Joshua15chapter 15

Joshua 15:1-12

Judah is given first and given most, before the tabernacle tribe and before Joseph, which matches the sceptre of Genesis 49:10 rather than birth order. The word lot is meant literally: Numbers 26:55 and Joshua 14:2 both say the land was divided by lot, so the borders traced here were settled by a method nobody could steer. The frame runs from the salt sea in verse 2 to the great sea in verse 12, so the chapter opens by drawing a line around the whole of it before naming anything inside.

Joshua 15:13-15

Caleb receives Hebron by the commandment of the LORD rather than by lot, which is the discharge of the promise made to him at Numbers 14:24 and claimed by him at Joshua 14:12. The three men he drives out are named, Sheshai and Ahiman and Talmai, and they are the same three the spies saw at Hebron in Numbers 13:22 when the report came back that the land ate up its inhabitants. The man who said the report was wrong takes the exact city that produced it, at eighty-five.

Joshua 15:16-19

The one piece of narrative in the chapter, and Judges 1:12-15 tells it again almost word for word. The man who takes the town is Othniel, who becomes the first judge of Israel at Judges 3:9, so the deliverer of the next book is introduced here winning a wife. Achsah is the only person in sixty-three verses who asks for anything, and what she asks for is water, since a south land without springs is a field that cannot be worked; her father gives her both the upper and the nether springs.

Joshua 15:20-32

The cities are grouped by region rather than listed at random, and this run covers the dry south toward Edom. A list like this is a legal record of title, which is why later books can argue from it, and why a town's tribe can be settled by looking it up. Beersheba stands in the middle of it at verse 28, already old by Genesis 21:31.

Joshua 15:33-47

The lowland and then the coast, and the coast is where the difficulty sits. Ekron, Ashdod and Gaza are written into Judah's inheritance at verses 45 to 47, and Joshua 11:22 had just said that the Anakim were left in those three towns. Zoreah and Eshtaol open the list, and they are where Samson is born and buried at Judges 13:2 and 16:31, so the tribe's paper border and the ground it actually holds are two different things from here on.

Joshua 15:48-62

The hill country and then the wilderness beside the salt sea. Bethlehem is absent from the King James list at verse 59, and the Septuagint carries eleven further towns there including it, which is the largest textual variant in the chapter and is worth naming rather than passing over. Engedi and the City of Salt close the run at verses 62 to 63, in the country where David later hides from Saul.

Joshua 15:63

The chapter ends on a failure, and it is stated in the same book that says at 21:45 that there failed not ought of any good thing which the LORD had spoken. Judah could not drive them out, and the Jebusites hold Jerusalem until David takes it at 2 Samuel 5:6-9, generations later. Judges 1:21 tells the same fact of Benjamin rather than Judah, and the two accounts stand together without either being corrected.