Joshua4chapter 4

Joshua 4:1-3

The order comes while the priests are still standing in the riverbed and the water is still held back, so the memorial is arranged before the miracle closes. The twelve men were picked a chapter earlier at 3:12 and the text gives their errand only now. The stones are taken from the one patch of ground a man could not otherwise reach, the place under the priests' feet in the channel, so the monument is built out of the riverbed itself.

Joshua 4:4-7

Verse 6 gives the reason for the pile before the pile exists, that a child will ask what the stones mean and get told. The same shape is set down twice in the Torah, at Exodus 12:26 for the passover and Deuteronomy 6:20 for the statutes, and each time the question comes from the child and the answer is a piece of history rather than a rule. Israel is told to leave an object strange enough on that flat ground to make somebody ask.

Joshua 4:8-9

Two piles are named, one carried out to the lodging place and one set up by Joshua in the middle of the river where the priests had stood. Barnes and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read them as two separate monuments, and other writers take verse 9 as a fuller account of the same twelve stones, since the Hebrew carries either. The clause and they are there unto this day puts the writer at a time when the second pile could still be pointed at, which is one of the marks readers use in dating the book.

Joshua 4:10-11

The priests hold the middle of the channel until every word is finished, and the people cross at speed. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read the haste as weakness set beside the priests' steadiness, while Clarke reads it as what any man would do walking a riverbed with the water piled upstream, and takes the detail as the mark of an eyewitness. Verse 10 says the orders came according to all that Moses commanded Joshua, and the charge Moses gave him at Deuteronomy 3:28 and 31:7 carries none of these details, so the writer knows of instruction Scripture does not preserve in full.

Joshua 4:12-13

These are the tribes that already hold their land east of the river, and they cross first and armed because of the bargain struck at Numbers 32:16-32 and put to them again by Joshua at 1:12-15. The forty thousand is a portion of them rather than the whole, since the muster of Numbers 26 puts Reuben, Gad and half Manasseh near a hundred and ten thousand fighting men, and Clarke reckons the seventy thousand five hundred and eighty left behind to guard the women, children and cattle. The men with nothing further to gain go over the water in front of everybody else.

Joshua 4:14-15

Joshua 3:7 promised this before the crossing, that the Lord would begin to magnify him in the sight of all Israel, and verse 14 reports it done on the day named. The comparison is exact. Exodus 14:31 says that after the sea the people believed the Lord and his servant Moses, and the same sentence is now written about Joshua after a river, so the successor is confirmed by the same kind of act that confirmed the man he follows.

Joshua 4:16-18

The chest is called the ark of the testimony here and the ark of the covenant everywhere else in the book, the two names Exodus 25:16 and 25:22 give the same object and the law kept inside it. The water answers to the soles of the priests' feet in both directions, cut off when they touched it at 3:15 and returned when they lifted at verse 18. It comes back in flood and over all his banks, so Israel is left standing on the far side of a river no man among them could now recross.

Joshua 4:19-20

the tenth day of the first: The date is given and it carries weight. The tenth day of the first month is the day Exodus 12:3 set for taking up the passover lamb, and four days later at 5:10 Israel keeps the passover in the land; they left Egypt on the fifteenth of that month, so the entry falls forty years less five days after the exit. Gilgal is named here before 5:9 explains where the name came from, and the pile of river stones is the first thing Israel builds in Canaan.

Joshua 4:21-24

The answer the fathers owe their children is written out in full, and it ends at the Red Sea, so the stones teach a crossing the children never saw by way of an older one their parents never saw either. Verse 23 slips into the first person, which he dried up from before us, though the men who walked through the sea were dead by Numbers 26:64; the speaker counts the nation as one body across its generations. Verse 24 states two aims, that all the people of the earth might know the hand of the Lord and that Israel might fear him for ever, and Clarke reads the first phrase narrowly of the peoples of that land while other writers take it as wide as it sounds.