The tribes living east of the Jordan river are finally dismissed to go back home. They build a giant altar just on their side of the border which stirs up a lot of concern back in Israel proper. Knowing that God will punish the whole nation of Israelites for the idolatry of a few tribes, the rest of the Israelites are ready to go to war with the tribes of Benjamin, Gad and the quarter-tribe of Manasseh.
When they show up with a giant army, the two and a quarter tribes living there explain that they didn’t erect this altar to any foreign God, but as a testament pointing at the tabernacle back west of the river. They actually built their altar specifically so the other tribes wouldn’t be able to roll in after a couple generations and claim that they weren’t worshiping the Lord out here.
Once everything is straightened out and nobody feels the need to annihilate anyone else anymore, they all have a big party in stead. Happy ending.
Joshua reaffirms the covenant between God and the people and, in front of all the elders. leaders, judges and officials of all the tribes of Israel, he bound them to all follow the Lord and not worship foreign gods or compromise their culture or religion with their neighbors. God will not tolerate any nonsense when it comes to foreign gods and foreign worship.
A while after this speech, Joshua dies. A while after Joshua dies, Eleazer, the head priest dies. Since the high priest died, I presume that means there was a free for all in the cities of refuge. You have to stay inside the boundaries of a city of refuge if you accidently kill someone and want to avoid their people from killing you back, but you are allowed to leave when the head priest dies. If you can’t ever leave the city, it’s got to be hard to make a living, which must be why a big part of your tithe is supposed to go toward supporting the cities of refuge. Still though, I’ll bet living in a city of refuge was probably not a very pleasant existence.
Eleazer is buried in the land of Ephraim, which is strange since he’s a Levite and not an Ephraimite. That’s fine though, maybe Levites are all buried in other lands since Levite land was divvied up differently than everyone else’s. Joshua is buried in Shechem, in some land that he bought there. Now this is a pretty minor point, but my text says that that land became a part of the inheritance of Joshua’s line, but land that is bought is supposed to return to the original owner in a year of jubilee every 50 years. At least the land is staying in the tribe of Ephraim, but it’s weird that this land is bought permanently.
I guess no rules are broken though because the book of Joshua ends by claiming that the law was upheld all through the time of Joshua and the time of the elders that outlived him who had seen the miracles God performed in these times.
I feel like this wouldn’t have been pointed out to us how well everyone followed the rules in this era unless it was in contrast to the era we’re going to read about in the next book.
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