ix. The Per.son of Joshua.— We are now able to consider the person of Joshua himself. The attempt has been made to relegate, not only the deeds, but the personality of this great leader to the domain of legend and myth. Stade [GVI i. p. 135) and others t have fastened on the undoubted fact that in each successive stratum of the tra- dition Joshua is made to play a more active and regulative part in the allotment and conquest of the territory. They assert that he is not men- tioned by J, and that we can trace the origin of him to E. Eis an Ephraimitic document, Joshua an Ephraimitic hero. And the inference is drawn by these critics, that, to begin with, Joshua is no rnore a person than, say, the ' Judah and Simeon his brother ' of Jg 1'; but only the personification of a Josepliide clan, whose centre was Tininath-
• The rest of v. 13 is a prose statement that the prayer of Joshua for a lon^ day in which to complete the rout of the eneuiy, was fulfilled by the literal halt of sun and moon in their courses.
t Cf. W. Meyer, ZATW L p. 1S4 ; Wellhausen, Comp. det Vtx p. H6f. n. L
serah (Jos 19" 24'°) or Timnath-heres (Jg 2») • i« the S.SV. of the hill-country of ICphraim.t
But, as Kuenen says, the fact that Joshua appears with increasing importance through the later strata of tradition, so tar from being a proof that he did not appear in the earliest stratum, strongly supports the presu|)position that he was
S resent there. And, as a matter of fact, Joshua oes appear in J (Jos 17'*'"*), not merely as tlie leader of Ephraini or of a part of that tribe, as E represents liim, but as the arbiter over all Israel to whom the tribes appeal when they are dis- appointed with the territory allotted to them. Nor is it pos.sible to deny that Joshua apiicara in the simpler form of the double JE narrative* of the taking of Jericho and Ai, and of the treaty with Gibeon ; which form Budde has very suc- cessfully argued to belong to J (ZATW vii. pp. 134-14G, 155-157). Budde has also proposed the restoration of Jo.shua's name to Jg l'" ' And the house of Joseph went up to Bethel, and Joshua with them.'t Moreover, Joshua is the speaker in the ancient poetical fragment (ch. lO'-- "). And in conformity with these descriptions of all Israel acting under one leader, at least up to the taking of Ai, ch. 10' states that the army returned to Gilgal after Ai was taken, and, similarly, v." brings them there again after the battle of Beth- horon. These verses probably belong to E.
There is, then, no point in the development ol the tradition at which we can say. Here Joshua was added for the first time to the story. So far back as we can trace it, Joshua is part of the tradition, and he appears upon that line of it, the Judiean J, in which there was no temptation to create him as a tribal hero, for he does not belong to Judah but to Ephraim. On the other hand, the rest of the data of the tradition and the historical probabilities require Israel to liave been under one head. In the absence of contemjiorary evidence, these are all the proofs of his historical reality which it is possible to obtain. But surely they are sufficient. If, as is probable, the poetical fragment is genuine, Joshua's existence as the Captain of all Israel is put beyond doubt.
X. Joshua's Work. — Joshua, then, was the successor of Moses, and led all Israel across Jordan. All the documents appear to agree that the crossing took place opposite to Jericho, — appear, for even here a difficulty arises. As we have seen, one of them, E, makes a statement, found both in Dt and Jos, to the eflect that Israel were sum- moned by Moses to celebrate their arrival in W. Palestine by setting up a monument, with the law written upon it, at Shechem. Now Shechem, be- sides being the centre of the land, would naturally be the first goal of any invasion of W. Palestine from the other side of Jordan. No one can doubt this who is familiar with the aspect which W. Palestine presents to an observer from the site occupied by Israel in the N. of Moab. A wall of mountain, broken only by narrow gorges, runs far N. of Jericho ; the first break in it, the first invita- tion to invade W. Palestine, is the great pass, the Wady Fera'a, which leads up from Jordan to Shechem ; and it is at its mouth that the fords across Jordan are most easy. Take this geo- grapliical fact along with the evidence furnished by E, and at first sight it is hard to resist the inference of at least the probability of an invasion
* These passages are reversed by Stade, OVI 143, n. 2.
t Stade, p. 135 ; Meyer, op. cit.
I MX and B read the meaningless ' and Jehovah with them ' ; A has 'and Judah with them.' See Budde, op, cit. p. 144. The substitution of another name for Joshua's in this verM and the omission of his name elsewhere in Jg I was necessary to the editor, when he removed the events described in Jgf 1 from their proper setting and plihced them all aft«r JothuM'k death, see T.l*.