Joshua ( ), also known as Yehoshua ( Yəhōšuaʿ, Tiberian: Yŏhōšuaʿ, lit. 'Yahweh is salvation'), Jehoshua, or Josue, was Moses' assistant in the books of Exodus and Numbers, and later succeeded Moses as leader of the Israelite tribes in the Book of Joshua of the Hebrew Bible. His name was Hoshea ( Hōšēaʿ, lit. 'Save') the son of Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim, but Moses called him "Yehoshua" (translated as "Joshua" in English),Bible the name by which he is commonly known in English. According to the Bible, he was born in Egypt prior to the Exodus.
In , the Hebrew Bible identifies Joshua as one of the twelve spies of Israel sent by Moses to explore the land of Canaan. After the death of Moses, he led the Israelite tribes in the conquest of Canaan, and allocated lands to the tribes. According to biblical chronology, Joshua lived some time in the Bronze Age. According to Joshua died at the age of 110.
Joshua holds a position of respect among Muslims, who also see him as the leader of the faithful following the death of Moses. In Islam, it is also believed that Yusha bin Nun (Joshua) was the "attendant" of Moses mentioned in the Quran before Moses meets Khidr. Joshua plays a role in Islamic literature, with significant narration in the hadith.
Mainstream scholarship holds that the Book of Joshua is a theological and nationalist narrative compiled and revised centuries after the supposed conquest, with archaeological evidence largely contradicting its account, though there is ongoing debate over some sites.
Name The English name "Joshua" is a rendering of the Hebrew Yehoshua, and is mostly interpreted as "Yahweh is salvation"; although others have also alternatively interpreted it as "Yahweh is lordly". The theophoric name appears to be constructed from a combination of the Tetragrammaton with the Hebrew noun יְשׁוּעָה (Modern: yəšūʿa, Tiberian: yăšūʿā), meaning "salvation"; derived from the Hebrew root ישׁע (y-š-ʿ), meaning "to save/help/deliver". Other theophoric names sharing a similar meaning can also be found throughout the Hebrew Bible, such as that of the son of David אֱלִישׁוּעַ (ʾĔlīšūaʿ), whose name means "My El (God) is salvation".
"Jesus" is the English derivative of the Greek transliteration of "Yehoshua" via Latin. In the Septuagint, all instances of the word "Yehoshua" are rendered as "" (Iēsûs), the closest Greek pronunciation of the .Bible Numbers 13:16 LXX (and Moses named Hosea, son of Naue, Jesus) Thus, in modern Greek, Joshua is called "Jesus son of Naue" (, tû Nauḗ) to differentiate him from Jesus. This is also true in some Slavic languages following the Eastern Orthodox tradition (e.g. "", Iisús Navín, in Bulgarian, Serbian and Russian, but not Czech).
Biblical narrative
The Exodus
Joshua was a major figure in the events of the Exodus. He was charged by Moses with selecting and commanding a militia group for their first battle after exiting Egypt, against the Amalekites in Rephidim,Bible in which they were victorious.
He later accompanied Moses when he ascended biblical Mount Sinai to commune with God,Exodus 24:13 visualize God's plan for the Israelite tabernacle, and receive the Ten Commandments. Joshua was with Moses when he descended from the mountain, heard the Israelites' celebrations around the Golden Calf,Bible and broke the tablets bearing the words of the commandments. Similarly, in the narrative which refers to Moses being able to speak with God in his tent of meeting outside the camp, Joshua is seen as custodian of the tent ('tabernacle of meeting') when Moses returned to the Israelite encampment.Exodus 33:11 However, when Moses returned to the mountain to re-create the tablets recording the Ten Commandments, Joshua was not present, as the biblical text states "no man shall come up with you".Exodus 34:3
Later, Joshua was identified as one of the twelve spies sent by Moses to explore and report on the land of Canaan,Bible and only he and Caleb gave an encouraging report, a reward for which would be that only these two of their entire generation would enter the promised land.Bible
According to Joshua 1:1,Bible God appointed Joshua to succeed Moses as leader of the Israelites along with giving him a blessing of invincibility during his lifetime.Bible The first part of the book of Joshua covers the period when he led the conquest of Canaan.
Conquest of Canaan
At the Jordan River, the waters parted, as they had for Moses at the Red Sea. The first battle after the crossing of the Jordan was the fall of Jericho. Joshua led the destruction of Jericho, then moved on to Ai, a small neighboring city to the west. However, they were defeated with thirty-six Israelite deaths. The defeat was attributed to Achan taking an "accursed thing" from Jericho; and was followed by Achan and his family and animals being stoned to death to restore God's favor. Joshua then went to defeat Ai.
The Israelites faced an alliance of five Amorite kings from Jerusalem, Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, and Eglon. At Gibeon, Joshua asked the to cause the Sun and Moon to stand still, so that he could finish the battle in daylight. According to the text, the Sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. This event is most notable because "There has been no day like it before or since, when the heeded the voice of a man, for the fought for Israel."Bible The also fought for the Israelites in this battle, for he hurled huge hailstones from the sky which killed more Canaanites than those which the Israelites slaughtered. From there on, Joshua was able to lead the Israelites to several victories, securing much of the land of Canaan. He presided over the Israelite gatherings at Gilgal and Shiloh which allocated land to the tribes of Israel (Joshua 14:1–5 and 18:1–10), and the Israelites rewarded him with the Ephraimite city of Timnath-heres or Timnath-serah, where he settled (Joshua 19:50).
According to the Talmud, Joshua in his book enumerated only those towns on the frontier.
Death
When he was "old and well advanced in years",Bible Joshua convened the elders and chiefs of the Israelites and exhorted them to have no fellowship with the native population, because it could lead them to be unfaithful to God.Bible , At a general assembly of the clans at Shechem, he took leave of the people, admonishing them to be loyal to their God, who had been so mightily manifested in the midst of them. As a witness of their promise to serve God, Joshua set up a great stone under an oak by the sanctuary of God. Soon afterward he died, at the age of 110, and was buried at Timnath-heres, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of Mount Gaash.Bible
Historicity
Current mainstream opinion The prevailing scholarly view is that the Book of Joshua is not a factual account of historical events. The apparent setting of Joshua is the 13th century BCE which was a time of widespread city-destruction, but with a few exceptions (Hazor, Lachish) the destroyed cities are not the ones the Bible associates with Joshua, and the ones it does associate with him show little or no sign of even being occupied at the time. Given its lack of historicity, Carolyn Pressler in her commentary for the Westminster Bible Companion series suggests that readers of Joshua should give priority to its theological message ("what passages teach about God") and be aware of what these would have meant to audiences in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. Richard Nelson explained that the needs of the centralised monarchy favoured a single story of origins, combining old traditions of an exodus from Egypt, belief in a national god as "divine warrior," and explanations for ruined cities, social stratification and ethnic groups, and contemporary tribes.
It has been argued that the Book of Joshua holds little historical value. The archaeological evidence shows that Jericho and Ai were not occupied in the Near Eastern Late Bronze Age, although recent excavations at Jericho have questioned this. The story of the conquest perhaps represents the nationalist propaganda of the eighth century BCE kings of Judah and their claims to the territory of the Kingdom of Israel, incorporated into an early form of Joshua written late in the reign of king Josiah (reigned 640–609 BCE). The book was probably revised and completed after the fall of Jerusalem to the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 586 BCE, and possibly after the return from the Babylonian exile in 538 BCE.
Nadav Na'aman believes Joshua 10 might be a variant of a story found in 2 Samuel 5 and 1 Chronicles 14, in which David takes his army to confront the Philistines, where Yahweh smites the Philistines before David. Na'aman also points to similarities with the campaigns fought by Sennacherib in the same region in 701 BCE, where numerous fortified cities were captured and destroyed including Lachish, Libnah, Eglon (Tel' Eton), and Debir. Assyrian inscriptions also describe how the storm god Hadad wiped out fleeing armies of the kings of Urartu with rain and stones from heaven, while the enemy hid in "the recesses of the mountain". Comparatively, Sennacherib in his conquest accounts hangs the corpses of the chief Philistine rulers of Ekron on poles.
M. Noth (1930s) In the 1930s Martin Noth made a sweeping criticism of the usefulness of the Book of Joshua for history. Noth was a student of Albrecht Alt, who emphasized form criticism and the importance of etiology. Alt and Noth posited a peaceful movement of the Israelites into various areas of Canaan, contra the Biblical account.
W.F. Albright (1930s) William Foxwell Albright questioned the "tenacity" of etiologies, which were key to Noth's analysis of the campaigns in Joshua. Archaeological evidence in the 1930s showed that the city of Ai, an early target for conquest in the putative Joshua account, had existed and been destroyed, but in the 22nd century BCE. Some alternate sites for Ai have been proposed which would partially resolve the discrepancy in dates, but these sites have not been widely accepted.
K. Kenyon (1951) In 1951 Kathleen Kenyon showed that City IV at Tell es-Sultan (Jericho) was destroyed at the end of the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2100–1550 BCE), not during the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1200 BCE). Kenyon argued that the early Israelite campaign could not be historically corroborated, but rather explained as an etiology of the location and a representation of the Israelite settlement.
G.E. Wright (1955) In 1955, G. Ernest Wright discussed the correlation of archaeological data to the early Israelite campaigns, which he divided into three phases per the Book of Joshua. He pointed to two sets of archaeological findings that "seem to suggest that the biblical account is in general correct regarding the nature of the late thirteenth and twelfth-eleventh centuries in the country" (i.e., "a period of tremendous violence"). He gives particular weight to what were then recent digs at Hazor by Yigael Yadin.
Joshua's sun miracle Baruch Margalit refers to the sun standing still in the Joshua story as the "most difficult section in the entire narrative". In the poem, Joshua addresses the sun directly, and it obeys his command, while in another verse it was Yahweh who heeded Joshua, not the sun. Theodore Hiebert argued that both the sun and moon are standing by to join Yahweh into battle, being seen in context with a similar passage in Habakkuk 3. This would then not be focused on extending daylight, but about preparing celestial forces for war in a battle incantation ritual.J. Briend, "Josué 10: Une conquête en morceau", Foi et Vie 97/4, 1998. Margalit believes the poetic fragment from the Book of Jasher was reinterpreted to depict the miraculous long day, when it was originally about the arrival of the heavenly host. Another view is that Joshua is asserting his authority over the sun and moon which are personified Canaanite deities, or that the Israelite God himself was envisioned as a solar deity.