Joshua5chapter 5

Joshua 5:1

The kings hear what happened at the water and lose their nerve before a sword is drawn. Rahab had told the spies this was already happening in chapter 2, so the verse confirms a report the reader was given by a Canaanite before any Israelite said it. The Hebrew reads until we were passed over in the first person, which the older editions mark, and commentators take it as the writer placing himself among those who crossed.

Joshua 5:2-7

The covenant sign had lapsed for the whole of the wilderness, and the text says so plainly at verse 5, that those born by the way had not been circumcised. Nobody explains why it stopped, and the chapter gives the fact without a reason. The generation that carried the sign died in the desert and the generation that lacked it is the one taking the land, so the first act inside the country is to put the mark of Genesis 17 back on the people.

Joshua 5:8-9

They abide in the camp till they are whole, which leaves an entire army unable to fight, a few miles from a walled city, in enemy country. Genesis 34:25 records what happened the last time men were caught in that condition. Then God names the day, this day have I rolled away the reproach of Egypt from off you, and the place is called Gilgal from the rolling.

Joshua 5:10-11

This is the third passover Scripture records after the night it was instituted, following Numbers 9:5 at Sinai, and the first kept inside the land. The date is the fourteenth at even, exactly as Exodus 12:6 set it, and the circumcision of the preceding verses is what made it lawful, since Exodus 12:48 bars the uncircumcised from eating it. They eat unleavened cakes and parched corn of the country, so the meal is made from the land itself.

Joshua 5:12

Exodus 16:35 said the manna would run until they came to a land inhabited, and this verse is where it stops. It stops the day after they eat the produce of Canaan, so the supply ends when the substitute arrives rather than before it. Forty years of bread that nobody sowed close without a word of ceremony, in half a sentence.

Joshua 5:13-14

Joshua asks whose side the stranger is on and gets Nay for an answer, which refuses the question rather than choosing between its halves. The reply is as captain of the host of the LORD am I now come, and Joshua falls on his face and worships, and is not stopped. Commentators divide over who this is, with many of the older writers reading a Christophany from the worship accepted and the holy ground of the next verse, and others reading a created angel; Revelation 22:8-9, where an angel refuses worship twice, is the strongest text on the other side and belongs in the same breath.

Joshua 5:15

The words are Exodus 3:5 said again to a second man, and the reason given is the same, that the ground is holy. What made the ground holy at the bush was who was standing on it, and nothing else has changed here. Joshua gets no battle plan in this chapter, and the instruction he receives before Jericho is to take off his shoes.