“The Hebrew Bible: Joshua” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter begins his introduction to the Books of the Prophets with a word of caution, “Given the immense historical distance that separates us from the prophets, it is hard to evaluate their reiterated claim that they are speaking God’s words. That claim is certainly much more than a pious fraud. There are indications that the prophets, or at least many of them, may have delivered their words in some sort of ecstatic state. It is quite conceivable that they felt they had heard God speaking to them in the precise words of Hebrew poetry—sometimes sublime poetry—or visionary prose that they conveyed to their audiences.” In his introduction to the Book of Joshua, Alter suggests, “Joshua is really two books, symmetrically divided into twelve chapters each. The first of these we may call the Book of Conquests…. The second half of Joshua can be given the rubric the Book of Apportionments.” Next, Alter relates a bit of historical fact, “What the last several decades of archaeological investigation have established is that there was no sweeping conquest of Canaan by invaders from the east in the late thirteenth century B.C.E.—which would have been the time of Joshua—and that many of the towns listed as objects of Israelite conquest were either uninhabited at this time or did not come under Israelite rule until considerably later…. If the Canaanites seem to have disappeared, it was not because they were extirpated but because they had been assimilated by the Israelites.”

In Joshua 1:18, Alter depicts the construction of the beginning of the book, “Only be strong and stalwart. The opening section of Joshua comprises four speeches: God to Joshua, Joshua to the people’s overseers, Joshua to the trans-Jordanian tribes, and the response of the trans-Jordanian tribes to Joshua. These interlocked speeches are meant to convey a sense of perfect solidarity on the eve of the conquest of the land.” In Joshua 3:1, Alter points out the emphatic application of repetition in the narration, “crossed over. The verb ‘avar, which means either to cross over or, as in verses 2 and 4, to pass through or over, is repeated eight times in this chapter, thus marking the episode as a portentous liminal moment when the people of Israel cross over from their long Wilderness wanderings into the land they have been promised.”

Alter frequently mentions the biblical technique of the envelope structure to frame narrative segments. In Joshua 22:1, he relates, “the Reubenites and the Gadites and to the half-tribe of Manasseh. The book began with the necessity of the trans-Jordanian tribes to join their brothers in the conquest of the land west of the Jordan. Now that the conquest is complete, we come back to these tribes, in an envelope structure, as they are sent back to their own territory.” Finally, Alter presents a recurring theme, which hangs over much of the book, in Joshua 23:1, “after the Lord had granted rest to Israel from all their enemies. This ringing declaration is subverted by the threat of exile that hovers over the end of the chapter. This is a tension that runs through both Joshua and Judges: God has enabled Israel to conquer all its enemies, yet the land is not completely conquered, and enemies threaten both within it and from surrounding nations.”