Myth #90:

Joshua led Israel after the death of Moses.

The Myth: Now after the death of Moses the servant of the LORD it came to pass, that the LORD spake unto Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ minister, saying, Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel. (Josh. 1:1–2)

The Reality: Joshua’s name indicates that he was a mythological figure named after two Egyptian creation deities.

Before leaving Joshua’s campaigns in Canaan, we should ask ourselves: if almost every major battle story is fictitious, did Joshua himself actually exist? No, he didn’t.

The Bible frequently refers to Joshua as “Joshua, Son of Nun.” This name raises some questions. In Hebrew, Joshua’s actual name is “Jeho-shua.” The Jeho portion represents JHWH, the name of the Hebrew God, and many Israelites had that element in their name. Scholars usually translate his name as “God saves” or “God is salvation.” (Jeho-shua is also the proper Hebrew name for Jesus.)

But we have a chronological problem with Joshua having the element “Jeho” in his name. The name JHWH did not become known to the Israelites until Moses brought it into Egypt at the time of the Exodus. He himself didn’t learn that name of God until just before going back to Egypt to confront the pharaoh. The Hebrew Patriarchs apparently knew God only under the name El Shaddai.exodus 6:3 proves this: “And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of El Shaddai, but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them.” (English translations usually substitute “God Almighty” for the Hebrew words “El Shaddai.” “El Shaddai” means “El the Mighty.” El is the chief Canaanite God, whose name is subsumed in the Hebrew Elohim.)

But Joshua already had reached adulthood and served under Moses at the time of the Exodus. He couldn’t have had the element “Jeho” in his birth name because his parents wouldn’t have know that name at that time. So, at the very least, the name Joshua, as a Hebrew name, would have to have been either a change of name for Joshua after the Exodus or a late invention of the biblical redactors. Consequently, a biblical editor added the claim that Moses had changed Joshua’s name from the original Hoshea.

Since Joshua belonged to the tribe of Ephraim, a good case can be made that his name had an Egyptian rather than Hebrew origin and that his character functioned in a mythological role. Ephraim was the youngest son of Joseph and Asenath, his Egyptian wife. His mother was the daughter of the chief priest of Heliopolis, a major Egyptian cult center and the place where Moses, as a member of the royal household, would have received his education. The full name “Joshua, Son of Nun” contains name elements for two of the most important Heliopolitan Egyptian deities, Nun and Shu.

The god Nun represented the primeval flood at the beginning of Creation. He stirred the floodwaters and caused the god Atum to come forth. Atum, in turn, brought forth a son named Shu, who represented the space between heaven and earth, and a daughter named Tefnut, who represented moisture. Shu and Tefnut were the ancestors of all the other Egyptian deities, and some Egyptian texts say that Nun brought them up out of the primeval abyss.

In Near Eastern tradition, grandchildren were considered the children of the grandparents, and the Bible frequently identifies grandchildren as the sons of grandfathers. In Egypt, then, Shu would also have been the son of Nun. This gives us a correspondence with Joshua’s name “Jeho-Shua, son of Nun.” The only non-Egyptian element in that name is “Jeho,” which we have seen could not have been part of his original name.

Joshua’s name, therefore, signified a deity known as “Shu, son of Nun,” who was worshipped by Israelites as a cult figure in the years following their departure from Egypt. As Israel shed its Egyptian cultural trappings, and as Jeho came to play a more intimate monotheistic role in Hebrew life, Joshua devolved from deity to human. Eventually, the scribes added the Jeho portion of the name in order to hide Joshua’s earlier cult image. Jeho-Shu, the Egyptian-Semitic name that he received, eventually became confused with the similar Semitic word “Jehoshua,” meaning “God saves.”