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

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

I rarely get much out of the passages which describe what land was assigned to which tribe.  However, when I read today’s passage I was struck by how allocating land to the Levites from within the allocations of the other tribes provided for spreading religious teachers among them.  By spreading the Levites among the other tribes the Levites also provided a unifying presence to all of the tribes.  With the Levites spread out among the other tribes, they would have been encouraged to travel further than most people would have done.  This would have meant that cultural practices would have been kept more uniform across the entire nation of Israel, which in turn would have kept the people thinking of themselves as a nation.