Joshua 15:33

The list shows the promise to Abraham being kept, town by town. God told Abraham that he would give this land to his descendants (Genesis 12:7), and centuries later a family in Judah could point to a town on this list and know that the promise had reached their own door. Scripture says it plainly at the end of the dividing of the land, that not one of the good things the LORD had promised failed (Joshua 21:43-45).

It was also a working record. Each family’s land was to stay in that family, and a holding that had been sold came back to them in the year of jubile (Leviticus 25:23-28). A list like this let each tribe know what was its own to hold. The same rule of inheritance lies behind Naboth’s refusal to sell his vineyard even to a king (1 Kings 21:3).

The God who kept his word down to the name of a small town is the same God you are trusting. He deals with real places and real families, and he does not lose track of them.

The New Testament takes the thought further. Even after Joshua, a rest remained for God’s people (Hebrews 4:8-9), and those who belong to Christ have an inheritance of their own, kept in heaven where nothing can spoil it (1 Peter 1:4, Ephesians 1:11). Abraham himself, while living in this land as a stranger, was looking for the city God has built (Hebrews 11:9-10).

“The valley” here does not mean one valley. It translates shᵉphêlâh (H8219), the name of a whole district of low hills and broad valleys, sloping down from the hill country of Judah toward the plain by the sea. It had good farmland, and Scripture mentions its olive and sycomore trees (1 Chronicles 27:28). It also lay on the edge of Philistine country, and the two peoples fought over it again and again, even into the days when the Philistines took Socoh and other lowland towns from King Ahaz (2 Chronicles 28:18).

Judah’s towns are set out by district in this chapter: the south (Joshua 15:21-32), the valley (Joshua 15:33-47), the hill country (Joshua 15:48-60) and the wilderness (Joshua 15:61-62). This group of towns is the first of the valley’s groups. Judah’s share was so large that part of it was later given to Simeon (Joshua 19:9).

Eshtaol and Zoreah lie toward the north of this group, Socoh and Azekah face each other across the valley of Elah, and Adullam lies further south. The exact sites of several are unknown or only proposed. Zanoah has been placed at Khirbet Zanu and Engannim at Khirbet Umm Jina, for example, while nobody can say with confidence where Adithaim or Gederothaim stood. Villages get abandoned and names get changed over the centuries, and the list was written for people who already knew these places, so it was never meant as a map for later readers.

The list prints fifteen names and then says “fourteen cities”, and the text does not say why. Three names come in Joshua 15:33, four in Joshua 15:34, four in Joshua 15:35 and four in Joshua 15:36. The two other main groups of lowland towns add up exactly, sixteen in Joshua 15:41 and nine in Joshua 15:44, which shows the writer was counting with care.

Christians have made several proposals, and none can be proved:

• One town with two names: Gederah and Gederothaim may be the same place, so that two names make one city. The same chapter does something similar when it explains that Hezron is Hazor (Joshua 15:25). This is the proposal you will most often meet.
• A town and its folds: The old Greek translation reads the last name as Gederah and its sheepfolds instead of as a second town, and that would also leave fourteen cities.
• A place not counted by itself: One of the fifteen may have been too small to count as a city, or may have belonged to a neighbouring town.
• A copyist’s slip: A name may have been altered or doubled as the text was copied by hand, which would touch no teaching of Scripture.

A similar gap appears just before this group, where Joshua 15:21-32 prints well over twenty-nine names and then says “all the cities are twenty and nine”. Whatever the explanation, the Israelites who first read these lists knew which towns were theirs.

Several towns have a longer story elsewhere in Scripture, and some share a name with a different town, so the place matters.

• Judges 13:2: Zoreah, spelled Zorah there, was the home of Samson’s parents. He was first stirred by the Spirit “between Zorah and Eshtaol” (Judges 13:25) and was buried between the same two towns (Judges 16:31). Both also appear in Dan’s list (Joshua 19:41) and Danites set out from them to find new land (Judges 18:2), probably because Dan’s portion lay beside Judah’s here. Zorah was later fortified by King Rehoboam along with Adullam, Socoh and Azekah (2 Chronicles 11:5-10).
• Genesis 38:1: Adullam is the home of Hirah, the friend Judah turned aside to visit long before this list. Its king was among those Joshua defeated (Joshua 12:15). In its cave David found refuge from Saul, and his family and the distressed and indebted gathered to him there (1 Samuel 22:1-2). His mighty men came to him there as well (2 Samuel 23:13).
• 1 Samuel 17:1: Socoh, spelled Shochoh there, and Azekah mark where the Philistine army camped when Saul’s men faced them across the valley of Elah. From that camp Goliath came out and challenged Israel for forty days, until David killed him with a sling and a stone (1 Samuel 17:2-4, 1 Samuel 17:49-50). This Socoh is a different town from the hill-country Socoh of Joshua 15:48.
• Joshua 10:11: Azekah is where the LORD’s great hailstones fell on the fleeing Amorite kings as far as that town. Much later it was one of the last two walled towns of Judah still standing when Babylon’s army was at Jerusalem (Jeremiah 34:7).
• Joshua 10:3: Jarmuth’s king Piram joined the alliance against Gibeon and was defeated by Joshua.
• Nehemiah 11:29-30: Zoreah (as Zareah), Jarmuth, Zanoah, Adullam and Azekah were all lived in again by Judah’s people after the exile, so the same names came back to the same families’ tribe. A Zanoah in the hill country also appears at Joshua 15:56.
• Genesis 38:21: Enam seems to be the same place named in the story of Judah and Tamar, where the KJV renders the name as the word “openly”.
• 1 Samuel 17:52: After David’s victory “the wounded of the Philistines fell down by the way to Shaaraim”, which is very likely this Sharaim.

Other towns sharing a name lie elsewhere, among them an Engannim in Issachar (Joshua 19:21), a Tappuah on Ephraim’s border (Joshua 16:8) and a second Ashnah in Judah (Joshua 15:43). So when Joshua 12:17 lists “The king of Tappuah, one”, we cannot be sure which Tappuah is meant. Adithaim and Gederothaim are known only from this list, and for them being named here is the whole of their record.