Today, I am reading and commenting on  Joshua 15-17.

Todays passage discusses the territory given to the tribe of Judah and to the tribe of Joseph (as given to the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh).  Contained within the description of the territory given to Judah is a partial account of Caleb receiving his portion.  It contains the story of Caleb promising his daughter in marriage to the man who takes a particular town and then his daughter asking Caleb for springs to go with the other land he gave to her and her husband.  I am not sure why the account about Caleb’s daughter is here rather than earlier in chapter 14 where the book first discusses Caleb claiming his portion.

Once the passage concludes describing the territory which was claimed by the tribe of Judah, it goes on to discuss the territory given to the tribe of Joseph to claim.  I am not quite sure what is going on here, this is one of the few places where the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh are lumped together as the tribe of Joseph.  I think if I were to read this without any context from other parts of the Old Testament I would conclude that Joshua initially planned to give territory to Ephraim and Manasseh as if they were a single tribe.  A plan which was disrupted by the numbers of these two tribes and the difficulty which they had displacing the Canaanites living in the territory they were assigned.  And yet, part of this also reads as if they were already given two separate portions.  Perhaps, the way to read it would be that the portion of the tribe of Manasseh which did not settle east of the Jordan was being settled with the tribe of Ephraim , calling the combined group the “tribe of Joseph”.    In any case, both here, and earlier in the description of the territory assigned to Judah, we see indications of the problems which would later face the Israelites due to their failure to expel all of the peoples living in the land which they settled.

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