Joshua3chapter 3

Joshua 3:1-2

Shittim is the camp of Numbers 25:1, where Israel went after the daughters of Moab, and Joshua 2:1 sent the spies out of that same place. The nation leaves it, lodges at the river and waits three days, which is the interval Joshua 1:11 had already named when the officers were told to prepare victuals. Micah 6:5 later treats the two ends of this move as one act of God, from Shittim unto Gilgal, so the stretch that begins in this verse was remembered whole.

Joshua 3:3-4

The people are told to move when the ark moves and to keep about a thousand yards behind it. The verse gives its own reason, that ye may know the way by which ye must go, for ye have not passed this way heretofore, so the gap is about sight rather than danger, since a chest on men's shoulders cannot be seen from the back of a camp that size unless the ground in front of it is kept clear. Adam Clarke reads reverence for the sign of God's presence alongside that, and John Wesley notes that the later Jewish measure of a sabbath day's walk was fixed at the same two thousand cubits.

Joshua 3:5-6

Exodus 19:10-11 has Moses sanctify the people to day and to morrow against the third day, when the Lord came down on the mountain, and the same word is paired with the same to morrow here. Sanctify yourselves falls once more in this book, at 7:13 after the defeat at Ai, where it goes before a search for the accursed thing instead of before a wonder. The ark is carried by priests rather than by the Kohathites of Numbers 4:15, and Adam Clarke notes that priests carry it again at the circuit of Jericho in 6:6.

Joshua 3:7-8

Joshua 1:5 gave him the promise in these exact words, as I was with Moses, so I will be with thee, and this verse says the public proof of it starts today. Joshua 4:14 reports the result in the same vocabulary, that the Lord magnified Joshua in the sight of all Israel and they feared him as they feared Moses all his days. The instrument is a river, which is what accredited Moses at the sea, and Joshua's own part in it is to tell priests to stand still in the water.

Joshua 3:9-11

The living God has fallen once before in Scripture, at Deuteronomy 5:26 of the voice out of the fire, and the next man to use the title is David in front of Goliath at 1 Samuel 17:26. The seven nations listed here are the seven of Deuteronomy 7:1 in a different order, so the list is a standing formula rather than a survey of who was waiting across the river. The Lord of all the earth is rarer still: it falls twice in this chapter, at verses 11 and 13, and only once more in the whole King James Bible, at Zechariah 6:5.

Joshua 3:12-13

Twelve men are chosen and no reason is given for them, an omission John Gill points out, and chapter 4 supplies the answer when they lift twelve stones out of the riverbed. The condition in verse 13 is exact: the water is cut off as soon as the soles of the priests' feet rest in it, so nothing moves until men walk into a river in flood. Stand upon an heap is Red Sea vocabulary, since Exodus 15:8 says the floods stood upright as an heap and Psalm 78:13 says it again, and the phrase upon an heap falls in the King James Bible only here and at verse 16.

Joshua 3:14-16

Harvest is the detail that makes the timing hard rather than convenient, because Jordan overfloweth all his banks then; John Wesley reads it as the barley harvest, since chapter 5 has them keeping the passover on the fourteenth day of the first month a few days later. The water stops at a named place, the city Adam beside Zaretan, roughly sixteen miles upstream, so the account fixes a location it had no need to supply. Readers differ over the mechanism. Some point to the recorded blockings of the Jordan by bank collapses at that same reach, in 1267 and again in July 1927, and read a fall of earth timed to the moment the priests stepped in; others read a direct holding of the water, and the text gives the place and the hour and no mechanism at all.

Joshua 3:17

stood firm on dry ground: Dry ground is the Red Sea wording of Exodus 14:16 and 14:22, and after this verse it falls next at 2 Kings 2:8, where Elijah crosses this same river on it. The priests do not cross with the nation. They stand in the middle of the channel until every person is over, which keeps the ark between the people and the water for the whole length of the crossing, and 4:18 says the river returns the moment their feet come up on the bank. Albert Barnes sets the passage beside 1 Corinthians 10:1-2, where Paul reads the sea crossing the same way.