Anonymous · 600 BCE · overland

The Book of Joshua. The generation that grew up in the wilderness crosses the Jordan at flood and takes the country town by town - Jericho by circuit and trumpet, Ai by ambush after a failure nobody expected, and Hazor by fire. It is a short book and an uncomfortable one, and it does not soften anything.

1. 1
   The crossing of the Jordan

   The river is in flood at harvest, and the priests carrying the Ark step in first and the water stands in a heap upstream - twelve stones taken out of the riverbed and set up so that children will ask what they mean.

2. 2
   Jericho

   Two spies hidden under flax on a roof by Rahab, a scarlet cord in the window, and then six days of circling in silence and a seventh of seven circuits and a shout - and the oldest walled town in the world falls.

3. 3
   Ai

   A small town that routs them because one man kept plunder from Jericho - and after that is dealt with, taken by a feint and an ambush, which is the only piece of ordinary military tactics in the book.

4. 4
   Gibeon

   The Gibeonites arrive in worn-out shoes with mouldy bread claiming to have come from far away, and get a treaty by fraud - and Joshua honours it anyway, and then has to march all night to defend them.

5. 5
   Hazor

   North to the head of a coalition of kings, a city the text calls the head of all those kingdoms - burned, and the only one burned, which is a detail archaeologists have argued about for eighty years.

6. 6
   Shechem

   At the end, the tribes gather between the two mountains and are asked to choose whom they will serve - and Joshua tells them plainly that they are not able to, which is a strange note to finish a victory on.