One Big, Heaping Pile of Water (Joshua 1-4)

One of my favorite things to do when I taught literature to high school students was ask them to look at a story from a different perspective in order to emphasize that point of view matters. This morning this came to mind as I read in Joshua of the Israelites crossing the Jordan river:

The perspective of the story comes from its author, likely Joshua for most of the book although the Bible does not explicitly name him as such, and gives us the conditions from a vantage point of an Israelite watching the crossing of the Jordan. Naturally, that’s what the reader sees, too. We see from a distance of a biblical mile (2,000 cubits because that was Joshua’s command to the people as to the distance they should keep from the ark in 3:4) the priests step into the overflowing banks of the rushing Jordan river during its harvest time (3:15). The flow at this time and the depth would’ve been tremendous, and as we see later in 1 Chronicles 12:3-15 would’ve taken strong skilled men blessed with God’s favor to be able to cross. 


The priests carrying the ark are told by Joshua that when the soles of their feet come to a rest in the water, “the Lord of all the earth” will cut off the waters and will make them stand in one mass (3:13). The Levites holding the ark set out in faith and the people follow at a safe sight distance. When the priests step in the water, the action begins. The God who created the water (Gen. 1:2) and told it where it could go and how far (Job 38:11) does the miraculous work of providing safe passage on dry ground as they watch, heaping it up into one pile.


As I was reading today, it occurred to me to look at a map and some commentaries and find out about the cities mentioned in the text because I noticed something I had skipped over many other times, the words about the waters rising up in one mass “a great distance away at Adam, the city that is beside Zarethan” (Joshua 3:16). These cities are no longer in existence by these names, and students of biblical times writing about the great distance don’t always agree about their exact locations, but the minimum range seems to be from 14 miles (Holman Concise Bible Dictionary) to a maximum range of 30 miles (Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary) with several commentators settling in somewhere between at 16-17 miles (Barnes Notes on the Bible, Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges). The key thing here is that it is, as the Bible relates, a “great distance away.” Far enough that millions of people  could’ve crossed quickly on the broad, dry surface provided by God in what had been flowing water seconds earlier.


These children of Israel, many of them far too young to remember (if they were even born) the crossing of the Red Sea during the Exodus from Egypt, needed to see God’s miraculous abilities themselves. They needed to believe and obey where their parents had failed to do so in the wilderness. God graciously gave them the same kind of miraculous crossing into the promised land into freedom that he gave their parents out of slavery. 


Now look from the vantage point of the people of Jericho and the surrounding areas on the other side of the Jordan. The people of Jericho are at a more elevated location (about 345’ higher) than the Israelite camp at Shittim and would’ve been able to see the approximately 2.5 million people in their organized camp directly across the Jordan River. The people of Jericho would’ve seen them begin to move en masse towards the overflowing Jordan. The people of Jericho would’ve been able to see God stop the waters of the Jordan and pile them into a heaping mound (think how high that tremendous wall of water would stand). The people of Jericho would’ve been able to see the Israelites hurriedly cross the now dry expanse of what had been the overflowing Jordan River and head their way. The people of Jericho and the surrounding areas would’ve seen the Jordan released by God and return to its overflow when they finished crossing and the priests removed their feet from the riverbed and walked out of it (4:18).


If God uses this event to magnify and exalt Joshua in the sight of all of Israel so that they would fear him with a profound kind of awe and reverence like they had feared Moses all of his life, imagine what it would do to the people watching them progress into their own land (4:14). Before this happened, the two spies Rahab helps are told by her that “all the inhabitants of the land have melted in despair because of you” (2:8, AMP). They have already heard how the Lord had dried up the water of the Red Sea 40 years earlier for them as well as what happened to the two kings of the Amorites beyond the Jordan who were destroyed (2:10). Now there is no spirit left to fight because of the Israelites, “for the LORD your God, He is God, He is God in heaven above and on earth beneath” (2:11), Rahab tells them. 


In chapter 1 of the book, God promises Joshua he will be with him and no one will be able to stand against him as long as he lives (v. 5). In chapter 2 God graciously provides Joshua with evidence of the people’s fear of the Lord and dread of him. In chapter 3 Joshua acts on God’s command to cross over into the land He is giving them. In chapter 4, Joshua (at God’s command) sets up memorial stones, setting up a memorial recognizing that God cut off the waters of the Jordan because remembering and telling what God is doing and has done must happen. 


If we yet doubt the significance of this momentous occasion in the life of God’s people, look at verse 16 of chapter 4: “Order the priests carrying the ark of the Testimony to come up out of the Jordan.” The water ran deep at this point of crossing, and the priests have to climb up its banks. The stones that would be seen by their children in the future (peeking up at them when the water wasn’t overflowing at harvest time) would remind them and “all the peoples of the earth” that without any doubt whatsoever “the hand of the Lord is mighty and extraordinarily powerful” (4:24, AMP), which they should recognize and acknowledge, resulting in the fear of God and the obedient, reverent, profound awe and worship of Him forever.

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