40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Joshua 11:6-23 (Episode 192)

Episode Date: November 29, 2019

As kingdoms rise up against Joshua, we hear some language we've heard before concerning horses, chariots, and sand on the seashore. Why is God always stacking the odds against Israel? Were any of the cities in Canaan wanting to make peace? Is Israel the "good guys" and everyone else the "bad guys" in these accounts? Chad and Daniel discuss all of this. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network Donate to Giving Tuesday Houston City Event Las Vegas City Event

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. you can go to 1517.org slash podcast. Check out all the other podcasts that are living over there. While you're over there, events, they're happening. There's a page for them. Go to that events page. You can look at the city events that are coming up, Houston and Las Vegas. Registration is free for both of those events. It's an all-day thing. Bunch of speakers. There's lunch. There is Q&A. You should come hang out. That's the big thing. You get to hang out with a bunch of folks. I'll be over there at both of those events.

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You could just show up, but it helps us know how many people are coming. Do that. Chad, what's going on? Turkey's in the fridge. Turkey's in the fridge? Yeah. I don't know when people are going to listen to this, but I guess it'll come out what thursday or friday yeah it'll be the day probably it'll probably come out the day

after turkey's in the belly yeah the day that everybody just sitting around completely lazy because they ate too much the day before people are going to listen to this on a black friday they're going to be out shopping and we're going to be talking about some uh you know northern conquest yeah yeah well they won't have to worry about me uh sharing any space with them on black friday shopping you don't do that no i do not i'm a cyber monday guy oh yeah i like to like you know sit in my recliner get my laptop shop i don't have to worry about getting to parking space or getting mobbed by you know some crazy crowd somewhere i can just serve my way through amazon you know what i want last year might have been the first year where i i'm not sure i bought

one christmas gift in a store yeah which in some ways i feel bad about like i feel like there's other people who have jobs and stuff i need to support those jobs you know i should probably go shop local somewhere you know support some small business or something but man everything i need to do in that regard i can just you know i mean amazon is i'm that guy when christmas rolls around the ups truck is coming to my house dropping off the stuff that i ordered yeah it's true yeah every day we get home there's like there's a package two packages whatever it is that's my kind of shopping now does your wife like to go though does she want to go out yeah more so than i do yeah i mean i've never been much of a shopper it's just i i am not good

at buying gifts like if somebody tells me exactly what they want i'm happy to get it but uh i've never been good at just finding stuff for people you know some people just have that gift like they just you know they just always find the right thing for you but that's not been me but yeah stacy she she shops i mean she does a lot of online stuff but she doesn't mind going out and you know yeah getting that starbucks and just toting around a coffee and just window shopping and going around these stores and stuff it's not my favorite but yeah not mine either but i do have a daughter who loves to do that with her mother so i i usually just stay i stay home and you know watch sports when that's going on there you go this is also this is also very uh cliche isn't it

like the wife and the daughter shopping and i'm watching football and geez yeah well that's that's why we have cliches because they're so rooted in reality yeah indeed well what's going on in in uh in this conquest of canaan yeah that's what i was gonna say all this has a lot to do with with joshua uh i guess in some way so yeah we're uh we for those of you who listened last time i hope you did if you didn't go back and check out that that episode but we covered chapter 10 of joshua and we uh we we crossed the line a little bit into joshua chapter 11 because we had a few minutes left we talked about uh the next area of conquest which is a northern the northern campaign so we entered kind of central canaan you know took out jericho i the giving nights they surrender so

all that kind of area is taken care of then we move south that was joshua chapter uh chapter 10 but we have this whole area in the north so we're going to northern campaign now and we start out here kind of like we did at the beginning of chapter 10 if you remember the beginning of chapter 10 you have adonai zedek who's the king of jerusalem he gathers together a cohort of other kings, and together they go against Joshua and the Israelites, and of course they get beaten. Well, the same thing's going to happen here, except it's in the northern part of Canaan, because you have a king by the name of Jabin, or Yavin, however you want to say his name, J-A-B-I-N, and he's the king of this metropolis named Hazor, which is north of the Sea of Galilee.

And as I talked about last time, there's a big place, a lot, lot more acreage than your typical your typical city in canaan at this this particular time so and with the archaeological levels that they've dug going way back to to you know a millennium before joshua and the israelites got there so an old city a big city and a powerful city it was a leading city of this particular area so the king of of hazor gathers together again a cohort of kings who have this similar enemy in joshua and the israelites so anyway the first four verses kind of just describe this coalition of forces are going to go against this uh this new new kid on the block these israelites who have just been stomping everyone that they've that they've encountered now i'll pick it up here

with verse four and we'll we'll see what happens i have an interesting phrase that occurs in verse four see if you can if you're listening see if you can if it resonates with something you've heard before and they came out that is all these this coalition against the israelites they came out they and all their armies with them as many people as the sand that's on the seashore with very many horses and chariots all right so you picked up the phrase right it's the metaphor or the simile as many as the sand on the seashore so i i think i could be wrong but i think this is the third time that particular image is used in the Bible. The first two are in Genesis.

The first one's in Genesis chapter 22, which is, of course, the near sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. And it's in Genesis 22 where God promises Abraham he's going to have descendants as many as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. The same promise and same image is repeated in Genesis chapter 32 to Jacob, and now we hear it once more, but in a very different kind of context in Joshua chapter 11, because now, in kind of an ironic sort of way, it's used not to describe the population of Israel in fulfillment of God's promise to Abraham, but it's used to describe the enemies of Israel that have gathered together to try and defeat and kill the descendants of Abraham. So I think that's what's going on here, the reason

that the author chose this particular image, this particular metaphor, because it's used in sort of an ironic sort of way. So here's Israel that has grown in number and power over the generations. They're now entering into the land that God promised to give to Abraham. And yet, even now that they're here, they still face a foe that, like they are, is as numerous as the sand that's on the seashore. But the irony, of course, is that no matter how many there are, no matter how powerful they are, no matter what kind of superior weaponry they have, they're no match for the one who stands behind the Israelites to fight for them, namely Yahweh. Yeah, this great many of horses and chariots language is very Egypt-like, is it not? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, in fact, I'm glad you pointed that out, because we're going to see in the next few verses how I'm convinced that this is written with Egypt in mind. And specifically, not just Egypt in mind, but specifically with what happened in Exodus 14 at the Red Sea. I think what's happening here is the story is described in such a way that you can't, if you know the Old Testament, if you know the story, that you can't read this particular story without understanding how it is flowing from these earlier stories. And I think the sand on the seesaw is just kind of the beginning of that. Because, of course, what have we heard about horses and chariots before? Of course, it's what the Egyptians had, right? That's what they were on when they went out to try and bring the Israelites back after they had left Egypt after the 10th plague.

Yeah, I mean, this is in the Israel hymnody, right? I mean, this is horse and the rider thrown to the sea kind of stuff. I mean, if you're an Israel horse and rider, that's not unfamiliar language to you. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that was Song of Moses. They knew this. And so just like, you know, certain phrases that we sing in popular hymns, we can't hear those without immediately,

no matter, we can't hear those in another context without immediately linking it back to the hymn context. That's going to be the same for the Israelites. yeah i mean that's one of the reasons i sang it was it so much became so much a part of them yeah and you know you might think well is there anything special about horses and chariots well there is something special about it in the sense that not everyone is rolling around with chariots i mean not everyone had like huge calvaries and and uh and a huge army of chariots and stuff this is this actually is a fairly rare thing and that at that time yeah i mean that was uh it was we

don't have it i don't remember when i'd have to look at that maybe in the time of king david is when israel finally had chariots i don't know i'd i'd have to look back into that but at this point anyway we know they don't have chariots so they're already outmanned and out and outgunned as it were because uh this particular part of the canaanite confederation they have these these horses and chariots yeah i mean horses and chariots are uh a pretty big advantage at that time i mean a cherry if you have a ton of chariots i mean this is this makes things very difficult yeah yeah yeah it's a i i was uh i looked a little bit at this last week because i didn't know how far we would get and uh i was i was talking about it with my wife afterward just

the history of chariots and i mean we've seen these in movies but can you imagine what it would be like it would take a lot of skill simply to be able to to fight from a chariot yeah i mean you've so you got two guys in there you got one who's driving the chariot basically then you got the other guy who is the uh is the archer so i mean i've hunted a little bit with a bow and i know it's a challenge but i've never tried to hunt on the back of like a of a bouncing wagon basically that's being pulled by two horses in a rough field i mean this had to be an amazing an amazing a skill that these guys had not just to be able to shoot but to be shoot to shoot from a moving vehicle that was bumping along in the midst of of a battle i mean that's pretty incredible

well i mean uh this has not much to do with this other than uh the similarity and and and the military advantage but you know like when the when the mongols took like just i mean almost took over the world you know um yeah yeah the the way they were able to do it is because they had the they were people to step and what they had is they had these step riders and they had these guys that could just one guy on the back of a horse like running full blast and they could shoot they could shoot arrows like crazy off horseback like so they would they just like had really strong hips i guess they're just clinging to this horse and then just a deadly accurate with a bow and arrow and they just had a you know sheath full of arrows and they just tore people up man uh and

nobody had ever seen anything like it they didn't know they didn't know what to do about it yeah i mean they were i've read a couple of a couple of books about their history at this amazing military power and yeah i mean they really did they almost conquered well they were kind of like alexander the greatness you know he caught kind of their own world and that's basically what they did yeah they only didn't actually like conquer everything that was known because of weird political problems like we're like oh our guy died we have to go all the way back to this place and find a new leader then if they weren't doing that junk when they were in their conquest man they've been over yeah i don't i don't think there was probably an advance a greater advance

in uh kind of military weaponry or transportation until in a few cases they started using elephants in warfare i mean horses is one thing but elephants is that's that's taken at a uh to a whole whole other level but uh yeah i mean if you're on foot and uh you're facing an army that is uh is horseback then your chances of winning just basically are are nil unless you've got god on your side right yeah yeah so you might think this has nothing to do with anything but what we're trying to paint here is that that if you never mind a whole bunch of people but then they have military advantages that are no small thing i mean it's these are this is like fighting except up fighting someone that's got tanks and you don't and this is this this creates a problem for you

yeah yeah but this kind of sets up though in in a in a in a parable sort of way i guess you could say a theme that we see throughout scripture though right i mean god's people are constantly either outmanned or outgunned or outpowered whatever it is and yet in many ways well yeah some cases where God actually, he sets it up that way. I mean, he actually wants his people to be out man and outgunned in order that there might not be the slightest temptation for them to think that they were able to win the victory because of their own wisdom or their own planning or their own powers or whatever it might be. I mean,

the classic example of that of course is Gideon who has a lot of people and And God says, all right, anybody who's scared, tell them to go home. He says, okay, anybody scared, go home. So a bunch of guys leave. And God's like, oh, no, no, there's still too many. Take them down there to the river and let them all get a drink. And the guys who, I can't remember which is it, the guys who lap the water like a dog, are they the ones that stay?

Or is it the other guys? Whoever it is, there's like 300. Yeah, I can't remember. I think the dog lappers are the 300. Either way. that seems right because who does that right right yeah so those this was like this was the first 300 these weren't the uh it's worth the trojans but uh these were not the trojans but the uh spartans yeah spartans yeah these weren't the spartans but these were the israelites

so anyway he had got and god like purposely says i want you to only have a few men in order that you might realize that i'm the one who gives you the victory so god in sometimes in some cases even even sets it up like that but he certainly takes advantage of these situations you got the david and goliath uh kind of scenario that's played out over and over in israel's history and of course this comes finally to to christ who i mean one man against the whole not just against the whole Roman system, but also against the Sanhedrin and the powers that were kind of latent within the religious powers that were latent within that. So one man against the world, as it were, and yet God gives him the victory through the resurrection. So all of these kind of big powers

versus little bitty Israel was setting the stage for what happens in the crucifixion and resurrection. so anyway um they had horses and chariots all that was a commentary on horses and horses and chariots so pick it up here with verse five uh what happens well so all the kings they agree to meet and they come and they encamp together at uh the waters of merom to fight against israel now i think this is another one of those cases like you mentioned earlier horses and chariots makes you think of song of moses and exodus 14 and i think the fact that they're camped by the water and that's where the battle is going to take place and god's going to give them the victory this is another one of those resonances that takes us back to what happened

with israel when the egyptians attacked them yeah just never fight israel near water that's Yeah, get them away from the water. Yeah, yeah, it's a bad place to be. And listen to this. This is verse 6. This also is picking up the language of Exodus 14. This is God speaking to Joshua. He says, don't be afraid because of them.

For tomorrow at this time, I will deliver all of them slain before Israel. You shall hamstring their horses and burn their chariots with fire. Now listen to that. and let me turn here to exodus 14 verse 13 and this is also going to be god's speech except it's going to be god speaking through the mouth of moses so in verse 6 god says don't be afraid for tomorrow at this time i will deliver all of them slain before israel and then in exodus 14 13 moses says don't be afraid stand by and see the salvation of the lord which he will accomplish for you today. For the Egyptians whom you have seen today, you will never see them again

forever. So what Moses says to Israel, basically, don't be afraid. These guys that you see before you today are going to be wiped out by the time tomorrow comes. Same thing that the Lord says to Joshua in chapter 11. Don't be afraid because tomorrow I'm going to deliver you into their hands and you shall hamstring their horses and burn their their chariots with fire i yeah i guess it's because i grew up with horses i can't feel i can't help but feel sorry for the horses you know i don't i don't feel sorry for the enemies of israel but my heart kind of goes out to the poor horses are going to be hamster i i did look up uh how often this happened this actually occurs more than once this hamstring of uh the animals of the of the enemy david does it

in uh second samuel against some of his enemies he hamstrings their horses i don't know why they didn't just kill the horses that doesn't make any sense to me maybe there was a reason you know because if you i mean if you hamstring anything if you cut that tendon then of course they're they're useless they can't walk so they're gonna die anyway i'm not so i'm not sure why the animals weren't just put to death uh but anyway that it happens here it happens later in David's wars, and we hear about it in Genesis 49, was the other place, when Levi and his brother, they tricked the city of Shechem into all the guys getting circumcised, and they go in and slaughter everybody. In Genesis 49, when Jacob blesses his 12 sons, he says that not only did

they go in and slaughter the inhabitants but they also hamstrung their oxen so that's the first reference to doing this to the the animals of an enemy maybe this was part of ancient warfare anyway they do it here and of course they they're going to burn the chariots too so the god this is what god says so what's going to happen well verse 7 says joshua and all the men of war with him came upon them suddenly by the waters of marom and attacked them and the lord delivered them into the hand of Israel so that they defeated them and pursued them as far as Great Sidon and Mizrephoth Mayim and the valley of Mizpah to the east, and they struck them until no survivor was left to them. And Joshua did to them as the Lord had told him. He hamstrung the horses and burned

their chariots with fire. Then Joshua turned back. He captured Hazor and struck its king with the sword, for Hazor formerly was the head of all these kingdoms. I mentioned before that they were the leader of all of these city-states. They struck every person who was in it with the edge of the sword, utterly destroying them. There was no one left who breathed, and he burned Hazor with fire. Interestingly, archaeologists who have excavated the city of Hazor found a couple of burn layers one much later than this time but one that aligns pretty close to when the time of joshua would have been so good good chance that archaeologically we have evidence that that was the particular destruction of the city that took place and of course as we've discussed a couple

different times in the in the uh in the old days when cities were destroyed well another city would just be built on top of it that's why you have these tells uh these mounds that are littered throughout the land of the of the east because this is just a long long time place of habitation anytime there's a destruction well you don't have bulldozers you don't go in and like level out everything you just build on top of the ruins and after after a while it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger until you have this big mound so that's what happened with the city of hazel then it goes on verse 12 joshua captured all the cities of these kings all their all their kings and he struck them with the edge of the sword utterly destroyed them all this language of

utterly destroy in your english translations is the hebrew harem that we have seen repeatedly this putting things under the divine ban so anytime you see something like utterly destroyed know that the Hebrew behind that is harem yeah you'll see that that translated as devote to destruction a lot of times oh yeah yeah that's a yeah I'd forgotten about that translation yeah devote to destruction

utterly destroyed are typical renderings of putting something under the ban putting it to harem yeah it's a weird it makes sense that you would translate it that way but it's a weird thing I mean we could think about devoting

something to something else It's weird. Destruction is not a word that we would typically combine with, you know. Yeah. I'm very devoted to destruction. Yeah. It's a little weird. But, you know, when you talk about devoting something, I mean, this is where we get the word devotion. It's interesting that in one sense it could be very disturbing because you're like, I don't know, man. Like, devoting things to destruction doesn't sound very good.

Yeah. But if you're looking at this and what it's pointing to as this, the enemies of Israel, the enemies of God's people, if you look at God's judgment, which is, of course, what we talked about over and over again, what all of this talks about, to devote, with devotion, there's something built into that phrase that phrase that would mean a complete i mean that you have utterly destroy or that but this

devotion like has like has a more spiritual connotation to it right yeah because it's i mean it's not just like we're gonna wipe these guys out we don't like them right but this is yeah this is the implementation of a divine decree basically so this is all all god's all god's doing this particular judgment and destruction. And as off-putting as it is, the reason it's so complete, it's so utter, it's destruction to the uttermost, is because, again, when we're talking about the wrath of God, this is what we're talking about. So he is using this as a picture of what happens when the judgment of God falls on a people.

yeah all these are pictures of uh in one way or another of of two things they're all pictures of the crucifixion and they're all pictures of the end time right and the crucifixion and the last day are kind of two sides of the same coin because in many ways the last day's already occurred it happened when when when christ was crucified that's why you have all these kind of weird end time events happening like earthquakes and sky darkening and people coming out of their tombs, all that kind of stuff happening when Christ dies, because in many ways that was already the last day. But of course, there's also the last day coming in which all these things are going to happen again. But both of those events, the crucifixion and the last day, are pictured

for us in all these Old Testament kind of stories like this. So you read them, you read them eschatologically, that is to say you read them from the end to the beginning. So when you're reading these stories you kind of you like put the last day and in mind as you're as you're reading these these stories of destruction yeah and this is very much how just how god is i mean if you think about his you know god's threat to uh to moses his threat to moses is how about i utterly destroy this people and start over with you he doesn't talk about you know leaving moses uh you know a little posse of good people or something like that when god decides that that he's done with something that he's done with it and so he when he says to moses knows this he's like

if god decides he's done with this it's gonna be over yeah it's all or nothing yeah so that i mean it it's uh this is one more case of those those many examples like that speaking of moses he comes up here in verse 15 uh says that just as the lord had commanded moses his servant so moses commanded Joshua, and so Joshua did. He left nothing undone of all that the Lord had commanded Moses. So we have this common theme in Joshua, as Moses, so Joshua. So Moses serves as a foreshadowing of Joshua, just like Joshua serves as a foreshadowing of Jesus. You have multiple examples of this kind of string of types or string of foreshadowings in the Old Testament, because Adam was a whole lot like Noah, and then Noah is a whole lot like Christ. And you have Moses, who's a lot like

Joshua. Moses also is very similar to Samuel. There's even some affinities between Moses and Gideon. So you have this kind of domino effect, I guess you could call it, where one person falls into another, who falls into another, each one of these being similar to the one that came before them, and it all is leading to the fulfillment, the anti-type that comes in the Messiah. So as Moses, so Joshua. Now verse 16 through 23, to wrap up this chapter, is a summation of kind of everything that has gone before, and in many ways, a looking forward to what is going to be coming after so i'll begin here with verse 16 it says joshua took all that land they hit and then we have a list of what this land is so the hill country and all the negev

and all the land of goshen the lowland the arba the hill country of israel and its low land from mount alak that rises towards the ear even as far as baal god in the valley of lebanon at the foot of mount herman you get your atlas out your map to find all these places if you're interested he captured all their kings and struck them down to put them to death now we have an interesting verse here verse 18 joshua waged war a long time with all these kings so uh the hebrew there is i think uh ravim whatever it is many literally it's it's many many days um now how long has happened probably about seven years uh we have we'll get to it we get to chapter 14 but we have the age of caleb when uh when they uh they spied out the holy land and then we have a later age

given of of caleb and the way it kind of lines up it looks like it was pretty intense warfare for about seven years now i say that because we we kind of get the impression looking at just the chapters we've covered these last uh last few episodes that all this was just like blitzkrieg you know just they went in body slammed everybody took took the land within like six months it didn't happen that way yeah you read this and you're like that sounds like a hell of a weekend yeah yeah i mean you gotta get that impression right like yeah they went in they took jericho and then it went south they they took those guys out and they turned north and they took all these cities out and it just like like it happened really fast yeah it didn't it

it took many days and uh those many days were were probably pretty close to uh to seven years seven years makes sense of course it's got to be seven years yeah it's in the bible so it can't be five or five or eight or six you're trying to tell me this thing was complete after seven years shocking yeah very very strange so uh we'll we'll we'll hear more about that as we go along but uh i think it's an interesting verse that's kind of thrown in there just to kind of slow things down a little bit since there was not a city which made peace with the son's visual except the highbites living in gibeon heard that story a couple episodes ago now verse 20 is uh is another one of these verses. We've already seen a couple of them. Here's another one of these that takes

us back to Exodus again. We see once more how much Exodus has influenced this particular account. Verse 20, for it was of the Lord to harden their hearts to meet Israel in battle in order that he might utterly destroy them or devote them to destruction. That's it, that word again, that they might receive no mercy, but that he might destroy them, just as the Lord had commanded Moses. So it's kind of a fascinating word thing going on here, because the verb for harden their hearts is chazak, and it is the verb that's used all over Exodus to describe how Pharaoh hardened his heart and how god hardened the heart of pharaoh it's used there but what's interesting is it's the same verb that's used repeatedly in joshua when joshua is told be strong and courageous

that verb for be strong is chazak the same word that's used here for harden so it's kind of a it's kind of an interesting uh word play i guess that's going on here because we've heard multiple times, of course, God says to Joshua, be strong and courageous. Don't be afraid. Be strong and courageous. So be strong, be strong over and over. Now we get to verse 20, and we're told that the Lord also made strong the hearts of the enemies of Israel, but he made them strong in a very different sort of way. He made them strong in the sense that he hardened them so that they would basically go into battle against the israelites and as a result be be destroyed well it was a very pharaoh kind of activity i think it's fascinating that it talks about how no one

pursued peace with them because if you just read the accounts it seems like peace is not an option like israel's just going to go in here and just wipe everyone out uh but it says that no one pursued peace with them uh that they might not receive mercy in other words uh this if there were uh kingdoms that had come out and tried to make peace this puts israel in a weird spot which we've already seen yeah uh where you assume that they would they would have to consider doing so right uh but what you also see time and time again is they'll roll up on a city and it'll say that city came out to meet them like they're they're ready to go and so one of the things you You can, you know, because, again, the conquest of Canaan is a little disturbing.

One thing that is true in the text is that no one's asking not to fight or to have peace or to try diplomacy, that time and time again, Israel shows up, the troops come out, and you got a war on your hands. And so it's not as though there's these kingdoms pleading for a negotiation to find a better way. This doesn't happen ever except for that one time, and the one time it does happen, that's what they get. Yeah, I mean, logically you would think that if you're a king in, say, the northern part of Canaan, and word has reached you that basically everybody else in that area has just been completely annihilated by Israel, my first thought would probably not be oh well i'm gonna go kill those guys

my first thought would probably be what can i do to save my city but that's not the way it works everybody there's there are no doves here they're all hawks so everybody everybody goes out to fight no one no one pursues pursues peace and i think the reason is exactly what is said here in verse verse 20 the lord had hardened their hearts and this wasn't some sort of like just kind of flippant move. God woke up in a bad mood and decided, you know what? I'm going to harden the hearts of all these guys so they get destroyed. This was a long, long time in coming. If you remember, already in Genesis 15, when Abraham was around, God told him that the sins of the Amorites, meaning everybody that lived in Canaan, had not yet been fulfilled. They were

still, they were still going to continue doing their thing for like 700 more years. So this was going on a long time in the land of Canaan. So that hardening took place not just over like a day or a week or a year, but over actually centuries of kind of this gradual unraveling of society until it became what it was when the Israelites entered. Yeah, it's kind of important to remember that this isn't like a good guy versus bad guy thing i mean as as god says like i'm going to give you canaan but it's not because of your righteousness but because of their sin which sounds weird because if you're like okay so so those are the sinners and then these people are not the sinners and he makes very clear no no no those are the sinners your sinners too you just

happen to be marching around with my promises right yeah it's very important to keep keep keep in mind because we i mean we work with kind of a goodbye good guy bad guy dichotomy all the time right? I mean, that's the way it is in most movies and novels. And, you know, you got the guys who wear black hats and you got the guys who wear the white hats, you got the good guys and the bad guys. Well, that's not the way it works in the Bible. I mean, in one way or another, they're all bad guys. Just some bad guys have God's promises and his choosing of them to be his nation, his people, and some don't. Yeah. I mean, yeah, you should read the conquest of Canaan with the overlay of not because of your righteousness, but because of my name,

which is just another way of saying, you're going to take this over because these people are extremely wicked, but you're not going to win because you are not extremely wicked. You're going to win because of my name, which is just another way of saying, because I gave you my promise and I will not lie. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. That's it. So let's wrap up the chapter. that we just have two or three verses left uh it says joshua came at that time and cut off the anakim those are the big people the giants we've read about before he cut them off from the hill country and then it goes on to describe the destruction of those cities says there was no anakim left in the land of the sons of israel only in now notice this these are the giants right

the only ones left were in gaza gath and in ashdod some remain now the reason that's important is because Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod, those are the cities of the Philistines. And it's from the Philistines, of course, that Goliath and his brothers and his family are going to come. So there's a direct link between these Anakim we've heard about before, the big guys, the giants, and the giants that we are going to encounter much later, like in the books of Samuel, who are living down in those same those same areas so verse 23 wraps it up and verse 23 is sort of a summation to the whole book of joshua in many ways says joshua took the whole land according to all that the lord had spoken to moses and joshua gave it for an inheritance to israel

according to their divisions by their tribes thus the land had rest from war so the first part of that verse looks back to what's happened and the second part of that verse looks forward to what we're about to come to so we will we will be uh talking actually quite uh quite speedily about the next few sections because the next few sections are going to talk about the division of the land and some of the related matters so we will uh we'll probably be moving through the next few chapters at a pretty good pretty good clip so put on your seat belt for the episodes that are coming up all right well chad uh since this episode is going to air right after thanksgiving it behooves me to say if you are thankful for the work of 1517 not just this podcast but everything else

that 1517 does we are rolling up on what is known as giving tuesday and we do have a campaign for that now giving tuesday is a is december 3rd it is a day when people give to non-profits and this sort of thing. It's interesting that it is near Thanksgiving. And the reason for that is as people think about things that they're thankful for, sometimes they want to give back. And if that's you, we could use your help. We do have a goal of raising $100,000 on Giving Tuesday to support the work. What are you supporting? Well, we talked about it a little bit last week, but the podcast Network. You're listening to a podcast right now. We have grown to 175,000 monthly downloads. So that's how many different people are downloading the podcast. The free online academy where people

are getting theological and historical education. We have over 20,000 students. We have the blog that is reaching over 40,000 unique people per month. Those are just all the sort of free things that we do i mean we talked about the city events which are always free uh obviously none of this stuff is free to to make i mean we try to produce very qual high quality content we try to you know create content that's not difficult to look at or listen to and the events we try to make sure that they're a good time all of that stuff is made possible by people chipping in and so if you have benefited and are thankful and are able to join us in this campaign to reach this goal so we can reach even more people in 2020, I'll put a link in the show notes, but you can just go over

to 1517.org slash Giving Tuesday, and you can make a gift that will be designated to help us reach that goal and help us keep doing the things that we are doing. And so if you are able to do something do something that that you can afford but whatever you can afford is is greatly appreciated sounds great sounds great chad's gonna do it chad i'm gonna do it chad's gonna do it i'm gonna do it we're all gonna do it it's gonna be great and uh and we'll be back next week we'll see you then