Joshua 11:16

These verses close the first great part of the book, the taking of the land in chapters 1 to 12. The southern campaign of Joshua 10 ended with the defeat of five Amorite kings, and the northern campaign of Joshua 11:1–15 broke the great alliance led by Jabin king of Hazor at the waters of Merom and ended with Hazor itself taken. Before the list of conquered kings in Joshua 12 and the dividing of the land in Joshua 13–21, the book stops to say what all this fighting meant, in a summary that runs to the end of the chapter (Joshua 11:16–23). It begins with obedience.

Verse 15 traces a line of command. The LORD commanded Moses his servant, Moses commanded Joshua, and Joshua did it. Commanding runs through the verse from its first clause to its last, which comes back to “all that the LORD commanded Moses”. The verb is tsâvâh, to give a charge or order with full authority behind it, and the name behind every order is Yᵉhôvâh, the LORD, the covenant name of the eternal God who had bound himself by promise to Israel. Moses passed on what he received whole, and Joshua carried it out. The orders Joshua followed in Canaan were the ones God had given through Moses, such as the charge to drive out the nations of the land and make no covenant with them (Deuteronomy 7:1–6), and the land itself was the land God had promised to Abraham’s seed (Genesis 12:7).

“He left nothing undone” is in Hebrew lo hesir davar, literally “he did not turn aside a word” or “a thing”. The noun dâbâr means a word or speech, and it also means a matter or thing, so the phrase covers both the commands and the tasks they set. Joshua obeyed the small instructions along with the great ones, and he did not pick among them. This is exactly what the LORD had asked of him when he took up the leadership, charging him to meditate on all the law Moses commanded and to keep it, and promising him success if he did (Joshua 1:7–9). God promised blessing to obedience, and verse 15 records that the obedience was given and the promise kept.

The rest of Scripture speaks of obedience in the same whole-hearted way. Moses links righteousness with keeping all the commandments before the LORD (Deuteronomy 6:25), a psalm longs for a life steady in keeping God’s precepts (Psalm 119:4–6), and Jesus ties love for him to having his commandments and keeping them (John 14:21).

Verse 16 describes the land by its kinds of country. “So Joshua took all that land” uses lâqach, the common verb for taking in every sense, from receiving and fetching to seizing and winning. Here it means taking by conquest. “All that land” is kol ha’aretz, with ʼerets, the word for the earth or for one particular country. Then the regions follow one by one.

• “The hills” (har, a mountain or range of hills, a short form of harar): the central highlands that run from north to south, such as the hill country of Judah and Ephraim. This rugged country was the backbone of the land and hard to take because of its natural defences.
• “All the south country”: the negeb, a word that means “south” and is also the name of the dry southern region, named from its drought.
• “All the land of Goshen”: a fertile region in the south, in what became Judah.
• “The valley”: the shᵉphêlâh, the low country of slopes toward the sea.
• “The plain”: the ʻărâbâh, a plain, steppe or desert, and the name of the dry valley of the Jordan.
• “The mountain of Israel, and the valley of the same”: most likely the central highlands of Ephraim and Manasseh, the heart of the land, together with the lower ground around them.

High ground and low, the south and the centre, dry country and fertile: by naming every kind of land, the verse says that the whole of it, with its main strongholds, was now in Israel’s hands. The word “all” stands three times in the verse (“all that land”, “all the south country”, “all the land of Goshen”), and that makes the same point.

Verse 17 gives the same land by its two ends. In the south stands “the mount Halak, that goeth up to Seir”. Châlâq means “bare” or “smooth” and probably describes the look of the mountain, which is generally identified with Jebel Halak in the Negeb. Sêʻîyr is the mountain country of Edom, southeast of the Dead Sea, and the phrase places Halak on the rise that leads up into it. Edom itself lay outside the conquest at this time, and its mountains serve as a well-known landmark for the southern edge. In the north stands Baalgad, Baʻal Gâd, a name meaning “Baal of fortune”, which suggests a place linked with a local god. It lay in the valley of Lebanon, the Beqaa Valley, below Mount Hermon, the high peak at the far north. Between these two points runs the length of the land, the core of what became Israel, a land bridge between the great powers of that day.

This is the land God had promised. He made a covenant with Abram and set out its borders (Genesis 15:18–21), and Moses told Israel that their bounds would reach from the wilderness and Lebanon to the river Euphrates and the western sea (Deuteronomy 11:24). After the land had been given out to the tribes by lot (Joshua 14:1–5), the book declares that the LORD gave Israel all the land he had sworn, gave them rest round about, and that every good thing he had spoken came to pass (Joshua 21:43–45). Verses 16 and 17 are an early part of that fulfilment.

“And all their kings he took, and smote them, and slew them.” Canaan in Joshua’s day was a land of many independent city-states, each with its own king, its own army and often strong walls, and these kings joined in alliances against Israel, as the southern kings did in Joshua 10 and the northern kings in Joshua 11. Each king embodied the power of his city, so taking, striking and killing the kings broke the organised resistance of the land. The word for king is melek, and its plural, melachim, points to the many separate rulers. Joshua 12 goes on to list the conquered kings.

The victory was the LORD’s. The book says plainly that the LORD God of Israel fought for Israel (Joshua 10:42), and the nations fell under his judgment, for their abominations had defiled the land (Leviticus 18:24–30).

Verse 18 adds that “Joshua made war a long time with all those kings.” The word for war, milchâmâh, is the ordinary word for battle and warfare. “A long time” joins yôwm, the word for a day that also stands for a span of time, with rab, “many” or “long”, and means many days. Jericho and Ai fell quickly, and the great battles of chapters 10 and 11 were won in a day, yet taking the whole land meant many sieges and battles against city after city. Joshua led Israel through all of it with steady diligence.

“There was not a city that made peace with the children of Israel, save the Hivites the inhabitants of Gibeon: all other they took in battle.” The verb for making peace is shâlam, which at its root has to do with being safe and whole, and in the form used here means to make peace, as a city does by entering a treaty. Set against it is “took in battle”, the same verb lâqach as in verse 16 with the same word milchâmâh as in verse 18. Every city faced one of those two outcomes, and every city but one was taken in war.

The Hivites, Chivvîy, were one of the peoples of the land, and Strong’s gives the name the sense “villager”. Their city of Gibeon won its treaty by a trick told in Joshua 9. Its men came to Joshua dressed as envoys from a far country, and Israel’s leaders made a covenant of peace with them (Joshua 9:3–15). Scripture names the fault plainly: they did not ask counsel of the LORD (Joshua 9:14). Because the oath had been sworn by the LORD God of Israel, Israel kept it when the deceit came to light, and the Gibeonites were made servants for all time. The covenant stood because an oath in the LORD’s name is sacred, even one made by mistake.

God had forbidden covenants with the nations of the land (Deuteronomy 7:1–6) and commanded that the cities of these peoples within Israel’s inheritance be utterly destroyed (Deuteronomy 20:16–18). Gibeon’s peace is therefore the single exception, and it came from a human lapse. The command had two purposes. It was God’s judgment on nations whose ways were an abomination to him, including the giving of children to Molech (Leviticus 18:21) and the prostitution of their shrines (Deuteronomy 23:17–18). It also protected Israel, so that God’s people would not learn to follow the abominations of those nations (Deuteronomy 18:9) and would remain a holy nation, the people from whom the Messiah would come. Moses was careful to tell Israel that the land came to them because of the wickedness of these nations and God’s promise to their fathers, and that Israel had no righteousness of its own to boast of (Deuteronomy 9:4–5).

Verse 20 gives the reason behind verse 19. The kings came out to fight because “it was of the LORD to harden their hearts, that they should come against Israel in battle”. The verb is châzaq, which means to make strong or firm, and so to harden. The LORD made their hearts firm in resistance, so they came out to war and sought no terms.

The verse then sets out the purpose: “that he might destroy them utterly, and that they might have no favour, but that he might destroy them”. The Hebrew marks this with lema’an, “in order that”. “Destroy them utterly” is châram, to put under a ban, the root of the word herem. People or things under the ban were set apart from all ordinary use, to be destroyed or given to the sanctuary. Here the ban is God’s sentence on these particular nations at this time, given in his law, and the verse closes by grounding it there: “as the LORD commanded Moses”. That brings the passage back to where verse 15 began, with the command the LORD gave Moses (as in Deuteronomy 20:16–18). “That they might have no favour” means that for these nations the time for mercy had run out.

Scripture speaks this way in other places. The LORD hardened the heart of Pharaoh (Exodus 9:12), and he hardened the spirit of Sihon so that he fought Israel (Deuteronomy 2:30). Paul draws the lesson that God shows mercy to whom he will and hardens whom he will (Romans 9:18).

Joshua’s name is the Hebrew form of the name Jesus, and Scripture shows us in Jesus the obedience that Joshua’s life pictured. Joshua left nothing undone of what the LORD commanded, and Jesus fulfilled every command of the Father, in his life and in his death. He came to fulfil the law (Matthew 5:17). He said, “My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work” (John 4:34), and he was obedient to the point of death on a cross (Philippians 2:8).

Joshua brought Israel into rest in an earthly land, and the letter to the Hebrews says that a greater rest remains for the people of God (Hebrews 4:8–10), the rest Jesus gives to all who labour and are heavy laden (Matthew 11:28). Joshua took the kings of Canaan, and Christ on the cross triumphed over principalities and powers and made a show of them openly (Colossians 2:15). He must reign until all his enemies are under his feet (1 Corinthians 15:25), and he is King of kings and Lord of lords (Revelation 19:16). He has overcome the world (John 16:33), and he is the Captain of our salvation, who brings many sons to glory (Hebrews 2:10).

The land from Halak to Hermon was the inheritance of one nation, and Christ’s kingdom reaches to the end of the earth (Acts 1:8). Believers are blessed with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places in him (Ephesians 1:3) and have been brought into the kingdom of God’s dear Son (Colossians 1:13), and they enter it by being born again (John 3:3). The fight goes on in another form, for believers stand against spiritual wickedness in the whole armour of God (Ephesians 6:10–18) and fight the good fight of faith (1 Timothy 6:12).

The Canaanite cities never sought peace, and Christ gives his own peace to those who come to him (John 14:27). Gibeon, a people from outside Israel who were brought into a lasting bond with God’s people, is a faint early echo of God’s grace bringing the Gentiles near by the blood of Christ (Ephesians 2:11–13). And where the hardened nations had “no favour”, God offers favour in Christ to a world that deserves judgment. Christ was made a curse for us (Galatians 3:13), bearing the curse that the ban stood for, as the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). In place of a heart hardened for destruction, God gives a new heart, taking away the heart of stone and giving a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26).

This passage shows a God whose commands are binding and whose promises are sure. What he told Moses, Moses told Joshua, and Joshua did all of it, and the land God had sworn to Abraham was taken from the south to the far north. The long years of war show that his faithfulness holds over many days of effort. Gibeon shows that he holds his people to an oath sworn in his name, and that decisions made without seeking him carry lasting consequences.

The hardening of the kings shows that God rules over every heart, even a heart set against him, and that his judgment on sin comes at last, after long patience, exactly as he said. The same God has given his Son, the greater Joshua, who obeyed perfectly and took the curse on himself, so that those who were his enemies may receive favour, peace and a new heart.