Joshua the Prophet


Now that I have gotten over the shock of the fact that the lectionary skips over almost the entire Book of Joshua, I can make a few comments on the reading for today (Jos. 24.1-13).  Here we have Joshua functioning like a prophet.  We found out in Deut. 34.10 that Moses was a prophet.  A lot of what Joshua does mirrors what Moses did, e.g. miraculously leading the people through water (Jos. 3), having an encounter where he must remove his sandals (Jos. 5.15), etc.  So, we should not be surprised to see Joshua functioning like a prophet.

Check out Jos. 24.2:

2 And Joshua said to all the people, “Thus says the Lord,…

“Thus says the Lord” is a traditional prophetic formula.  Here is an Accordance chart that displays where the usages of this phrase cluster:

Thus says the Lord

That big spike is around the prophets.  And, Joshua delivers a prophetic type message here in Chapter 24.  Basically, he tells the people what the Lord has done for them (1-13), what they are doing wrong, and what they need to do about (14, 15ff).