Joshua12chapter 12

A list of this kind states a result. The narrative of chapters 6 to 11 reports campaigns, and the register reports the outcome in a form that can be counted: thirty-one named kings, each with his city, gathered under one number. The published exposition note on verses 19 to 24 records that the chapter ends on a number instead of a sentence.

The list also carries the seam between the two leaders. Verse 6 calls Moses the servant of the LORD. It records the grant of Numbers 32:33 to Reuben, Gad and the half-tribe of Manasseh as settled before a single western king is named. The published exposition note on verses 4 to 6 sets that out, with Deuteronomy 3:11, the one place that gives a measure of Og.

The historical value: the cities the spade has reached

Three of the places named in this list carry excavation reports the dossier already holds, and a fourth stands in the argument over the date (src/components/book/dossier-content/joshua.ts, the archaeology section).

Jericho at verse 9 is the first name in the western list. Tell es-Sultan was dug by John Garstang from 1930 to 1936 and re-excavated by Kathleen Kenyon from 1952 to 1958. The dossier states that a violently destroyed and burned city with collapsed fortifications is agreed, and that its date is argued. Garstang put the destruction near 1400 BC and Kenyon near 1550 BC. Bryant Wood argued for Garstang's date on a fresh reading of Kenyon's pottery (Biblical Archaeology Review, 1990). The dossier calls the site the single most argued piece of evidence bearing on the conquest's date.

Ai at verse 9 is the second name and the hardest. The dossier records that et-Tell, the traditional identification, was excavated by Joseph Callaway from 1964 to 1976. It shows no occupation at all in the Late Bronze Age, which leaves Joshua 8 with no city to destroy at either proposed conquest date. Bryant Wood proposed nearby Khirbet el-Maqatir, excavated from 1995, and reported a small fortified Late Bronze site with a gate on the north matching the ambush account. The dossier states plainly that the identification is argued rather than settled and that the difficulty at et-Tell is real.

Hazor at verse 19 is the one city the northern campaign burned. The dossier records the excavations of Yigael Yadin in 1955 to 1958 and 1968, and of Amnon Ben-Tor from 1990. They found a massive Late Bronze destruction, a burn layer reaching well over a metre in places, and deliberately mutilated Egyptian and Canaanite statues. Yadin identified that destruction with the Israelite conquest; Ben-Tor confirmed its scale and dates it to the thirteenth century, which fits the later exodus reading and leaves the earlier reading to account for the gap.

The outer limit on any of these readings is the Merneptah Stele of about 1208 BC, discovered by Flinders Petrie in 1896. The dossier describes it as an Egyptian victory inscription naming Israel as a people in Canaan, written with the determinative for a people rather than for a settled city-state.

The debated date of the conquest

The dossier carries this as a contested point with its holders, and this row cites it rather than arguing it again.

The fifteenth-century reading begins the conquest about 1406 BC. It rests on the four hundred and eightieth year of 1 Kings 6:1 and the three hundred years of Judges 11:26. It is held by Bryant Wood and by John Bimson (Redating the Exodus and Conquest, 1978). On this reading Garstang's burned city at Jericho is Joshua's Jericho.

The thirteenth-century reading begins it about 1230 to 1200 BC. It is held by Kenneth Kitchen (On the Reliability of the Old Testament, 2003) and by the majority of current archaeologists. They read the store cities of Exodus 1:11, the destruction layers at Hazor and Lachish, and the Merneptah Stele's mention of Israel in Canaan by 1208 BC. Lachish stands in this chapter at verse 11 and Hazor at verse 19, so the two sites the later reading leans on are both in the register.

The dossier's own header states that its timeline uses narrative-relative labels rather than fixed BC years, because a fixed conquest date depends on which of these readings of the exodus is taken. This page states no verdict.

The herem and the summarizing idiom

The dossier carries two positions on the ban, and this chapter is where the question meets a number.

The first position reads the herem as judgment on a ripened wickedness delayed four centuries. It rests on the text's own stated reasons at Genesis 15:16, Leviticus 18:24-28 and Deuteronomy 9:5, on the exemption of Rahab and of Gibeon, and it is this site's own reading.

The second position reads the campaigns as operations against fortified military centres, reported in the summarizing rhetoric ancient conquest accounts used. It is held by K. Lawson Younger Jr. (Ancient Conquest Accounts, 1990), who set Joshua beside Egyptian, Hittite and Assyrian campaign texts and argued that the summarizing idiom is shared, and by Kenneth Kitchen. The dossier's ancient Near East section states the point the parallel turns on. Egyptian and Assyrian annals of about 1500 to 700 BC carry total-victory formulas, in which a king reports annihilating a people and then campaigns against the same people in later years. The dossier states that this bears directly on how Joshua 10:40 sits in the same book as Joshua 13:1.

A king struck down and a city held

The register itself shows why the two kinds of statement in this book differ. Jerusalem stands in the tally at verse 10, and Joshua 15:63 states that the children of Judah could not drive out the Jebusites who lived there. The published exposition note on verses 9 to 18 draws the distinction from that: a king struck down and a city held are two different things in this book.

The same holds at the northern end of the list. Taanach, Megiddo and Dor are counted at verses 21 to 23. The published exposition note on verses 19 to 24 records that three of the five towns Manasseh left in place at Judges 1:27 are among them. Hazor's king is counted at verse 19, and a king of Hazor named Jabin is oppressing Israel again by Judges 4:2.

The witnesses to the number

The total at verse 24 is where the Greek and the Hebrew traditions part. Adam Clarke records that the Septuagint reads twenty-nine and then sets down twenty-eight, confounding or omitting the kings of Bethel, Lasharon and Madon (Commentary on the Bible, 1832, on Joshua 12:24). The Berean text of the store reads thirty-one at verse 24. The phrase "the king of" stands thirty-one times across verses 9 to 24 of that same text, so the names and the total agree. This page states no verdict on the Greek count.

The divine connection

What the register is measuring is a promise. Matthew Henry reads it that way on verse 7. He holds that the boundaries are described more fully in Numbers 34, and that what stands here is enough. It shows that God had been as good as his word and had given Israel possession of all He promised them by Moses (Commentary on the Whole Bible, 1710). The claim is checkable in the way a list is checkable, and it is checked against the same book's own record of what was left, which is the work chapter 13 begins.