Biblion Bible Commentary
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Very Much Land Remains
Joshua 13:1-14
1 Now Joshua was old and well advanced in years. Yahweh said to him, “You are old and advanced in years, and there remains yet very much land to be possessed. · WEB
An old commander is told the work is unfinished — and ordered to allocate land not yet taken, because God's I-will-drive-them-out makes unconquered ground inheritable.
Now Joshua was old and well advanced in years. Yahweh said to him, "You are old and advanced in years, and there remains yet very much land to be possessed" Joshua 13:1.
The sentence states Joshua's age twice — God repeating a man's own condition back to him — and then the agenda his lifetime will not finish. The remaining-land survey is specific: the Philistine pentapolis on the coast, the Sidonian north, Lebanon toward Hamath Joshua 13:2–5 — the very territories that will supply Israel's next centuries of trouble. The book that says nothing failed Joshua 21:45 is the same book that maps the unfinished; both are true, and the tension is the Bible's realism about promise and possession living at two tenses Joshua 1:3.
I will drive them out from before the children of Israel. Just allocate it to Israel for an inheritance, as I have commanded you Joshua 13:6.
Here is the verse's astonishing instruction: divide what is not yet conquered. The lot lines will run through land still held by Sidonians, because I will drive them out — future tense — is treated as sufficient basis for a present deed. Israel's tribes receive title to territory their faith will have to collect, which converts every remaining Canaanite enclave from a fact of life into an unclaimed inheritance. The design failed only where the next book shows the collecting abandoned Judges 1:27–33 Judges 2:2–3; the deed itself never lapsed.
With him the Reubenites and the Gadites received their inheritance, which Moses gave them, beyond the Jordan eastward Joshua 13:8.
The east-bank settlement is recorded first — Moses' own allocation, honored to the letter Numbers 32:33 — with its darker footnotes kept in the record: Geshur and Maacath not driven out Joshua 13:13, and among the slain of the old wars, one name pulled forward for special mention: the children of Israel also killed Balaam the son of Beor, the soothsayer, with the sword Joshua 13:22. The prophet-for-hire who could not curse Israel Numbers 23:8 and then taught Peor's snare instead Numbers 31:16 Revelation 2:14 gets his epitaph in a land registry — the soothsayer, dead among the ordinary slain.
Only he gave no inheritance to the tribe of Levi. The offerings of Yahweh, the God of Israel, made by fire are his inheritance Joshua 13:14.
And the chapter that opens nine chapters of land grants establishes its great exception before the first lot falls. Levi receives no territory — stated here and again at the chapter's close with the deeper wording: Yahweh, the God of Israel, is their inheritance Joshua 13:33 Numbers 18:20 Deuteronomy 10:9. In a book where inheritance is the whole vocabulary of blessing, one tribe's portion is God himself — a live demonstration, planted in the middle of the real estate, that the land was always the sign and never the substance Psalms 16:5 Psalms 73:26.
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