Study Desk

That is why the army of Israel turned and ran away from the fight. They did that because they have done wrong. They should be destroyed. I will not continue to help you or be with you unless you destroy everything I commanded you to destroy.

Then the Lord said to Joshua, "Hold your spear toward the city of Ai, because I will give you that city." So Joshua held his spear toward the city of Ai.

The men answered, "We are your servants. We have come from a faraway country. We came because we heard of the great power of the Lord your God. We heard about what he has done and about everything he did in Egypt.

This is what we must do. We must let them live. We cannot hurt them or God will be angry with us because we broke the promise we made to them.

The Gibeonites answered, "We lied to you because we were afraid you would kill us. We heard that God commanded his servant Moses to give you all this land. And God told you to kill all the people who lived in this land. That is why we lied to you.

Joshua captured all these cities and their kings in one series of battles. He did this because the Lord , the God of Israel, was fighting for Israel.

Then the Lord said to Joshua, "Don't be afraid of that army, because I will allow you to defeat them. By this time tomorrow, you will have killed them all. You will cut the legs of the horses and burn all their chariots."

So that day Moses made a promise to me. He said, ‘The land where you went will become your land. Your children will own that land forever. I will give you that land because you really believed in the Lord , my God.'

And that city still belongs to the family of Caleb son of Jephunneh the Kenizzite. That land still belongs to his people because he trusted and obeyed the Lord , God of Israel.

But the people of Dan had trouble taking their land. There were strong enemies there and the people of Dan could not easily defeat them. So the people of Dan went to the northern part of Israel and fought against Laish. They defeated Laish and killed the people who lived there. So the people of Dan lived in the town of Laish. They changed the name to Dan because that was the name of the father of their tribe.

If someone chases you and follows you to that city, the leaders of the city must not give you up. They must protect you because you came to them for safety after killing someone by accident—you were not angry and did not plan to kill the person. It was something that just happened.

Remember what happened at Peor? Was the sin we committed there not bad enough? Because of that sin, the Lord punished his people with a terrible sickness. And we are still suffering from that sin.

"‘Remember how Achan son of Zerah refused to obey the command about things that must be destroyed. That one man broke God's law, but all the Israelites were punished. Achan died because of his sin, but also many other people died.'"

"The Lord is our God! Again we say that the Lord is our God! And God knows why we did this thing. We want you to know also. You can judge what we did. If you think we did it because we are against the Lord or refuse to obey him, you can kill us today.

Do you think we built our own altar because we want to turn away from the Lord ? Do you think we built another altar for burnt offerings, grain offerings, and fellowship offerings? If that is why we built this altar, we ask the Lord himself to punish us.

But that is not why we built it. We built it because we were afraid that in the future your descendants might not accept us as part of God's people. So your children might say to our children, ‘You people have no reason to worship the Lord , the God of Israel.

With his help, one man from Israel could defeat 1000 enemy soldiers, because the Lord your God fights for you, as he promised.

The Lord helped us defeat the people living in these lands. He helped us defeat the Amorites who lived in this land where we are now. So we will continue to serve the Lord , because he is our God."

The Lord was on the side of the men of Judah when they fought. They took the land in the hill country, but they failed to take the land in the valleys, because the people living there had iron chariots.

The Amorites forced the tribe of Dan to live in the hill country. They had to stay in the hills because the Amorites would not let them come down to live in the valleys.