Joshua14chapter 14

Joshua 14:1-2

The three parties who divide the land were named by God seven years earlier, at Numbers 34:17, where Eleazar and Joshua are appointed with one prince from each tribe. Eleazar stands before Joshua here, though Joshua commands everything else in the book, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read the order from the method: what is settled by lot is settled by an appeal to God, and the priest handles that. The lot is meant literally and was commanded at Numbers 26:55, so the borders about to be traced were fixed by a means no man could steer toward his own tribe.

Joshua 14:3-5

For Moses had given the inheritance: Two arithmetic problems are answered in one breath. Levi is taken out of the count and receives cities with suburbs instead of territory, and Joseph is counted as two tribes, Manasseh and Ephraim, which Jacob had arranged at Genesis 48:5 long before there was any land to divide. Nine and a half tribes are left to provide for west of Jordan because two and a half already have their ground east of it, and the twelve are still twelve.

Joshua 14:6-7

Caleb comes before the lot is cast, because he is not asking for a share of what the lot will assign. He calls Moses the man of God, a title the King James floor first gives him at Deuteronomy 33:1, after the whole Pentateuch has gone by without it, and this verse is the next place it is said of him. His summary of his own report at Kadesh is that he brought word as it was in mine heart, which claims sincerity rather than accuracy, and Numbers 13:30 records what he actually said.

Joshua 14:8-9

Wholly followed the Lord is the exact phrase the King James floor uses six times, and three of the six are in this chapter, at verses 8, 9 and 14. It is first spoken of Caleb at Numbers 32:12 and repeated of him at Deuteronomy 1:36, so the man quoting it about himself is quoting a verdict God passed on him rather than inventing praise. Numbers 14:24 gives the same judgment in different words, that he had another spirit with him and hath followed me fully, and adds the promise of the land he walked on.

Joshua 14:10-11

The forty-five years break into two known stretches. Albert Barnes counts thirty-eight from the report of the spies to the arrival at Jordan, following Numbers 13:25 and Numbers 20:1, which leaves seven years of war since the crossing, and those seven are the long time of Joshua 11:18. Caleb was forty when he was sent and is eighty-five when he speaks, so he stood outside the sentence of Numbers 14:29 for the whole of it while every man he had marched out of Egypt with died in the desert.

Joshua 14:12-13

He asks for the one piece of ground that frightened the ten, and he names its two difficulties himself, the Anakim on it and the cities great and fenced. Those Anakim are the sons of Anak the spies met at Hebron in Numbers 13:22, and they are the reason Numbers 13:33 says the report ended in men like grasshoppers. His claim rests on the promise and not on his own strength, and the sentence he uses is conditional, if so be the Lord will be with me, which Adam Clarke and John Wesley both take as a plain confession that the help is not owed to him.

Joshua 14:14-15

The grant is given a reason, the third wholly followed in seven verses, and Joshua 15:14 and Judges 1:20 record him actually driving out the three sons of Anak afterward, so the request and the fighting are separate acts years apart. Hebron is where Abraham bought a grave at Genesis 23, where David reigned over Judah seven years and six months before he took Jerusalem, and Joshua 21:11-12 later gives the city itself to the priests while the fields stay Caleb's. The closing clause, the land had rest from war, is the first time the King James floor puts it in those words; Judges uses it three times, at 3:11, 3:30 and 5:31, and then stops using it for good.