Joshua8chapter 8

Joshua 8:1-2

The words God gives Joshua after the defeat are the words he had already given him before anything went wrong, be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed, at 1:9. The ambush in verse 2 is God's own instruction, so the tactic that takes the city comes from him, where the plan that failed was the one the spies proposed at 7:3. The spoil and the cattle are granted outright to the people here, and they are the same kind of goods Achan was stoned for taking out of Jericho one chapter earlier.

Joshua 8:3-4

Verse 3 sends thirty thousand men and verse 12 sets five thousand in the same place on the same night, and the difference is read three ways. Barnes suspects an early copyist wrote the sign for thirty thousand where five thousand stood. Henry takes verse 12 as the account doubling back on a single ambush of five thousand, and others read two bodies, a main force with the smaller detachment drawn out of it. The chapter records both figures and offers no reconciliation of its own.

Joshua 8:5-8

Joshua tells the men what will happen before it happens, and the phrase as at the first falls twice in two verses. The thirty and six men who died at 7:5 are what makes the feint work, because the men of Ai have a real victory behind them and will believe a second flight. Verse 8 puts the whole of it under the commandment of the LORD, which is Joshua standing on the ground he was given in verse 2 rather than on his own judgment.

Joshua 8:9-11

The whole force goes up this time, where the spies at 7:3 had said two or three thousand would be enough. Joshua lodges that night among the people rather than behind them, and musters them at first light; the word at verse 10 is the one for visiting or inspecting a rank, which Clarke marks. The valley named at the end of verse 11 lies between the camp and the town, and it is what Joshua goes down into in the dark at verse 13.

Joshua 8:12-13

about five thousand men: Joshua puts himself in the valley while it is still night, so what the king of Ai sees at daylight is a body of men in front of him and neither the ambush behind his city nor the host on the high ground to his north. Barnes reads the king's mistake out of that, that he took the men in the valley for a detachment like the one he had beaten before. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown identify the ravine with the wady running below the tell.

Joshua 8:14-15

the king of Ai saw: The king moves fast and moves early, and the verse says so twice over, that they hasted and rose up early. At a time appointed is read by Barnes as a place appointed, ground fixed beforehand for drawing up men, which suits a king who had fought on that field once already. Then the clause the chapter turns on, but he wist not that there were liers in ambush against him behind the city, which is the one thing in the whole account he does not know.

Joshua 8:16-17

Bethel empties itself into the field alongside Ai, and the two towns stand about three miles apart. Clarke takes it that the fighting strength of Bethel had already been moved into Ai as the stronger place to hold. This chapter never records Bethel being taken; its king is listed among the defeated at 12:16, and Judges 1:22-25 tells of the house of Joseph taking the town later after a man showed them the way in.

Joshua 8:18-19

The gesture is commanded before it is made, and the promise is attached to it, for I will give it into thine hand. Clarke takes the spear for a standard carrying a flag, which is what would make it readable to men lying a mile off behind a town. Behind it stands Exodus 17:11, where Israel prevailed while Moses held up his hand, and the man fighting in the valley on that day was Joshua.

Joshua 8:20-22

Israel runs this same tactic against its own tribe at Gibeah, and the words come back with it: liers in wait set round the town, a feigned flight, an appointed sign of smoke, and at Judges 20:40 the Benjamites looked behind them and the flame of the city ascended up to heaven. What God prescribes here against a Canaanite city is turned on Benjamin two books later. The men of Ai are caught between the ambush and the army, and verse 20 says they had no power to flee this way or that way.

Joshua 8:23-25

Twelve thousand is the whole population, men and women counted together, so the spies at 7:3 were right that the town was small. What they had wrong was what the size of a town had to do with the outcome, since the defeat came from the accursed thing named at 7:11. Clarke reads verse 24 of those left inside, the women and children and old men, since the fighting strength had gone out after Israel.

Joshua 8:26-27

Joshua holds the spear out until the work is done, and Gill sets it beside Exodus 17:12, where Moses' hands were steady until the going down of the sun while Joshua fought Amalek below. The younger man now holds the posture that was once held over him. Verse 27 records the spoil taken according unto the word of the LORD, and the clause is there because a man had taken spoil without that word one chapter earlier.

Joshua 8:28

The Hebrew name of the town means a ruin or a heap, so the sentence in this verse leaves the place as the thing its name already called it. Where Ai stood is disputed: et-Tell is the long standing identification and the difficulty pressed against it is the absence of a Late Bronze town there, while Bryant Wood and the excavators of Khirbet el-Maqatir nearby have argued for that site instead. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown record that the local name of the tell in their own day was the heap of stones.

Joshua 8:29

The body comes down at sundown because Deuteronomy 21:22-23 requires it, and Joshua does the same with five kings at 10:26-27. The heap of stones raised over him at the gate is the second such heap in the book, after the one piled over Achan at 7:26, and a third goes up at the cave mouth in chapter 10. Paul quotes that law at Galatians 3:13, cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree, and reads it of the cross.

Joshua 8:30-31

Ebal stands at Shechem, about twenty miles north of Ai through country Israel had not taken, and the text gives no account of the march or of anyone opposing it. The altar answers Deuteronomy 27:4-6 to the letter, whole stones with no iron lifted on them, which is the law of the altar in Exodus 20:25. The Samaritan Pentateuch reads Gerizim instead of Ebal at Deuteronomy 27:4, and that variant is the ground of the Samaritan claim for their own mountain which the woman raises at John 4:20.

Joshua 8:32

a copy of the law: How much was written on the stones is read differently: the ten commandments, the blessings and cursings of Deuteronomy 27 and 28, or the book of the law entire, and the verse settles none of it. Deuteronomy 27:2 and 27:4 had the stones plaistered first, and writing on a plaistered face is the Egyptian method the generation out of Egypt knew. The word rendered copy here is the same word used at Deuteronomy 17:18 of the book a king was to write out for himself.

Joshua 8:33

The tribes stand as Deuteronomy 27:12-13 assigned them, six against Gerizim and six against Ebal, with the ark and the priests the Levites between the two halves. The stranger stands in the assembly beside the man born in Israel, which is the rule of Exodus 12:49 kept in the first covenant act inside the land. The ground is Shechem, where Abram built his first altar at Genesis 12:6-7, where Jacob bought his field at Genesis 33:18-20, and where Joseph's bones are buried at 24:32.

Joshua 8:34-35

Deuteronomy 11:29 and 27:11-26 set this ceremony up, and these two verses are the one place in Scripture that records it carried out. Verse 35 lists who heard it, the women and the little ones and the strangers that were conversant among them, which is exactly the assembly Deuteronomy 31:12 named for the reading of the law. The passage sits in different places in the different witnesses, after 9:2 in the Greek and earlier still in one of the Qumran scrolls of Joshua, and what differs is where the account stands in the book rather than what it reports.