for asking had been given to him at Numbers 27:21, where Eleazar the priest inquires by the Urim.

Having sworn by the LORD, the leaders kept the oath instead of breaking it (Joshua 9:19-20), and centuries later 2 Samuel 21 shows that word still binding on Israel. John Wesley reads the treaty as right in substance and wrong in method, and says that in every business of importance we should stay to take God along with us. Ambrose of Milan names the failure and refuses to sneer at it in the same paragraph, observing that a promised word was held so sacred in those days that nobody expected to be deceived.

Gibeon itself has no page on this site yet, so it is named here in words rather than linked.

Scripture gives his age at death as 110 (Joshua 24:29). It never says how old he was at the Jordan and it never says how long he led.

Caleb supplies the only arithmetic the text offers. He was forty when Moses sent him from Kadesh-barnea, he was eighty-five when he asked for Hebron, and forty-five years lie between (Joshua 14:7-10). Thirty-eight of those years were the wandering, which leaves about seven years for the campaign. Joshua and Caleb were of the same generation, which puts Joshua at about eighty when he crossed the river.

For the length of his rule the Bible supplies nothing. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown report that Lightfoot computed seventeen years after the entry into Canaan and that others computed twenty-seven. Those are reckonings by later readers, not statements of Scripture.

Both statements stand in the same book and this page holds them together instead of choosing one. Joshua 11:23 says he took the entire land, and Joshua 21:43-45 says the LORD gave Israel all the land He had sworn to give and that not one good promise failed. Joshua 13:1 says he was old and that very much of the land remained to be possessed. Joshua 11:22 says no Anakim were left in Israel's land, and that some survived in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod.

The land was given and the taking of it was not finished. Joshua 23:12-13 warns about exactly that, and Judges opens with the work unfinished.

That surviving remnant matters later. The Anakim the spies feared at Numbers 13:33 are the Anakim Joshua cleared from the hill country, and the text names where the survivors went. Goliath comes out of Gath (1 Samuel 17:4), and 2 Samuel 21:22 says the men of Gath were born to the Rapha. The line runs from Genesis 3:15 through Numbers 13:33 and Joshua 11:22 to Gath, on the text and the evidence and no further. Gath and Gibeon have no pages on this site yet and are named here in words.

Scripture never says. No wife and no child is named for him anywhere, and the record on this site leaves both fields unknown because the text does.

A rabbinic tradition preserved in the Babylonian Talmud at Megillah 14b holds that Rahab converted and married Joshua, and that eight prophets who were also priests came from her. The Babylonian Talmud was completed between about AD 500 and 600, and this is a tradition rather than a biblical statement. It is reported here with its source named and is not presented as biography.

The famous line about his house at Joshua 24:15 has no household described anywhere in the text behind it. He is speaking as the head of a family the Bible never lists.

Israel served the LORD as long as Joshua and the elders who outlived him were alive (Joshua 24:31; Judges 2:7). Then Judges 2:10 says another generation rose up who did not know the LORD or the works He had done. Joshua commissioned no successor, and Judges opens with Israel asking the LORD who should go up first.

The burial place is given as Timnath-serah in the hill country of Ephraim, north of Mount Gaash (Joshua 24:30), which Judges 2:9 spells Timnath-heres. The two consonants are transposed and the commentators note it without resolving it. Two sites carry the tradition. Khirbet Tibnah, a ruin in the southwestern hill country of Samaria, is the identification many geographers have preferred, described by Victor Guerin in 1863 and again in 1870, and an excavation began there in 2022. The village of Kifl Hares carries a long-standing Jewish tradition placing the tombs of Joshua, Caleb and Nun, and a Samaritan tradition recorded in 1877 placing Joshua and Caleb there. Neither is proven, and both are given here as traditions with their witnesses named.

No inscription, seal, stele or annal from the ancient world names Joshua, and no excavated object has been shown to belong to him.