Today, I am reading and commenting on  Joshua 21-22.

Reading today’s blog I had a new thought about why the Levites were allotted cities and towns from among the other tribes, or, at least, part of what that meant.  All of the other tribes needed to go out and conquer the lands which were allotted to them.  However, the Levites cities and towns from within the land conquered by the other tribes.  So, the Levites could spend their time focusing on determining God’s will for Israel and helping the members of the other tribes worship God.  Which brings up the other reason that the Levites did not have a separate territory of their own.  The Levites were scattered among the other tribes in order to provide each tribe with people to teach them God’s Law and maintain the worship of God.

The other portion of this passage describes the return home of the warriors from the tribes which settled east of the Jordan River.  We learn an important lesson about asking people to explain their actions when we think they have done wrong.  When the eastern tribes returned home they built a large. impressive altar before crossing the Jordan.  The other tribes thought they were building themselves an alternative place of worship from that used by the rest of Israel.  So, the western tribes gathered to go to war against the eastern tribes.  However, before they began to march, they sent a delegation to the eastern tribes to confront them.  The eastern tribes immediately responded that the western tribes were correct, that it would be wrong for them to conduct their worship and feasts at a separate place from the rest of Israel.  They further explained that they had not built the altar for that purpose.  Rather the altar was built as a memorial to future generation reminding them that the tribes east of the Jordan were every bit as much a part of Israel as the western tribes.  Left unspoken, because everyone in the discussion would understand it, was the fact that if they had built any kind of memorial other than an altar, future generations would have made it an object of worship.

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