Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Joshua · About this commentary
The Commander of Yahweh's Army
Joshua 5:13-15
13 When Joshua was by Jericho, he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, a man stood in front of him with his sword drawn in his hand. Joshua went to him and said to him, “Are you for us, or for our enemies?” · WEB
Joshua's question — are you for us or for our enemies — is answered No, and the correction is the whole book's theology of war.
When Joshua was by Jericho, he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, a man stood in front of him with his sword drawn in his hand Joshua 5:13.
On the eve of the first battle, the general is alone near the enemy city — reconnoitering, presumably — and finds an armed stranger between him and Jericho. His challenge is a sentry's, and it is also every warrior's theology in one line: are you for us, or for our enemies? The question assumes two sides and asks which one heaven is on.
He said, "No; but I have come now as commander of Yahweh's army" Joshua 5:14.
The answer refuses the question's premise before supplying anything else. No — not for you as you imagine it, not for them; the visitor has not come to join a side but to take command. Yahweh's army was not marching in Israel's ranks and available for enlistment; Israel was being enlisted in his. The distinction is the difference between a God who blesses our causes and a God whose cause we are permitted to serve — and every war Israel will fight in this book goes well or badly precisely as that order is kept or inverted Joshua 6:2 Joshua 7:12.
Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and worshiped, and asked him, "What does my lord say to his servant?"
Joshua's response is the book's posture stated once and perfectly: worship, and a request for orders. The commander accepts the worship — which angels in Scripture refuse Revelation 19:10 Revelation 22:8–9 — and that acceptance is the strongest indication of who stands before Joshua. Readers from earliest times have seen here the Lord himself in warrior's form, as at Mamre and Peniel Genesis 18:1–2 Genesis 32:24–30; the text identifies him only by his office and lets the worship and the next verse speak.
"Take off your sandals, for the place on which you stand is holy." Joshua did so Joshua 5:15.
The words are Moses' bush, almost exactly Exodus 3:5 — spoken now not at a mountain of revelation but on the plains outside a doomed city. The successor receives his own burning-bush moment on the eve of his own impossible assignment, and the promise as I was with Moses Joshua 1:5 acquires its seal. The scene ends without a battle plan; that comes in the next verse. First the ground itself is declared holy, because the war about to begin belongs to the one whose presence makes it so — and the general it needed was already barefoot.
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