Joshua 13

Joshua 13 is where the book stops fighting and starts surveying, and it begins with a frank word from God to an old soldier. You are old, the LORD tells Joshua, and there is a great deal of land still to be taken: the whole Philistine coast with its five cities, the Sidonian hills, Lebanon up to the pass of Hamath. Then comes the instruction that shapes the rest of the book. Do not wait. Divide the land now, all of it, conquered and unconquered alike, by lot among the nine and a half tribes, because I will drive out those hill peoples myself. Israel is to receive its inheritance on paper before it holds it in fact. The rest of the chapter looks back across the Jordan to the land Moses had already assigned to Reuben, Gad, and half of Manasseh, the kingdoms of Sihon and Og, described the way a land registry would describe them, from the Arnon gorge in the south to Mount Hermon in the north, plateau town by plateau town, with the note that Balaam the diviner died there too. Twice the survey pauses for something that is not geography. The Geshurites and Maacathites were never driven out and still live among the Israelites. And the tribe of Levi got nothing, no towns and no borders, because the LORD himself, and the offerings made to him, are Levi's inheritance. The chapter is a list, but it teaches two things a list rarely does: that promises are given before they are possessed, and that some of God's people are meant to own nothing but him.