Joshua21chapter 21

Joshua 21:1-3

The Levites are the one tribe that has to come and ask, because Numbers 18:20 and Joshua 13:33 left them with the Lord himself as their inheritance and no ground of their own. What they claim is a standing order given through Moses at Numbers 35:2, and they claim it at Shiloh where the tabernacle stood. The suburbs of verse 2 are pasture land, measured in Numbers 35:4 at a thousand cubits from the wall and in Numbers 35:5 at two thousand cubits on each side, and readers have taken the two figures either as an inner belt inside an outer square or as two separate measurements of the same grant.

Joshua 21:4-8

Four lots fall and the counts run thirteen, ten, thirteen and twelve, which fills the forty and eight cities of Numbers 35:7 exactly. Aaron's own sons draw first, and they draw into Judah, Simeon and Benjamin, the three tribes holding the ground where the temple would later stand, so the priesthood is settled around Jerusalem generations before David takes the city. Numbers 35:8 had set the rule that large tribes give many cities and small tribes few, which is why Judah's share is the heaviest here.

Joshua 21:9-19

Hebron goes to the priests as a city of refuge, and verse 12 keeps Caleb's grant of Joshua 14:13 intact by giving him the fields and the villages while the walled town becomes Levite ground. Anathoth in verse 18 is where Solomon banishes Abiathar in 1 Kings 2:26 and where Jeremiah comes from in Jeremiah 1:1, so two of the sharpest turns in the history of the priesthood happen in a town listed here without comment. Gibeon heads the Benjamin group at verse 17, the town that deceived Joshua in chapter 9 and was bound to serve the house of God, and the tabernacle itself stands there in 1 Chronicles 16:39. The parallel list at 1 Chronicles 6:54-81 differs in several names, which Albert Barnes treats as variant forms and copyists' slips rather than a different grant.

Joshua 21:20-26

The Kohathites who were not priests are placed in Ephraim, Dan and half Manasseh, and three of their ten towns are places Israel never cleared. Gezer at verse 21 is where Joshua 16:10 says the Canaanites stayed and paid tribute, Aijalon at verse 24 is where Judges 1:35 says the Amorites would dwell, and Tanach at verse 25 appears as Taanach in Judges 1:27 among the towns Manasseh could not drive out. Shechem is the refuge city of this group, the place where Joseph's bones are buried at Joshua 24:32 and where Abimelech is crowned in Judges 9.

Joshua 21:27-40

Gershon takes the north and Merari takes Zebulun with Reuben and Gad beyond Jordan, and four of the six refuge cities stand inside these verses at 27, 32, 36 and 38. Kedesh in Galilee is the town Deborah sends to for Barak at Judges 4:6, and Ramoth in Gilead is where Ahab dies in 1 Kings 22:29-37. Heshbon at verse 39 had been Sihon's royal city in Numbers 21:26, and Mahanaim at verse 38 is where Jacob met the angels in Genesis 32:2 and where David sheltered from Absalom in 2 Samuel 17:24. Levites are settled in towns that were Amorite capitals one generation earlier.

Joshua 21:41-42

Forty and eight cities inside every other tribe's land, so the tribe with no territory ends up living in all of them. Genesis 49:7 said of Levi, I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel, and Jacob spoke it as a sentence on the violence at Shechem. Here the scattering is the shape of the tribe's work, since Deuteronomy 33:10 gives Levi the teaching of the law and 2 Chronicles 17:8-9 shows Levites going through the cities of Judah to teach it. Matthew Henry reads the spread as deliberate, so that no part of the country sat far from a Levite.

Joshua 21:43-45

Three verses say the promise came through without remainder, in the same book that said at 13:1 there remaineth yet very much land to be possessed. Judges 1:19 to 1:36 then walks tribe by tribe through the towns that were never taken, and several of them are Levite cities listed earlier in this chapter. Readers hold the two together in different ways, some taking Joshua to speak of the land as granted and handed over rather than as occupied, others taking the rest of verse 44 as real and reading Israel's later losses as a forfeit of ground already won. Scripture states both and corrects neither.