Today, I am reading and commenting on  Joshua 18-20.

Many modern scholars argue that the conquest described in the Book of Joshua never happened because there is no archeological evidence for it, and that the existing archeological evidence seems to contradict it.  First, I want to point out that the dates given in the Bible are ambiguous enough (I have touched on the ambiguity of translating Hebrew) that determining the dates for the conquest cannot be done with reliability (that does not mean that it can’t be done, just that we should not put too much credence when dates arrived at from the Bible do not match up with dates arrived at from other dating methods).  Today’s passage gives us a reason to think that the events in the Book of Joshua actually happened (even if they may appear differently to our eyes than the description given here).   At several points earlier in this book and in the books preceding it, we were told that Joshua and Eleazar would sit down with representatives of the tribes and divide the land up by lot immediately after the Israelites had conquered all of the land (or, at least, all of the land which they had sufficient numbers to settle).  However, here we discover that late in Joshua’s life, seven of the tribes had not yet had any land allocated to them.  In fact, this passage indicates that the land which would be theirs had not even been conquered yet. What is presented here is not how one would describe the conquest of the land if one were making it up solely to justify control over the land.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.