Do YOU Really Belong?

Do You Really Belong?

YOU belong to God....

Rahab, Achan, Gibeon, and the line God actually draws in Joshua 1-10

By Dr. Shawn M. Greener | Through the Bible in a Year: Walking the Story of God | Sunday Summation and Deepening, Days 135-139

© 2026 Dr. Shawn M. Greener. All Rights Reserved. Free to copy and share as a devotional, provided this copyright notice and a link to TrueWordFaithforLife.com travel with every copy.

You know the sticker.

It's white, with a red border, and it says HELLO, MY NAME IS. Somebody at the welcome table hands you a marker. You write your first name in letters a little too big and press it onto your shirt. For the rest of the morning, everyone who looks at you knows one thing before they know anything else.

You're new here. You're not one of us. Yet.

Maybe you've worn that sticker your whole life. In the church you visit twice a year and leave during the last song. At family dinners, where you're the one with the divorce, the past, the kid who went off the rails. On the job, twenty years in and still the new guy. Everyone's polite. You still feel like a guest.

Or maybe you've never worn the sticker at all. You were born in the front pew. Baptized young, raised on the songs, you can find Obadiah without the table of contents. Somewhere along the way you drifted, quietly, and you've been counting on the family name to carry you.

Both of you are asking the same question. Who's really in?

The first ten chapters of Joshua answer it. And the answer isn't where most of us would have drawn the line.

The Week We Walked

Day 135, Joshua 1-2. Moses is dead, and Joshua hears be strong and courageous again and again, because he's shaking. In Jericho, Rahab hangs a scarlet cord. The Hebrew word for that cord is tikvah, the word the rest of the Hebrew Bible uses for hope (Joshua 2:18).

Day 136, Joshua 3-4. The priests step into the flooded Jordan before it stops, and twelve stones come up from the riverbed for the children to ask about (Joshua 3:13-17; 4:6-7).

Day 137, Joshua 5-6. A commander with a drawn sword answers Joshua's question with one word, No, and Jericho's wall falls after six days of silent walking (Joshua 5:13-15; 6:20).

Day 138, Joshua 7-8. Achan buries a cloak from Babylon, silver, and gold under his tent, and Israel loses at Ai until it's dug up (Joshua 7:21).

Day 139, Joshua 9-10. The Gibeonites fool Israel with moldy bread. Israel never asks the mouth of the LORD, keeps its oath anyway, and the sun stands still over Gibeon (Joshua 9:14; 10:12-14).

The Pattern Hiding in Plain Sight

Read Joshua 1-10 one episode at a time and you get five strong stories. Read them side by side and something structural shows up. The book is built around three people, or peoples, who cross the line between inside and outside. They cross it in the direction you'd least expect.

Chapter 2 gives us Rahab. A Canaanite. A woman. A zonah, a prostitute. Her house is in the wall of the first city placed under the ban. She confesses the LORD in words that echo Deuteronomy 4:39 (Joshua 2:11). She asks the spies to swear by the LORD to show her household chesed, covenant loyalty (Joshua 2:12). And Joshua 6:25 says she lives in Israel "to this day."

Chapter 7 gives us Achan. The narrator introduces him with a pedigree fit for a prince: "Achan the son of Carmi, son of Zabdi, son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah" (Joshua 7:1). Four generations. Judah, the royal tribe. Zerah, the twin brother of Perez, from whose line David will come. Achan is as far inside Israel as a man can be. And the ban that fell on Jericho falls on him. God says Israel itself has "become devoted for destruction" until the stolen things are gone (Joshua 7:12).

Chapter 9 gives us the Gibeonites. Hivites, the text says, from inside the land itself. They come in costume. They lie. And listen to why they came: "Your servants have come from a very distant country because of the name of the LORD your God" (Joshua 9:9). They lied about their sandals. They told the truth about His name. They end up inside the covenant, cutting wood and drawing water for the altar of the LORD (Joshua 9:27).

Canaanite woman, in. Judahite man, out. Canaanite city, in.

The line in Joshua was never blood. It was allegiance.

Paul says the same thing in his own words: "not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel" (Romans 9:6). And the Torah says it before Joshua does. The reason for the ban was never ancestry. It was worship: "that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices" (Deuteronomy 20:18). Deuteronomy 13:12-18 places an Israelite town that turns to other gods under the very same ban.

The Words Underneath

A handful of Hebrew words carry the weight of the week. Here they are side by side.

Achan's confession in Joshua 7:21 runs I saw, I coveted (chamad), I took, I hid. Set it beside Genesis 3:6-8 and three of its four verbs are Eden's own. The first sin in the land is told as a replay of the first sin in the garden.

Notice what that means. The garden story was about all humanity. Joshua 7 tells it about an Israelite of Judah. The royal tribe can stand at Eden's tree as easily as a Canaanite can stand at Rahab's window.

What Israel's Neighbors Meant by "Utterly Destroy"

The cherem chapters are hard. Every careful reader feels it. We read them better when we hear how the ancient world talked about war.

Two stones help.

The first is the Merneptah Stele, set up by Pharaoh Merneptah around 1208 BC and found at Thebes in 1896. It holds the oldest undisputed mention of Israel outside the Bible. Merneptah boasts that Israel is laid waste and "his seed is not." Israel survived.

The second is the Mesha Stele, carved by Mesha king of Moab around 840 BC, found at Dhiban in 1868, and now in the Louvre. Mesha describes taking the Israelite town of Nebo and says he devoted it to Ashtar-Chemosh, using the very same root, ḥrm. On the same stone he claims Israel has perished forever. Israel hadn't.

Kings of the ancient Near East described victory in total, sweeping language. K. Lawson Younger documented the convention across Egyptian, Hittite, and Assyrian conquest accounts. Joshua speaks in the same register. That's how Joshua 10:40 can say Joshua "left none remaining," while Joshua 13:1-6, Joshua 15:63, and Judges 1 make plain that many Canaanites were still in the land.

This doesn't make the hard texts soft. Judgment on Canaan was real, and Genesis 15:16 tells us God waited four centuries before it came. But it means we read the ban the way its first hearers did. And it means the most pointed use of cherem in the whole book isn't aimed at a Canaanite at all. It lands on an Israelite who hid what belonged to God.

A word on Jericho itself. Its archaeology has been debated for nearly a century. John Garstang in the 1930s dated a destruction layer to Joshua's era. Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s redated it centuries earlier, and many followed her. Bryant Wood in 1990 argued Kenyon misread her own pottery and that Garstang's date was closer. The question remains open. What isn't in question is what the text says Jericho meant: the first gift of the land, devoted wholly to God.

From the Valley of Trouble to the Door of Hope

Achan the troubler died in the Valley of Trouble, and a heap of stones stood over him for generations (Joshua 7:26). The place became a name for disaster.

Centuries later, the prophet Hosea hears God speaking tenderly to His unfaithful people Israel, like a husband courting back a wife who betrayed him. And God says, "I will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope" (Hosea 2:15). Isaiah 65:10 promises the same valley will become a place where the flocks lie down, for God's people who seek Him.

Petach tikvah. A door of hope.

Joshua opens with tikvah tied in a Canaanite window. And the prophets promise that the valley named for an Israelite's trouble will become a doorway of tikvah for Israel itself.

The hope that brought the outsider in is the same hope that brings the insider home.

Israel's Place, Guarded

When the outsiders in Joshua come in, Israel is never pushed out. Rahab doesn't replace Israel. She joins Israel. The Gibeonites don't take Israel's place. They serve at Israel's altar.

Paul says exactly this to Gentile believers. You were "grafted in among the others," and "remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you" (Romans 11:17-18). And "the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable" (Romans 11:29).

Hosea 2 is a promise to Israel, and God hasn't withdrawn it. Here's the wonder: Paul reads the close of that same chapter, "I will say to Not My People, 'You are my people'" (Hosea 2:23), and hears in it the welcome of the nations too (Romans 9:25-26). The door of hope in the Valley of Achor is Israel's door first, and the rest of us come through it as guests made family.

The Stone That Stayed and the Stone That Rolled

One more scene holds the week together.

After the battle at Gibeon, Joshua puts five Amorite kings to death and hangs their bodies on five trees "until evening" (Joshua 10:26). At sunset, following Deuteronomy 21:22-23, the bodies come down, because a man hanged on a tree is under God's curse and must not remain there overnight. They're thrown into the cave at Makkedah. Joshua had ordered stones rolled across its mouth (Joshua 10:18), and those stones "remain to this very day" (Joshua 10:27). Joshua 8:29 tells the same of the king of Ai.

Twice in these chapters the text slows down to show you a man on a tree, taken down at sundown, with stones over him.

Now read the Gospels. A man on a tree. The leaders anxious that the body not remain there on the Sabbath (John 19:31). Taken down before sunset. Laid "in his own new tomb, which he had cut in the rock. And he rolled a great stone to the entrance of the tomb" (Matthew 27:60).

In Joshua, the stones stay.

At the garden tomb, the stone rolled away.

"Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree'" (Galatians 3:13). The Torah says a person under the ban "shall not be ransomed" (Leviticus 27:29). No price buys him back. So the Redeemer stepped under the curse Himself. Achan stole what was devoted to God and died under the stones. Yeshua, set apart wholly to God and given up for us, walked out from behind the stone.

That's how Rahab ends up in Matthew 1:5, in the family of the Messiah, and in Hebrews 11:31 with two words written in front of her name: by faith. That's why Paul can tell Gentiles in Ephesians 2:19 that they're no longer strangers but members of the household of God. And that's why Yeshua could promise in John 6:37, "whoever comes to me I will never cast out."

You don't belong to God because of your bloodline. You belong because of His blood.

Seven Days to Live It

1. Day one. Settle your allegiance. Say out loud, in your own words, whose side you're on. Mark it the way Joshua did: take your shoes off somewhere and kneel (Joshua 5:14-15).
2. Day two. Step before the sign. Do the one thing you've been waiting for God to make easy, before it gets easy (Joshua 3:13).
3. Day three. Walk your wall. Take one silent walk, name the thing that hasn't changed, and refuse to complain about it to anyone today (Joshua 6:10).
4. Day four. Dig it up. Tell one safe person the thing nobody knows (Joshua 7:19; 1 John 1:9).
5. Day five. Ask first. Before every decision today, ask God out loud and wait a full minute (Joshua 9:14; 1 Kings 3:5).
6. Day six. Name your Valley of Achor. Write your place of trouble on paper and write Hosea 2:15 across it. Put it where you'll see it.
7. Day seven. Find a Rahab. Sit with the person who feels like an outsider. Invite them in. Tell them out loud, you belong here.

Take Off the Sticker

Back to the welcome table, and that white sticker with the red border.

Here's what Joshua tells you. God never checked anyone's name tag. Rahab had the worst one in Jericho. Achan had the best one in Israel. The Gibeonites wrote theirs in disguise. The only thing that decided where each of them stood was where they put their hope.

So if you've worn the visitor sticker your whole life, peel it off. Hang your hope on Yeshua, the way Rahab hung hers in the window. You're family now.

And if you've never worn one because you assumed you didn't need to, kneel down anyway. Pedigree never saved anybody. Open hands do.

The window is open. The door of hope is hung in the Valley of Trouble. And the stone is rolled away.

Welcome home.

Watch the full Sunday Summation and Deepening and every weekday episode on YouTube. Subscribe and tap the bell so the next episode finds you: youtube.com/@DrShawnMichaelGreener

More teaching, the full archive, and the free study guide: TrueWordFaithforLife.com

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

© 2026 Dr. Shawn M. Greener. All Rights Reserved. Free to copy and share as a devotional, provided this copyright notice and a link to TrueWordFaithforLife.com travel with every copy.

STUDY GUIDE

The Line Was Never Blood

A Study Guide to Joshua 1-10: Allegiance, the Ban, and the Door of Hope

For Small Groups, Sunday School, and Bible College

Dr. Shawn M. Greener | True Word, Faith for LIFE! | Sunday Summation and Deepening, Days 135-139

© 2026 Dr. Shawn M. Greener. All Rights Reserved.

PERMISSION TO COPY AND SHARE. This study guide is a gift to the Body of Messiah. You're encouraged to copy, print, photocopy, and distribute it for personal devotion, small groups, Sunday school classes, Bible studies, and classroom teaching, free of charge, provided every copy includes this copyright notice and a credit to TrueWordFaithforLife.com. It may not be sold or republished commercially without written permission.

HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE

Small group (one 90-minute session or five 45-minute sessions). Read the Big Idea aloud. Spend about 20 minutes in Part Two (the five threads), 30 minutes in Parts Three and Four (the structure and the Theological Center), and 20 minutes in Part Five (Yeshua). Close with the Seven Days practice in Part Seven and the group questions in Part Eight.

Sunday school (five weeks).

Bible college (seminar unit, one to two weeks). Assign the Primary Readings, the starred bibliography entries, and one research assignment from Part Eight. The footnotes name the main scholarly debates and serve as a launching point for further work.

Watch first. The full Sunday teaching and the five weekday episodes behind it are free on YouTube: youtube.com/@DrShawnMichaelGreener. Subscribe so your group can follow the series together.

THE BIG IDEA

In Joshua 1-10, the line between inside and outside God's people doesn't run along bloodline. A Canaanite prostitute and a Canaanite city come in; a man from the royal tribe of Judah falls under the ban. The book draws the line at allegiance: where a person hangs their hope. Paul states the same principle, "not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel" (Rom 9:6), while insisting that God's calling of Israel as a people is irrevocable (Rom 11:29). And the prophets promise that the very valley named for an Israelite's trouble will become a door of hope for Israel (Hos 2:15), a hope fulfilled in Yeshua, who bore the curse of the tree so that all who come to Him will never be cast out.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of this study, participants will be able to:

1. Trace the five threads of Joshua 1-10: strength as Presence, the step before the sign, God's side rather than ours, the corporate weight of hidden sin, and asking the mouth of God.
2. Explain the meaning of cherem, its stated rationale in Deuteronomy, and how Israel's neighbors used the same term and the same style of war rhetoric.
3. Identify the literary pattern of Rahab (ch. 2), Achan (ch. 7), and the Gibeonites (ch. 9), and state what it teaches about membership in God's people.
4. Follow the word tikvah from Rahab's cord (Josh 2:18) to the door of hope in the Valley of Achor (Hos 2:15), including the akar wordplay that names the valley.
5. Connect Joshua 10:18-27 to the burial and resurrection of Yeshua (Matt 27:57-61; John 19:31-42; Gal 3:13).
6. Articulate how Gentile inclusion confirms rather than replaces Israel's irrevocable calling (Rom 9:6; 11:17-29).
7. Put one concrete practice into action each day for a week.

PRIMARY READINGS

• Joshua 1-10 (read the whole unit in one sitting)
• Deuteronomy 4:39; 7:1-6; 13:12-18; 20:10-18; 21:22-23; 31:1-8
• Leviticus 5:15; 27:28-29
• Genesis 3:1-8; 15:13-21
• Exodus 3:1-6; 12:1-13; 15:1-8
• 1 Chronicles 2:7; Hosea 2:14-23; Isaiah 65:8-10
• 2 Samuel 21:1-14; 1 Kings 3:4-15
• Matthew 1:1-6; 27:57-61; John 1:28-29; 19:31-42
• Galatians 3:10-14; Hebrews 4:8-10; 11:30-31; Romans 9:6-8, 25-26; 11:11-32; Ephesians 2:11-22

KEY TERMS

PART ONE: BACKGROUND

Setting. Joshua opens on the plains of Moab, east of the Jordan, after the death of Moses (Josh 1:1; Deut 34). The crossing happens "throughout the time of harvest," when the Jordan overflows its banks with spring runoff (Josh 3:15). Israel camps at Gilgal, near Jericho, which becomes its base through chapter 10. Gilgal sits in the Jordan Valley below sea level; Gibeon sits high in the hill country of Benjamin, so Joshua's all-night march to relieve Gibeon (10:9) was a hard climb out of the valley.

The generation at the river. Those who died in the wilderness were the fighting men twenty and older at Kadesh (Num 14:29; Josh 5:4-6). Many standing at the Jordan were children at the Red Sea, and Moses addresses them as eyewitnesses (Deut 11:2-7). The rest were born in the wilderness.

Date. Scholars divide over the date of the entry into Canaan. An early date in the fifteenth century BC rests on 1 Kings 6:1 read at face value; a later date in the thirteenth century BC rests on Exodus 1:11 and the archaeology of several highland sites.[^1] The Merneptah Stele (c. 1208 BC) places a people called Israel in Canaan by the late thirteenth century at the latest.[^2]

Jericho. The archaeology of Tell es-Sultan has been debated for nearly a century.[^3]

War rhetoric in the ancient Near East. Israel's neighbors described victory in total, formulaic language. K. Lawson Younger's comparative study of Egyptian, Hittite, and Assyrian conquest accounts found the same hyperbolic conventions Joshua uses.[^4]

The Mesha Stele uses the same root as cherem for devoting a captured town to a deity, which shows the practice and its vocabulary were shared across the region.[^5] Philip Stern traces cherem as a religious category in Israel and its world, and John and J. Harvey Walton argue that its core sense is removal from human use: something handed over to the deity so completely that no human hand may use it.[^6]

Covenant frame. Joshua fulfills Genesis 15:13-21, where God promises Abraham the land and explains the four-century delay: "the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete" (Gen 15:16). Deuteronomy 7:1-6 and 20:16-18 set the ban for the nations of the land and give its reason: their worship and practices (20:18). Deuteronomy 13:12-18 applies the same ban to an Israelite town that turns to other gods. Deuteronomy 20:10-15 permits peace with distant cities, the loophole the Gibeonites exploit.

Vassal language at Gibeon. "We are your servants" (Josh 9:8, 11) is the standard petition of a lesser party seeking a treaty with a greater one in the ancient Near East. Some commentators also read Israel's taking of the Gibeonites' provisions (9:14) as a shared covenant meal (compare Gen 31:46, 54); others read it as simple inspection.

PART TWO: THE WEEK'S FIVE THREADS

Thread 1. Strength Is a Presence (Day 135, Joshua 1-2). God commands courage three times (1:6, 7, 9), the people echo it (1:18), and the charge had already come at the handoff from Moses (Deut 31:7, 23). The reason under every command is "for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go" (1:9). God's promise in 1:5, lo arpekha, uses rafah: I will not let you drop. Rahab confesses the faith of Deuteronomy 4:39 (Josh 2:11) and binds her hope to a scarlet tikvah (2:18).

• What's the difference between being told "you are strong" and being told "be strong, for I am with you"?
• Rahab's confession comes before any wall falls. What does she know, and how did she come to know it (2:9-11)?

Thread 2. The Step Before the Sign (Day 136, Joshua 3-4). The ark goes first (3:3-4). The waters stop only when the priests' feet touch them (3:13, 15). The river heaps up "at Adam" (3:16), in the language of Exodus 15:8. Twelve stones come from the riverbed (4:3) so that children will ask, "What do those stones mean to you?" (4:6). Israel comes up on the tenth day of the first month (4:19), the day of choosing the Passover lamb (Exod 12:3).

• Why does God require the step before the sign? Where has that been true in your life?
• Many at the river had seen the Red Sea only as children. What does it take for inherited faith to become your own?

Thread 3. Whose Side? (Day 137, Joshua 5-6). Circumcision at Gilgal "rolls away" (galal) the reproach of Egypt (5:9). Passover is kept; the manna stops (5:10-12). The commander of the LORD's army answers Joshua with "No" (5:14) and echoes the words of the burning bush (5:15; Exod 3:5). God speaks Jericho as already given (6:2). The silent march (6:10) ends with Jubilee horns and a wall that falls flat (6:20). Rahab is spared (6:22-25).

• Why does the commander refuse to take a side? How does that reshape prayer?
• What is the spiritual value of the six silent days?

Thread 4. What's Hidden Poisons the Body (Day 138, Joshua 7-8). "The people of Israel broke faith" (7:1), though one man took the devoted things. Thirty-six die at Ai (7:5). God says, "Get up!" (7:10) and declares Israel itself under the ban (7:12). Joshua calls Achan "my son" (7:19). Achan's confession, saw, coveted, took, hid (7:21), follows the shape of Genesis 3:6-8. At Ai, God permits plunder (8:2). Covenant is renewed on Mount Ebal (8:30-35).

• Why is Israel as a whole held responsible for one man's sin? What does this say about community?
• If Achan had waited one battle, he could have had plunder with blessing. Where are you tempted to take now what God may give later?

Thread 5. Ask the Mouth of God (Day 139, Joshua 9-10). The Gibeonites act "with cunning" (9:4). Israel examines the provisions "but did not ask counsel from the LORD," literally "the mouth of the LORD" (9:14). Israel keeps its oath (9:19), which God enforces after Saul breaks it (2 Sam 21:1-14). Joshua marches all night to defend Gibeon (10:9). God fights with hailstones (10:11) and the sun stands still (10:12-14). Gibeon later hosts the tabernacle (1 Chr 16:39) and becomes the place God says to Solomon, "Ask" (1 Kgs 3:5).

• Why did careful inspection fail? What was missing?
• How do you keep faith with a commitment you now regret?

PART THREE: THE STRUCTURE OF INSIDE AND OUTSIDE

Read Joshua 2, 7, and 9 side by side.

The two outsiders who come in frame the one insider who goes out. Commentators have noted that Joshua uses these stories to unsettle any reader who assumes Israel's identity rests on ancestry rather than allegiance.[^7]

A second structural pattern ties Joshua to Moses:

PART FOUR: THEOLOGICAL CENTER

The line was never blood. The ban (cherem) in Joshua isn't an ethnic category. It falls on Jericho, yet a Canaanite household is spared because of allegiance. It's meant for the nations of the land, yet an entire Canaanite city enters covenant. And it lands with full force on a man of Judah whose pedigree the narrator lists in four generations, until God declares Israel itself under the ban (Josh 7:12). Deuteronomy gives the ban's reason as worship, not ancestry (Deut 20:18), and applies it to an apostate Israelite town (Deut 13:12-18). Where a person's hope is pledged, to the LORD or to a cloak from Babylon, decides where they stand.

Paul's frame. This isn't a denial of Israel's election. Paul holds both truths in the same letter: "not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel" (Rom 9:6), and "as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable" (Rom 11:28-29). Joshua shows the first truth in narrative; the prophets and Paul guard the second.

The hardness of the ban is real, and so is its rhetoric. The comparative evidence in Part One shows that Joshua shares the war language of its world, and Joshua itself records that many Canaanites remained. That doesn't dissolve the moral weight of these chapters; God's judgment on Canaan is presented as real and long-delayed (Gen 15:16). But it frees us to read the totalizing summaries as their first audience would, and it shows the book's sharpest use of cherem is aimed inward, at Israel.[^8]

From Achor to the door of hope. Joshua 7:25 turns on a wordplay: "Why did you bring trouble (akartanu) on us? The LORD brings trouble (ya'kor'kha) on you today." The Chronicler names the man by his deed, Achar, "the troubler of Israel" (1 Chr 2:7), and the valley carries the same root, Achor. Hosea 2:14-15 takes that memorial of disaster and promises to make it petach tikvah, a door of hope, as God woos His unfaithful people back. Isaiah 65:10 makes the same valley a place where the herds lie down, "for my people who have sought me." The tikvah that began with a Canaanite cord ends, in the prophets, as Israel's own door home.

The point. The God of Joshua isn't a tribal deity who checks bloodlines. He is the Holy One who won't share His people's heart with idols, and who opens the window to anyone who hangs their hope on Him. That isn't a softening of Israel's election. It's the purpose of it: "so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the hand of the LORD is mighty" (Josh 4:24).

PART FIVE: FULFILLMENT IN YESHUA

One name. Joshua is Yehoshua, "the LORD saves," shortened to Yeshua in Nehemiah 8:17. In Greek both Joshua and Jesus are Iesous (Heb 4:8). The first Yeshua brought Israel into the land; the second brings His people into God's rest (Heb 4:8-10).

The Lamb at the Jordan. Israel came up from the Jordan on the day the Passover lamb was chosen (Josh 4:19; Exod 12:3). At Bethany across the Jordan, John said, "Behold, the Lamb of God" (John 1:28-29).[^9]

The commander. The figure of Joshua 5:13-15 receives worship and echoes the words of the burning bush. Many interpreters, ancient and modern, identify him with the pre-incarnate Son; others see a high angel.[^10]

The tree and the stone. Joshua 8:29 and 10:26-27 slow down to show kings hung on trees after death, taken down at sunset in obedience to Deuteronomy 21:22-23, and buried under great stones "to this very day." The verb for sealing the Makkedah cave is galal, "roll" (10:18), the same root that named Gilgal (5:9). The Gospels describe Yeshua taken down before sundown (John 19:31) and laid in a rock-cut tomb with a great stone rolled to its entrance (Matt 27:60; Mark 15:46). Paul cites Deuteronomy 21:23 directly: "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us" (Gal 3:13). The stones of Joshua stay; the stone of the garden tomb is rolled away.

The unransomable, ransomed. Leviticus 27:28-29 calls every devoted thing "most holy to the LORD" and rules that a person under the ban "shall not be ransomed." Yeshua, set apart wholly to God, takes the place of those under the ban. Paul's word in Galatians 3:13 is katara (curse), not anathema, the Septuagint's usual rendering of cherem; the link between the ban and the cross is a typological reading, not a direct New Testament equation.[^11]

Rahab in the family line. Matthew 1:5 names Rahab as the mother of Boaz.[^12] Hebrews 11:31 lists her among the faithful, "by faith Rahab," and James 2:25 commends her works.

Israel's irrevocable calling. Rahab joined Israel; she didn't replace it. The Gibeonites served at Israel's altar; they didn't take Israel's place. Paul applies the same order to Gentile believers: they are grafted into Israel's olive tree, supported by its root, and must not boast (Rom 11:17-24). "The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable" (Rom 11:29). Hosea 2 remains a promise to Israel, and Paul hears in its closing line, "I will say to Not My People, 'You are my people'" (Hos 2:23), a word that also welcomes the nations (Rom 9:25-26). Gentiles who come to Yeshua become "fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God" (Eph 2:19), never Israel's replacement.

The promise. "Whoever comes to me I will never cast out" (John 6:37).

PART SIX: TRANSLATION TENSIONS

PART SEVEN: SEVEN DAYS TO LIVE IT

1. Settle your allegiance. Say aloud whose side you're on, and mark it physically (Josh 5:14-15).
2. Step before the sign. Do the one thing you've waited for God to make easy (Josh 3:13).
3. Walk your wall. One silent walk, and no complaining about it today (Josh 6:10).
4. Dig it up. Tell one safe person what nobody knows (Josh 7:19; 1 John 1:9).
5. Ask first. Before every decision, ask aloud and wait one full minute (Josh 9:14; 1 Kgs 3:5).
6. Name your Valley of Achor. Write it down and write Hosea 2:15 across it.
7. Find a Rahab. Invite someone who feels like an outsider to your table.

PART EIGHT: QUESTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS

Group questions

1. Which of the three, Rahab, Achan, or the Gibeonites, do you most identify with, and why?
2. Have you ever relied on a pedigree (family, church background, reputation) to feel secure with God?
3. Who in your life feels like an outsider to faith? What would welcoming them look like this week?
4. Achan's trouble became his name. How does Hosea 2:15 change the way you look at your own Valley of Trouble?
5. What's the difference between asking whether God is on your side and putting yourself on His?

Seminar questions

1. Assess the claim that Joshua 2, 7, and 9 are arranged to subvert an ethnic definition of Israel. What evidence supports it, what limits it, and how do Romans 9:6 and 11:28-29 refine it?
2. How should comparative ancient Near Eastern war rhetoric shape an evangelical reading of the cherem texts without evacuating them of moral content?
3. Evaluate the identification of the commander in Joshua 5:13-15 with the pre-incarnate Son. What are the strongest arguments for and against?
4. Trace the reception of Deuteronomy 21:22-23 from Joshua 8 and 10 through Galatians 3:13 and the Gospel passion narratives. Does Leviticus 27:28-29 legitimately belong in that trajectory?

Research and writing assignments

1. Write a 2,500-word paper comparing the Mesha Stele's use of ḥrm with Joshua 6-7 and Deuteronomy 13:12-18. Use primary text editions and at least three scholarly sources.
2. Survey the excavation history of Jericho from Garstang to the present and assess what the data can and cannot establish about Joshua 6.
3. Write an exegetical paper on Hosea 2:14-23 that traces its reuse of the Exodus and conquest traditions, including the Valley of Achor, and Paul's use of Hosea 2:23 in Romans 9:25-26.
4. Write a pastoral paper on belonging and church hospitality drawing on Joshua 2 and 9, Romans 11, and Ephesians 2.

LEADER'S NOTES

Outsiders in the room. Some in your group have felt like guests in church their entire lives. Let Rahab speak first. Don't rush past the word "prostitute" or soften it. Some ancient Jewish sources, including Josephus and the Targum, call her an innkeeper, but the Hebrew zonah and the Greek of Hebrews 11:31 and James 2:25 say prostitute. The force of the story is that God's welcome reached the person everyone else had labeled.

Achan's family. Someone will ask why Achan's household died. Don't answer with a shrug or a lecture. Note that Deuteronomy 24:16 forbids executing children for a parent's sin, that the stolen goods were buried in the floor of the family's tent, and that many careful readers infer complicity. Admit what the text doesn't say.

The violence of the conquest. Some will be troubled, especially those who have known violence. Take the question seriously. Share the comparative evidence in Part One, the four-century patience of Genesis 15:16, the stated reason in Deuteronomy 20:18, and the fact that the book's sharpest judgment falls on an Israelite. Don't make the hard texts easy.

Hidden things. Thread 4 may stir secrets: addiction, money, abuse suffered or committed. Have the name of a pastor, counselor, or recovery ministry ready. Never pressure anyone to disclose in the group. Point them to one safe person.

Regretted commitments. Thread 5 may touch marriages. Keeping faith with a hard commitment isn't the same as remaining in danger. If someone describes abuse, help them get to safety and qualified help first.

Israel's place. Guard against any reading that Gentile inclusion means Israel's exclusion, or that "the line was never blood" means Israel's election no longer matters. Rahab joined Israel. Read Romans 9:6 and 11:17-29 aloud when the question comes.

NOTES

[^1]: For the early date, see Bryant G. Wood, "The Rise and Fall of the 13th-Century Exodus-Conquest Theory," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48, no. 3 (2005): 475-89. For the later date, see K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 307-10.

[^2]: "The Israel Stela," trans. John A. Wilson, in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, ed. James B. Pritchard, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 376-78. A possibly earlier reference to Israel on a Berlin statue pedestal (ÄM 21687) has been proposed in Manfred Görg, Peter van der Veen, and Christoffer Theis, "Israel in Canaan (Long) Before Pharaoh Merneptah? A Fresh Look at Berlin Statue Pedestal Relief 21687," Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 4, no. 4 (2012): 15-25. That reading remains disputed, which is why Merneptah is described here as the oldest undisputed mention.

[^3]: Kathleen M. Kenyon, Digging Up Jericho (London: Ernest Benn, 1957); Bryant G. Wood, "Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho? A New Look at the Archaeological Evidence," Biblical Archaeology Review 16, no. 2 (1990): 44-58; Piotr Bienkowski, "Jericho Was Destroyed in the Middle Bronze Age, Not the Late Bronze Age," Biblical Archaeology Review 16, no. 5 (1990): 45-46, 69. The debate is unresolved; groups should present it as open.

[^4]: K. Lawson Younger Jr., Ancient Conquest Accounts: A Study in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History Writing, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 98 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990). Younger's thesis that hyperbole was a conventional feature of conquest reports is widely accepted; how far it explains the biblical texts is debated.

[^5]: "The Moabite Stone," trans. W. F. Albright, in Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 320-21.

[^6]: Philip D. Stern, The Biblical Herem: A Window on Israel's Religious Experience, Brown Judaic Studies 211 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991); John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton, The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest: Covenant, Retribution, and the Fate of the Canaanites (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017). Stern reads cherem within a framework of divine order set against chaos; the Waltons press "removal from human use." The two accounts overlap but are not identical.

[^7]: See L. Daniel Hawk, Joshua, Berit Olam (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), on Joshua's interest in the boundaries of Israel; and Richard S. Hess, Joshua: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries 6 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), on Rahab and Achan as counterparts.

[^8]: For an evangelical treatment of the ethical questions, see Walton and Walton, Lost World of the Israelite Conquest; and Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide? Coming to Terms with the Justice of God(Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2014). The two works reach different conclusions on the meaning of cherem; both should be read critically. Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible(Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015), adds a cosmic-geography reading of the conquest tied to Deuteronomy 32:8-9 and the Anakim (Josh 11:21-22).

[^9]: The location of "Bethany across the Jordan" is debated. Tradition places it at the Jordan near Jericho (modern al-Maghtas); other proposals locate it in Batanea to the north.

[^10]: Trent C. Butler, Joshua 1-12, 2nd ed., Word Biblical Commentary 7A (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014), discusses the textual and interpretive questions of 5:13-15, including the variant reading lo ("to him") for lo' ("no"). Marten H. Woudstra, The Book of Joshua, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), surveys the identification of the commander.

[^11]: The Septuagint regularly renders cherem with anathema. Paul uses anathema elsewhere (Rom 9:3; 1 Cor 12:3; Gal 1:8-9), and 1 Corinthians 12:3 forbids the confession "Jesus is accursed (anathema)." Teachers should therefore present Yeshua as bearing the curse that rested on those under the ban (Gal 3:13), rather than equating Him with cherem as a title.

[^12]: Matthew's genealogy is widely understood to be compressed; Matthew 1:5 should not be used to calculate the chronology between Rahab and David.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Entries marked ★ are recommended first readings.

Commentaries on Joshua

• Alter, Robert. The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary. Vol. 2, Prophets. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019.
• Butler, Trent C. Joshua 1-12. 2nd ed. Word Biblical Commentary 7A. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014.
• Hawk, L. Daniel. Joshua. Berit Olam. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000.
• ★ Hess, Richard S. Joshua: An Introduction and Commentary. Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries 6. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996.
• Woudstra, Marten H. The Book of Joshua. New International Commentary on the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981.

Ancient Near Eastern background and archaeology

• Bienkowski, Piotr. "Jericho Was Destroyed in the Middle Bronze Age, Not the Late Bronze Age." Biblical Archaeology Review 16, no. 5 (1990): 45-46, 69.
• Görg, Manfred, Peter van der Veen, and Christoffer Theis. "Israel in Canaan (Long) Before Pharaoh Merneptah? A Fresh Look at Berlin Statue Pedestal Relief 21687." Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 4, no. 4 (2012): 15-25.
• Kenyon, Kathleen M. Digging Up Jericho. London: Ernest Benn, 1957.
• Kitchen, K. A. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.
• Pritchard, James B., ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. 3rd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.
• Wood, Bryant G. "Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho? A New Look at the Archaeological Evidence." Biblical Archaeology Review 16, no. 2 (1990): 44-58.
• Wood, Bryant G. "The Rise and Fall of the 13th-Century Exodus-Conquest Theory." Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48, no. 3 (2005): 475-89.
• ★ Younger, K. Lawson, Jr. Ancient Conquest Accounts: A Study in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History Writing. JSOTSup 98. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990.

Herem and the ethics of conquest

• Copan, Paul, and Matthew Flannagan. Did God Really Command Genocide? Coming to Terms with the Justice of God. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2014.
• Stern, Philip D. The Biblical Herem: A Window on Israel's Religious Experience. Brown Judaic Studies 211. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991.
• ★ Walton, John H., and J. Harvey Walton. The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest: Covenant, Retribution, and the Fate of the Canaanites. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017.

Biblical theology and worldview

• ★ Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015.
• Stern, David H. Complete Jewish Study Bible. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2016.

Lexical

• Brown, Francis, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs. A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907.

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